We introduced a monthly/annual subscription model back in 2019 where no matter how much you sell, you pay only the monthly fee of the plan of your choice and keep all of your royalties — all of your sales revenue. This way, authors can anticipate the cost of their distribution and also save way more time for writing or building their author brand.
Self-publishing globally can be costly: either by spending a lot of time and energy dealing with operational tasks, or paying for those tasks and thereby giving up your earned royalties. If you want to become a full-time writer and run your business, neither of those options sound good. We talked to authors and figured out that for a reasonable monthly fixed fee, they would love to keep all of their titles, operations, sales data and analytics in one place — instead of spending countless hours handling everything on their own. We believe with this pricing model, authors will not only lower their distribution costs, but also save way more precious time to focus on writing.
Our subscription pricing is one of the most innovative and lucrative options in the industry. This option lets you keep 100% of your royalties (after the stores’ fee) for a small monthly fee of the plan of your choice.
Let’s look at some examples to see how pricing for self-published authors can affect take-home royalties.
Scenario #1
John is a new author whose monthly sales are a few hundred dollars, and he is using the royalty share option with another aggregator. All of his sales come from Amazon. He sells his books for $3.99 each.
Here’s a breakdown of his monthly sales:
| Store | Amazon |
| Units sold | 100 @ $3.99 = $399.00 |
| Author royalty (with store fees subtracted) | 70% = $279.30 |
| Minus the conventional royalty share fee | 10% = $27.93 |
| Author’s final royalty | $251.37 |
Scenario #2
After about a year, John begins to see a steady increase in sales. He is now selling over $1,000 per month:
| Store | Amazon |
| Units sold | 1000 @ $3.99 = $3,990.00 |
| Author royalty (with store fees subtracted) | 70% = $2,793.00 |
| Minus the conventional royalty share fee | 10% = $279.30 |
| Author’s final royalty | $2,513.70 |
At this point in John’s career, it makes much more sense to enroll in our Subscription Pricing instead.
Let’s see what John’s earnings would look like with these same figures using Subscription Pricing:
| Store | Amazon |
| Units sold | 1000 @ $3.99 = $3,990.00 |
| Author royalty (with store fees subtracted) | 70% = $2,793.00 |
| Minus PublishDrive fee | $49.99* |
| Author’s final royalty | $2,743.00 |
*This scenario assumes that John is enrolled in our Plus plan which allows the distribution of 18 books total.
To compare, John was taking home $2,513.70 with the Royalty Share option. But with Subscription Pricing, his take-home royalties are $2,743.00 - that’s more than 9% increase!
When high-earning authors continue to sell more books, they will see this difference increase exponentially.
However, our subscription plans are beneficial to beginner authors too! Instead of losing 10% of your royalties to royalty share, you can distribute your book to hundreds of stores for a fee as low as $16.99/month.
You can check our currently available subscription plans here.