The Price of Books
By Jerry D. Simmons | October 2nd, 2006 | No Comments » (Click to add yours!)
Ever wonder why books cost so much to buy? When I started selling paperbacks back in 1977, long before the hardcover was the dominant format, the mass-market size was retailing for $1.95. My former company Random House was the first to raise the mass-market paperback price to $2.95 with the launch of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion. This happened at about the same time Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds was flying off the shelves at $2.50. Now we have hardcovers selling for as much as $35, trade paperbacks for $19.95, and mass-market paperbacks at $7.95.
When you break the cost of producing a single book into it’s various components the single largest expense is the advance paid to no less than the biggest bestselling authors. This multi-million dollar payout is factored into the retail price of all books and is of course passed along to the consumer with higher cover prices. When you visit a bookstore and compare prices, you should realize that only a fraction of the authors being published are the primary reason books cost so much at retail.
Certainly the rising cost of paper is a big factor in the retail price of books, but the production itself is rather inexpensive. All editorial, cover art, and production work as well as printing cost per single copy is built into the basic cost of each book and is the same for each. Margins of profit for publishers are small, a $20 book is billed to booksellers at roughly a 50% discount meaning all expenses must come out of the remaining $10. If you take the huge payouts to the biggest authors out of the equation, the price of books could drop by as much as 40% or more.
Why is this important to you, the author? When you self-publish you should take this into consideration. You price your book(s) according to the market, and of course that is appropriate, but what do you think would happen if you dropped the retail price by 40%? Consumers are discriminating buyers, they understand that paying the same for a book by a relatively unknown author is difficult when for roughly the same price they can purchase a known quantity, namely a bestseller by an author who has been read and liked. Something to think about the next time you price your book.
Leave a Reply
