Amazon have recently unveiled a new royalty program, at first glance giving authors 70 percent royalties for each book sold seems pretty generous, however there are some catches.
To cut a long story short it seems that Amazon will only offer this level of loyalties if “The author or publisher-supplied list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99” and “This list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest physical list price for the physical book”.
Other requirements include that “The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights” and also “The title will be included in a broad set of features in the Kindle Store, such as text-to-speech. This list of features will grow over time as Amazon continues to add more functionality to Kindle and the Kindle Store”.
Their final requirement insists that “books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices. Amazon will provide tools to automate that process, and the 70 percent royalty will be calculated off the sales price”.
All of these royalty requirements seem quite insistent and give the impression that is in affect ‘my way or the highway’, however in my opinion they do have to have the Kindle’s success as their priority, these requirements ensure this.
For more information check out SlashGear. Do you feel these requirements are acceptable?
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