The real numbers behind our 50/50 model.
I know what you’re thinking.
Fifty-fifty? No fees? Author-first? Sure, Nikki. And my last query letter got a same-day response with hearts in the margins.
I get it. I genuinely do. You’ve been in this industry long enough to know that when something sounds too good, it usually comes with a predatory contract, a “marketing package” that costs four grand, or the word “hybrid” doing a lot of heavy lifting.
That’s actually why we’re here.
So let me do something that most publishers won’t: show you exactly how the money moves at Nightingale Press. Line by line. Dollar by dollar. Because you’ve earned the right to see it, and I’m really tired of watching talented people get talked out of fair deals by an industry that’s been underpaying them for decades.
What This Is Really About
I think the largest point of friction when pitching this press has been the assumptions.
We didn’t start Nightingale Press to make us money, so we’re not interested in squeezing every dime out of your book. We started it because brilliant writers keep getting ground down by a system that treats them as the most disposable part of the process—when they are, by any sane measure, the entire reason the industry exists.
The model works because we built it to be lightweight, honest, and tilted in favor of the people doing the actual creative work. It’s really not complicated. It just requires a team of people who are willing to look out for everyone the same way they look out for themselves.
I put the math in this post because I think you deserve to see it. And I think once you do, the question stops being “is this too good to be true?” and starts being “why hasn’t anyone done this before?”
I don’t have a great answer for that one. But I know what we’re doing about it.
The 50/50 Split, Demystified
When a copy of your book sells—whether through a retailer, a distributor, or directly from our website—money lands in the Nightingale bank account. We look at that deposit, and we send you exactly half. That’s the split. Net receipts. From copy one.
There’s no formula where your 10% of retail price gets further reduced by returns reserves and co-op fees and whatever other line items trad publishers use to make your royalty statement look like a tax return designed by someone who hates you. There are also no advances—but that means no advances to pay back.
You sell a book, you get paid for that book. Period.
The Actual Math on a $28 Hardcover
I promised receipts. Here they are.
THIS IS JUST AN EXAMPLE WHILE WE SHOP PRINTERS
We’re using a $28.00 prestige hardcover as the example. Roughly 300 pages, black-and-white interior, case laminate binding through IngramSpark. The printing cost on that unit runs about $8.50 per copy.
In a wholesale scenario—your book sold through a bookstore or online retailer—the retailer takes a 55% discount off the cover price. That’s $15.40 to them. Printing eats another $8.50. What’s left is about $6.80, and we split that down the middle. Your share: roughly $3.40 per copy. Shipping and fulfillment on wholesale orders are handled within the retailer’s discount—they don’t come out of the split pool.
In a direct sale from our website, the only deductions are the ~3% card processing fee (~$0.84) and the same $8.50 printing cost. Shipping gets charged separately to the buyer, so it doesn’t touch the split pool either. That leaves about $17.00 in net receipts, and your half is roughly $8.50 per copy.
In a traditional publishing deal, you’d see about $2.80 to $4.20 on that same book—and only after you’ve earned out your advance.
Read that last comparison again.
On a single direct sale from our website, you make roughly $8.50. In a traditional deal, you’d need to sell two to three copies through a retailer to match what one direct sale earns you here. And that’s before accounting for the earn-out period where you’re making exactly $0.00.
This is why we’re building a storefront and a brand that drives direct traffic. Every direct sale means more money for you and more money for us. The incentives actually point in the same direction.
Anthologies
If you’re a short fiction author considering our inaugural anthology, we pay $0.08 to $0.10 per word, upfront, upon acceptance. It hits your account regardless of how the anthology sells—your labor is compensated the moment we agree your story belongs in the collection. You wrote it, we accepted it, you get paid.
What the Author Pays — Nothing
If Nightingale Press signs your manuscript, you will never receive an invoice from us. There is no reading fee. No editorial fee. No “production cost share.” No marketing package upsell.
We cover ISBNs, copyright filings, editing, cover design, interior formatting, printing, distribution setup, and marketing. All of it. That’s our job. Your job was writing the book, and I promise you that was hard enough.
I’ve personally invested in the high four figures to build this press from scratch—legal formation, infrastructure, branding, production pipeline. That money came out of my pocket, not yours. When I tell you we take the financial risk, I mean we’ve already started.
We will be offering occasional paid features down the line—detailed submission feedback, fundraiser-specific events, that kind of thing. But those will always be clearly labeled as optional, and they’ll never be a requirement to get your work in front of us. Submitting to Nightingale is free. Getting published by Nightingale is free. The author pays nothing.
“Okay, But How Do You Stay Alive?”
Fair question. We’re building a catalog that pays for itself.
Nightingale runs lean by design. There’s no office lease. No corporate bloat. No middle management. Our team of five is small, sharp, and invested—literally. The staff earns when the press earns. Every person at this table has a stake in the book’s success, which means nobody here is collecting a paycheck while your royalties stagnate. Our incentives are identical to yours.
Because of that structure, our cash break-even on a title is low. We’re talking a few hundred copies to cover the hard production and marketing costs. Everything sold beyond that point is profit. The 50% we take from each book is then used to fund the next one.
Early funding comes from a mix of my personal investment, community support, and a crowdfunding launch to get the first titles into production. But the long-term model doesn’t depend on any of that.
“But Will Anyone Actually Buy My Book?”
A good deal structure means nothing if the books don’t sell. I know that. You know that. And I’d be insulting your intelligence if I handed you a pretty royalty split and then shrugged about the part where people actually have to find your book and buy it.
This is the part I’m not actually worried about—which is saying a lot.
I’m not going to lay out the entire playbook here, because that’s part of our competitive edge. But I will tell you this much: marketing is baked into the structure of this press. We’re building the audience, the plan, then putting books in front of people who are already looking to buy books.
Our Director of Marketing brings a decade of professional marketing experience from the corporate world. She’s done this at scale, across industries, and she’s now applying that entire toolkit to selling books. We have active campaigns across Substack, BookTok, social platforms, and a growing network of cross-promotional partnerships with other writers and publications.
—we also have a combined email list of over 10k. That helps.
Your book won’t be left to fend for itself. That’s the whole point.
Your Rights. Your Exit.
A few important things I want on the record:
We’re a literary press. We acquire print, digital, and optional audio rights. We are not quietly optioning your film/TV rights or claiming merchandising.
Every Nightingale contract is fully reviewable by your own legal counsel. I expect you to have a lawyer look at it. Please have a lawyer look at it. I don’t want authors signing things they haven’t had independently reviewed—that’s how the industry got this broken in the first place.
If your book goes out of print or falls below a minimum sales threshold over a defined period, your rights come back to you. Full reversion. We have no interest in sitting on someone’s work and doing nothing with it.
And the multi-book question—I know the About page mentions “your next three projects.” That’s aspirational. We sign manuscripts, one at a time. The hope is that working with us is good enough that you want to come back. If it isn’t, you’re free to walk. We don’t lock authors into multi-book contracts.
We want people who want to be here. Hopefully, that’s you.
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