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Originally Posted by HamsterRage
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.
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The fact that you don't believe it doesn't make it untrue.
For instance, here's a snippet of a message posted to a list I'm on a while back by some in the production end of publishing:
The unit manufacturing cost (paper, print, and bind) of a dead tree edition is as follows:
mass market: $.50 - $1.
trade paper: $1-2
hardcover: $2-$4.
These are "typical" numbers at a medium-to-large trade publisher. Small presses and ultra-short-run presses (e.g. academic presses) typically have higher unit costs, which might explain why some small presses go the all-ebook route, offering paper only via POD.
The costs above specifically do
not include warehousing or distribution.
If the above numbers seem too low, they
can be even lower. The biggest costs in printing are in "setup" and "make ready": creating the plates from which the work will be printed, putting the plates on the press, inking, putting paper in the press, and running test copies to make sure everything is correct. The
incremental cost of producing additional copies once the above is done is a fraction of the above, largely composed of the cost of the paper and the additional time of the pressman.
Paper/Print/Bind costs will be a total amount for the press run of the book. If the press run is doubled, the total paper/print/bind cost does
not double, as the additional costs are the incremental ones. The total cost is allocated over the press run, so the cost
per book of paper/print/bind
drops.
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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.
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It is definitely part of the upfront cost. The publisher issues it to get the right to publish the book, as one of the first steps in the process. And the advance will influence other costs. as the larger the advance, the more effort the publisher will want to put into selling the book (and the larger the initial press run is likely to be.) What about it do you think makes it
not an upfront cost? The publisher has already
spent that money, and all they have at the moment is a manuscript. In fact, they may not have that: for established authors with track records, a book is usually sold on the basis of an outline and some sample chapters, so the author will typically get a 50% cut of the negotiated advance with the contract, and the other 50% when the completed manuscript is turned in. (Authors who have not sold books before
will have to turn in a completed manuscript, to prove they
can.)
And note that while it technically is an "advance against royalties", and the publisher hopes that the book will "earn out" - that is, sell enough to cover the costs and the advance, and sell additional copies on which the author is due additional royalties - the majority of books
don't earn out. The advance is the only payment the author sees. (And the author's agent will probably try to negotiate an advance high enough that the book
won't earn out.)
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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.
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True, and thanks for the correction. There is a unit cost in ebooks, though it's vanishingly small. But that simply reinforces my point.
And those costs incurred
before the book is actually issued do not magically decrease simply because an ebook is the intended end result.
______
Dennis