Let's Deconstruct: "Most compilers take 10% plus expenses...you're taking 100."
By tweeting this post, you can earn promotional tweets from me as part of the Amazon Tweet Exchange.
Details here.
Details here.
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| That's me, greedily eating the whole pie. None for authors! |
The poll in that post has already produced some interesting results.
Click HERE to read my response to the question (from a pollster), Why on earth would you expect authors to hand over all royalties to you?
The point of this post is responding to the comment: "Most compilers take 10% plus expenses...you're taking 100."
Let's Deconstruct!
First of all, how much money might we be talking about?If we sold 1,000 copies, half during a 99¢ sale and the other half during a $3.99 period, we'd have $1,155 to mess with. For the math involved to get to that number, see this post.
According to the pollster, I should only take 10%. OK, so my fee would be $116 (rounded up by 50¢—sue me).
What exactly would my fee be?
(If I were charging based upon the work involved)
(If I were charging based upon the work involved)
Let's assume there are 10 books involved. Each book would get a promo post of its own. Instead of pointing at the single book on Amazon, I would link to the anthology. Otherwise it's a normal promo post. I wouldn't need to email the book club about each book, so the basic promo package is fine. That's $25 a book.
That's $250.
But I wouldn't stop there. The authors would also get access to this site for interviews, top ten lists, guest posts, etc... Let's say that cost $25 an author.
That's another $250.
But that's not all. (I sound like a TV salesman, don't I?)
Let's add another $30 for all the tweets I'll do to promote the anthology directly on Amazon, instead of tweeting about the posts mentioned above. We're talking about 1,000's of tweets over the course of the anthology's life.
That's a total of $530.
If I gave a 15% group discount, that would be $450. (I gave back the 50¢ from earlier. Call your lawyers and cancel your suit.) Shoot, even if I gave a 50% discount (ain't happenin'), my fee would still be $265.Let's go with the $450 for this scenario. That's only for the main site. It doesn't include the work involved over at Masquerade Book Tours. Though we are tightly affiliated with one another, our finances are separate.
DeeJay would probably be willing to do a tour even if she weren't being paid her full amount since more money would likely be made from the tour, but I wouldn't expect her (nor would I allow her) to do a tour without some compensation. I'm getting paid. So should she.
According to this page, her most expensive, standard blog tour is $230 (includes a $100 gift card giveaway).
Add that to my $450 fee, and we come to a total of $680, leaving us $295 for third party blog tours. Xpresso's "Rock The Stars" blog tour is a good option.
It costs $280.
After that, we'd have $195 to play around with. The authors could choose a $15 gift card (1% royalty), I suppose. Or, I would probably find another blog tour for $150 and add a gift card giveaway to it.
AND...
That's if we can get the anthology to sell at $3.99. Most anthologies I see are for 99¢. A comment on this post backs up that statement:
Personally I think boxed sets are a great idea (and I have a kindle full of them). The ones I have seen that do really well are priced cheaply, usually $0.99 and the authors involved don't take royalties. Everything earned is ploughed back into promoting the set. All you're doing is offering the same deal but taking the work load off the authors :)
We'd have to sell 2,786 copies at 99¢ to have the above options at our disposal.
Of course, I could take the 10% the pollster mentioned. But I wouldn't do nearly as much of what I said above, meaning sales would be affected. Meaning the authors still wouldn't get much. And I would actually get less than the 10% of the above scenario.
In that case, I would just keep doing what I'm doing. But I would like to do more.
That means Masquerade MegaPacks
