Monday, July 6, 2020

Book Printing Logistics for... Uh... Dummies

The book is not finished but I am eager to make it so. While my wife continues one last overview of the book and it's contents, I've started the process of getting quotes from potential printers to see what I'm actually working with. What I've learned already, after only a few hours, is very interesting, so I wanted to share!

I use Notes to jot down what I need on the fly when I get an idea. 

To the right is a basic (and messy) profits & losses statement. I wanted to get an idea of what kind of expenses go into printing a book and things that I wouldn't otherwise think about. My goal is to print a hardcover, ideally, but—choosing between softcover and hardcover—a softcover will give me a larger print run and a lower per unit cost. Alright...

Are you ready to fuckin' MATH?

Using my current eBook vendor, BookBaby, I generated two estimates, with only the hardcover and softcover variables changing.

Interestingly enough, printing 150 softcover and 100 hardcover, is the exact same price. I used this as a baseline for all my quotes.

To produce 1 softcover volume, after printing, shipping (from the printer), and taxes, is roughly $15.85 at cost. I figure I can sell them at $20 per copy, which would be a total "profit" of $4.15. For the hardcover variant, the rate would be $23.78 at cost and $30 per copy. The "profit" for the hardcover would be $6.22.

But then, remember, we need to SHIP these to our beautiful readers. For shipping costs,  it would seem that most of the internet recommend using media mail via USPS. The rate for this starts at $2.75 for the first pound, plus an additional .52 per pound. Therefore, it costs $3.27 to ship a 2LB package. (Calculating the weight of the final printed book, at this time, isn't possible. However, books of a similar size are roughly 1LB 3OZ.) After all said and done, I figure it would be reasonable to charge $4 to ship the book, in addition to the cover price, thereby bringing the total to a $24/$34 total for either version.

I researched a few vendors to compare with BookBaby:



Moving on, one of the things that people don't realize is that the margin for profit in physical book publishing is so horrendously slim that many publishing houses are going out of business, unable to compete with digital publishing platforms like Amazon Kindle and Apple iTunes. The way to calculate how much you make during a publishing print run I've detailed below:

Total profit:
  • Softcover profit is $4.15 x 150 = 622.5
  • Hardcover profit is $6.22 x 100= 622
Note: I was floored initially that the total profit was (almost) the same in both formats. 

Next step, we calculate the margin of profit using the total cost of the print run (printing, shipping, and taxes):
  • Softcover margin: $622.50 / $2378 = 26%
  • Hardcover margin: $622 / $2378 = 26%
Believe it or not, 26% is absolutely incredible. According to my mentor, who has been printing and publishing books for almost 35 years, his industry average is around 11%.

A real profit and loss statement will have much more going on, citing things like cover design, editing, marketing, and the author's advance. I'm lucky enough to have a beautiful wife who edits professionally, but I do pay for the cover design and eBook conversion. The $622.50 profit does not cover the cost of designer fees, unfortunately; which means the book will inevitably lose money. But for me, it's more important to see it printed. I dunno, it's just nice to tangibly hold in your hands, something you've made. Imagine if, after going through labor, the OB gave you a hologram of the baby, saying something, like, "This is your little girl! She can't hug, but look at that resolution, huh?"