Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Correct. But my point was that the manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution costs are a far smaller percentage of the total cost of producing a book than most folks seem to think, and eliminating them will not reduce the cost of an ebook as much as many hope.
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Manufacturing, warehousing & distribution are per-unit costs. Author advance, editing & formatting are per-title costs; the more books you sell, the less they matter for each unit sold.
The $.50-1.00 printing cost for mmpbs, and whatever it costs to ship & store them, *cannot* be reduced. (The industry has already done everything it can to get those costs as low as possible.) It doesn't matter if they sell 1000 copies or 500,000; that much per sale is reserved for production & distribution. (And that's not considering the returns. If those are the actual production costs per book, the truth is that production costs are more like $1-2 per sale, because about half of them are trashed.)
The production costs of an ebook are "author advance + editing" (a few thousand dollars, if we're being generous?) "+ bookcover" (few hundred, maybe?) "+ distribution" (percentage of sale price). If it sells 1000 copies, the book may have the same profit level or lower than the print version. If it sells 50,000 copies, the profit margin is ridiculously high--even if the per-book profit is just fifty cents.
I want to see one of those
publisher cost breakdowns that differentiates between per-unit costs and per-title costs. Because saying that typesetting/formatting costs "$.50 for an ebook; $.80 for a hardcover" is ridiculous. Of course they don't spend $.80 to format every hardcover; they spend a flat rate formatting the title, and divide that cost among however many they print. But that doesn't work for ebooks--they can "print" as many or as few as customers want.
Those numbers are based on an assumed level of sales. According to those numbers, Baen should've gone bankrupt years ago; they're selling ebooks below cost!