[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by MrPLD

Interesting topic folks... very interesting. Maybe it should be summarised as "What's a reasonable profit for an eBook?"

I think that's the wrong question. The right one is "How much profit do you have to make, to stay in business?"

The OP is generally right - the cost of "making" eBooks post production is effectively zero, maybe 5c/download if you're living in a country where your server hosting charges per MB and you're amortising things like server depreciation and electricity costs into it all.

The problem is that 80% or more of the cost of producing a book is incurred before you ever get to the point of actually issuing an edition, whether print or ebook.

Personally, I think that an eBook should sell for effectively the profit margin that your printed books should sell for, so if you're working at about $7 USD per printed book, then go for that on the eBook as well.

My feeling is that when the dust settles, the price for an ebook will wind up at about the level of the mass market paperback edition. Some will be a lot more expensive, but those will be electronic versions of books that would be a lot more expensive in paper versions, and for the same reasons.

If you consider it takes 6 months to a year to produce a fairly typical 350~400 page novel at reasonable wages (let's say $30,000/yr), add in the cost of editing, marketing you'll be somewhere between $20,000~$35,000 for a book. At $10 profit that's 2000~3500 books to sell for a break-even, or at $5 it's 4000~7000 copies!

Those numbers might work for a self published book. They don't work at all for a traditionally published book. Consider that "$10 profit". It constitutes your margin on the sale. If your margin is $10, what are you charging the customer?

I admire those people who sell their eBooks for $0.99 each, I can only imagine they've done it on the side and are releasing it more as a novelty rather than anything else.

It depends on the individual author's motivations. There are folks on MobileRead going the self-published route. If they are lucky, they cover their costs and make beer money. It's essentially a hobby.

For some folks, simply having the book available in a form others can read is sufficient. Others would like to make some actual money writing. There are a few doing it through self-publishing, but the ones I can think of offhand already have a name established through traditional publishing, and their main challenge is letting their following know about their self-published offerings. For the folks trying to establish themselves as authors, self-publishing is a much harder row to hoe.

In summary - while it costs nearly nothing to 'produce' a single copy of an eBook, there's all the pre-production work that has to be paid out first.

Yes. And there's a of wishing thinking about what those costs are, and even more wishful thinking about what percentage of them are accounted for by printing, binding, warehousing, and distribution, and how much the price of the book can be lowered if those costs aren't there.

Paul.

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Dennis