Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
If the publisher has a print run of 50,000 hardback books and only sells 3,000 they will certainly make a loss.
But for an average author whose books sell around 3,000 in hardback, with an advance of $10,000, they would not. Because their print run would be around 4,000.
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But the $50,000 per title overhead is just that, a per title overhead, not a per book printed overhead. It represents the back office expense of keeping the doors open, not the actual expense of printing a specific number of books. You have the same overhead if you print 25,000 or 4,000. It pays for all the back office expenses require to run a large company.
Most businesses have this sort of thing. For example, I use to work for BellSouth, a large telecomunications company based in the US south east area. Each business unit was charged, in accounting terms, $6 per square foot of office space used as overhead (this was some time ago, I'm sure it would be more now).