Quote:
Originally Posted by kindlekitten
could you give us a break down on a book, say such as the latest King novel to market?
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I'm not sure who this question is addressed to, and I doubt anyone here knows the marketing budget for the King book, although I can assure you it was hundreds of thousands of dollars if not several million dollars. I know that when I prepared a marketing budget for a book that had no chance of selling anything close to what King's book will sell, the minimum budget to get reviewers, distributors, and retailers to even consider the book was $50,000 -- and that was in the early 1990s. Marketing costs ran 5 to 10 times -- and sometimes more -- the print costs (and we haven't even gotten into editorial costs, nonprinter production costs, acquisition costs, etc.). On one book we did, our out of pocket costs ran more than $200,000 and the number of copies sold ended up being less than 3,000, with a suggested retail price of $29.95 and thus a wholesale price of $14.97.
Somewhere over the entire product line those losses have to be made up.