January 2010 Archives

Thanks for visiting my all-new web site at www.bfreemanbooks.com.  I hope you'll browse the site and learn more about me and my books.  Feel free to send me an e-mail with your feedback, join my e-mail list, or become a fan on my Facebook page and post your comments with other readers.

On the new site, you'll find information and excerpts from all of my books, links to sites where you can buy the books around the world, and exclusive bonus content, including short stories not available anywhere else.  I'll be posting additional content in the months ahead.  You can also subscribe to my blog and events pages for up-to-the-minute news about my books and appearances.

If you signed up to follow my blog on my old web site, you will have to sign up again on this page in order to keep receiving my posts. (Look for the "Subscribe to feed" link on this page.) If you follow my posts on Facebook, however, you should still see them there as I release new entries. I have also posted copies of many of my favorite blog entries from the past few years here on the new site, so feel free to re-visit them.

For those of you in book clubs, don't miss the Book Club page, where you'll find questions to guide discussions of each of my books.  You can even invite me to join you by phone!

Meet Brian on Saturday afternoon as he signs copies of his new Duluth-based suspense novel THE BURYING PLACE.  Readers outside the Twin Cities can place advance orders for signed copies from Once Upon a Crime.  Just call Pat or Gary at the number above or e-mail onceuponacrime@earthlink.net.

Brian will join dozens of other Minnesota mystery authors at the annual Write of Spring at the Once Upon a Crime bookstore in Minneapolis.  Join the crowd for this opportunity to rub shoulders with the state's amazing roster of suspense writers.  Meet Brian from 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm.

One of the most frequent questions I get from readers is:  How much money do authors receive on the sale of their books?  The answer can get complex depending on the edition, the discount, the number of copies sold, etc., but I saw the following breakdown as provided by a literary agent the other day and thought you'd enjoy getting a look at how publishing economics work:

Start with a $24.95 hardcover.

Discounts to booksellers vary, but for a rough estimate figure that the publisher receives around 50%.

Let's say the author has a 10% retail royalty, and the author has an agent who receives 15% of the author's share. This works out to (again, roughly):

$12.48 to the bookseller (50%)
$9.98 to the publisher (50% minus author/agent share)
$2.12 to the author (10% of retail minus 15%)
$0.38 to the agent (15% of 10%)

For another example, let's take a $14.95 trade paperback where the author receives 7.5% retail. That translates to:

$7.48 to the bookseller
$5.83 to the publisher
$0.95 to the author
$0.17 to the agent

Obviously, it's less for mass market paperbacks (where the retail price is normally around $7.99 -- you can do the math) and for e-books (where, depending on the retail price, the royalty is about a third of what the author would receive on a hardcover sale). 

We're only talking about new books here, of course.  Sales at used book stores make money only for the bookseller -- the publisher, author, and agent receive no compensation.  Most libraries buy their books, but a single sale at a library is a single sale, regardless of how many patrons read it.