Hi Bill! Long time, no see. Much as I love bookstores, they’re on the ropes. Most small communities don’t have one already, and that only accelerates the decline. Soon they may be like record or CD stores, the rare sorts of places where only the hardcore fans go. They’re just being squeezed by Amazon on one side and Wal-Mart on the other.

Returns have bankrupted many small publishers…ebooks nicely sidestep that.

After my years at West End Games, I KNOW that the big publishers’ claims that printing, warehousing and shipping were only a “small fraction” of the cost of producing a book reeked of utter BS. No way it is possible.

Returns only compound the problem since with mass market paperbacks you only get the cover back (unsellable) and with trade paperbacks, often the returned books are so scuffed and shopworn that they can never be shipped to another store to be sold as new.

Now, the only advantage that medium to large publishers have is their (theoretical) ability to get books into physical bookstores…but considering that the physical bookstores have cut back drastically on inventory, order fewer copies of the fewer books they do carry, still return early and often, and the shrinking number of bookstores, honestly, not being available in a printed form is less and less of a liability these days. And there is nothing preventing an indie author from producing a POD book and selling direct to readers through Amazon, Amazon Marketplace, B&N’s marketplace, etc.

Physical book stores are having a difficult time competing with the immediacy and immense libraries online ebook retailers can offer.

— Bill Smith
BillSmithBooks.com

Some small presses do work like that, printing chapbooks and other limited runs to establish reputation. At this point, though, that may be a dying model, unless you’re working with well-respected authors and creating high-quality books for which the limited nature helps fuel the deman. Under a certain print run number, it makes more sense to go to print-on-demand, as the prices are much more reasonable per copy than they are for short runs on a traditional offset press.

Excellent points, Louise. As you say, self-publishing means you get to do all the jobs, and it doesn’t excuse you from doing them well.

Now, small record labels tend to print vinyl singles in batches of either 250 or 500. They charge $5 or $6 a single, and after paying off costs and the band, turn very little profit. The outsider nature of the music, combined with the band & label’s limited resources, means there’s very little money to be made–but there is art to be made, and a lot of the labels are at it for years, producing quality music that you won’t hear on the radio. Some even become recognizable beyond the underground, like Siltbreeze and In the Red.

Anyhow, my idea has been to run a small press in a similar manner–i.e., keep costs down with limited runs and limited profits. Even 500 books is a lot to move, so I’d want to start smaller–first though I need to get quotes from some local printers. Point of fact, I think my first step is to produce a very limited run of chapbooks and see if selling those very cheaply can create possible future customers. Do you know if anything like that has been tried?

Thanks, Bill!

Good points, Frank. I wasn’t saying all ebooks should cost 99¢, just that the claim that ebooks cost just as much to produce as a printed book rings false and that one of the reasons for that is the fact that ebooks and POD books solve the inventory management problems that have plagued publishers till now. It takes a good chunk of the risk out of the equation, although not nearly all of it.

I mentioned the fixed costs up in the opening paragraph. Most of those refer to the time spent, and I’d toss marketing in with those relatively fixed costs. I don’t look at my time spent on a book — whether for writing, marketing, or any of the other things a publisher must do — as free. I do this full-time for a living, and I don’t have a trust fund to fall back on. I run the Kickstarters for my 12 for ’12 project mostly to cover that time at a bare minimum rate.

One of the big problems that books of any format have — well, any product for that matter — is making a profit at whatever the perceived value of the product is. If it can’t be done, then it’s time to come up with different products or find better ways to sell them. For me, Kickstarter was the key, and I’ll try to cover that in a future post.

For the single author who decides to self-publish, it’s easy to mark off the time you spent as “free” time. But as a publisher, I have to look at every hour I spend as an investment into one project or another; as money made or lost. I have only so many hours in the day, and books simply do not sell themselves. You’ve got the great head start of name recognition and a built-in audience, but most authors who wrote 12 books in a year would have 12 unread books. They’d also have very few hours to devote to actually selling those books.

Marketing, again, is not free. And even if you’re only advertising in free venues, it takes time (time again equally money made or lost).

But the real reason why ebooks don’t all cost 99¢ is simply a matter of sustainability. If I publish your book and it has a POD cover price of $14.99, I make a couple of bucks, but before I start to make a profit, I’ve got to cover my time, the cover, the shipping and printing, etc. But, still, there’s some meat on the bone there. On a 99¢ ebook, if sold someplace like Amazon or Smashwords, we make about 70¢ per book… which we split with the author right down the middle. And let me be the first to tell you that few publishers do the kind of volume you’d need to survive on 35¢ per sale.

We’ve got to stay lean and while advances in technology have made our survival less risky (no huge outlays of cost), I have to sell a lot of ebooks just to cover our investment on each title. And, of course, there’s a whole essay to be written about how we arrive at our price points. But this is not that essay. 🙂