[kevinr]

I have a small pile of friends in publishing, so I'll take this from the other side. The reasons for the publishers' apparent insanity are:

* Contrary to popular belief, physical production is NOT the single largest part of a book's cost. In fact, even before ebooks, the cost of paper and ink and shipping was actually a pretty negligible part of the final cost.

Most of the cost of a book is the highly-skilled labor involved (writing, editing, copyediting, proofreading, designing, typesetting, marketing, selling) and these critically don't go away or even get much cheaper in an electronic world. Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting, and I have some examples which did not get that love which will make your eyes bleed if you don't believe me.

Salaries in publishing have for decades been nosing around the minimum the market will bear---as just one example, freelance proofreaders get paid a penny per word; the good ones get two. Many freelance proofreaders are also editors, copyeditors, and authors in their own right, and hustle their asses off to make incomes that, coming from tech, we wouldn't consider starvation wages.

* Price is an important signalling mechanism, and so---given the costs of book production---it's important to the publishers not to drive the perceived fair cost of books down below, no matter whether Amazon is currently subsidizing that or not.

[pgrote]

"* Price is an important signalling mechanism, and so---given the costs of book production---it's important to the publishers not to drive the perceived fair cost of books down below, no matter whether Amazon is currently subsidizing that or not."

I think this is the number one reason. The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value.

I buy a fair number of non-fiction books and loved when ebooks emerged as a viable way to buy a book at what I perceived to be a reasonable price. Now that the agency model has been in force I've just shifted how I buy ... I buy used books from Amazon.

All the books I used to buy as ebooks the publisher was receiving revenue. Now, they don't receive any money from my purchases.

The book publishing industry still has a window of opportunity to transition to ebooks under their own direction, but it's almost closed. See the recording industry.

[kevinr]

> The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value.

How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance?

This is a serious question: just a few days ago I was suggesting that a friend, twenty published books over the last thirty years, books you may have read or heard of, start a Patreon so that he might, for the first time in his life, afford health insurance.

People working full-time in publishing might have health insurance but are working for well below market (by outside of tech standards, which are pretty embarrassing) in some of the most expensive cities on earth. And they can't just move, because then they'd get converted to contract and lose their health insurance.

This is not to shame you for buying used books---that's fine, there's no way I'd have the library I do without them, and I grew up groveling the library and used bookstores because that was all we could afford. Readers are readers. But---and I encounter this again and again---readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.

[lmm]

Serious answer: I think there is a huge oversupply of authors at the moment. The world would probably be better off if half of all authors (selected at random) were to quit and go find something more productive/lucrative to do.

(I think everyone, even people who simply don't want to work, should be able to eat and receive reasonable medical care. Authors not having healthcare is terrible, but no more terrible than unemployed people not having healthcare; the problem there is the crazy American healthcare system)

[coldtea]

>Serious answer: I think there is a huge oversupply of authors at the moment. The world would probably be better off if half of all authors (selected at random) were to quit and go find something more productive/lucrative to do.

Or you know, let them do whatever they want, and price THEIR work however they want, and then either buy it or don't buy it.

[lmm]

Sure. But if they're choosing to be an author in full knowledge of the economics of it, "working well below market" as the grandparent said, then they shouldn't complain about not earning much money.

[coldtea]

I don't think that's something we can settle with "they knew about working below market so they shouldn't complaint".

Knowing about something and considering it fair and acceptable are two different things.

A logical argument would be: "they knew about working well below market so they shouldn't act surprised" (because knowing in advance and acting surprised are contradictory).

But being hurt and complaining? There's no logical contradiction between doing that and having prior knowledge that a choice would end bad for you.

(Besides they also know that for some authors that's not the case, and they could -- even legitimately for some -- think that they are better than them, and deserve the same money).

[pbhjpbhj]

You can choose something bad but still not have better choices available. If it's their best option are they allowed to complain then?

[Nutmog]

The number of books in the world is monotonically increasing.

The number of hours a person has available in their life to enjoy reading books is constant, or at least capped pretty close to where it's at now.

There are already too many books for anyone to read everything that might interest them in their lifetime.

So what's the use of new fiction books? Haven't enough already been written to serve everyone's needs? I agree that we need fewer fiction authors and the market is showing that with their low compensation.

[dreamfactory2]

Also true for music, film, games and massively amplified by digital storage and distribution. I really don't care about the price of a book as the increasingly astronomical cost to me as I age is the time to read it.

[amag]

I don't understand why you're being down-voted. I mean I want to scream "NO!" to what you said, but against my will (I love books) I have to concur. Same as in all other branches of the entertainment industry too much crap is being produced which decreases the SNR making it harder to find the good stuff.

[AJ007]

Writing isn't alone for this one. Musicians, actors, and artists fall in the same group. These are things a huge number of humans are capable of doing at a very high level. Many perform irregardless of earning potential.

My guess is that the long term earnings for writing will move closer to zero. The best writers working for the best organizations will still be able to make a lot of money.

We have just barely started moving in to a period where online education turns billions of uneducated third world/developing country citizens in to highly educated English speakers.

[paganel]

> How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance?

I'm not the OP, but seeing as most of my favourite authors are already dead (some have been so for more than a century) I would so: "not so much". The "would someone think of the content creators" mantra kind of works (up to a point) in the music and movie industries, where Taylor Swift doesn't compete against long-time dead J.S. Bach, nor does Star Wars compete against Melies's films, while any new fiction author has to compete against long-time dead authors like Proust, Kafka, Joyce or Ray Bradbury.

[kevinr]

I'm glad you're finding works you enjoy among the classics!

I have a long fondness for Bradbury, Shelley, Conan Doyle, etc., but they didn't write, oh, Hal Duncan's VELLUM, or Christopher Barzak's THE LOVE WE SHARE WITHOUT KNOWING, or Silvia Moreno-Garcia's SIGNAL TO NOISE---I don't think they could have been written before the last decade or so, and I don't see that they compete any more with Proust than Taylor Swift does. There will always be a market for new fiction.

[cr1895]

But what about, for instance, the translators of the modern editions of Kafka's work? Or the musicians who play Bach's music today?

[EliRivers]

Just out of interest, would any of them still be alive if they'd had health insurance?

[toyg]

The reality of the matter is that the ungodly amount of offer reduces book value to a very low level. Between books published in the last 200 years and the humongous amounts published every week, there is just too much choice to justify spending significant sums on individual books.

I suspect the answer will be a switch to "open publishing", with authors and editors collaborating via websites like on OSS programs and then monetizing on "stores", hence keeping costs so low that they can work on economies of scale.

[pbhjpbhj]

>How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance? //

Thing is with ebooks the author should make more money, there's a wider accessible market, lower production cost. But publishers moved to close the market and to increase the selling price whilst at the same time accruing the added profit from the reduction in production cost.

The blame here shouldn't be on those buying the books who refuse to be screwed by the publishers.

Readers don't care about the booktrade, they want to read books and have authors rewarded for writing them, the booktrade somehow doesn't seem to help much to this end.

Instead of starting a Patreon, perhaps your writer friend could sell books to readers rather than to a publishing house?

[kevinr]

> Thing is with ebooks the author should make more money, there's a wider accessible market, lower production cost.

The market is... different. Wider in some ways, narrower in others. Young adult fiction is largely nonexistent in ebook, still, because young adults' access to e-reading devices is still more limited than adults', and they are less likely to discover fiction online than through more traditional channels.

The production costs are, again, not significantly lower in ebook than print.

> Thing is with ebooks the author should make more money

While that's been the going theory in some parts for a while, in practice it hasn't turned out that way.

[pbhjpbhj]

>The production costs are, again, not significantly lower in ebook than print. //

But the prices have been / are often higher.

I see that good ebooks have some extra typesetting and such, but that should be largely automated with the production of print ready copy.

How can they not save on paper, presses, covers, delivery, distribution?

Yes editing, proofing, marketing, cover design, etc., still costs.

Devices don't seem that discounted that there should be an extra load per book to post for them.

Do you have a source for eBook production costs, would be interested to look at financials vs. traditional publishing.

[ghaff]

This was noted in another comment. A print book is about $3 more in cost (printing, distribution, returns, etc.) than an ebook. i.e. not nearly as much as most people assume.

(I note that I can order quantity one of the book I have on Amazon Createspace for $3.75 plus shipping.)

[mcguire]

"The production costs are, again, not significantly lower in ebook than print."

...depending on how many copies are sold, at the minimum. (Physical production and transportation will come to dominate at some point.)

...and, of course, this means that mass market paperbacks should be priced at the same level as first-run hardcovers.

[mruniverse]

People don't buy books because they value their favorite authors eating or having health insurance. They buy the books because they want to read them.

> readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.

The actual cost of a book has no bearing on it's value. You could spend a billion on editing, publicity, materials, etc. and if no one wants to read it good luck.

[eru]

If readers value books, but not enough to make writing pay, isn't the economic thing to stop being a professional writer?

[kevinr]

Or to try to convince readers to value books more.

[JustSomeNobody]

If I have $30 to spend on books each month, is it better to spend on one book so one author can eat well, or spend it on two books so two authors can simply eat?

[elthran]

Or why not 4 books so I can maximize my personal enjoyment and cultural enrichment?

[eru]

Sure, if you can pull it off.

[dragandj]

Good luck with that.

[iamben]

Right, so as the parent suggested, the comparison to the music industry is pretty apt. A handful of popular superstars live very well. In the middle you make enough to live, but not to live well or from forever, but you do get to do what you love. At the bottom you have people who do it because they love it - either terribly, or in a very specialist niche that takes a lot of skill/creativity and will be extremely valued but by only a few.

I try to buy records/merch from (some of) my favourite bands. I value them greatly. They'll never make a decent living from it.

[zeveb]

> > The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value.

> How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance?

I give to charities to take care of those who can't take care of themselves; I buy entertainment to be entertained.

> readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.

Then maybe the profession of writer will gradually go away, much as the profession of fencing master (the real sort, who taught how to win in a fight, not at sport) has.

[avn2109]

>> "Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting"

I must confess to being baffled by all this talk of typesetting, for the following reasons:

1) My ebook readers (Calibre and iBooks, mostly) algorithmically render and reflow the text to arbitrary typefaces, sizes, columnar layouts, etc. Isn't this "typesetting?" And isn't it taking place entirely in software? [0]

2) Latex consumes a plain-text (aka neither designed nor typeset) file as input and produces tolerably-good machine typeset output. Its output is vastly better than plenty of well-regarded periodicals such as [1], which proves by construction that good-enough machine typesetting can be implemented.

[0] I'm not claiming iBooks typesetting is remotely comparable to what's found in a Random House hardcover, but rather that no hand typesetting at all takes place for most (all?) ebooks.

[1] http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/

[kevinr]

Your ebook readers get a lot of hints from the ebook file about how to present the material---I am light on details, but I believe them to be significant. It's true that there's no human there checking the typeblocks for rivers and orphans, but I can tell the difference between an ebook file produced by Calibre and one which a human has had a hand in, I happily pay my $13 for the latter, and woe betide the publisher when I discover that I paid $13 for an automated conversion. (The most egregious was a math book which OCR'd the formulas---from a book which was evidently set for print in LaTeX.)

When I'm translating plain text (Markdown-ish) input to LaTeX, I spend a bit of time going through by hand making sure all my formatting has converted correctly, any accents or non-roman characters are correct, the single- and double-quotes are correct, I haven't accidentally copy-pasted any ligatures, I have included hyphenation for nonstandard words, I've included any relevant non-breaking spaces, figures and headings and captions are flowing correctly, etc. etc. And all of these are still necessary when producing an ebook.

It's maddeningly detail-oriented, but the results are really noticeably much better, and in many cases make the difference between the text being readable and not. It's a bit like the cue dots at the movie theater---if you're not looking for them, you don't notice your uninterrupted experience unless the projectionist screws something up.

[daemin]

That also applies to code, I've seen some ebooks that have blocks of code formatted like they exist on a blog instead of in a printed environment. It made reading them a pain because code snippets were word wrapped badly, split over multiple pages, and you'd get pages and pages of code.

Given that ebooks are electronic, perhaps they could use some sort of pop out window for larger code snippets, so that they could be scrolled rather than in page format.

[Nutmog]

That's nice for a perfectionist. But how many readers care at all or could tell the difference if they tried? Do you struggle to read stories on the web because they're not hand typeset? I personally find that the content of a book completely dominates my experience over any of the superficial details. Well, I do use an annoying e-book reader that keeps accidentally turning pages for me and I lose my place. No amount of carefully placed hyphens will overcome that though, but a bit of software could.

[kevinr]

Most of those issues I mention are exactly the kinds of issues which pull the reader out of the text, even though he may not be able to pinpoint exactly why. Certainly often when I use Instapaper to read a web page or Calibre to convert ebooks I can read through the issues if I try hard enough, but it takes more effort than reading a well-produced book, and I somewhat regularly give up on automatically-converted texts because the issues are just too dire.

(Some of my other favorite conversion errors: Endnotes or references not hyperlinked. Chapters and other headings not correctly marked-up. Page numbers or other irrelevant header/footer material not stripped. Footnotes, margin notes, or other relevant header/footer material stripped. ...As you can tell, I'm great fun at cocktail parties.)

[dietrichepp]

LaTeX can only do typesetting when a human operator makes it happen. Human operators for LaTeX tend to be fairly expensive, I dare you to try and hire one.

[dragandj]

Or could, oh, horrors, the authors, editors, and proofreaders learn to use LaTeX themselves so the typesetter could just check the final document for errors?

[gunnihinn]

Hi, LaTeX copyeditor and typesetter here. The bane of my existence are authors who know just enough LaTeX to be dangerous. First, almost all of their formatting work is the first thing to be thrown out. Second, authors are strongly incentivized to learn the bare minimum of LaTeX to do what they need, and to copy-paste furiously whatever stuff they find on the net. You have to remember that (La)TeX is both a markup and a programming language. Can you imagine spending your time reading code written by a copy-paste monkey? I can, and don't wish you the pleasure.

[dragandj]

Sure - for highly specialized stuff. But, let's not pretend that 99% of the published work couldn't be well served by standard LaTeX templates and a little effort of learning the basics. If that is too much, then how do they send you the formatting specifications anyway? In some custom, poorly self-invented format?

[nowprovision]

This comment could so easily be PHP about instead of LaTeX, your pain is shared.

[kaitai]

LaTeX is fine for putting out pdfs. It's not a sufficient skillset for putting out an ebook in any other format. It is still a pain to put out a math-heavy book in a wide range of formats. I would say that Softcover (Michael Hartl's effort) is making that a lot easier, but I can't use the full range of LaTeX there (for reasons discussed elsewhere in this thread) and I still need to visually check every format to make sure that formulas are typesetting appropriately, because I'm trying to push the boundaries of current implementation -- and that's just in writing about probability and linear algebra.

In addition, if you really want to put out a quality product you have to be aware of how each e-reader renders the stuff you send them. Different e-readers process the same file differently and not all support the promised features of epub 3.0. It's best to know up front what each supports in terms of images and scaling, and then write with that in mind. Again, far beyond latex.

[lmm]

Division of labour tends to increase efficiency. Do you really want an author spending hours reading LaTeX tutorials, or do you want them to get on with their personal specialty and let a typesetting specialist do the typesetting? Either way the ultimate cost is going to be similar.

[dragandj]

But the problem is that their personal specialty is not valued much, so if they want bread on their table they better augment it with a complementary specialty.

[tzs]

> Contrary to popular belief, physical production is NOT the single largest part of a book's cost. In fact, even before ebooks, the cost of paper and ink and shipping was actually a pretty negligible part of the final cost.

Yup. For a typical hardback, the physical costs (printing, shipping, and storing) are about $3.25. Here's an article from a few years ago that looked at the money side of paper books and ebooks: [1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.ht...

[philfrasty]

Given that you print a vast amount of copies and it is all black-and-white on thin paper. Go color (e.g. cookbooks) with 200g+ paper and you can easily double or triple that price.

[revelation]

That's a massive massive part of a $15 book, then? That's about the same proportion as the parts cost for a typical electronics product.

[true_religion]

> Most of the cost of a book is the highly-skilled labor involved (writing, editing, copyediting, proofreading, designing, typesetting, marketing, selling) and these critically don't go away or even get much cheaper in an electronic world. Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting, and I have some examples which did not get that love which will make your eyes bleed if you don't believe me.

The costs of modern day e-books are real, but for many genres markets its possible that buyers are simply willing to tolerate a book that's objectively worse (more errors, worse design, illustration by total unknowns, fonts free sources instead of foundries).

Rather than continuing to participate in the traditional industry, I think a lot of authors will have to self-publish and realize that if they can't give their book the love needed to not "make your eyes bleed" then their work will fail in the marketplace. They can't rely on someone else to take a manuscript and clean it up to a publishable version anymore.

There's just not space for those middlemen and helpers in a lot of genres market, unless you are a best seller.

[kevinr]

Actually, most of my experience is from the science fiction/fantasy genre. Genre buyers are willing to tolerate sub-par production---and let's be honest, the pulp paperbacks of yesteryear were not exactly going to give Edward Tufte a designgasm, so this isn't a new trend, just an old trend which has found new life in a new medium.

That said, the market for freelance book production people is actually much better than it was a few years ago, for precisely the reason that there's just more money in the market now.

[ghaff]

They probably need at least a copy editor. (Typos are really annoying and you just can't deal with those without help.) But, yeah,for some genres, people with at least a niche following may do better with cutting out a lot of expensive "middlemen" who provide incremental improvement.

[kaitai]

It is mildly hard to find a copyeditor, especially for technical books. I tried recently and did not figure out where to find a quality person (for math), and gave up after not trying very hard. (If you have any suggestions let me know!)

This used to be the selling point of publishing through Springer, for instance. But now it seems very little editing or copyediting is done. I am reading "Novelty, Information, and Surprise" put out by Springer in 2012 (math/stats/information theory) and there are two typos in the first paragraph of the introduction. It doesn't feel like the rest of the writing saw an editor either.

I'm looking for the rise of a more streamlined process for hiring your own editor as people realize that publishing through the mainstream doesn't get you editing or royalties (although it still does give a lot of street cred or something to put on your CV!).

[spacecowboy_lon]

But As Charlie Stoss says he doesn't want to do that middle mans work as it takes time from writing.

[ghaff]

Which, for someone who can establish a good relationship with a good publisher, is a perfectly reasonable position to take. Publishers are like any other service. If they provide good value, authors should use use them and otherwise not use them.

[mcguire]

On the other, other hand, editing, etc., is a one time cost. And, as far as I can tell, <$10,000 per book.

Publishers, however, take their share per-copy. And, IIRC, the final profits are divided about 50/50 between author and publisher.

Charlie may be leaving a significant chunk of money on the table, given his popularity.

I wonder how much more work it would be to get a good relationship with a single priced editing service over a traditional publisher. Hey, maybe you could even get your agent to do that.

[ghaff]

Maybe. On the other hand, I suspect that, precisely because he is a popular (at least by genre standards) author, he probably also gets some benefit from the publisher in terms of sales, promotion, etc. I've heard from a number of sources that one of the issues with going to a traditional publisher for a new author today is that you have all the publisher overhead while not getting much of an advance or much in the way of marketing and promotional support.

But I don't know how the relative economics work for an established author like Charlie. Empirically, most known authors seem content to stay with publishers so I'm guessing it makes economic sense for them. But I don't really know.

[StephenConnell]

Why can't one deal with typos, without help?

It seems to me that a combination of technology and time should be sufficient.

I know I have read books that seem to have missed spell check... Really annoying.

[kevinr]

Speaking as an occasional author, by the time I've finished the however-many drafts and several rounds of edits, I'm completely blind to the manuscript's mechanical flaws, and need someone else to point out to me the Spoonerisms, unfortunately euphemistic word choices, or even just that I've dedicated my book to "My parents, Ayn Rand and God."

Also, I say again: copyeditors and proofreaders are cheap. Doing that work myself makes about as much sense as doing anything else I could outsource cheaply.

[toyg]

But i think the point is that you have to outsource it. There is no space for you "outsourcing the outsourcing" to publishers, because there is not enough fat in the market for them to survive anymore (or so they say). Authors will increasingly have to take charge of managing their creations, like it happened with musicians.

[dilemma]

I used to think so, but in industries where supply is abundant, publishers provide not only "post-production", but distribution and more importantly marketing and branding - social proof. The biggest benefit may be setting oneself apart from the fray.

Source: I'm a smalltime author and publisher.

[lmm]

Managing production and outsourcing is its own skillset. Division of labour between a specialist "producer" and the person who does the actual writing ought to make sense in terms of efficiency.

[anon4]

> My parents, Ayn Rand and God

That's the proper way to write it. If you want the other meaning, it's "My parents - Ayn Rand and God". You English people really should learn proper punctuation - most of the world has been using these things called dashes, colons, etc. for quite a while now. They help immensely to disambiguate.

[ghaff]

What kevinr says. At some point, you start reading what you expect to read rather than what is actually on the page--including typos with red lines under them. You basically cannot publish something significant without having another set of eyes on it at a minimum. A decent copy editor will also help fix up some things (in my case excessive wordiness). Tools like spellcheck help but only to a degree. Also as kevinr says, basic copyediting is pretty cheap. I paid about $400 for my last book.

[StefanKarpinski]

Legitimate question: what is the total cost of labor to publish a book, aside from writing it and physical production? It's hard to imagine it being more than $25k – a quarter-person's salary at $100k/year for editing, typesetting and design. At $5 per book, that's covered by 5000 sales. With ebooks, the rest is pure profit – or could go directly to the author if authors hired publishers to do that work instead of the other way around. The push to revive print books seems like a last ditch effort to preserve a model where the publishers are essential and therefore in control instead of the authors running the show.

[grey-area]

This might be a little out of date, but the breakdown is something like 40% retailer, 10% distribution, 10% print, 5-10% author, 10% editorial, 20% profit. On future print runs the publisher gets more profit of course. NB the retailer takes most of the profit. For ebooks the situation is worse in that Amazon takes 70% unless you choose to sell exclusively, but at least canny authors can bypass the publisher. You can see then why publishers are hostile to ebooks, for them it is an even worse deal and they lose control to a predatory retailer (Amazon).

5000 sales is larger than most first print runs, a minority of books are bestsellers and sell hundreds of thousands, the majority sell just a few thousand and make very little profit if anything, this is why publishers offer an advance set against future royalties.

There is still a vestigial authority to a printed book (someone other than the author liked this) and a stigma attached to self publishing, so there is some value still to being published on paper, because the main benefit to most authors is reputational, not monetary. It will be interesting to see if that changes with ebooks. However, like print newspapers, mass-market print books are dead, they were always on thin margins but are now unsustainable. This will take a decade or two to work out, but it will happen.

[kevinr]

Oh hey, someone better-informed than me.

There's also a sizeable fraction of the reading public of all ages who still prefer print books for a host of reasons both sentimental and practical. (The one I've just discovered: I can't read ebooks before bed because the blue light from the iPad screen keeps me up. Whoops.)

Ebooks have mostly killed the mass-market paperback, though---more's the pity for beach-reading and other circumstances where I don't want to have to worry about the physical condition of sensitive electronics.

[elthran]

> I can't read ebooks before bed because the blue light from the iPad screen keeps me up

Seriously, get a kindle - if you like reading you will absolutely not regret it.

[cableshaft]

Had a Kindle Keyboard forever, finally impulse bought a Kindle Paperwhite.

Reading even more books than ever, since now I can turn its backlight setting to very low, and it's so much less light than my iPad ever was, while still being plenty to read with, and it's not bright enough to bother my SO if I read while she sleeps.

[toyg]

This. People don't realize the difference between eInk and screens is massive.

[lmm]

I don't know about the iOS walled garden, but more generally there are tools to adjust screen colour temperature to something appropriate to the time of day.

[socket0]

There was: http://9to5mac.com/2015/11/12/flux-iphone-sideloading-shut-d...

[cableshaft]

Even if I set the iPad to its lowest brightness, though, it's still about 10x brighter than the lowest I can set the backlight in a Kindle Paperwhite.

[stevewillows]

IOS 9.3.4b also has automatic temp control built in. I was sideloading f.lux -- but this works just as well.

[grey-area]

Definitely try a kindle. It is cheap enough to take to the beach and comfortable in all lighting.

[akie]

I'm involved in an open access book publisher that will publish their first (academic) books this summer. Everything digital & print on demand, and the reviewing and copy editing is mostly done for free by other academics. Professional typesetting though, and I do think they pay someone for helping with editing. All in all, this brings us to a cost of €3000 to €5000 per book.

[ylem]

Is that the fixed cost/book? What field(s) are you publishing in?

[kevinr]

This is weird because there's great variety between books and publishers, and there are lots of hidden costs. The one most self-publishers miss is marketing and sales---at the big publishers, there are

I am not a publishing industry insider, so these numbers are an educated SWAG, but let's see if they shed any light.

Let's say a top editor at a big-5 genre publisher makes $100k a year. That's way high, but we'll roll with it, 'cuz it makes the math work out nicely. Let's say they work on ten books a year, also probably high, but that's $10k/book. If they make $50k and work on five books a year that's still the right ballpark.

The art and production departments are shared across a publisher's whole line, or possibly even multiple imprints. Let's say the department costs $300k total and does thirty books a year, for $10k/book, which includes the cost of soliciting and paying the artist for the cover art, ebook and physical production, copyediting and proofreading.

We're up to $20k now.

Now we get to the fun part. Your big-5 publisher literally pays people to go read your book and then drive to all the bookstores in a geographic area and convince them to buy it. Figure that there are 10 of them in the US, each of them pulls in $50k, and they're repping 25 books a quarter, so 100 a year. That's another $5k on top just for their salaries, not counting their travel and expenses, for which $15k a person a year seems not unreasonable. And this isn't counting ad buys or any marketing, just plain sales. So figure half your book's total budget is sales.

So that's $40k/book for a midlist, 100k-word genre title from a well-regarded editor before we get to the author or the physical production.

(Things I'm leaving out: legal department, some kind of business/management structure, some kind of web site???)

Professional rates in fiction are a princely seven cents a word, so for an author who's worked a year on a book (not unreasonable) that's a whole $7k---but this book was acquired by a well-regarded editor at a good house, so let's say the author is getting a whole twenty cents a word, or $20k, for this year of labor. That's a third of the cost of the book so far. Accounting around authors in publishing gets weird---advances versus residuals, etc.; actually accounting in publishing is just plain weird, period---and a $20k advance is princely, but not unreasonably so.

So then the publisher has spent $60k on your book, and wants to earn its money back and then some.

My sense is that 5k sales is a low number, and certainly you aren't going to get a $20k advance next time, if your next book gets picked up at all. Publishing is a hits business---most sales happen in the first few months---so rates matter more than absolute numbers. 5k sales over ten years might finally earn out your advance, but 5k sales in the first month will get the second book of your trilogy picked up. 100k sales is John Scalzi territory, and my sense is that 30k sales is comfortable midlist territory.

Now, 30k sales on $60k spent out of the gate works out to $2/book, or $8/book profit at $10/book ($13 list with an Amazon/wholesale cut of 30%), but remember that in a hits business not nearly every book will sell even that many copies, but no one can predict ahead of time which ones, so publishers need to invest in many more books which won't sell to find the ones that will. It's anecdotally reported in the publishing industry---and I think it's evident in the financials as well---that breakout, millions-of-copies-sold success 50 Shades of Gray subsidized essentially all of Random House's other books for a year or two.

It depends on your hits business how bad the ratio is, but in genre publishing figure that less than half of books earn out for the author, so at $60k/book that's 6k sales minimum, which not every book makes. (Classic scenario: publisher gives you a big advance on your outline but then decides not to sell or market the book when you turn it in and they don't like it, but they don't want to pay the kill fee, so they rush it through production, ignore it in marketing, print the minimum required copies, and hope nobody buys them. Whoops.)

The key expense self-publishing discussions usually miss is really the sales and marketing one, followed closely by editorial. And freelance editors do exist and are quite good, so if you're self-publishing, consider one. I don't know of any freelance book salespeople, though. For some reason salespeople are very good about getting paid.

I should add that this is not to say that, if you're self-publishing, you should expect to spend $60k on your book. My sense is that even $10k/book is on the high side. Certainly out here in the freelance world I would tell an author expecting to put that much up to self-publish her book that she was being taken for a ride, and not the fun kind.

Remember that you're giving up sales and marketing, and you're not paying yourself an advance, so you're down to $20k already, and then you're working with newer artists and freelance professionals. Depending on how good you are at the various aspects of the work (and don't kid yourself here, he says mostly to himself), figure $3-5k is a decent ballpark for an anthology or a full-length novel. It's not going to sell 6k copies either, but then paying more probably wouldn't help its sales any. Still, do your research, don't shortchange your business partners, pay for quality where it counts, and don't pay for vanity publishers (Author Solutions, etc.)

[dilemma]

I have some insight into the industry and while some details may be slightly off, I believe your outline is very accurate. Thank you!

[tomjen3]

Shutterstock has pictures for less than 100 usd as long as you don't print more than half a million copies of the book. You could probably cut other expenses too (eg why not hire a VA to copy edit it?).

[kriro]

My counterpoint would be that marketing and selling are often done rather wrong by the big publishing houses. People care about the story behind the book and the authors, I rarely see these emphasized in the typical publisher campaigns. Much easier for a modern author to forge these relationships naturally. The other things you mentioned can also be automated to some extend (typesetting and layout for sure).

[joshvm]

You might be interested in this Japenese bookshop - it was on HN a while ago. The proprietor only stocks one title at a time and treats the shop more like an exhibition.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/23/japanese-booksh...

[x0x0]

And, having witnessed what happened to the music industry, the publishers are uneager to let amazon itunes them.