I get asked this question from time to time and it’s usually a shock. I got this email from a write this morning so I decided to pull some actual figures.

They wrote…

‘As a published horror writer, I noted with interest the latest Twisted50 horror project and submission cost of £15.

Can you tell me, what royalties will be paid to writers whose stories are selected for publication, please?

Also you have a typo on your website ’

I can do a deep dive into costs if anyone REALLY wants it, but off the top of my head, we get around 150 submissions for each Twisted50 project. That’s around £2,250 income. We have to pay 20% VAT off the top, plus another 5%ish for PayPal, so a quarter is gone right away. That leaves about £1,687.

From that we need to pay for the site build, hosting, upkeep, additional tools for submissions, share of annual accounting, Midjourney for the images, we also use Elfsight and POWr for handling submissions and contracts (many of which are damned monthly payments). All the site is managed manually by our team (that usually means me, but we have an intern starting soon who can help with he load). Then there’s the book editing and production, along with reading, selection and overall management. It’s a petty huge task. I am also pretty sure I have forgotten some stuff too. 

Now for sales.

In the month of July we made about $8 across all five Twisted books. This is both direct sales and also page reads via Kindle Unlimited. According to Google, this is what we get from pages reads… ‘608 pages in Kindle Unlimited would earn you between approximately $2.43 and $3.04, as the payout rate varies monthly but typically falls between $0.004 and $0.005 per page.’

Looking at the KENP chart too it looks like 7 or so people downloaded the book, and 4 read a large part of it.