What the royalty split actually costs an independent author

Publishing arithmetic is dull until you do it on your own book, at which point it becomes the most interesting arithmetic in your life. So let's do it on a $9.99 ebook, sold a thousand times.

The familiar channel

At the standard 70% rate, a $9.99 ebook returns $6.99 per copy, minus a delivery fee charged by file size — call it 15¢ for a typical novel, more for anything with images. Round it to $6.84.

That 70% is conditional. Price below $2.99 or above $9.99 and the rate drops to 35%, which is why the entire market clusters at $9.99 like water finding a level. The pricing of independent publishing is not a market outcome; it is a royalty table wearing a market's clothes.

A thousand copies at $6.84 is $6,840.

Now the same thousand copies at 35%, because you wanted to charge $12.99 for a 600-page book: $4,547. The extra $3 of list price cost you $2,300.

What the payment layer takes

Underneath the royalty split sits the payment processor. Cards cost roughly 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction, which on a $9.99 sale is about 59¢ — six percent of the price, taken before the split anyone talks about. On a $2.99 short story it is closer to twelve percent.

You don't see this line. It has already happened by the time your dashboard shows a number. But it is why sub-$3 pricing is structurally miserable and why nobody sells a $0.99 book at any margin worth having.

Then, quietly, there is the float: the two months between a sale and a payout, during which your money is someone else's balance sheet.

The verdict: on a $9.99 sale, roughly $3.15 of every copy goes to intermediaries — a third of the price, for storage and a card form.

The other arithmetic

Sell the same book for the same $9.99, paid in bitcoin, settled straight to your own wallet:

A thousand copies: $6,840 against $9,990. The gap is $3,150 — for most independent authors, that is the difference between a book that funded the next one and a book that funded a laptop.

Two honest caveats, because the table above is the best case:

• Discovery is the real cost. A shop with a smaller audience sells fewer copies, and 100% of a hundred sales loses to 70% of a thousand. Direct channels work for authors who bring their own readers — a newsletter, a following, a back catalogue. They are not a substitute for an audience.
• Bitcoin is volatile and final. You are paid in an asset that can move 5% before you convert it, and refunds are manual. Some authors convert on arrival; some don't. Both are defensible; neither is free.

What we take

Inkwharf takes nothing per sale. The payment goes from the reader's wallet to the merchant wallet configured in Blockonomics, and the shop only watches the chain to know when to unlock a download. There is no float because there is no balance to float — no money ever sits here.

That is not generosity, it is what the architecture makes cheap. A shop that never touches funds has nothing to bill for except the shop itself.

What it takes to list

Upload an EPUB, write a description, set a dollar price. The bitcoin amount is quoted per order at checkout, so you think in dollars and readers pay in satoshis. No exclusivity, no listing fee, and you can delist any time — readers who already bought keep their files, because their files are files.

If you have a book and a wallet, that is the whole prerequisite list. Open a studio account, or read how paying in bitcoin works first if the settlement side is new to you.

A bookshop where the file is yours and the money is theirs. Browse the catalogue.