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Originally Posted by screwballl
Out of the gross revenue for each hardcover book, the publisher pays about $3.25 to print, store and ship the book, including unsold copies returned to the publisher by booksellers.
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Out of that gross revenue, the publisher pays about 50 cents to convert the text to a digital file, typeset it in digital form and copy-edit it. Marketing is about 78 cents.
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False numbers.
Konrath certainly isn't paying anything close to $1.28 per copy he sells on conversion & marketing. And, yeah, Konrath is a single guy with very limited overhead, and no, I don't think mainstream publishers can just copy his method--but the point is, the conversion and marketing "cost per book" are based on an assumed number of sales; increase sales, and those numbers drop. So any action taken that increases sales--like dropping the price--decreases those costs.
The publisher doesn't pay $.50 per copy of ebook to convert it, not the way it pays $3.25 to print & distribute a hardcover book. The hardcover cost is fixed per unit; the ebook cost is fixed per
title, and divided by the number of units sold. Or rather, average number of units expected to be sold across their entire print run. Same with advertising: it's not a per-unit cost. (If they're paying almost $1 per sale for ebook advertising, there's something very very WRONG with their business plan.)
I'd very much like to know what's included in "ebook marketing" that's entirely separate from (and therefore, in addition to) pbook marketing.