When it comes to ebooks and digital publishing, the major publishing houses are doing a reasonable imitation of a freshly caught fish on the deck.

For someone who isn’t trying to publish a book, it’s amounted to low-cost entertainment, though for those writers and industry folks trying to make sense of things, I’m sure a little less hilarity is involved.

For example, the insanity of HarperCollins’ “26-checkouts-and-it’s-a-dead library ebook” suggests a less-than-thoughtful approach to libraries and digital publishing.

And the industry’s attempt to shoehorn ebook sales royalties into what seems like a rapacious 75%/25% split (writers don’t get the 75%) suggests they’re hoping most writers can’t do math.

A few apparently can.

Several writers have said stated that royalty split isn’t even close to equitable; the publisher has made a substantial profit before the writer earns out even a reasonable advance:

Self-publishing guru Joe Konrath published an interesting analysis of the 75/25 split here, though we can easily sum it up:

The 25% the publisher is offering is actually based on net. So you’re getting 17.5% of the list price. (Amazon gets 30%, they get 52.5%–which is obscene)

When your agent gets her cut, you’re earning 14.9% of list price on ebooks.

For a $9.99 ebook, that’s $1.49 in your pocket for each one sold.

If ebook prices go down (and they will) it would be 75 cents for you on a $4.99 ebook

If you release a $4.99 ebook on your own, at 70%, you’d earn $3.50 an ebook.

Let’s say you sell a modest 1000 ebooks per month at $4.99.

That’s $9000 a year you’d make on ebooks through your publisher vs. $42,000 a year on your own.

Now an English writer and her agent — fed up with their publisher’s intransigence over digital rights — are also going it alone (and capturing approximately 70% royalty instead of nearly 15%):

Land has warned book publishers they will lose control over authors’ digital backlists unless they improve their royalty offer.

Land this week announced her decision to publish 100 of Catherine Cookson’s novels as e-books through her company Peach Publishing, bypassing Cookson’s physical publishers Transworld. Other agents warned against the move, one calling it “tantamount to a declaration of war”.

…

Speaking about publishers in general, Land said: “The thing that really annoys me is that they won’t even negotiate a decent rate . . . They say ‘25% is perfectly reasonable’. They need to stop pretending it’s so expensive. I’ve just done it. I can do my sums.”

Self-publishing ebooks is becoming very lucrative for a few authors, though mostly for genre writers and those with sizable out-of-print backlists.

Some writers — like screenwriter and tie-in novelist Lee Goldberg — have been surprisingly frank about their revenues.

Obviously, eBooks offer a lot less competition in the graphics-intensive categories, though given my short experience with my Nook e-reader, they’re more appealing than print when you’re buying something simply to read.

Which likely comprises the majority of book sales.

New writers seem to either view self-publishing an ebook as a direct path to the public or the route straight to hell, and while I don’t believe self-publishing is about to displace the publishing industry en masse, the choices available to writers suggest big changes are on the way — especially if publishers continue to stumble.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

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