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Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
@Hitch: Hi, could you elaborate on real world print costs for publishers in small, medium, large runs?
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I can try, but I don't do a ton of work for trade pubs, and of course--as you've noticed--they're close-mouthed about their business models, as much as they are able. If you're doing a print run of 10K, (which would be typical for a midlister), the typical print production cost for MM paperbacks or trade runs ~$2.00. A larger run will reduce those costs a bit, so the Sandfords of the world are probably costing $1-$1.50 for those grocery-stand paperbacks.
For an offset press, if memory serves, 125 pages is a skosh under a dollar. Assuming 3 times the length for Dan Brown, Sandford, etc., assume twice-ish the price. Again, it's the setup costs that push the price up more than the number of signatures needed to make the book (pages grouped in 8s or 16s). That same 125-page POD book runs around $7, again, if memory serves. (Just throwing that in for whatever purposes of comparison.)
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The only reliable data that I can find is pricing for POD which is about $4-$6 for normalish paperbacks. That is also the surcharge many Indies charge for print books when they offer both ebook and pbook. Naturally I would not expect them to do otherwise as they are just passing on the cost to the (few?) that really really want a pbook. Only thing I remember is that big run of offset mass market paperback is around $1, and hardcover around $4. Is that still accurate today?
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I'm not sure that the Indies are charging
surcharges, really; most of our clients are charging just enough to pay for the book using expanded distribution.
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Highly interesting what you said about the children's books. Coincidentally I recently bought a really nice one from Goodwill for 50 cents. It looked pretty much brand new. But I wouldn't have paid list price for it, or even what Amazon wants for it (link). To be fair, two of our grandkids really enjoyed the book and read it multiple times by themselves already (a Kindergartner and a Firstgrader). For how long it entertains the value is not there in my mind at new prices.
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And that's part of it, isn't it, with kids' books? Like clothes, they'll be great today and forgotten or grown out of, tomorrow. If you have your own herd, fine, you can get more use out of it, but like many other things, larger passels of kids are yesterday's news. It's harder to make a $30 book "go around" than it used to be. :-)
Someone else commented that of course, publishers don't choose to publish books that they know will be total losers, and that's true. But they do, absolutely, knowingly publish books that they don't believe will earn much beyond earn-out. All publishers do that. They always have, and always will. It's a standard discussion with new kids, to publishing, which, like all kids carrying on about "fairness," feel that the attention and resources that the Browns and Sandfords get isn't "fair" to new authors and all that. The lecture always is, without them, those new authors would never get the chance to be trade-pubbed. Even when rag publishers were cranking out (literally!) their own magazines and circulars, etc. they were always publishing their less-popular offerings because the more-popular subsidized them. It has ever been so, and I don't foresee it becoming otherwise.
If it does, as I said, you'll have Darwinian Publishing--a publishing entity that scours Amazon, et al, like a Great White Shark, seeking books that are already selling, authors that already have followings, and signing those people, based not upon the quality of their writing but the volume of their readership. I've already seen it happen, with a young man that writes a very, very popular "series" of books that he publishes like a serial novel. His entries and books are quite short, 20-30K each; he publishes them quickly. They're quite popular amongst his following, and he makes a very good living doing it. They're pretty awful. They're unedited, the dialogue is rough, and all that, but bygod, they make money. He was offered a publishing contact with a name publisher. Was it for his sterling prose? His novel concepts, wonderful character, etc.? Hell no. It was money, pure and simple.
That's the world we'd be doomed to, if publishing pricing has to be "fair" as discussed in this thread. I want to be able to look for new writers, new authors, via trade publishers, because I know that they've done some of the culling for me. Like many of you, I'm bloody busy. I work a 60+ hour week, and I don't have the time to Diogenes my way through LITBs at Amazon, seeking that one good author.
But, everybody has their own perspective, of course. I would urge you to think about the business model of publishers, though and realize it's not all about a single book, or that single book's pricing. It's about their entire organization, and all those books that didn't earn out, that didn't hit it big, that are consigned to the Island of Misfit Books. You may well have loved some of those--I know that I certainly have some hardly-heard-ofs on my shelves, that are much-loved to me. Sure, it's possible that today, tehy'd have self-pubbed, and maybe I'd have found them, but...I can't know that for sure. None of us can.
Hitch