Quote:
Originally Posted by rlauzon
And since you only need to do all that ONCE per book, the costs of doing that are spread over all copies sold, making those costs very small - per book.
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I'll check out Eric Flint's stats later, but I'll also note that to make those costs small you either need to start with them being small or you need to spread them over a *lot* of books. Taking that hypothetical 10,000 copy run, if the one-time costs are $65,000 then that's $6.50/copy. Books from well-known authors usually sell more than 10,000 copies, of course-but the average book doesn't.
Perhaps the problem is that publishers are spreading their costs over all books. maybe if the costs were allocated according to sales it would be more fair-but it seems to me that pricing a new author's book at, say $1000/copy would result in far fewer new authors being published.