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Originally Posted by shalym
If the ink, paper, and warehouse space *are* included in those fixed expenses, then the argument that ebooks should be cheaper is valid.
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Print/Bind/Warehouse/Distribute is about
10%-15% of the average book's budget. Dropping print editions entirely would not provide the costs saving a lot of folks think. As mentioned earlier, 80% or more of a book's costs are incurred before it ever reaches publication, in print
or electronic form.
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If they are not, then the publishing companies are wasting money on fancy offices in New York City and high salaries for their executives, and they deserve to fail.
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They do?
Publishing is not a "work from home" business for the most part. Those fancy offices in NYC are historical artifacts, because that's where those publishers originated. (And I've been in some of them. The ones I've seen are small, cramped, and anything but fancy. Some of them relocated from higher cost midtown locations to lower cost space elsewhere in the city.)
The people who work there need to be folks who live near enough to commute there. The vast majority are not upper level folks commanding huge salaries. Editors, Art Directors, Copy Editors, Proofreaders, DTP specialists, and the like are middle class positions with middle class salaries.
So the publisher decides costs are too high and relocates from expensive NYC office space to somewhere else. Where do they go? And more important, what happens to those who work there? If where they go is a significant distance, it will effectively mean pulling up stakes and relocating for their employees. Many may simply not be
able to, as they have existing commitments like houses and kids in school.
A late friend was an acquisitions editor at Baen Books. Baen was maintaining editorial offices on Riverside Drive in the Bronx, north of Manhattan. Baen relocated to NC in search of lower costs. My late friend was
not pleased and declined to follow. (She'd have been better off relocating all told, but had reasons good to her for staying put.)
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If they are spending more money on things that are not specific to publishing than they are on the actual business of publishing, then, again, they deserve to fail.
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Define "specific to the business of publishing".
But once again, the equation is likely more complex than you assume.
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Dennis