The standard in the print publishing is 15% of cover price goes to author. That means each unit of a $10.00 book would be $1.50 to the author.
In our model, a $10 book would be sold to distribution for $5.00. The print price of each book may be around $2.00. Leaving $3.00 profit per unit, half to publisher and half to author, meaning $1.50 per unit to the author.
If that same book is sold from the AIP website for $10.00, with a print price of $2.50 ( costs us more to have small print runs ), that leaves $7.50 total profit, so $3.75 towards author and $3.75 to publisher.
For an e-book, there is really no set industry standard, but they tend to go with the same 15%. so, for a $5.00 ebook, that is $0.75 to the author.
For us, an ebook sold through amazon at $5.00 (70% royalty ) would generate $3.50 net profit, $1.75 to author and $1.75 to publisher.
We do offset the "cost" of a book with the initial setup cost as we are a small publisher.
So, for example, let's say an ebook has $100 spent towards the cover art and $5 for the ISBN registration. The first $105 dollars earned in net is applied to that cost, then the royalties for the author start accumulating towards the initial author advance (typically $100 ). So, for a given ebook at the above numbers through amazon, it would take 30 units to cover the costs ( $105 / 3.50 ), at which point it would take an additional 57 ($100 / 1.75 ) units before you have earned out of your $100 advance and start accumulating additional royalties. This works out as 87 units sold before you start to see additional money.
If you were getting the flat 15% of cover, you would start to see additional money after 133 units )
Note, that a book sold through the AIP website is $5.00 even, with no discounts to the vendors, so would earn $2.50 from each sale.
We do not charge for the hours and hours of time that we put into editing, doing layouts, setup, marketing, etc for the book. The only thing we consider as costs for the book are the actual external fees required by us to create the book as I have shown.
I understand your take on avoiding author paying for book production and wanting just the flat fee per unit. Our model is a bit more complicated as we prefer that the author receive equal share of any money we make on the product. What our model does is provide you a larger percentage of the books sold directly through the publisher ( either online or at conventions )