Electronic Publishing — Self - publishing through eBooks became popular due to the possibility of a virtually non-existent
production cost per book.
Not exact matches
You are right that
production and distribution
costs per unit are less for ebooks than for paperbacks, but authors have the same 2 % to 12.5 % earnings of the list price of the
book.
Once I learned how do to this myself, I shaved off $ 100
per book in my
production cost.
However, since traditional publishers own the means of mass
production for print
books, their
per - unit
costs are lower than mine, which means they can offer a print edition for less than I can.
While Create Space recently began offering the option to list your
book in wholesale catalogues used by U.S. libraries and booksellers, there is no easy or practical way to get your Create Space
book listed on Amazon's international sites or in wholesaler
books or wholesaler catalogues used outside the U.S. Lulu offers a global distribution option for a fee, but Lulu's
per copy
production costs are so high that I don't recommend using them.
Those charts need to be re-wickered and research needs to be done that includes time to market, numbers of
books to market by time
per author,
cost of
production (indie vs trad), author * time * spent on promotions, author * funds * spent on promotion and inclusion of all
books that make up the top 50 or 75K of
books in Amazon (not BS lists because some are hard to get on, others not so much).