REPOST: Book Royalties (was: win32all-141 for Python 2.2)

[Peter Milliken]

"Bruce Eckel" <Bruce at EckelObjects.com> wrote in message
news:5$--$$_----__-$_%$@news.noc.cabal.int...
> You can get a rough estimate with these numbers:
>
> A computer book author typically gets between 10-15% royalties.
> Let's be positive and say it's 15%. But that's 15% of what the
> publisher gets, which is roughly half of what the bookseller
> charges (retail, in general, doubles their cost, which sounds like
> a lot but retail is still a very difficult business). My copy of
> Mark's book says $35 on the back, although this is often
> discounted. So let's say the publisher gets $17.50, then Mark gets
> about $2.00 per book.
>
> It looks like the publisher gets an inordinate share here, but less
> than 10% of books that most publishers put out make back their
> investment -- that is, break even. About 1% are actually
> successful. The successful books must pay for all the publisher's
> mistakes, thus the low royalty rate. I believe that most publishers
> look at this and say "to be successful, we must pump out lots of
> books to increase the number that the 1% represents." Maybe they
> don't say this explicitly, but there is pressure in that direction.
> I think O'Reilly has been successful because it has said "instead
> of always hunting for the blockbusters, let's try to make every
> book something that people will want." An excellent business model,
> it would seem, but one that I suspect will only work in a
> privately-held company, as the constant-growth imperative of the
> publicly-held corporation pressures everyone to abandon quality for
> percentages.
>
> Just my 2%.
>
> Bruce

Interesting - but where is the incentive for the author i.e. $2 per book
isn't going to make you a millionaire anytime soon (500,000 books? :-)).
Even a reasonable income of say $100K per year requires 50,000 books at that
rate. I can understand things from the publishers side and don't in anyway
blame them for the setup. But surely these figues would argue for a lot of
pressure for an author to publish electronically and directly - hence
getting far more than $2 per book i.e. from what I have seen of your Python
jottings recently, I would happily pay $20 for an electronic copy of the
book (10:1 improvement on your income :-)). If you follow the model of
making it cheap enough people are less likely to pirate the book i.e. copy
the electronic version illegally. Binding books doesn't guarantee an
income - people can always ask their local library to buy it in - and they
"share", so you'll never get volume sales! :-). One of the biggest
problems/practics that businesses follow is "what will the audience pay",
rather than "what is a reasonable price that everyone will pay" - I pass up
on buying lots of items because they have obviously priced for what they
think the market will bear (and they got in wrong in my case :-)) rather
than attempting to sell for volume - hence they lose *some* potential profit
in a sale to me - I suspect many people fall into this category and hence
sales are lost.

Books here in Australia - especially technical books, suffer badly from the
exchange rate, we are current sitting at roughly 2:1 on the US dollar. This
means that a $49.95 US book will cost me somewhere in the vicinity of $100+
AUS, and yet I earn the same salary in AUS dollars as I would if I worked in
the US (which I have :-)). The exchange rate doesn't reflect any realistic
standard of living or costs etc just the desires of the international
monetary community in investing. Of course Australia isn't a big market at
the best of times compared with the US market, so many publishers can just
ignore it (population ratio is over 10:1). But these kind of numbers have
driven me to my local library for fictional books (standard Science Fiction
book is around $17.95 - $19.95 at the moment), I will be shortly requesting
technical book buy-ins the same way. Then the sales are lost because people
will find the book in their library and not have to purchase it directly.

Just some of my thoughts - we don't have 1 and 2 cent pieces anymore, the
smallest is a 5 cent piece :-).

Peter

>
> *********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********
>
> On 12/29/01 at 6:43 PM Peter Hansen wrote:
>
> >Ron Stephens wrote:
> >>
> >> Thanks, Mark. I really appreciate your efforts. I also suggest
> that
> >> *anyone* and everyone* using Python and Windows rush out and buy
> your
> >> book, Python Programming on Win32. Do you have any other book
> projects in
> >> mind?
> >
> >From what I understand of how book publishing works,
> >Mark probably makes about 10 cents on each sale.  ;-)
> >It would be better to just send him a cheque!
> >
> >--
> >----------------------
> >Peter Hansen, P.Eng.
> >peter at engcorp.com
> >--
> >http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
>
>
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