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Our royalties are already very reasonable, higher than the majority of other publishing houses – and tweaking them one way or another for individual authors isn’t worth the cost to the system and the mistakes it’s likely to generate.
Advances are a gamble, and we do not invest in gambles, but try and make each title work on its own merits.
We work cooperatively. Sharing information through the database is a key principle of our business, and that’s undermined if everyone has different royalty rates and advances. It would also be impossible to figure out an average advance that could be applied to all titles.
No advance is common in academic and specialist publishing, unusual in larger trade houses and mass-market publishing (though things are changing).
To compare our royalty rates with much of the industry, have a look here.
If you would like to haggle on the royalty, or receive an advance, best to go to another publisher.
We could spend an hour or two revising every contract to get the language exactly as you want, but it is simply not worth the time, as it will have no impact on your sales, or your income, or your rights.
Our clauses are fairly standard to all major publishers. Dozens of authors have signed with us after being advised on the terms by others, including their own lawyers and staff from the Society of Authors.
The contract is with Collective Ink Ltd.
We do not consider print and ebook rights separately – it just leads to too many complications, including how the print and ebook editions are then presented on the same page on Amazon, preventing us from selling overseas rights, etc.
The types of licensing that falls under subsidiary rights includes: audio to a third-party, large print books, serialisation, dramatization, merchandising, apps and games, anthology, extracts and any other rights where the work will be sold in a format other than traditional print, eBook, or publisher produced audio.
Do not expect much income from this. We have someone focusing on foreign-rights sales, but not on extensive sub-rights, like film, audio, which is why the contract does not include them.
We have these various sub-rights clauses in the contract because it’s standard publishing practice, though, in general, it mostly only applies to bestselling fiction/memoir/celebrity biography etc.
We do sell a lot of translation rights, but if we get extracts/articles we’re grateful for the publicity and usually don’t get paid for it.
As of 1st December 2021 we are including audiobooks in our contracts. Contracts signed prior to this do not include audiobooks. For authors with contracts signed prior to 1st December 2021, we can point you in the direction of making your own audiobook.
There is a lot of inevitable legalese bumf – some of it to protect you, some of it to protect us. It could really be summed up in one paragraph, but, apparently, it has to be in there.
Read the relevant pages of The Insider’s Guide to Getting Your Book Published by Rachel Stock if you have any concerns.
We have never got to the point where we are in disagreement with authors over what’s due to them and need to revisit the contract. We have never been bankrupt (in any form), or been to court, or failed to pay our bills or our royalties.
If you are working through an agent, that is fine – we work with a couple of dozen. We would just ask that you still follow our system through the different editorial, production, and sales and marketing processes. We need you to be able to use the system here, download and upload manuscripts/proofs, see when review copies have gone etc. rather than asking an agent to ask us (and the agent won’t do it him/herself). We are happy to send your agent a password so that they can use the website as well.
If your title has come to us through an agent, they will be listed on the contracts page, and payment will be made to them, and they will make a corresponding payment to you, minus their agreed %.
We do not put books out of print. However, if after three years your title sells fewer than 50 copies (print and ebook combined) during a 12-month period, you may cancel your contract.
Please contact Mary Flatt via Printing queries on the Author Forum if you wish to inquire about a return of rights
- If there is stock at the warehouse you will be required to buy this at 60% discount plus freight charges, or pay the costs for pulping the stock (£75 UK stock; $100 US stock).
- You will not be able to reuse the ISBN as it is company specific.
- You will not be able to reuse cover art from Shutterstock or Adobe Stock as the license prohibits it. We do not permit the reuse of our text design files.
- Any foreign-rights contracts instigated by us will have to stand and you will become the new contact for the foreign publisher.
If you Decline your contract, there is an opportunity to leave us comments. We read all feedback left, but please do not expect a direct response.
We do not buy copyrights.
What you are agreeing to here is to give us the exclusive right to publish the book for the period of copyright, while the book remains in print, in all formats, print and digital, in return for a royalty on sales, along with various subsidiary rights where the income is split 60% or 80% in your favor, depending on the areas.
There are two main reasons:
We do have a cancellation option. If after three years your sales fall below 50 in a 12-month period (paperback and ebook combined) then you may ask for a return of rights.
Our default position is for worldwide publishing rights, in all languages, and that happens in about nine cases out of ten.
But if you want to confine it to English language worldwide, just let us know via the Author Forum: Contract queries; or you can tick the relevant box yourself.
Please note that we cannot take on titles or translations where a foreign publisher owns the rights.
There is not an option to give us English-language rights but change your mind later to give us world rights if you have tried selling some yourself but it has not worked out.
We only sign contracts where, at the minimum, we have English publishing rights worldwide (we prefer worldwide publishing rights in all languages).
If you have already sold one or two translation rights, or want to keep back one or two because you have established relationships with an overseas publisher, that is fine. We just need to know so that we can enter it on the website as a territory that is already covered.
In the split of rights income between author and publisher, agents sometimes push for 80% in favour of the author rather than our standard 60%. That works if you’re dealing with bestselling authors with a good track record of rights sales. For the reasons above, if you want more than 60%, just take the clause out and leave yourself with the overseas rights.
It gets too complicated in sales/distribution. If you have already published an ebook edition (or, indeed, print), it doesn't rule a contract out, but we need to ask you to remove your version from circulation when our publication date is set.
So long as we receive the manuscript within the open period of the contract, which is 12 months. We put up an "expected date" on the system, and will send you a notification if it has not arrived by then, but that is just a check to see that it has not gone astray.
For Level 1 & 2 contracts, so long as it’s not a radically different book to the one suggested in the proposal – half or twice the length – it doesn’t matter, as we haven’t scheduled it or priced it yet.
If the contract is subject to a subsidy we allow a variance of 10% before charging for the extra wordage.
Basically, you’re saying here that it hasn’t been published before, that it’s your material, you’re not copying someone else’s, and that you’re not libeling anyone or invading their privacy. Whether any of these things are the case or not, you are in a better position to know than we are, so it is your responsibility.
If parts of the book have been published before in magazines, that’s not a problem. You only need to get permission to reuse your own material in book form if you have signed away the copyright on such material, or have a written arrangement restricting such usage for a period.
If your book has been available in full before as an ebook, or on your website, or as a self-published book, but you’ve told us about it, that’s also fine. But once we bring your book out in print/digital you need to withdraw your own version – it gets confusing for everyone having different versions of the book in the market.
We payroyalties twice a year, covering the periods May to October and November to May, payable 60 days later.
That’s standard for all publishers, except for the vanity/subsidy publishers, who don’t have to account for the distribution pipeline that books go through. ]
Do be aware that royalties are often negative after the period, because of returns from the shops exceeding new sales.
We do not hold back royalties as a "reserve" against returns.
Royalties on receipts means paying on the actual invoiced value to the buyer that we receive for selling the books.
So, for instance, if the book is priced at $10, and a shop buys it at $6, you receive a royalty on the $6.
We do not deduct other costs that we pay from within the $6, like being charged for making the sale, for warehouse, freight, or anything else.
We cannot tell you exactly what the royalty amount will be on each book sold because it varies according to currency, account, and discount that the buyer takes.
One thing to make clear: none of our sales in any country are discounted first.
We are not “selling” books to the distributor, who in turn sells them to the shop. We own all the stock in those warehouses, and we sell through to shops and wholesalers in the same way as every local publisher does.
So in all the markets your % of sales on receipts is the same as any other publisher in that territory would give you.
Some agents insist on payment on retail price.
For instance, 6% or 7.5% on retail rather than 10% or 15% on receipts, or different royalty rates on retail at different discounts – we never agree to it.
The retail price is increasingly a notional figure. It all gets too complicated, particularly for us, in that we’re selling in different currencies (a benefit to you, which most publishers don’t have to factor in when arranging contracts). In some market areas, we don’t know what price the book is being sold at; we just get the quantity and the value of the sale.
The sums involved are too small and the number of bank accounts, agreements and paperwork, too large.
As editor, you need a letter of agreement from the contributors giving you the right to act on their behalf as regards the one-volume edition. A couple of sentences should suffice. We do not need copies.
There is no restraint on the contributors publishing their individual contributions elsewhere in non-book form.
If it's basically a rewrite of the same kind of material, no. We’re not trying to be too restrictive here, but if a reader picks up a similar title and can genuinely think “I’ve read this before,” that’s bad news, and things get complicated.
VAT Only applies to a few UK authors. If you are a US citizen (or from any other country) you do not need a VAT number, we do not deduct any taxes from your royalties in the UK, and there is no paperwork needed from you. You do not need a double-taxation exemption form from us. You just declare your royalties as income to your usual Revenue Office when you come to do your taxes.
You receive 6 copies of your book, free, as part of your contract (though we will send you an invoice for the freight if you live outside the USA or UK). If there are two authors, it’s three copies each. You should receive them within a month of the publication date being set. After that, you can order new copies at a discount:
On the contract page, underneath "imprint," there may be – not always – a reference to "publisher rights 15%." It is an internal note. The publisher of an imprint has some responsibility for making contacts, commissioning books, developing the marketing for the imprint. As a commission payment, they receive a percentage of what the title generates in royalties from sales. It is not deducted from the royalties the author receives, but is in addition to it. At the bottom of the contract page there is reference to a "royalty split." This is only applicable where there is more than one author.
Most publishers have a “first refusal” clause which gives them first option on your next book. This is just mentioned here because its absence is often remarked on.
Obviously, if we can sell your book, we would like to publish another one, and as you can see from the website and cross-checking it against Amazon, we tend to keep the authors we have.
Slightly over half our authors are "one book only"; after that, it climbs through two books, to ten/twenty plus. One or two times out of a hundred we lose an author to a big publisher for their next book, which we're delighted to see happen, in a way...
Even then we tend to find that new editions tend to muddy the waters with retailers and distributors.
In ticking the box to accept an offered contract you consent to the company sharing the personal details you provide within the business for publishing-related purposes. If you have further queries on the contract, please put them up on the Author Forum in Contract queries.
