Resources - Write/Edit for Hentzenwerke

Wanna write or edit a book? Here's all you need to know about how the publishing process works here.

• About HWP
• The Publishing Business
• The Process at HWP
• Proposing a Book
• The Contract
• Getting Paid
• Doing the Writing and Editing
• Source Code
• Ebook Stuff
• Our Covers
• Going to Press
• Marketing
• Writing Whitepapers
• So You Want to be an Author
• So You Want to be a Tech Editor
• The HWP Author Kit

Getting Paid

How much?

With contracts come questions about money. That's good, because we're all in this for the money to some degree.

Remember that my authors are full-time professionals - they don't just write books for a living. That means the content is better, since it's written by people who actually use the product for a living, not just learn it for three months and then discard it to learn something else. This means that it takes them longer to write a book since they have a 'real job' (that job might be in the employ of another company, or it might be as an independent consultant). It also means that they have a source of regular income (although some consultants are smirking as they read this!)

Typically, HWP doesn't pay advances, both because the author doesn't need the money like a professional author would, and because HWP is still in the 'startup' phase and just don't have the money to lay out advances for six months or more like the big publishers. However, in order to compensate for that, our royalty percentages are significantly higher than any other publishing company I know of.

Once the book is printed and available for sale, we sell direct, through distributors and through online places like Amazon. As soon as the book starts selling, royalties accrue, and I pay royalties monthly for the sales of the previous month. In other words, royalties for sales in January are paid by the end of March. 

As you’ve seen, we've tended not to sell through bookstores in the past, because of the numerous problems I outlined in other sections. You may be concerned that this means that total royalties would be lower because of lower sales. Actually, that's not really been the case, and you can pull out your old Economics text right now if you’d like to follow along.

Why? Well, we sell direct as much as possible, so that we keep as much of the $50 list price as we can, instead of giving 50% or more to a middleman. As a result, an author sees more dollars on those sales, because the sale price is higher.

Specifics? With the exception of one specialized title, every one of our books that has been out for at least 18 months has earned royalties for the authors that are better than industry average for a book. Yes, that’s right, to date every one of our authors has done better than the industry average. And that's a fact that I'm very proud of, particularly considering we're just a small outfit selling books through the 21st century equivalent of the back of a psychedelic Volkswagen Microbus at a Grateful Dead show.

You may still be wondering how many books we sell; that number varies according to the title, and specific numbers are not public knowledge. As we discuss your book, potential sales will be one of the topics we'll cover.

Tech editors get paid a fixed amount per printed page, and then get an additional amount for every thousand books sold. The tech editor, thus, has a financial interest in the success of the book as well.

When?

Short answer: You get paid between 30 and 60 days of when we do. When we get paid varies according to where the sale was made.

Sales made on our website are paid by the end of the second month after the sale was made. For example... a sale on January 4th or January 28th shows up in the royalty payment you get by the end of March. (We wait 30 days to make sure the reader isn't going to return the book.)

If a book of ours is sold somewhere else, though, we don't see that money for a while. For example, suppose a book goes on sale on February 1st on our website. We also ship oodles of copies to our distributor on the same day. Due to all the middlemen involved, that book won't actually hit the stores for 4 to 6 weeks, which puts the early sales in March. (That's why a book available on our website isn't available at Amazon for a while.)

The bookstore doesn't pay our distributor for those early March sales for 90 to 120 days, so they don't see a check until June. We'll get paid in July for the receipts they saw in June, and you see your cut of those receipts in August. So even though we shipped on Feburary 1st, you get paid a lot later. Blech.

Makes those direct sales from our website really attractive, eh? In order to counteract that lag in cash flow, we pay each month in order to get money flowing to you regularly, instead of making you wait quarterly or semi-annually like, ahem, many other publishers.

Authors and Editors are emailed a monthly statement that lists quantities and dollars for every project they've worked on for Hentzenwerke Publishing. Authors and editors who reside in the United States receive their funds electronically to the bank account they designate while authors and editors who reside outside the United States receive a good old-fashioned check in the mail unless they can make arrangements with a U.S. bank.

Funds are transferred electronically at the same time that the statements are emailed (it takes between 2 and 4 bus days for the funds to be available in your account, depending on the bank.)

Back to Top