> Patrick King said: "I'd love to see a
> return to a $2.00 paperback book. Don't
> tell me no one can make money doing
> that."
Sorry, Patrick, but...no one can make money doing that.
I agree wholeheartedly with all the posters who lamented that
books these days are longer than they need to be -- as I've
told countless authors whose over-written books I've
rejected, there are stories you can tell at 50,000 words that
you just can't tell at twice the length. Hard Case Crime
books almost all run between 208 and 256 pages, with fairly
large type (we could bring them in at 160-192 pages if we
were willing to use the tiny type they used in the old days,
but readers have begged us to spare their aging eyes). I'd
almost always rather read a 35,000 word book than an 80,000
word book. There are exceptions, of course, but I am a big
believer in the shorter-is-better philosophy.
I'm also a big believer in the cheaper-is-better philosophy,
and looked seriously into whether we could price our books at
$2-3 -- but for a variety of reasons (some better, some
worse), it just couldn't be done.
To start with, even if you assume there's no discounting (and
people sometimes do pay full cover price for mass-market
paperbacks, or something very close to it), you have to take
into account that the cover price gets split (roughly) in
half -- half goes to the publisher and half to the
bookseller. If your book sells for $2, that's just $1 for
each of them. On the bookseller side, that $1 has to pay for
the use of a piece of precious shelf space for a certain
amount of time. You might not think of a paperback book
taking up all that much space, but it does take up some, and
a whole section of paperback books takes up as much space as
a section of any other sort of goods -- razors, cold
medications, cans of soup, whatever. The retailer has to pay
a certain amount of rent each month for those square feet, he
has to pay a certain hourly rate to his staff each month to
keep those square feet stocked, and if a shelf of paperback
books is generating just $1 apiece each time one sells, the
retailer has to decide a) whether that's enough money to
cover his rent and staff costs, and b) unless he's selling
books because he's got a consuming passion for books, whether
he could have made more than that $1 by stocking the same
space with some other product. Sadly, the answer to (a) is
generally no, except in some very inexpensive parts of the
country, and the answer to (b) is almost always yes.
That wouldn't be the case if books were more popular and just
flew off the shelves in huge numbers, and you could argue
that maybe they would if instead of $7-10 they cost $2 -- but
honestly I don't think anyone believes this. Publishers have
experimented over the past few years with selling some titles
for $3.95, and the difference in the number sold was not
enormous. Penguin even did a line of skinny $1 books, as I
recall, and they were a huge dud. Cover prices being high may
be the reason some readers buy only 1 book/month instead of 2
or 3 or 4, but that's not the reason that people who don't
buy books at all and aren't in the habit of reading for
pleasure don't buy books. At the margin, the appearance of a
$2 book might tempt a few people who are right on the
borderline to try a book when they might otherwise not, but
it wouldn't turn a generation of non-readers into readers any
more than the existence of iTunes selling music mp3s for 99
cents apiece (a very nice, low price) has made me go out and
buy an iPod. I just have no interest. They could drop the
price from 99 cents to 20 cents, and I'd still have no
interest.
(Meanwhile, the people who do have an interest might buy
*somewhat* more if they did that, but not the 5 times more
they'd need to in order to justify the price cut.)
That's from the retailer's point of view, a topic about which
I know a little less, since I'm not (currently) a retailer;
now let's look at it from the publisher's point of view,
about which I know more.
To begin with, you have to be prepared to print two copies of
each book for every copy you sell. Often more than half the
copies you print come back as returns (or, in the case of
mass market paperbacks, get destroyed in lieu of being
returned), sometimes less than half do; using 50% for
modeling purposes is actually on the optimistic side, but
what the heck, let's do it. This means that whatever it costs
to print a book (depends on paper quality, fancy cover
treatments, etc.), you have to double that number and take it
off the top. Some fat, fancy paperbacks cost almost a dollar
to print; some skinnier, cheaper ones cost 35-50 cents. If
your paperback were printed in enormous volume you might be
able to get it down to an even lower price, but unless you're
publishing Dan Brown you're not going to be printing millions
of copies. The kind of mystery novels we love might sell
5,000 copies or 15,000 or maybe even 50,000, but not 500,000
and definitely not millions. Back in the Gold Medal days, you
could reliably sell 100,000 copies of any book you printed --
but those days are long gone (and cutting the price to $2
wouldn't make them return; radio's still free, after all, and
you don't see people listening to radio dramas the way they
used to; life moves on, and entertainment tastes
change).
Let's be generous and say you print your skinny book for 25
cents and sell one for every two you print (both
unrealistically optimistic numbers, incidentally). That's 50
cents of cost that comes off the top of your $1 share of the
$2 cover price. Which leaves you with just the other 50 cents
to cover the amount of money you paid to the author, the
cover painter, the copyeditor, the typesetter, the
proofreader, the accountant who produces your royalty
statements, the salesforce that gets your book into stores,
etc.; and of course you have to pay your own rent and
electricity and insurance bills and photocopier rental and
phone bills, etc. But even ignoring the latter sorts of
overhead, consider that if you sell 5,000 copies, this model
says you only have $2,500, total, to cover your costs; even
if you sell 50,000 copies (which you rarely will), you only
have
$25,000. The up-front costs of getting a book out the door
will vary from publisher to publisher (some tiny houses pay
the author nothing up front, some use all-type covers to
avoid paying an artist) -- but I can tell you that Hard Case
Crime is about as tiny and as cash- strapped as they come,
and it costs us nearly $10,000 per book to get a book ready
to be printed. (And that's despite our paying our copyeditor
and proofreader -- i.e., me -- nothing.) How many copies does
the model descibed above tell us we'd need to sell in order
to cover a $10,000/book up-front cost even if our other
overhead costs were zero? 20,000. How many Hard Case Crime
books have sold 20,000 copies or more? Not many. Not zero --
but a very small minority. And this is in spite of
*outstanding* distribution (we're in Barnes & Noble,
we're in Borders, we're in hundreds of independent
bookstores, we're in drugstores, we're even in Wal-Mart,
albeit in small numbers), and outstanding reviews in every
major publication, and lots of award nominations, and
occasional TV appearances, etc., etc.
And that's just talking about breaking even -- not about
"making money." No one's in business to just break even. If
somehow you managed to make $1000 on each book and you
published 120 books/year
(ten times as many as we do), you'd have a company that's
earning
$120,000 per year. For the entire *company*. Not exactly a
businessman's dream.
On the other hand -- let's say that instead of $2/book you
charge
$7/book. Now the publisher keeps $3.50 from each sale instead
of $1, which after deducting 50 cents of production costs
leaves $3 instead of $0.50. You'll sell fewer copies at $7
than you would have at $2 --
but not a lot fewer, I'm certain of that (maybe a
factor of 2, but not a factor of 10...and I'd bet not even a
factor of 2). If you were selling 20,000 copies at $2 and
just breaking even, compare than to selling 10,000 copies at
$7. Instead of having $10,000 to pay all your bills, you'd
have $30,000. Now, instead of having to sell 20,000 copies to
break even, you'd only have to sell 3,333 copies -- much more
achievable.
Now, keep in mind that all of the above numbers are wrong;
this analysis is a gross oversimplification; but making it
right would make it worse. Real returns rates are higher than
50% on average; retailers sometimes keep more than 50% of the
cover price; books cost more than 25 cents to print; overhead
costs are not zero. On the flip side, it is possible to get a
book to the printer for less than
$10,000 (even we spend a bit less than this) -- but that
positive difference isn't enough to outweigh the other,
negative ones.
The key numbers to keep in mind are that paperback crime
novels
(other than ones by Grisham, Brown and their ilk) sell ones
of thousands or tens of thousands of copies, not hundreds of
thousands or millions (unlike razors or cans of soup), and
that cutting the price from $7 to $2 would almost certainly
do no better than doubling your unit sales. (You can choose
not to believe this, of course. But for whatever it's worth,
I'm speaking from years of experience doing direct marketing
on a very large scale -- when I ran Juno we spent millions of
dollars doing direct marketing tests both online and in the
real world, marketing a wide variety of products at a wide
variety of price points -- we sold books, we sold DVDs, we
sold electronics, we sold lots of things, and one of the
things we spent lots of time testing is how consumers respond
to variations in price point.)
Sorry for the length of this post (you're thinking: Didn't he
say he likes things *short*?), but I had to respond.
Nothing's simpler than saying, "Damn it, why can't shirts
cost a buck the way they used to?" or "Don't tell me no one
can make money selling paperback books for
$2!" But that doesn't make it true. Try doing it. You'll be
broke in no time.
--Charles
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