Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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.
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Now, you see, that's where I get stuck. I see this repeated and repeated and repeated, and I just don't believe it. For tiny print runs, maybe. But for something where you print, say, 100,000 copies - even at unit cost of $1 to print and ship there's just no way.
And what's getting counted in "cost" before printing? I have a feeling that the author's advance is getting counted in that, and that it's a big part of it. But that's just an advance, right? Essentially a loan that's going to be clawed back out of the author's royalties AFTER the book has been printed - it's not an up-front cost. If you want to be super technical about it, I guess you can count some sort of value for the lost investment income that the publisher didn't get from that money because it was loaned to the author.
And finally the idea that it's 80% REGARDLESS of whether it's print or ebook, is mathematically impossible. Paper books have a non-zero unit cost, so the more you print, the smaller a percentage of the costs are going to be pre-production. On the other hand, something like %99 of the costs for an ebook are pre-production, since the production costs are close to zero on a per unit basis.