Selling your book

Once you have written your wonderful book, secured a publisher, and gone through the exhaustive (sometimes exhausting) editorial process, it would be nice if someone else would go and sell your book for you and just send you royalty cheques from time to time. In practice, leaving sales to someone else can result in your book finding a smaller audience and in you never seeing much in the way of money from it.

 

In terms of author benefit, the best return is on copies of your book that you sell yourself.

Let's say the suggested retail price for your lovely book is $26.95. Your contract stipulates that you get a certain percentage of the net income if Moose House or some reseller sells copies for you, and the net income is generally less than half of the cover price.

So, in declining order, here are the main selling options:

 

1. you buy copies at the author discounted price of $16.17 and sell them at $26.95 = profit to you of $10.78 per copy. Note, you don't also get royalties on copies that you buy and then resell.

2. people buy copies from the Moose House website, or from our table at a book fair: you get 10% of the purchase price = $2.70 per copy.

3. people buy a copy in a bookstore that got them from us: you get 10% of the NET income (the bookstore takes a cut) = around $1.75 per copy.

4. people buy books from Amazon, which takes a much bigger cut = around $1.00 a copy.

 

Note, the downside of option 1 is that you have to lay out money to buy the copies you resell. If you overestimate, you may end up with cartons of books in the spare bedroom. The nice thing is that we can always get more copies for you as you run out of copies to sell, so you can invest cautiously in option 1 until you get a sense of the demand.