Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
How do you figure $3 for the publisher from a $10 book? Under agency agreements retailers take a flat 30%, and handle all dsitribution costs. So the publisher receives $7. Are you saying the author would get $4, leaving only $3 for the publisher?
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So you wanna get specific, huh?
$10 cover price
$2.50 royalty
$3.30 retailer's cut
$4.20 is publisher's cut
If we ignore taxes, and conversion costs $10k, that's 2300 copies to break even. If conversion costs $7500, that's 1700 copies.
$5 cover price
$1.25 royalty
$1.50 retailer's cut
$2.25 is publisher's cut
$10k conversion is 4,444 to break even. It may be plausible that the book will sell twice as much at half the price, but it's hardly guaranteed.
Or, to look at it another way: Let's say you run Penguin, and you get your conversion costs down to $2000 per title. If you convert 200 titles, that's still going to cost you $400,000. (Or, let's say you hire a staff of 8 at $50k a year each, and each staffer converts 25 books per year). At the $5 price point, Penguin will need to sell 175,000 copies of those 200 titles just to break even.
I'm not saying that these kinds of sales figures are impossible (or terribly accurate), only that the conversion isn't free, and you have to sell a fair number of copies to break even.