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From: David Samuel Myers <dmyers@ic.sunysb.edu>
Subject: Re: DM4, Publishing Costs, and more (longer)
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Daniel Barkalow <iabervon@iabervon.org> wrote:
> I'll be interested to know how much of the work involved is only difficult
> the first time. You've already found a suitable printer, who seems to have

true

> Perhaps authors don't self-publish because it's a lot of work to go
> through for just one book, and nobody has three books ready at the same
> time.

not true.

I've known authors that couldn't get published and finally found an outlet
after many many years of work. There *are* people who have 3 finished
books all queued up and ready to go, if the publisher is interested. And
that has happened, successfully, for a few people.

The real issue, in fiction writing especially, is that part of the whole
point of saying you are a published author is that someone *else* - an
editor, an insider in the world of books, savvy in the ways of what's
marketable and what's not- someone *else* actually validates the fact that
this material might have wider appeal outside the author's family and
friends. That, and most authors are inherently bad self-marketeers. They
don't want the job of promoting their own book and getting on the shelves
of the chains (very hard) with a zero budget. Others here have already
noted that this is the real service the publisher provides, and this is
basically the botom line.

In an era where promotion budgets are very small for books not authored by
Stephen King, Tom Clancy, and John Grisham, the gap between what the
publisher can provide and what the self-publisher can do is closing a bit.
One day (and we are not there yet by a stretch), the low overhead of
(self-)e-publishing has a shot to completely change the economics of
books.

Currently, the quite typical situation is that the author gets 20% of the
cover price. Someone had been asking what the typical breakdown is,
curious whether it was 2%-98% or something like that. Well, it's not too
too far from 20% most of the time. The agent, if there is one, gets a
little of that, so it's actually less. The retailer is getting in the
neighborhood of 20%, too. The distributor (and that is a different entity
than the publisher) is getting about that much too, and that can vary by
more than amounts the author or retailer can get. There are actually only
a handful of high volume retailers in the US. Two or three companies
handle the vast majority of books published. These guys' costs for
shipping, plus the limited shelf life and competition for space in big
chains are such that books not sold in a certain amount of time (and it's
not that long) are pulped. A really large amount of books never have a
shot at even getting back to the author even if *not* sold, even if s/he
wanted to remarket them him/herself, as they are pulped.

Finally, the publisher is making ballpark 40%, maybe quite even quite a
bit less can be considered 'profit', after you talk about salary for
artists, designers, editor, etc etc. The promotional budget is in there
somewhere too, if there is one. I.e. - that's still more than authors, but
the shipping and printing costs are way up in the last 10-15 years, and
the publishers are getting squeezed too a lot of the time.

Last but not least, for more on do-it-yourself publishing, distribution,
promotion, etc etc. you can refer to r*if-er Jim Munroe's (last year's
comp entry 'Punk Points', and director of a five? minute live-action film
about IF) site: www.nokediakings.com. That has lots of information about
how a motivated author can cut out the publisher and distributor and sell
a book for less than the usual amount... his argument basically goes
roughly (cynical version here): since the odds are you aren't going to
sell many copies anyway, you can make the *same amount* self-publishing
and selling for cover price $10 as if with a publisher for $20, if you
sell the same number of copies. The only catch is, clearly, you have to do
a buttload of self-promotion to fight yourself onto shelves just to sell
those frikkin 2000 copies (or insert your own number).

-d
