Publishing Books

Just read an interesting blogsite today concerning the world of book publishing.

{It's been a goal of mine to one day actually publish a book. Once I come up with something worth reading.}

The premise is very interesting. Paper is on its way to becoming a niche market, book-wise. The future is electronic readers. They say. And since there is not much overhead involved with publishing books electronically (once all your readers have purchased the electronic reading device and paid for all those batteries), it makes sense that the bulk of the profit from the sale of the book goes to the actual author.

Instead of a measly 15% of the wholesale price, imagine making 70%!

Hmmm ... let's see ... pull out my calculator here ... What does an average book cost these days, anyway? Hardbacks are in the $20 - $30 range, so let's say $25 to make it easy. That's ($25 * 0.17 = ) $4.25/book. Paperbacks are somewhere between $8 - $15, so let's even it down to $12. That's ($12 * 0.17 = ) $2.04/book. So to make a good living - somewhere in the neighborhood of $80k, perhaps - you'd need 10,000 hardback (a typical number for a first edition), which gives you $42,500, plus 20,000 paperback (20k * $2.04 = $40,800). Thirty thousand books. Per year. And that's assuming you're getting a percentage of the retail cost, not the wholesale production cost. If you're talking wholesale, you've gotta sell roughly twice as many, say sixty thousand.

That's a lot of books.

Naturally, there's a difference in price between the paper books and the electronic books, since there's no paper or binding or glue or actual 'printing' involved. Just an electronic file that gets downloaded to a device. At which point the reader gets to select the color, font, page formatting, and other parameters of the book. The author provides the text (and pictures, diagrams, tables, etc.).

Looking around at some of the eBooks that are available, it looks like the prices vary from $0.99 all the way up to $6.99. Quite a spread, percentage-wise. If we apply the 70% cut to those, we see that the same thirty thousand books nets us somewhere in the range of (30k * $0.99 = ) $30,000 to (30k * $6.99) = $270,000.

Now add in the extra bonus that selling eBooks is a lot easier than selling paper books, since they can be bought and paid for and downloaded all within the comfort of the reader's home, and it becomes obvious that it makes a lot of sense to write - and purchase - eBooks.

Except for needing to buy all those pesky batteries. Or staying near an outlet so there's always a handy power source.

Makes me wonder if there's an even better way of doing it.

Back in the good old days of the Internet, it was all going to be done with PCs. But people found it difficult to cradle their desktops in their laps while reading a good mystery story late at night. Then the laptops came out, and they were better, but it still wasn't as comfortable as a good old-fashioned paperback. Now with the Kindle (et al) readers, it remains to be seen.

I should drag a few of those old stories out of mothballs and see what happens.