Quote:
Originally Posted by toddos
Assume you pay the author a generous salary of $100k/year for 3 years, editors and others maybe another $100-200k total (because they're not spending all their time on a single author/book), and throw in some extra and call it $1million to write and bring a good book to market. That's maybe 1% of the budget of a Hollywood blockbuster. And most books aren't going to cost anywhere near that to bring to write and bring to market.
$5-10 for an ebook is a generous price. $20 for an ebook is an insult.
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Here's an interesting analysis of the cost of writing a novel, based on a survey of 380 writers (available at
http://howtothinksideways.com/novel-cost-survey.php):
"If, following the weak areas of idea generation and project planning, you figure that the average writer spends $4483.92 to write the novel and $8252.83 to revise it, and has $13,826.81 worth of unfinished novels stashed in a drawer on a hard drive somewhere, that writer has spent an AVERAGE of $26,563.56 to get a novel out the door to the publisher. This very expensive project he then sends out an average of 4.37 times before selling it or writing it off and moving on to something else."
So, add another $3000 for editing and proofreading, which is surely lowballing it, another $3000 for design and marketing, and your cost as the writer is $32,356. Now let's figure you sell 5000 copies — a number that for a work of non-genre fiction would leave most traditional publishers blubbering with satisfaction. As the self-published writer, your cost per sale is $6.47. Via Amazon your take is 70 percent, so to get your $6.47 the actual sales price should be $9.42.
Realistically, no one but a fool who is writing non-genre fiction expects to recover the cost of his or her time. People write for all sorts of reasons, some of them noble and some of them borderline pathetic. But if you read a book you love, chances are the writer has given you a gift of largely uncompensated labor. I'm not saying anyone should fall all over themselves expressing their gratitude, but I also don't think it's correct to feel badly used if a book price reflects something of the actual cost.