"99p on Kindle" and royalties

[JellySlice]

If a book that normally costs, say, £10 in paperback and £5 in Kindle, is promoted for a while at 99p on Kindle, what happens to the author's royalties?

Is the author paid a percentage of the sold price of every copy sold in any format, or only a percentage of any amount earned by the book over a set amount? In other words, does the author actually earn anything from the Kindle flash-sales?

It will depend on the contract what the percentages paid are, but any royalty is paid on net sales, so the royalty on heavily discounted sales (bulk sales to book discounters, for example) will be less as it is a percentage of the discounted price. Generally, big companies like Amazon and Waterstones buy with a substantial discount compared to independents. Often contracts set a different percentage for ebook sales compared to print sales but I always assume 99p Kindle deals are more about pushing a book up the chart for visibility or drawing in new readers when a more recent book is about to launch.