Business Time: Self-publishing vendors and ‘royalties’
One of my pet peeves as a publishing professional: the author’s 70% share on KDP is not a ‘royalty.’ It’s the author-publisher’s share. Royalties are paid when rights are taken by a publisher and that content is then sold through vendors. KDP isn’t licensing rights and creating an end-product to sell, it’s just selling end-product. The use of the term ‘royalty’ muddles the reality of the relationship between an author and the vendor. Self-publishing is a solid path to publication now, but let’s be clear what KDP, Nook Press and other vendors are: vendors. When you’re a publisher, you come to terms with vendors – how they’ll sell your product, what discount they get (which then informs their margin), whether they can return the product, and so on. Signing a KDP/Nook Press/etc. deal is signing with a vendor. The thing is that KDP and other vendors that court self-publishers hold a vast amount of power compared to individual small business of self-publishers, so those vendors feel empowered to dictate terms, and are unlikely to negotiate those terms. These vendors depend on volume of sales across a range of agreements rather than on securing a distribution agreement with any specific author (though I imagine they might care more about signing up each new Hugh Howey or Sylvia Day book, or the like).
