--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "hardcasecrime" <editor@...> wrote:
>
> Nobody needs a long, boring lecture from me on the economics of
> publishing. But a short, boring one never hurts. The up-front costs of
> putting out a mystery novel, even if you pay a paltry advance, don't pay
> generously for cover art, etc., are about $10,000. (You can get that
> down if you don't pay any advance, of course, and use clip art or just
> text for the cover -- but that's not the way professional publishing
> works.) Even if you print cheaply, figure on $1 per copy; most books
> cost more. And if you get distribution into stores (as opposed to
> selling one copy at a time through your website, or something like
> that), you have to be prepared to print two or three copies for every
> one you sell. And figure on only pocketing maybe $4 for each copy you
> sell (you can keep more if you have a higher cover price, but that'll
> only be for formats such as trade pb or hardcover that also cost more to
> print). So, let's imagine you print 10,000 copies and sell 4,000 (a
> better result than Al's very realistic numbers in an earlier post): Your
> costs are in the ballpark of $20,000 up front and your revenue is maybe
> $16,000. Let's say you double your cover price and your printing costs
> -- now your costs are $30,000 and your revenues are $32,000. Okay,
> you've broken even at the "gross profit" level. But you haven't paid
> your salespeople for getting the book into stores, you haven't paid the
> rent or phone bill or electricity for your office, you haven't paid for
> the advance copies you printed and mailed to 100 reviewers across the
> country, we haven't talked about warehousing or freight...and I haven't
> mentioned that it takes 60 or 90 or 120 days to get the revenue out of
> the stores' hands and into your bank account, but you've got to pay your
> author and artist and typesetter and proofreader and printer well before
> that.
>
> So: Can you make money selling a moderate number of copies of a lot of
> books? Well, it depends on what "moderate" means, of course. But
> having a lot of titles that sell 4,000 copies and none that sell 40,000
> (forget about 400,000 or 4 million) is a good way to go out of business.
> And very, very, VERY few of the books we love to discuss on this list
> sell anywhere near 40,000 copies. Even 4,000 is a stretch for some of
> them.
>
Charles, it's not quite as bleak as that, at least not for all publishers and all deals. Of course not all contracts/deals are going to be the same, but publishers can still make money selling foreign rights, audio rights, mass paperback rights, etc., which can allow them to make a profit even on those books where they're selling under 10,000 copies.
--Dave
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