Chris Lindley asked Tim Butcher:

Hi Tim. As an author, does where the consumer buy your books affect how much royalties you get? Just like in the music industry it seems to be getting more difficult for authors to make money from their efforts thanks to greedy corporates. Musicians are finding outlets to self publish or have options for a fairer share. Is this an issue for authors? Where would you recommend we buy your books from? Thx

Tim Butcher In theory books are easy to trace so for an author it should not matter where real books are bought: each sale should come through as a royalty. The biggest bookshop in London, a small independent in the Welsh hills, an online store such as Amazon. If a book is sold the arrangement is the author receives a percentage of that sale price, typically 12 per cent although it varies from publishing contract to publishing contract.
Things got a bit sticky for a while with e-books. In the end the publishers and the big online distributors (basically Amazon) agreed to keep good records and pay the author a royalty of about 30 per cent. Again, this can vary from publishing contract to publishing contract but the point is it makes more money for the author. Why? Because Amazon was forced to concede it bore none of the costs traditionally associated with the production of a real book: no printing costs, storage, distribution etc. So it could make the same money and still leave more to be passed onto the author.
So if you are going to buy a real book, it matters not to the author where you buy it. But if you are neutral between buying a real book or a virtual book, then it makes more for the author if you buy it virtually.
All of this breaks down of course if publishers/booksellers do not keep good records. The publishing industry is littered with the bones of authors to whom royalties were never passed because of some glitch or some skulduggery. Authors are in an invidiously weak position of not being able to meaningfully check booksale figures so the whole thing relies on trust. My UK publishers have always been convincingly accurate in their records and payments, not so some of my foreign pubishers. You end up wondering how shameless a publisher must be to retain (steal?) money owed to an author, smug in the knowledge they will never be held to account.

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