Quote:
Originally Posted by Fbone
I'm confused. Do you believe the number should be higher or lower than 80%?
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If you count the author's royalty as a per unit cost to the publisher then I figure it should cost something like $2-3 per unit to print & distribute a book.
So at 10,000 copies, you're talking $20-30K compared to something around $10-20K for the preproduction. Which would put the pecentage at less than 50%.
I'd be willing to believe that big name authors like Stephen King get a lot more up front costs. But those authors are expecting to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. So the pbook only expenses are going to be up near the $million mark.
Going the other direction, I can't see publishers spending $30K on a book that's expected to sell only 2000 copies. And at $3 a copy in production costs, that's what they'd have to spend to have 83% in pre-production costs. And at $10 a unit, they'd only gross $20K from sales, so they'd lose money.
Let's keep going with the math. At 5000 units sold (with a printing & royalty cost of $3/unit), they would need to spend $60K up front to hit the 80% mark. But the gross sales would only be $50K at $10/unit. So they'd lose a lot of money, especially since the publisher only gets a portion of the gross sales.
What if the unit costs are lower? OK, well the royalty has to stand at about $1, so put the printing & distribution costs at $1/unit for a total of $2/unit. Let's stick to 5000 units printed (which I'm told is good numbers for a typical book to sell). That's $10K in per/unit costs which means they need to spend $40K to keep that 80% ratio. But that only grosses $50K and the total cost to the publisher is $50K. And of course, the publisher only gets something around half of the gross. So, once again, the publisher loses money.
At $0.75/copy royalty, and $0.50 printing and distribution, the publisher has to spend $25K to hit the 80% ration, with a total cost of about $31K. At 50% of the gross, they still lose $6K on the book.
There you go, from what I can figure, the only way for a publisher to spend 80% of the cost of a pbook "before it gets anywhere near printing" is to lose money on the book.
I'd call that myth, "Busted".