One of
my trade paperbacks costs about 1.50 to print.
Not exact matches
U.K. and E.U. readers may order the general
trade paperback from Amazon, manufactured in Europe for faster delivery and lower postage
costs.
While it's impossible to say what your unit
cost might be — there are too many variables from project to project — a broad rule of thumb is that if you're producing a minimum of one thousand black - and - white
trade paperbacks, your
cost is likely to be around $ 1 to $ 2 per unit, and for hardcovers about $ 3 to $ 4 per unit.
In all of these scenarios, the marginal
cost of production is not going to be even $ 1 for a
trade paperback and will rarely be over $ 1.50 for a
trade hardcover (obviously the last big brick Harry Potter novels
cost a teeny bit more due to sheer volume of paper needed to print a 750 page novel, but not * that * much more), meaning that if we're talking marginal
cost of production as the difference in price between a
paperback and an ebook, we're not talking about a huge difference in price.
I think it's ridiculous for an ebook to
cost the same as a print - version
trade paperback.
In some cases, the agency model dictates that the price of an e-book is higher than its corresponding
trade paperback edition, despite the significant savings in printing and distributing
costs offered by e-books.
HarperCollins is doing something pretty amazing, they are going to offer the
trade paperback, which
costs $ 14.99, at the price of $ 8.99 just to schools.
One aspect of POD that Curtis mentioned in his recent blog post is the prohibitive
cost per book when comparing a typical print run of a
trade paperback with the
cost of printing one title at a time per customer request.
Mostly I wait for remaindered stock or, at worst, reduced price
trade paperbacks, which seem to be about the best bargain given the high
cost of mass market paper backs now.
The lower
cost of e-books have made waiting for mass - market reprints of higher - priced hardcover or
trade paperbacks increasingly obsolete.
The $ 14.99 price for Jemisin is the retail
cost of the
trade paperback but you can get that
trade paperback apparently for $ 6.