Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
Many indies don't have paper versions at all and those that do are prohibitively expensive due to smaller scale.
.
|
The first part of that is (mostly) true.
There's a variety of reasons for that. Mostly because the ex-tradpubs still have pbooks floating around the used pbook market and newcomers understand they need a bigger fanbase for pbooks to be worth jumping through the necessary hoops (And the returns requirement is too risky, even for POD.)
The second isn't, though. Sorry.
Try a flyby INGRAM'S LIGHTNING SOURCE pricing calculator.
Most any indie willing to invest a few thousand $$$ can get reasonable prices on pbooks, even *hardcover*.
https://myaccount.lightningsource.co...pingCalculator
Indie POD books don't have to be expensive, even at low volumes. But it's a harder market for unknowns to play in.
That isn't the cheapest way to go, though, merely the easiest.
DWS did a column years ago (circa 2011,) part of his THINK LIKE A PUBLISHER series, explaining how indies can do pbooks affordably. The trick is to deal with chinese (or canadian) printing shops directly. Not hard in the age of internet.
Doing that and being willing to order up a few thousand copies upfront results in per unit prices under $3 and often under $2. (Ages ago, John Grisham did that.)
The issue with pbook pricing for Indies isn't sales volume or costs prices; it's the margins inherent in print.
Getting listed on Ingram is easy, but B&M stores need to see a 40-50% discount vs list price on Ingram. And they want to see the books as returnable. That means setting a reasonable sale price (via POD or batch print) is less profitable than ebooks. The same is true for tradpub: print margins, regardless of pricing, are lower than for digital. But when they ship 10,000-15,000 titles a year all they need is for 1% to do well to break even.
Generally, indies need the fabled "thousand true fans" for print to be profitable. That is no different from tradpub that since the last decade has been dropping authors for *only* selling 30,000 copies. Indies doing that much business make a nice profit even on print. But they can make similar profits on digital only with much lower sales. So many don't boter.
Print doesn't make much sense to lower selling authors, except as one indie I saw put it: "Christmas Gift Edition".
(Some of us are curious about "how sausage is made".
