Quote:
Originally Posted by ottdmk
I remember seeing a well-written cost breakdown of the publishing game by an independent sort a while back. Wish to god I'd bookmarked it. Anyways, it turns out that while yes, ebook costs are lower, they are not nearly as lower as you'd think. The physical parts of the process don't make up nearly as much of the final cost as I'd expected.
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There've been a few of those; they're all disingenuous. They list the breakdown for editorial, formatting, etc. side by side... but they don't say whether the ebook costs are *in addition to* the print costs.
If they're already publishing a print edition, they don't have to pay the editors twice; it's a matter of something between minutes and a few hours to format the book properly for ebook release.
Those cost breakdowns also say nothing about backlist books, where the editing and marketing is already done. They don't need an ad campaign to push Book 3 of a series that's on Book 10; they just need to make it available, and newcomers to the series will snap it up.
They also very, very carefully don't mention scale. Editing is a fixed cost--it's per book released, not per unit sale. Paper and distribution costs per book--whether they sell 10 books or 10,000, each one will have a paper cost. Editing gets cheaper per unit the higher the sales are. All their numbers presumed a flat amount of sales, which they didn't release. Editing doesn't cost "12% of the cover price" of a million-book bestseller.