Will I receive any royalties?

The baseline is that very few scholarly publications ever sell enough copies to compensate for, let alone exceed, their production costs. punctum books is a non-profit, public benefit corporation and all the money we make from selling print copies is reinvested into publishing more books. We are kept afloat thanks to the generous contributions of academic libraries. As a result, we do not have a royalties clause in our contract.

However, if you feel strongly that your book might become a bestseller, for various reasons, we are amenable, in specific instances, to adding a royalties clause that will specifically state that any profits above our production costs will be be split 65% (punctum) + 35% (author). You will not see anything like this split in any publishing contract from any trade or academic publisher, where 2% to 15% of net profits are the average shared with authors.

At the same time, once a book is published, our costs are not over, but continue, because there are many things we are always doing to keep your title visible across the world and integrated into as many global knowledge systems as possible, which systems are always being created, developed, and updated (such as library databases, open book repositories, open metadata management systems, digital preservation platforms, and so on).

Royalties are calculated on an annual basis and paid out in June each year.