Question of the Day - 30 December 2025

So you want a primer in the economics of the book business for authors? Hold onto your hat, 'cause it ain't pretty.

First, we can dispense with the idea that you have to get your book in a bookstore to make any money. Most books aren't sold in bookstores anymore, mostly because there aren't any bookstores. Barnes and Noble is the last major chain, joined by a handful of independents in the major (and some minor) cities. And B&N is mostly concerned with bestsellers, like blockbuster novels by Stephen King, Danielle Steele, John Grisham, James Patterson, Dean Koontz, and Margaret Atwood, and for non-fiction Michelle Obama, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Bill O'Reilly, and Bill Bryson currently. 

But sticking with the bookstore idea, to get a title onto a Barnes & Noble shelf, a publishing company needs representation by a book wholesaler or distributor, such as Ingram, Baker and Taylor, or Publishers Group West. For their services, distributors take a mere 65%-70% of the retail price. So if your book sells for $20, Ingram sucks upwards of $14 right off the top. That leaves $6 or so for the publisher (minus setup and recurring fees, minus returns, minus damaged copies, minus shipping to and from Ingram's warehouses). From that "net invoice price" of $6, the author receives a royalty of somewhere between 10% and 20%. Let's use the high end; your $20 book earns $1.20 per copy sold via Barnes and Noble through Ingram. 

So sell 1,000 books through Ingram and you're looking at $1,200 in royalties. Sell 5,000 and it's $6,000 in your pocket. Get struck by lightning and sell 10,000 and now you're talking big big money, $12K or so.

However, Huntington Press doesn't sell through Barnes and Noble. Most of our books (and all books, for that matter) are sold through Amazon. Amazon takes "only" 55% off the top. So now the publisher is looking at $9 per copy sold and the author $1.80 in royalties. A little better, but nothing to quit your day job over.

When we sell your $20 book ourselves for retail (we rarely do, as we're usually competing with Amazon, which discounts our books as they see fit), the author makes around $4 per. 

According to BookScan, the leading point-of-sale tracking service for print books, 90% of the three million to four million books published every year in the U.S. sell 500 copies or fewer over their lifetimes. So even if every copy of your book sells for retail at a $4-per-copy royalty, you're looking at $2,000. Total.

Call it $3-$4 an hour for writing a book -- if you're very fast. 

As for Cullotta -- The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster, and Government Witness, that was one of our better-selling titles (most of our mob books are). But even then, Frank didn't write the book; Denny Griffin did. So Frank and Denny split the royalties between them. Both are deceased now, but Cullotta is still selling and the royalties are paid out to their respective estates. 

Our other titles that have sold well include The Frugal Gambler, The Killing of Tupac Shakur, Gambling 102, Whale Hunt in the Desert, Knock-Out Blackjack, 21st Century Card Counter, Beneath the Neon, Madam, The Man with the $100,000 Breasts, The Battle for Las Vegas, Kill Phil, Surviving the Mob, and several others.