How a Book Royalties Calculator Helps Professional Speakers Forecast Income From Their Book

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

As a professional speaker, your book is so much more than just a book. It’s a credibility builder, a lead generator, and a bridge to potential consulting arrangements. It’s the reason your event planner can say: “This person knows what they’re talking about.” What’s more, if done right, your book can also be a significant revenue stream.

By revenue stream, we mean more than just “Yes, this book could help reinforce my brand” and more “track and forecast your income on a spreadsheet.” That’s where having a book royalties calculator can help.

If you’re publishing your book through BookBaby, our free royalties calculator is inside the Distribution Information section of your account. Here, you can enter a retail price and calculate your royalty earnings before you set your book’s price. You can also use it to see royalty amounts for Amazon and the BookBaby Bookshop.

For professional speakers, being able to forecast income in this way is important, because your books often fit inside of a larger business model. For instance, you might sell your books after a keynote, bundle them into workshop packages, include them in VIP offers, or use them as an entry point into higher level consulting.

Royalties aren’t just publishing income

Think of your book royalties as an integrated part of your entire speaking ecosystem. Your book can branch out to support a variety of revenue channels, including:

• Selling directly to attendees or clients
• Bulk sales for events
• Workshop materials
• Lead generation for consulting
• Upsells for an online course
• Corporate training bundles
• Back-of-room sales after presentations

Your book’s price and its royalty structure can affect the profitability of your entire speaking engagement. To illustrate, imagine you sell 75 books after a workshop. To calculate royalties correctly, you’d need to know whether those sales bring you $2, $5, or $9 in royalties per copy. It might not seem like much per sale on the surface, but when you sell at dozens of speaking events, that amount adds up quickly.

You’ll also be glad to know that printed books sold through your BookBaby Bookshop page pay you 50% royalties. To compare, sales through other retailers like Amazon typically generate anywhere from 10% to 30% royalties depending on the price, specifications, printing costs, and other factors.

How a book royalties calculator works

Pricing your book correctly is about more than just the royalties you receive. Do it right, and you’ll have positioned yourself extraordinarily well. A book priced at $9.99 feels accessible to most attendees, whereas a book priced at $34.95 is more substantial and feels like it would fit in perfectly as a professional training resource.

Choosing the right price for your book means knowing your audience, topic, format and business model well. BookBaby offers a complete book pricing guide to help you figure out all the details without undervaluing your knowledge and expertise.

Revenue vs. profit

When pricing their books, one of the biggest mistakes that speakers make is thinking that book price is the same as royalties. If your book sells for $20, that doesn’t mean you earn $20. The royalties you earn depend on a number of things, such as:

• The format of your book
• The retailer or platform it’s sold through
• The cost to print your book
• The distribution methods you’ve chosen
• The terms of the platform you signed up with

Luckily, BookBaby Bookshop was built for independent authors, and it’s a great tool for success. For example, your eBook is sold through the BookBaby Bookshop, authors earn an impressive 85% in royalties.

A book royalties calculator helps you focus on what you can actually earn, not just what the customer pays on the surface. Without such a calculator and the ability to forecast potential revenues, it’s easy to underprice these packages.

Forecast your book sales at events

If you order your books in advance, you need to know, up front, the things that will affect the price and royalty, such as the printing costs, sales price, and profit margin. If you send attendees to a direct online sales page, you need to know how many royalties you get. If you buy copies in bulk, you need to know how much of a discount you can offer while still making a profit.

Fortunately, BookBaby has you covered. Our book pricing page lets you select between different printing pricing types and create quotes based on the type of project, genre, page count, trim size, binding, paper stock, cover finish, and print type. It’s invaluable for when you need both royalty forecasting and to plan for production costs.

Asking the right questions to grow your business

Having an accessible, easy-to-use book royalties calculator goes beyond pricing, to help you ask better questions too:

• How many books do I need to sell at this event to make it worthwhile?
• Should I push print books, eBooks or audiobooks?
• Should I bundle the book into my speaking fee?
• Should I use my book as a giveaway to generate consulting leads?
• Can my book stand alone as a profitable product or should it be a low-cost lead gen tool?

Questions like these help connect your book to your larger business strategy. Of course, a book royalties calculator can’t make those decisions for you, but it can give you the fuller picture of numbers you have to work with, and what you need to adjust to start building a whole new stream of income as you grow and improve in your speaking business. Try it now by visiting BookBaby.com.