ETC Press isn’t able to give book advances. Instead, we have a revenue split on earned royalties with book authors and editors as follows:
With our reduced pricing structure, we aren’t able to provide royalties for contributors in edited books, and we price our books and proceedings without any retail markup so there are not any royalties involved.
Since we’re a small staff, we don’t spend our time running reports and sending them out. We are working to put together an annual email, but the surest way to find out is to send us an email.
ETC Press prices our titles as inexpensively as possible because we want people to have access to them. We’re most interested in the sharing and spreading of ideas. We base our prices off of Lulu production costs plus retail markup in order for a project to be sold through other book sellers. Lulu.com offers a revenue calculator that gives authors the ability to see how much the book costs to print and how much profit is made.
Most books at the ETC Press don’t sell thousands of copies, which means you probably aren’t going to get rich. However, the editors will work with authors on a bootstrap plan for marketing the book and finding new avenues such as bundles to increase potential sales.
ETC Press doesn’t have a budget for marketing or public relations. We will work with the author to develop promotional assets such as digital images for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, work with Carnegie Mellon University’s marketing and communication team to distribute a promotional release and work with the author to engage with ETC and ETC Press audiences.
Since ETC Press is an on-demand publisher, there are no print runs. We don’t have the capacity to warehouse books.
Lulu.com is a book distributor, which means it will make your book available through the websites of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple’s iBookstore. Each of those distributors takes a big cut of your revenue (roughly half). For books, ISBNs are obtained through Lulu, and LCCNs are granted by the Library of Congress.
Lulu has its own online marketplace where people can purchase your book. ETC Press only links to Lulu because the revenues on those books are substantially higher for authors. (This is how many independent and small publisher operate.)