Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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?
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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
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Let's take one more swing at the math then; on a PB run of 50K units, sold at $10 a copy and with an author royalty of 10% of the gross and $1.50/unit for the PPBWD part. Let's also assume that the author gets an advance of $25K, which I'm led to believe is generous, and would be half of the royalty from the sales. That leaves $25K in royalties to be paid after the books have been sold. So the total post-printing cost is 50,000 x 1.5 + 25,000 = $100K.
So your "people in the industry" are stating that this $100K is only 20% of the total cost to produce the book. Which makes %100 of the cost $500K, of which $400K is spent "before the book is even printed". The total gross for the book is $10 x 50,000 = $500K. If the publisher nets 50%, which I also believe is generous, then they lose $250K on the book.
And it gets worse the bigger the print run gets, because the 80/20 ration your people in the industry are telling you demands that the upfront cost go up way faster than the profits from the sales. With production & distributions costs of $1.50 a unit, which doesn't count the author's royalty after the advance has been chewed up, means that they need to spend an additional $6.00 in up front costs - which is more than their net on the sale. Even with production and distribution at $1 and no author royalty at all, the total costs still come up to $5 a unit.
Which is why I did examples with tiny little print runs in my earlier post. It's the ONLY way that the 80% doesn't look completely silly.
Note that I'm not making any value judgments on how the company spends that up-front money. I'm not expressing an opinion. I'm just doing math. And the math simply does not support the 80% claim, not at any realistic print run size. Hell, not even at unrealistically tiny print run sizes. Even counting the advance as an up-front cost.
So even when I'm super generous with the conditions, the math doesn't work. The myth remains "Busted".