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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
If we ignore taxes, and conversion costs $10k, that's 2300 copies to break even.
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Ok, well that's a 1000 less to break even than the last post, if we keep going a while we'll be able to do it ourselves and make money
(For the avoidance of any doubt, that is purely in fun, and not a dig at you or the figures, which are always going to be rough approximations)
Another thing that struck me is that if I'm an author and I'm getting a straight 25% off the top, before the retailer's cut or any overheads/taxes, I think I'm pretty happy with the concept of eBooks, and would be looking to push them as much as possible.
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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.
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But they don't have to deal with limited shelf life any more, each book is available for ever. On that basis, if they took their top 200 backlist titles that were either out of print or had limited print availability, is selling an average of 1000 copies of each book going to be that difficult? Even just correcting the really stupid situation that seems to occur so often where books 3 and 4 of a series are available in eBook, but books 1 and 2 aren't.