costing of book

When developing a book the cost and profit margins are a highly influential factor, in order to gather a greater understanding upon such topic research was gathered, these results are expressed below.

Independant book stores pay authors an 85 percent royalty when your book sells in their store.

And book distributors take a cut of the sale price to cover their costs. The cut is usually between 25-35% of the net price. Obviously when going through a publishing house the profit margin is very small for the author, and they are likly to gain only 50p for every £10 book sold. Due to this it often occurs that thousands of books must be sold in order to gain any form of profit. Although this is the most frequent method of selling books, I believe it is not valid for that of the village bookstore audience, and thus it could be suggested that I would indepndantly publish this book, in turn gaining a greater profit.

Printing prices in Uni:

When pricing the book it cost around £12, this obviously not taking into count time spent and that of the binding method.(Book cloth-£3) (Spreads-£8)

(Glue-£1). From this a profit of £8 could be made if sold 

Search into the mass manufacturing cost of book:

Altogether ten printers were contacted in order to gather a diverse range of pricings for the books. 100 copies was the inital mass, due to the village bookstore being a relitively small shop. From the quotes gathered a mean price was developed for this mass, being that of £554.00. This therefore calculting each book at £5.54. 

working out profit:

If this book were to be sold at £20, the profit would be £1,446. From this it must be considered that the village bookstore would take 25% this then leaving me with a profit of £1,085. Considering the time spent upon the book (an average of 40 hours) this could be applied as a £27.50 hourly rate.

When being sold on an indutrial scale, through  publishers it would take £1085 books to be sold in order to gain the same profit, due to this other stores would have to be considered for distrubution ie waterstones.

As a result of this it is fair to suggest that my book would make a large profit if produced independantly, although their is a large risk that the books would not sell. Due to this large efforts would be made through promotion.