Question about royalties

[Boomvang]

Are academic book royalties generally higher on hardcovers or ebooks?

[Parasaurolophus]

Are academic book royalties generally higher on hardcovers or ebooks?

I dunno about generally, but mine are 3.5% for hardback, 8% for softback/eBook, 7% on "rentals".

The hardback costs six times as much as the paperback/eBook, though, so...

[clean]

to clarify, I am guessing that those are percentages of wholesale prices.
How different are wholesale and retail prices? 
If a student buys a hardcover textbook for $250 from the campus bookstore , are you getting $8.75 or much less?

[Parasaurolophus]

to clarify, I am guessing that those are percentages of wholesale prices.
How different are wholesale and retail prices? 
If a student buys a hardcover textbook for $250 from the campus bookstore , are you getting $8.75 or much less?

For me, it's based on the actual amount received by the publisher (so: usually, but not always, wholesale). The hardcover list price is $128, so I'd get $4.48, and the bookstore would take $122. I doubt they'd mark it up so much, though; they're more likely to buy the paperback at $22 and charge $25-30.

[darkstarrynight]

It's zero since I do not see why anyone would buy my hardback. It costs so much more than the paperback and eBook versions. I think even libraries are only buying the paperback and eBook versions. Nevertheless, I make very little off of royalties anyway, and I think my publisher has not sent me a statement or any money in more than six months. C'est la vie!

[Wahoo Redux]

I've made maybe $500 total off royalties, mostly from sales to libraries, although some citizens must have bought the thing because there are used copies on Amazon.  The royalties are not quite half the cost of paying permissions fees.  Así es la vida.

[Ruralguy]

i get 10 percent of whatever the sales price was, including all coupons or whatever. The price in this sense is what the retailer actually collects for the book. Of course, ebooks sell for much less than paperbacks or hardcovers.

[jerseyjay]

For the two academic books I've published, I think I have earned less than $500 total in royalties. That is, they have not yet brought in enough money to cover the cost of having them both indexed, much less the cost of the research. That said, the first one got me a tenure track job and the second one got me tenure, so they have paid off in other ways.

The first book, for a major European publisher almost a decade ago, has yet to pay any royalties. I think I get 10 per cent of all sales, except I have to sell some number of books (a thousand?) first. Since the the hardback is really expensive (like 100 euros) and there are not that many research libraries, I haven't crossed the threshold.

The second book, published a year ago by an academic publisher in the US, started paying royalties immediately. However, as these things tend to be, the book sold several hundred in the first six months (libraries, etc), and then has petered off.  So I got maybe 200 in the first year, and I do not expect to get anything for a while.

This doesn't answer the OP's question, except to say that royalties are only a small part of most academic publishing decisions.