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Originally Posted by HamsterRage
First, just because you keep repeating it doesn't make it any more true than me not believing it makes in untrue.
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Most of the folks I hang out with are in publishing, and the numbers I quote here come from folks who deal with them for a living.
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Second, it doesn't sound fair to leave out warehousing or distribution, as they both contribute to the costs that the publisher needs to recover.
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No, and I'm not trying to leave them out. I'm simply giving an example of one set of costs that isn't as high as normally believed. Paper/print/bind and warehousing/distribution make up at most about 20% of the book's cost. The breakdown between them will probably vary depending upon the book.
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Third, I'm not an accountant, but I'd be willing to bet that those advances go on the books as something other than just a "cost". So I don't think that just because it hits the same definition of "spent" as we'd use for our household expenses means that it should really be viewed as an upfront cost in the complex accounting of a book contract.
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It's money the publisher has actually
spent, before they even have something ready to go to press. I'd call that a "cost", and I'm willing to bet the accountants would, too. It's something they hope to recover through sales, but they may not in fact do so.
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But let's play the numbers game according to the way you've represented the numbers. I'll go for a "good" projected sale of 5000 copies, with an advance equal to 10% of the cover price of $10 for a mass market paperback, or $5000. So the unit cost is now $1, and we'll warehouse and distribute for free. The total printing cost is $5K, and that's going to be 20% of the total cost. Which means that the total cost of the book run is $25K. Total gross sales will be $50K and let's assume that the publisher nets half of that (which is generous), which is $25K. So they come out totally flat on the book, assuming that there are zero returns and the books magically appear in the stores without spending anything to warehouse them or ship them.
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5,000 is a decent sale for a first novel published in hardcover at a price 3 times that of the PB, where you haven't offered a huge advance.
If the best you do on a mass market PB is 5,000 copies, you're screwed. I heard from a bookseller a while back about a mass market PB edition that had a press run of three times that, and was stunned. I couldn't image they would make any money, even if
every copy sold.
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So I still say, "Busted".
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I get my numbers from people in the industry who deal with this every day. If you aren't willing to take my word for it because it doesn't fit what you want to be true, whose word
will you take?
For that matter, what do you think an ebook
should cost? Let's assume you're
only doing an ebook edition, and paper/print/bond/warehouse/distribute costs don't come into it. (Some folks here seem to think the ebook can piggy back on the work done for the pbook, and the pbook covers the costs. Unfortunately, the accounting doesn't work that way...)
What do you think the non-paper/print/bond/warehouse/distribute costs are, and why?
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Dennis