Soothesayer said:
Since I'm not in any of the traditional publishing gigs, maybe someone can explain to me why they think they NEED 75% of the revenues from his books if they are electronic? What possible costs could amount to that level of vampirism?
I can't speak to this specific author because obviously he isn't mine and I don't know the particulars of his contracts. In general, companies view all variants of a product as the same product. If a toothpaste company puts out a new line of toothpaste in peppermint, ocean blast, arctic cool, and orange (same formula, but different flavors) they treat all of those flavors as a single product when determining their price structure. They aren't going to say "Well, we already made all of our money back on the peppermint, so since all we did was change the flavoring in the others we'll sell those cheaper." They will track the different flavors to make sure that the cost/benefit of having the separate flavor is profitable, but they aren't going to apply different pricing to each flavor simply because the main flavor earned out.
Compound this with the fact that not all products earn out. As a business, you don't turn a profit on every single product produced. There is a reason why the manufacturers of consumer commodities are always changing product lines. Some product lines don't make money. It's the same with books. For every million seller, you have ten that never earn out the advances paid, and another two dozen that either just break even or lose money overall.
For an individual author, you don't have these concerns. Sure, you have your own mortgage and bills. but those are your personal bills and not business expenses. But you don't have the overhead that a publisher does. You don't have a lease on a building that has to be paid whether you sell books or not. You don't have office staff. You don't have liability insurance. You don't have all of the expenses that come with maintaining a physical presence and having employees. You don't get surprise visits from the state health department wanting to do an inspection of your entire building just because you have vending machines in your building (like what happened to us recently.) You don't have to pay a $500 license fee to the FCC simply because you use walkie-talkies in your warehouse (like we just found out we have to do). To be blunt, as an indie author, if you don't pay your editor because your sales are down, the worst that happens is the editor tries to sue you in small claims court. Maybe you get bad mouthed in a forum. If Simon & Schuster stops paying its employees their earned wages, they get a visit from Uncle Sam and multi-million dollar fines.
So it isn't "vampiric." It is the nature of running a large company. The cost of any product, whether it is a book or a bottle of shampoo, includes more than just the cost of the materials to make it. There is a whole host of expenses that have to be factored in as overhead.
I'm not arguing whether or not this particular author's royalty is fair. I don't know what was in his contract. I'm just addressing the issue of "vampirism."
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