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Creative writing

If you love authors, buy ebooks

If you love authors, buy ebooks. Royalties from ebooks are — by a staggering amount — greater than paperback and hardcover books. Pounds against pennies, in some cases.

So if you want your authors to have nice things, like enough money to keep writing, pay editors and commission cover artists…buy ebooks.

I know, physical books are lovely objects. You can feel the paper grain, smell a book’s age, even lick it if you want to learn what diseases previous readers have had.

Admire the cover of a physical book between readings and wonder what the cover art has to do with the story. Show off your collection on Zoom calls and make sure that everyone sees your latest read while you commute. No ebook can provide these pleasures.

I read a lot of fiction on my Kindle, but I buy hard copy books about writing because I like to fill them with Post-It notes. Everyone’s got their process.

She’s making the right choice (source image: freepik, book cover: Design for Writers)

Ebooks are a private pleasure. With an ebook, no-one on the morning train knows you’re reading Colleen Hoover or Dan Brown or Chuck Tingle. They’ll take a look at your fine self and conclude that you’d be reading Camus or Atwood, blissfully unaware of your true tastes.

Sure, a paperback sale will almost guarantee that the book will go on to find new life in someone else’s hands. Hardback sales make an author smugly satisfied at their readers’ largesse. But smugness and second hand bookshops don’t keep the lights on.

Ebooks vs physical royalties…the numbers

How big is the difference between the royalties from ebooks and physical copies? We’ll use my first book, Blood River, as an example, because I’ve just republished it with a new cover and interiors. The costs are still fresh in my mind.

Blood River’s a short novel, so I priced the ebook at £3.99 on Amazon UK. I get 70% of that, or £2.75 per sale. Amazon covers the 6p delivery cost unless it’s returned.

For a paperback, the cost to the reader rises to £9.49 and the cost of printing comes out before any royalties. With Blood River, that’s £3.61 per copy, leaving £5.88, but my royalty drops to 60%. I end up with £2.08 for each book I sell, or just 19p on the 40% rate if you buy it outside of Amazon through their Expanded Distribution programme.

A stack of the book Blood River, by Alexander Lane, with one copy resting against the pile

The hardcover price jumps to £12.99, but it costs £6.51 to print each copy, so I receive £1.28 from the most expensive format you can buy.

Amazon uses print-on-demand, where each book is printed when the order arrives1For reasons they won’t explain, Amazon may print additional copies and then refuse to get rid of them when you upload a new edition of your book. This will incur additional costs to the author.. Traditional publishers have the advantage of printing in bulk, so it costs them a lot less, but nothing competes with the almost-free cost of an ebook.

Trad-pubbed authors may rely initially on the fabled advance, but they all dream of the day when they sell enough books to “earn out” their advance, and they start to receive royalties. The ebook bonus works as well for them as it does for self-published indie authors.

Wide for the win? Not in print

Going “wide for the win” is a mantra in self-publishing circles that means you only use Amazon for selling on Amazon, and other services for reaching bookshops, libraries, or printing author copies to sell directly. It also includes using alternative ebook retailers like Apple or Barnes & Noble, but that’s not on today’s menu.

The most popular alternative print provider is IngramSpark, because it has much wider distribution and a reputation for better print quality. IngramSpark also has a notoriously bad user interface, awful customer service and it’s even more expensive to print your books. The royalty is lower, too, so no “win” there, it seems.

It’s true that no-one has ever said “I love the smell of an old ebook” (image: Freepik)

There are other on-demand printing services, like Draft2Digital and BookVault. None seem to be any cheaper than Amazon, or more generous with royalties.

Even going wide, the best gift you can buy an indie author is to buy their ebooks. And then buy a print edition to loan to your friends so they can learn about this great new writer you’ve found.

Buy ebooks…bye bye world?

On the face of it, books are made of trees and trees are good, therefore paper books are good. We can always grow more trees. Kindles and other e-readers are tech made of all sorts of nasty things, they need power-hungry data centres, plus Amazon = evil, therefore ebooks are evil.

Common sense, eh?

But paper books come from monoculture plantations that have about as much resemblance to real forest as Donald Trump has to an honest man. Making paper isn’t a clean process, and there’s a significant carbon cost to produce and ship that book.

A Kindle has a high environmental production cost, but it will easily last for a decade or more, allowing one person to read thousands of books, and uses minimal power. You can gift them second-hand (or in my case, lose your Kindle while travelling and discover that someone else has started using it. Amazon wouldn’t turn it off, so if that’s you, I hope you’re enjoying it).

And for all that Amazon is a market-distorting behemoth with a terrifying vertical monopoly, Kindle Direct Publishing helped to democratise authorship. Through self-publishing, many thousands of independent writers have broken the dominance of the agent-publisher hegemony.

It looks like a draw, and that’s not just my opinion. At least, you shouldn’t feel guilty for buying an ebook. And you don’t have to use a Kindle. There’s Apple Books, Kobo and Google Play too. All nicer than Amazon, I’m sure… (no, I’m not going there).

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