Nothing beats putting your book out into the world and knowing that your story is reaching audiences of all ages all around the world. You spent so much time and effort crafting your book, and you want it to be successful. While this might not be why you decided to publish a book, you could be left asking, “How do I make money from selling my book?”
Here at Cloverly Children’s, we support you every step of the way to make sure you get what you are owed through our agreements with wholesalers and retailers that put your book out into the world. We do not make any profit from your book until you do because our authors always come first.
Whether you are selling a print book or a digital eBook, you receive a portion of each and every retail sale of your book, just in slightly different ways.
Print Books
Selling your physical print book is very special for all authors, especially when it comes to sharing stories with classrooms or families. To sell your book in a bookstore or any other retailer, we have an agreement with our wholesaler, Ingram Content Group, to get your book into stores around the world. Ingram is the most trusted wholesaler in the publishing world, and our agreement with them gets your book in front of consumers everywhere.
All retailers, whether brick-and-mortar stores or digital stores, receive their book supply from wholesalers. The wholesaler is the company that buys all the books from us to ship off to the retailers. To put it simply, Ingram will be the only entity to buy all your books, and it is their job to facilitate further sales to consumers.
For each book, Ingram sets the retail price, which is the standard price consumers will pay when they buy your book at the retailer of their choice. That retail price then establishes the wholesale price of your book (50% of the retail price), which is the share of each sale that we receive on your behalf for each sale. Our agreement with Ingram reflects the industry standard.
For a book that has a retail price of $16, every sale will result in a wholesale price of $8 that is sent to us on your behalf. Each book also requires a separate printing cost that is approximately $4 for a $16 book, which we account for before sending your earnings to you. After the printing cost is taken out, you are ultimately left with about $4 per sale of a $16 book, which goes directly to you until you make a profit on your initial investment. After you have recouped your investment, we only take an additional 25 cents per sale, leaving the rest to you.
Per the agreement with Ingram, their retail price sets the wholesale price for all retail sales of your book, even if a retailer sells it under that price. For example, if your book’s retail price is $16 and Amazon sells a physical copy for $12, we still get the $8 wholesale price from the original retail price. Your final earning from each book sale remains the same. Any arrangement between Ingram and the retailers has no bearing on what you earn from each book sale.
Digital books
Selling digital eBooks, however, is much simpler to calculate. Gone is the need for a middleman wholesaler, as Ingram or any other wholesaler does not need to be involved in eBook sales because no physical book is being sold. It is all digital.
Instead of operating through a wholesaler, what we do is directly upload the document of your digital book to online retailers for no additional printing costs. These retailers — Amazon, Apple, Google, Barnes & Noble, etc. — sell the eBook directly to consumers for only a 30% fee from each sale, leaving the remaining 70% for us to pass on directly to you. And as always, you keep all proceeds for two years and until you recoup your initial investment, at which point we only keep 25 cents per sale.
Without the need for printing costs, it is not just authors that benefit from digital sales, consumers get a deal as well. For the same exact book, just in a digital eBook format, your audience can purchase your book for less money than a physical book. An eBook selling for $10 on a digital retailer leaves $7 (after taking out $3 for the platform fee) for you. eBook sales are encouraged to maximize your profits, but you will always receive your due.
A simple breakdown of the profits you can receive from either print or digital books can be found here.
