Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
It's not uncommon that yes, that's the author's share. And the publisher needs the book to "earn out" before they get to pocket any so-called profits.
May I ask, what is it that you think constitutes the real "cost" of book production? If your thought process is that it's all the paper and ink, then I can see why you would believe this. But if you look at the bigger picture of "costs," then perhaps it would be less confounding.
The real "costs" of producing a book of quality aren't limited to just the printing. And every publisher has to balance those costs, too--for example, surely, fans of poetry aren't deluded enough to think that the books that they buy and love, in the bookstore, are profitable for publishers, do they? ....
...... I want them to have the ability to discover and produce new authors, to produce and publish those "small" books that will never sell like Sandford or Brown, et al. Without the profits--from all types of production--they won't be able to do that.
Offered FWIW. Just my $.02.
Hitch
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My much less knowledgeable prospective is that book publishers are required
to be gamblers. For every successful run they have multiple failures and they need to price their books so that they'll still make a profit. And to make matters worse they have no guaranteed method of determining ahead of time which books will have successful runs.
And yet I've still been able to regularly buy books on sale from main stream publishers for two to four dollars Canadian. Only four of my last fifty books (excluding those for which I paid no money) cost more then five dollars Canadian. While this count includes the twenty volumes of Galaxy's Edge, most of the rest were published by mainstream publishers.
[ FYO these fifty books were purchased between Dec 3, 2018 to Mar 29 of this year or why I'm not keeping up with my TBR list.
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Complaining that I can't buy every single book I want exactly when I want at the price I want seems churlish given that before ebooks I could never have been able to afford to buy fifty books in three months.