Third Party Vendors (An Informational Post)

I was told there'd be no math! :3 (Stealing that line shamelessly from LT3's CFO. ;3) Before I get started on this topic, I'm meaning this to be informational. A lot of peeps know third-party vendors take a cut, and I'm putting solid numbers out there for those who are curious about the exactitudes of that cut. ^__^

Okay, so LT3 supplies our books to eight or so third-party vendors. Third-party vendors get us more exposure and make people more inclined to buy our books while they're doing their other shopping (typically for books from other publishers). Sort of like the way WalMart and other stores picked up the super center model with groceries, general merch, and pharmacy and the like.

A rundown of LT3's third party vendors:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
iTunes
Kobo
AllRomance Ebooks
Rainbow Ebooks
Bookstrand

(We also do Smashwords, but their system is extra special complicated so for simplicity I'm skipping that one.)

Let's start with Amazon. If the book is priced between $2.99 and $9.99, they'll give you 70% of the list price. If it's less or more, you get 35%. But wait! Amazon distributes to a bunch of different countries (think Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.com.br, etc.) If you don't exclusively distribute with Amazon (the KDP Select program), you can only get 35% of the price in India, Japan, and Brazil. There's no 70% option there.

Barnes & Noble has a similar tier setting. If your book is between $2.99 and $9.99, they'll give you 65% of the list price. Anything else, you get 40%. No ifs, ands, buts here, just two simple tiers.

iTunes is simple and complicated. They give us 70% for all books, regardless of price. However! You have to match their price tiers. This is pretty easy for USD prices, as their price tiers pretty evenly match ours (everything must end in .99), but gets trickier when you start to do conversions to Euros, GBP, etc. >_<

Kobo also does tiered percentages. If you're between $1.99 and $12.99, you get 70%. Everything else gets 45%.

AllRomance and Rainbow Ebooks both take a solid 40%, giving us 60%, and Bookstrand splits it 50-50.

So what does this mean? Well, LT3 gives our authors 40% of the price from books sold through LT3, and 35% of the gross we get from third party sales. Here's what that looks like (math!):



(Apologies for the size of that image, but no way was I coding that table by hand. x__X;;)

There you have it. ^__^ If you've got any questions, drop 'em, though I may have to ping Sam to answer any tough ones.