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Old 09-22-2009, 12:41 PM   #12
Morlac
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Posts: 75
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Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: New Jersey, USA
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I'm in educational publishing, which is admittedly a different sector of the business, since we don't sell to stores but to schools and districts.

I can verify that the cost of paper and ink should be around $1/book, depending on size, page count, and print run.

What I have not seen yet in this discussion is the notion of non-printing production costs. Unfortunately, these are almost all up-front costs and do not change from print to e-ink.

If I want to produce a book, I have to pay an editor to go through the manuscript one or more times. Ditto for a proofreader/fact-checker. I have to pay an artist to lay the book out and another artist to do the cover and any interior illustrations. These costs can easily run several thousand dollars. If I'm only going to sell 3,000 copies of the book over its entire lifetime, I need to make more than $2 each just to cover those costs before I've done any sort of advertising, marketing, etc.

Granted I can do a half-a**ed job on the editing and layout to save money, but that's not particularly attractive to me as a long-term business model.

Now what's attractive to me about e-books as a supplement to paper is that once I've done the above for paper, I can leverage an investment I've already made. That's *If* I'm not just cannibalizing my paper sales by converting them into lower-priced and easier-to-pirate e-book sales. The potential upside is well-known: the ability to make corrections instantly with no inventory loss, much lower storage costs and unit production costs, and the ability to keep my backlist in print where it can generate small profits that could aggregate to meaningful dollars.

But I'm also considering producing some materials as pure e-books. No print edition at all. So the entire up-front editorial and art costs -- which stay the same -- have to be borne by an e-edition. Will I even sell enough copies that way to pay off those costs? There's no question that I'll charge less for my e-books than my print books. The question I'm grappling with is by how much!
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