Amazon's customer profiling always makes me laugh when the manage to send me a link to one of my own books...!!! Please note that this will be for the paperback edition. In fact, it looks like Amazon won't be getting the hardback at all, as I can't find it listed there. The special pre-order discount offer running on the Quilt Museum's website is for the hardback, which is a more limited edition, so if you want a hardback, order now. There will only be hardbacks available from the first edition, which is coming out simultaneously in hardback as well as paperback, and the hardbacks are usually never reprinted.
I read the following article in the Guardian yesterday - Author's incomes collapse to abject levels
I left a comment -
"I'm a non fiction author. One of the problems with income from royalties is that the retail price of books, and therefore publisher's receipts of which royalties are typically a 10% share, have scarcely risen in twelve years. The cover price of my first book was £17.99 in 2003 and the cover price of my next one, scheduled for August 2014, is £19.99. You hardly need to bother with the maths to see how the cost of living has risen during the last eleven years and the spending power of the £ decreased, making royalties from a sale today worth significantly less than a decade ago. Factor in the bulk discounts available to the big retailers compared with the smaller discounts traditionally available to smaller bookshops (25 - 40% typically, depending on wholesaler) and when the likes of Amazon are dominating online sales, it is easy to see how authors are receiving less and less. In proportion to income, the cost of a full colour hardback book has fallen dramatically in the last thirty years and the public expect books to be cheaper than ever.
"To make £50 - 70k writing commercial fiction at a 10% of publisher's receipts royalty rate, as mentioned by another commentator, your publisher's receipts must be at least half a million a year from your titles, which means the retail value of your books is around a million GBP. If the average price of a paperback novel is £10, that's 100,000 books sold a year, which is very good going for fiction."
The first paragraph also explains why authors make much more if you buy a book from them personally, say at a quilt show - they get the bookseller's discount, which is worth far more per copy than royalties.
The 1718 was written to help raise funds for the Quilters' Guild and the Quilt Museum, so if you buy your copy from the Museum or the Guild, you'll help fund raise even more, because they will get the bookseller's discount as well as the royalties on the book.
My first full-time job was in a bookshop in the 1980s, which is one reason I have a good overview of book pricing from then to now! I worked in Galloways, Aberystwyth's university bookshop - a big independent bookshop, with three floors of books and stationery and a second hand/antiquarian department next door. The kind of bookshop that is rarely seen nowadays. It closed several years ago.
