Publishing a book is not always just about making a profit, but that is always a plus. Making money from book sales is not guaranteed, but when you do, it is a huge accomplishment to see your hard work pay off.
How you make money from your book depends on the format: print or eBook. Either way, Cloverly Publishing’s approach ensures that you come first, and we do not make any money from sales of your book until you turn a profit.
Print Books
When publishing a print book, sales are carried out to consumers through wholesalers. Here at Cloverly, we use Ingram Content Group, which is the largest book wholesaler in the world. Wholesalers are responsible for retail book sales around the world.
Whether your print book is purchased at Barnes & Noble or your local neighborhood bookshop, it has to go through a wholesaler, Ingram in this case. One way to look at it is that Ingram is the only entity to buy copies of your book, and they, in turn, sell it to consumers at a wholesaler-determined price. Ingram will sell to whomever requests your book and share proceeds accordingly.
Ingram sets the retail price of your book, which is what a consumer pays for it at the retailer of their choosing. From there, we receive the wholesale price from each sale, which is set at 50% per our wholesale agreement with Ingram. That means that if Ingram sets the retail price of your book at $16, we receive $8 (50% of $16) per sale. The only other take that comes out of your profit is any printing cost that goes into creating the physical book. This is all standard in the industry, and nearly all publishers act accordingly.
After Ingram sets the retail price, the actual price a book is sold for has no impact on you at all. Even if the book is sold at a retailer for less than retail price, we receive the wholesale price (50% of the retail price) regardless.
For example, if your $16 retail book sells at a bookstore for $10, we still receive our $8 share of the retail price. After taking out the printing cost of around $4, your direct take ends up being $4 per book sold. Even though everyone is looking to make a profit, the arrangement between Ingram and the retailer has no effect on your take.
eBooks
As an alternative to selling print books, profits from eBooks are much more straightforward. There are no wholesalers to go through for retail sales, so there is no middleman to sell the books to who then sells to the general public. There are also no printing costs for eBooks because it is all digital.
We publish the eBooks directly to the retailers’ platform; Amazon, Apple, Google, and Barnes & Noble are the major ones. The retailers then sell the eBook to consumers and only take one 30% fee for allowing use of their platform. The other 70% is shared with your publisher on your behalf, which Cloverly will pass on to you until you make a profit.
We greatly encourage eBook sales as much as possible because it is more profitable for you and us. Without a middleman and printing costs to factor, eBooks yield a higher profit for each book sold. eBooks are also often sold at a lower cost than print books. For example, a $10 eBook sold on Amazon will result in a $7 profit, only dropping off $3 for the platform fee.
A summary of the profit structure for selling your book can be found here.
