Month: April 2011

Go Read This | Amazon’s profits are small publishers’ losses | Books | guardian.co.uk

~ Eoin Purcell ~ 3 Comments

I don’t have much time for this argument, if you lose money on sales through amazon, stop selling through Amazon and develop a new model that doesn’t cost so much! That said, it IS a clear illustration of the tough economics of small publishing!

Here are the scary sums:

Amazon takes 60% of my RRP (in the book trade, the bigger the sales outfit, the bigger the discount they demand from the publisher: Amazon 60%; Waterstones 50%; independent bookshop 35%). On a £11.99 book, Amazon’s takings are￡£7.20. Mine are £4.80.

Out of this comes £2.50 to pack and post the book to Amazon, and the author’s royalties on a heavily discounted book reduced to 50p. My writers lose out on an Amazon sale, too. That leaves 82p for Linen Press, but the book cost £4 to produce. So I lose £2.18 on every sale by Amazon.

via Amazon’s profits are small publishers’ losses | Books | guardian.co.uk.

Go Read This | Go To Hellman: The Public Broadcasting Model for eBooks

~ Eoin Purcell ~ 4 Comments

This WILL happen for books. IN fact in some ways it is already starting to happen. The key is forming communities of interested audiences. It’s nicely put by Eric though:

The reason this works anyway is that radio has large fixed costs and infinitesimal marginal costs. If the listenership doubles, the costs stay exactly the same. It’s not like book publishing, which spends a lot of money pumping paper through a complex supply chain.

A book can cost a lot to produce, too. An author might devote a whole year to the writing of a book. Let’s be generous and say the author deserves $200,000. There’s an editor, a graphic designer, maybe an illustrator who also work on the book. Add some management overhead, tax accountants, lawyers, and it’s easy to get over $300,000 in fixed costs, and we haven’t even started promoting, printing and shipping the book. Many books, of course are produced for much less money. Some authors don’t get paid a cent.

via Go To Hellman: The Public Broadcasting Model for eBooks.

Go Read This | Publishers should improve their royalty rates | FutureBook

~ Eoin Purcell ~ 3 Comments

Sonia Land tells it like it is. Publishers cannot hope to avoid 50% net for ebooks in the medium term, at the very least on back-list titles:

Publishers can so simply redress this threat: their main concern therefore must be to secure book rights and this they can easily do by offering a fair rate to authors for their e-book rights. If any publisher offers an author 50% of net proceeds from the sale of an e-book, an agent will be hard pushed not to go with them even if the author can get 70% from the online retailers.  And I will be happy to go with a publisher because I believe they can still publish a book better than anyone else.

But does this mean that a publisher will lose out financially? I really don’t understand why the financial guys in the publishing world don’t do their sums properly. No matter how a publisher tries to gloss over the figures, there are huge profit margins in the sale of each e-book. There are no paper, print, production costs; no distribution costs in a time of ever increasing fuel prices; no need for inventory control and yes, let us not forget the bane of all publishing companies – return of books! And one last big plus: every sale is a cash sale!

via Publishers should improve their royalty rates | FutureBook.