Random House to Sell Books by the Chapter

[Liviu_5]

Originally Posted by NatCh

There's a precedent for this sort of approach: this is the way they used to sell novels in the 1800's.

Worked pretty well at the time, actually.

They were serialized in newspapers/magazines and they were included in the cost; NYT did Chabon new novel (Gentlemen of the Road - you can still find it for free in their archives since they opened them recently) this way several years back.
By and large I am skeptical of this method (selling a chapter at a time) for various reasons, but hey let's see how it works in practice...

[6charlong]

Originally Posted by snookums

Yep. That's how Dickens sold his novels. It's also how Stephen King sold The Green Mile. I actually have all of the chapter books for The Green Mile. I bought them as they came out. The problem is that only an idiot would buy a book a piece at a time when the whole thing is already out for the cost of about 3 chapters. This is evidence for the total disconnect that there is between publishers and reality. If they had half a brain, they would be giving away the first chapter of every book in their catalog for free. I've already bought at least half a dozen books I never would have bought if not for the sample chapters I can get on the Kindle.

Maybe it's because Amazon has experience selling books while Random House has experience publishing books. In bookstores I always read the TOC and at least part of the first chapter to sort out exactly which book I want to buy. Amazon has found how to do that on-line. Maybe the publishing houses would be well advised to let book sellers handle the selling.

I bought The Green Mile that way too, Snookums, and found myself looking forward each month to the next installment. They were $3 a chapter, then jumped to $4 for the last one, making it cost $19 for the entire book, which came out in a single volume for about half that price. They never tried that again!

[giedre]

Does anyone know just how much money of an average paperback book, let's say eight dollars, actually goes to pay for the paper and ink in making that book? I guess the reason I ask is because I too feel that ebooks are still too expensive. Perhaps we are underestimating the amount of money due an ebook??

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by giedre

Does anyone know just how much money of an average paperback book, let's say eight dollars, actually goes to pay for the paper and ink in making that book? I guess the reason I ask is because I too feel that ebooks are still too expensive. Perhaps we are underestimating the amount of money due an ebook??

The 'shelf' price is usually twice the price to the bookstore - so a mass-market paperback 'priced' at $6.99 'costs' the bookstore $3.50. Of that $3.50, a percentage - not more than 55% and often less, goes to the fulfillment and distribution company. That brings the amount to the publisher to $1.75 - at BEST! Out of that $1.75 comes the printing costs, the author's advance and royalty money, promotional expenses and the publisher's labor and fixed costs. The rest goes to the publisher as profit.

If you go to BooksJustBooks.com, they'll run the numbers for a typical MMPB (mass market paperback) that you want published. And for a print run of 5,000 or more copies, the per-copy price (and this includes their profits) drops to less than a buck.

The big costs per book are always the distributor and the retailer. None of that money, unless the publisher is also the distributor, goes back to the publisher. Nor does the author get any of that, except in the cases where the author is self-publishing and self-retailing.

But when you consider that the SAME breakdown occurs with hardcover books, then paying MMPB prices for an ebook isn't all that much of a burden. Paying HC prices *IS*!

Derek

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by giedre

Does anyone know just how much money of an average paperback book, let's say eight dollars, actually goes to pay for the paper and ink in making that book? I guess the reason I ask is because I too feel that ebooks are still too expensive. Perhaps we are underestimating the amount of money due an ebook??

Figure a few dollars. Remember that the price you pay is the retail price. Your retailer will purchase books from a distributor, who it turn gets them from the publisher (or if your retailer is one of the big chains, get them directly from the publisher), and their price will be 50%-60% of what you pay.

Also recall that it isn't just paper, ink, and printing costs. There are distribution and warehousing costs on pbook editions that need to be counted in as well.

I'll ask around a bit, and try to get a relative percentage breakdown between the costs you will have in any book, electronic or paper, and the costs added by the paper edition. But offhand, I think many folks have too optimistic a view of how cheap an ebook can be.
______
Dennis

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Figure a few dollars. Remember that the price you pay is the retail price. Your retailer will purchase books from a distributor, who it turn gets them from the publisher (or if your retailer is one of the big chains, get them directly from the publisher), and their price will be 50%-60% of what you pay.

Also recall that it isn't just paper, ink, and printing costs. There are distribution and warehousing costs on pbook editions that need to be counted in as well.

I'll ask around a bit, and try to get a relative percentage breakdown between the costs you will have in any book, electronic or paper, and the costs added by the paper edition. But offhand, I think many folks have too optimistic a view of how cheap an ebook can be.
______
Dennis

The interesting thing I found at BooksJustBooks.com right now (I haven't visited them for a while.) is that a 3,000 copy run of a basic MMPB was $0.65 each! That's for a single-color-text 5.5" x 8.5" size for about 120-160 pages. Not a big book, but still! So figure that a 10,000 copy print run would drop the per-copy 'cost-to-print-and-bind' at less than $0.40.

However, as you and I both pointed out, distributor and retailer margins soak up a LOT of the cover price!

Derek

[mores]

Originally Posted by giedre

Does anyone know just how much money of an average paperback book, let's say eight dollars, actually goes to pay for the paper and ink in making that book? I guess the reason I ask is because I too feel that ebooks are still too expensive. Perhaps we are underestimating the amount of money due an ebook??

8 bucks for an eBook would be awesome. Most are priced three times as high.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

The interesting thing I found at BooksJustBooks.com right now (I haven't visited them for a while.) is that a 3,000 copy run of a basic MMPB was $0.65 each! That's for a single-color-text 5.5" x 8.5" size for about 120-160 pages. Not a big book, but still! So figure that a 10,000 copy print run would drop the per-copy 'cost-to-print-and-bind' at less than $0.40.

They use Docutech for their POD mass market editions. You might want to look at one before thinking it's a solution. It is not what major publishers use, and the costs for Docutech cannot be considered costs for a standard MMPB.

However, as you and I both pointed out, distributor and retailer margins soak up a LOT of the cover price!

They do.

My bigger concern is that there are an assortment of costs for a publisher in publishing a book, regardless of whether it is a paper or electronic edition.

You have the cost of acquiring the rights to the book, which will vary depending on perceived value of the book and projected possible sales. You have the time of the editor who acquires the book and does the line edits (which may be different editors), the costs of copy editing and proofreading, the cover art and interior art (if any), and the markup and typesetting to produce the copy that will be the basis of the printed book or the ebook, the cost of the ISBN, plus an allocated share of the overhead of the publishing house.

Those costs will be there whether the book is issued as an ebook or a pbook, and will set a floor on how low an ebook price can be and still make any money for the publisher.

I don't know at the moment just where that floor is (and it will vary depending upon the book,) but I suspect it is higher than a lot of folks would like to believe.

Derek

______
Dennis

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

SNIP

My bigger concern is that there are an assortment of costs for a publisher in publishing a book, regardless of whether it is a paper or electronic edition.

You have the cost of acquiring the rights to the book, which will vary depending on perceived value of the book and projected possible sales. You have the time of the editor who acquires the book and does the line edits (which may be different editors), the costs of copy editing and proofreading, the cover art and interior art (if any), and the markup and typesetting to produce the copy that will be the basis of the printed book or the ebook, the cost of the ISBN, plus an allocated share of the overhead of the publishing house.

Those costs will be there whether the book is issued as an ebook or a pbook, and will set a floor on how low an ebook price can be and still make any money for the publisher.

I don't know at the moment just where that floor is (and it will vary depending upon the book,) but I suspect it is higher than a lot of folks would like to believe.

______
Dennis

Those costs are certainly there, and need to be covered. That said, we have one useful data point -- Baen makes money on eBooks at $6.00 a pop, while charging each copy its proper pro-rated share of the fixed costs. That is, if a book sold half its total copies in bits they'd charge half the fixed costs to the e-sales for purposes of determining profitability. They report being very happy with eBook sales; they make a little less than hardcover, but more than paperback on each ebook sold.

Oh yeah, they also sell the majority of their eBooks via bundles that include four front-line and a zero-to-four re-issues for $15. So figure that their average selling price per eBook is actually well below $6.00.

Xenophon

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

Those costs are certainly there, and need to be covered. That said, we have one useful data point -- Baen makes money on eBooks at $6.00 a pop, while charging each copy its proper pro-rated share of the fixed costs. That is, if a book sold half its total copies in bits they'd charge half the fixed costs to the e-sales for purposes of determining profitability. They report being very happy with eBook sales; they make a little less than hardcover, but more than paperback on each ebook sold.

Oh yeah, they also sell the majority of their eBooks via bundles that include four front-line and a zero-to-four re-issues for $15. So figure that their average selling price per eBook is actually well below $6.00.

Doesn't matter, because the numbers still work out.

In paper books, your big variable will be actual sales. You print X thousands and put them out through your distribution channels. You cross your fingers that enough will sell to cover your costs and make money on the book.

For hardcovers that don't sell, you get the actual books back. For paperbacks, you get the covers torn off and sent back. The actual body of the book is supposed to become landfill somewhere, but often winds up being sold for a fraction of the cover price. To make it worse, the publishing industry has historically had a 100% returns policy, so there was no risk to the retailer. Didn't sell? Send it back for credit.

And because of the length of the distribution chain, it could be 6 months to a year before you even know whether a title has sold and see any revenue from it.

Ebooks change that. You don't have the same distribution chain, you know right away whether a title is selling, and you don't have the expense of unsold returns. But you do still have to be concerned about sales, and you can lose money on titles that don't sell, since you spent the money to acquire and produce them.

Selling bundles may mean less on individual titles for Baen, but probably works out to more over all, as all the titles in a bundle sell.

And Baen is a smaller house in a lower rent area -- costs in NC are a fraction of NYC -- so the share of overhead will be less.

Making less than a hardcover sale but more than an MMPB sale at $6/book on ebooks is not a surprise. MMPBs are really squeezed these days, and I've heard stories of press runs as low as 15,000 copies. Not that long ago, I wouldn't have believed you could print that few and make any money. Baen was struggling in the old days when they were an MMPB house. The Free Library helped drive their metamorphosis into a thriving hardcover house. If that hadn't happened, they might not exist now.

I wouldn't be overly surprised if at some point Baen did hardcovers and ebooks and dropped MMPBs entirely.
______
Dennis

[moz]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

They use Docutech for their POD mass market editions. You might want to look at one before thinking it's a solution.

I think I have. It was ok, nothing to get excited about. In terms of contrast and fragility I'm hoping the Sony 505 will be better. The POD book was grey-on-grey and started to fall apart after about a month and three readings. It also cost a bundle - $US12 to print according the the author.

I bought a copy of "Echoes in the Blue" direct from the author and out of the cover price he donated $1 to activists, then some to the retailer/distributor and seems to get about $1 after costs. I asked about an eBook version and he says the deal he has with the distributor prevents that. You can download the prologue though.

http://www.cgeorgemuller.com/echoesintheblue.htm
cost breakdown here: http://www.cgeorgemuller.com/faqs.htm#Q11