What Does 100% Royalties Really Mean?

We believe the author should make all the royalties from the sale of his or her book.

When you learn what other self-publishing companies take in royalties (for doing nothing) you´ll realize how much more profit you´ll make as a Mill City Press author.

Take a standard 200 page, paperback.  The actual cost to print the book (in a print-on-demand situation) is $.015 per page and $.90 for the cover.   Since we don´t mark up printing, it will cost you $3.90 to print one to 1,000 copies of your book (once you print in larger quantities, off-set printing may be appropriate and we can help arrange that).   Because we don´t mark up printing, authors can afford to price their books at a commercially viable price.   For a 200 page paperback, we´d suggest a retail price of between $11.95 to  $14.00.  But, the final retail price is set by you.

Here is what a Mill City Press author will earn per 200 page, standard paperback he or she sells for $14.00.

Sale Through The Author´s Website

Each author gets his or her own five page website.   If you sell the books yourself, you will generate more profits than selling through an online retailer.   You can set up a free account at Paypal (or Google´s equivalent) and put that button on your site.   Or, you can use  our book fulfillment system and we handle all aspects of the sale for you (collecting the money, shipping the book, providing real-time sales reports, and more).

The royalty formula would be as follows:

Retail cost of book--print costs=your net profit. 

$14.00

-$3.90 (print costs)

$11.10  net to author  (assuming your customer pays shipping charges, like they do on Amazon and other retailers.   If you want to include shipping to entice the buyer you certainly can)

Orders through The Author´s Website With Mill City Press Book Fulfillment

If you sell the books through your website, but choose Mill City Press´s book fulfillment service , there is a one-time fee of $500 (which covers all set up costs to develop an entire software suite for your book) and then a fee of $1 per book for each book fulfilled (but you get the first 250 books fulfilled for free).  When we handle book fulfillment the formula would be:

               Retail cost of book - print costs - $1 book fulfillment fee

               $14.00

               -$3.90 (print cost)

                -$1.00 (fulfillment fee)

                $10.10 net to author  (Mill City charges the shipping costs to the buyer directly)

Orders Through Amazon and other online retailers

Selling the book through Amazon.com (or other online retailers) becomes a bit trickier, as they do take a percentage of each sale (20-55%).  Mill City Press authors can set the trade discount percentage anywhere between 20%-55%). 

However, if the trade discount isn´t at least 40%,  no brick & mortar retailers will order your book.  We suggest that authors set a trade discount no less than 40%. * 

The Amazon.com payouts (for authors not in our bookstore distribution program) would work as follows:

Retail Cost of Book minus Amazon´s percentage (we use 40% as an example below, but you can plug in any percentage), minus print cost of book, equals your net profit.

$14.00

-$5.60 (40% Amazon discount)

-$3.90 (actual print cost)

$4.50 net to author

 For more information about this service, contact Anna Schmeling at   anna@millcitypress.net   or 612-455-2294, ext. 202.

*Authors participating in our bookstore distribution program cannot set the trade discount as it is automatically 55% by the distributor.