Quote:
Originally Posted by apbschmitz
Lord knows I'm no accountant, but I wonder about this. There's the cost of printing and shipping, warehousing, shipping to distributors who then ship to stores, receiving returns of unsold books, pulping, all the related accounting and other steps I'm probably not imagining. Seems like more than $2.50 or whatever per unit.
|
Give some thought to this: "As much time as the author spent writing it." Think about that. An author spends, literally, months writing a novel. Hundreds of man-hours, possibly thousands.
The editing and publishing - without including print and shipping costs - is as many man-hours as the writing. According to those in the business (and authors, who have a seriously vested interest in the matter), who are remarkably consistent on that factoid.
Print is about 99.99% automated these days, and while warehosue space isn't free, neither are servers or bandwidth to run them. Shipping is more labor intensive, but again, quite automated, and extremely efficient. A truck carries tens of thousands of pounds of freight at a time; loading and unloading is very mechanized.
(I've worked in retail my entire adult life, most of it at management levels and above, and honestly, I find $2.50 per unit entirely reasonable, or even high. Really. If it cost more than that, somebody is doing something seriously wrong.)