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Originally Posted by brecklundin
That is some really nice candid insight into the overhead for a professional creation of an audiobook. And pointing out that "brand name" readers carry huge premiums. I imagine that the more popular readers have higher rates as well, but the nice thing is there have to be a lot of actors and just regular folks who can pretty much teach themselves to be readers so it could keep costs down to a reasonable level. And ultimately it still comes down to the book itself because even the best reader can't propel a marginal book to popularity or if the cost to produce the audiobook version makes sense as even, say $3500 is still a lot of cash requiring a fair number of sales to reach that "Mendoza Line".
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Why thank you.
I try to take all the cool stuff I've learned while working on the inside of the publishing industry to help out authors to better understand what they're getting into and what to expect/do in order to be as successful as possible.
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Originally Posted by jbcohen
What percentage of an ebook's price is profit? What does it cost a publisher to publish an ebook?
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Well, that depends a lot on the price, startup and continuing costs, plus the distributer fees. Most distributor fees average about 30% of the ebook sale price. Subtract another 20% for other costs and fees, including marketing and the like, it averages out to about 50% or so.
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Originally Posted by Andrew H.
Talent fees (for professional narrators who are not celebrities (i.e., the kind of narrators that audible tends to use) will add an additional $200-$300 per hour. Also - I'm an Audible "Platinum" user, meaning I get two credits/month for, I think, $23. I never use my credits on an audiobook less than ten hours long; mostly I "read" ones that are 15+ hours long (my current read is 22 hours). So it can get somewhat expensive.
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Yeah, talent fees for non-celebrity professional readers would increase it somewhat. But even if the studio fees went as high as $1000 per studio hour, you're still within a reasonable ballpark cost when you're all done. On a book with 15-22 hours of studio time, plus extras, that's upwards to $25k for the entire production of the audiobook. At $25 a pop on the shelf, minus discounts and costs, bringing the total down to probably $12 realistically that you would get from selling each audiobook, that still allows you to break even point of about 2100 units sold. This would actually fit nicely with my 3/2 rule. In other words, I need to sell 50% more units than it cost to produce the book/audiobook/ebook/whatever in order to justify even bothering with doing it.
And this applies regardless of who you publish through from big house, all the way down to self publishing. If you can't guarantee yourself at least 50% more income from sales than it cost to produce it (this counts both in money and time, as time = labor = cost. Even if the labor is free, it's still a cost, even if it is soft expense. Thus it still needs to be figured into the cost of producing the item)