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From: mazlack@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Lawrence J. Mazlack)
Newsgroups: net.books,net.research
Subject: Re: getting a book published
Message-ID: <15036@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Mon, 28-Jul-86 13:48:55 EDT
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Posted: Mon Jul 28 13:48:55 1986
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Keywords: 15 percent
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In article <8189@duke.duke.UUCP> kpc@duke.UUCP (Kim P. Collins) writes:
>I saw that 15% royalties (85% publisher?) is about standard.  Does anyone else think that this is outrageous?  Are there any publishers that have a quality reputation and give higher royalties?  Or does it really cost that much for all publishers?

15% is pretty standard for paper-bound texts that they expect to sell a lot of
(at least 5,000).  Sometimes, hard-backs only get 12%, but this is becoming
more rare.  If your book is expected to sell more than 20,000 you should be
able to get at least 18%. Normally, first time authors can expect to get
no more than 15%.  The largest that I have heard of is 22% - but this was
for a book that went over 80,000 copies on the first edition - the 22% was
for the second edition.

I don't think that it is outrageous.  The publishers front end costs are high
(editing, typesetting, aquisiton, clerical, etc.).  If I understand it 
correctly, they don't break even until about 8,000 copies have been sold.
(Sold, not used books, not books that were given to a professor and then
sold to the used book people.)

...Larry Mazlack  mazlack@ernie.berkeley.edu