Part of the process in learning about book deals is the madness of contract terms and book royalties. To be honest, I didn’t know much about how it worked. Well, until I created this bad boy.
I whipped up this quickie application to learn more information about the book royalties process. I didn’t want anything too complex. Just an application which showed me whether I would earn out or how many books I would need to earn out. I could have gone hardcore and developed an application to break down multiple royalties and sale types. (For example, a break down of hardcover with its percentage and amount, and then mass market with its percentage and amount of books sold.) But I somehow stuff the crazy urge back into the can and create a simple application to answer my questions.
In the application below you’ll see I filled in the values to give you an idea of what you can put in there. You can also check Brenda Hiatt’s Show Me the Money to get ideas on royalty rates and advance values you can enter in there.
Note: This is a tool for fun/estimate the values to earn out an advance. It does not factor in the fact that book costs can be discounted to bookstores or that the royalty rate may change base on the number of books sold.
I have other writer tools as well. Be sure to check them out.
You are too cool for words. 🙂
Angela @ The Bookshelf Muse
hmmm, makes me wonder … is someone obsessed with this whole book deal concept?? hahaha … just kidding! this is so cool.
This is awesome! Thank you so much for coming up with it! Re-tweeting now…
Love this. I think. I'm going to (eventually) be obsessively counting book sells to reach the magic number. lol
This is pretty cool! Things do start to get confusing, however, when publishers offer gross vs. net percentages for royalties. This can come into play with small publishers. It's good to be aware of which one they are offering because that makes a huge difference.
For keeping this simple, you did an awesome job!
This is so cool. I could play with it all day and dream.
awesome. I'm now obsessively calculating how many books i have to sell to quit my day job instead of doing revisions.
Sigh.
I can't wait until I need this…thanks! 🙂
Thank you, this was very helpful.