Quote:
Originally Posted by hogleg
By the time you buy it, that first print run is bought and paid for, and they have the books on inventory. They buy what they are sure they will sell, and if someone steals or borrows or checks out a book, that doesn't take food out of their mouths...they will just sell the book they have to someone else.
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I'm not sure what you're saying here, but you also have to take into account that a publisher generally operates entirely on speculation. They get the manuscript of an author, think long and hard about it, and decide they might make money with it. They then spend
quite an amount of money: the author's advance, editing, typesetting, cover designing, getting the required permissions, the initial print run, paying their agents who pitch the books to the bricks-and-mortar stores, etc. In all, I think it's not unreasonable to figure that it'll cost the publisher $25K to get the first 5000 books out in the stores.
Even if all of these are sold (at a cover price of, say, $15), they receive 5000x(0.45 x $15) = $33750. That seems like a nice profit. But if the book
doesn't sell as well as they hoped, the book stores will simply return them (probably in such a state that they aren't resellable). The publisher will try to remainder them in the hopes of recouping some of the costs.
In short: it's the publisher who takes all the risk. The author's advance is already paid, editors, typesetters etc. simply get paid for the hours spent on the book, and the printer certainly expects to get paid for what he printed, not for what the publisher was able to sell.
So to say that any book is "already bought and paid for" once it's on the shelves is a little unfair to the publishers.
I keep seeing names such as Stephen King or Tom Clancy popping up in these threads. Of course, a publisher hopes that the next King, Clancy, or Brown signs up with
them. Once the initial costs are recouped, the money starts rolling in.
But it's not for nothing that new authors have such a hard time getting published. The publisher needs to take quite a financial risk putting this new author on the shelves, and I'm certain there are publishers who'd much rather operate entirely on backlist ("classics", so to speak) because that's a much less risky operation.