Quote:
Originally Posted by Timboli
I don't disagree with some of what you both say, but the idea that authors are just getting by, as you are seeming to infer, just flies in the face of what I know. Though I don't doubt that is the reality for a good number of them. How many and why, is really the question.
As I have mentioned before, they need to change their model, as it is outdated. There are publishers out there who have already done so. [...]
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Indeed there are publishers using different models, largely because they are addressing different markets. Print is still significant for the large publishers and the difficulties of dealing with physical books still an ever present reality.
The large publishers don't make profit book-by-book (except as they may assess the situation in retrospect), they make profit across a range of titles. The point of the exercise is to have enough titles that sell profitably that the business makes a profit - and I have no doubt that the big publishers achieve just that - but they don't do it by relying on a fixed profit margin for each copy of a book they produce. Production costs set the minimum required before profit is realised on any given book, but cannot be used to anticipate a margin because that will depend on sales, which are not know in advance.
Exactly how the costs vs sales distribute between hardcover, trade-paperback, mass-paperback and ebook is something you need to ask each publisher - and they're not saying. Publishers are used to the fact that margins will vary significantly for each title and edition, it's part of the business. And even if ebook sales end up paying for more than their fair share of the costs of production, so what? It's all part of producing the title, and while people continue to pay full prices for ebooks, publishers will continue to let them.