They may be primary rights, but the per - unit costs of e-book sales are actually ridiculously low compared to per -
unit costs of print books.
Not exact matches
A traditionally published or self published
print run
of 2000
books will
cost $ 2 /
book and that
unit cost continues to drop as more
books are
printed.
Digital
printing increases the
unit cost of your
book compared to traditional
printing.
The
unit cost of a
print - on - demand
book is fairly high, but the risk is zero because you don't
print it until you've sold it.
I've got a thousand or more copies
of that
book in my warehouse that I have to sell through before I can do another
print run — and I need to decide if sales are strong enough to warrant another thousand or more
books, or if I need to go to a small digital
print run, in which case, I might need to raise the price (because small
print runs
cost more per
unit than large ones, and I have to offer my distributor a 65 % discount as per our contract).
Robin Cutler [00:10:14] Pam, talk a little bit about, just to give our listeners an idea
of what the
unit cost is for a typical
print - on - demand
book.
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.
When
print - on - demand was first introduced, the the
unit cost (the
cost per
book)
of printing just one
book at a time was far higher with
print - on - demand than it was for a
print run
of thousands.
After the initial set up
of the press, the
cost per
unit is reduced the most
books printed.
The per -
unit cost of a
book goes down the more
books you
print.
Print - on - Demand is attractive because it doesn't require any up - front investment in inventory, but you trade off the lower
unit cost of books produced in larger quantities for that convenience.
They operate at a huge scale where they
print and warehouse tens
of thousands
of books at a time at
costs per
unit that are well below what the average POD publisher pays.