Book Sales From A Publisher’s Point Of View

In The Everything Guide to Writing A Book Proposal, authors Schneider and Doyan outline the publishing business in their chapter, The Business of Publishing. In addition to descriptions of acquisitions, etc., they include some numbers which really surprised me.

According to them, it costs publishers at least $50,000 to produce a new book. That number is based on printing costs, distribution costs, discounts and royalties to the author. That’s a fair amount of money invested, particularly when you consider many titles never earn out the initial investment.

The example they use is a hard back book retailing for $25 – it takes 10,000 books sold to earn the publisher $60,000. Ten-thousand books sold doesn’t sound like much until you consider another figure found in the book: “You can reasonable expect about 1 percent of your potential readership to actually buy your book.”

So, if you can identify a million potential readers, that means only 10,000 books are apt to be sold. Of course, there are wild exceptions to these averages. There are books that sell hundreds of thousands of copies, even millions – but they are rare.

Which doesn’t mean it can’t happen for you… or for me.

Write well and often,

You can read my review of  The Everything Guide to Writing A Book Proposal