Off BeatBusinessMagazine
Publishing Getting a Good Deal?
What Your Publisher Doesn’t Tell You About Author Book Copies
By Marshall Mitchell When I started a publishing house a few years they poured blood, sweat, and tears into. ago I realized there were common practices in the publishing industry that I would never It’s not wrong for an author to pay to have their book published, printed or distributed. do. Book publishing is, however, not exclusively It’s a common practice for publishers to about producing printed works. It’s about mark up the price of a book when the author producing books to sell books, and that means requests to buy copies from the publisher. selling books to readers, not authors. It’s so common that no one questions it. The author’s usual concern is whether or not “Because that’s how we do it.” they’ll order a higher number of books so that they can get more books for a cheaper I talked with a semi well-known speaker one day before he spoke. He wrote a book with price per book. one of the top 5 publishers and has to order The author is charged wholesale prices— his $40 (retail) book for $25 (wholesaler the prices that retailers like Barnes & Noble, discount) because that’s what his contract Amazon, and your local bookshop pay— says. He’s pushed for a paperback printing of in order to own copies for personal use, his book, but the publisher hasn’t budged. marketing or review purposes, sell them out It’s costly to stock his own book and it’s costly to the reader. A print-on-demand set up or a of the trunk of their car or on their website. short run of paperbacks would have increased sales for the publisher and decreased cost for Why do I have a problem with this? the reader. There’s a difference between a publisher who Your book is meant to change lives and makes money off of book sales and the one if you’re unable to bring it to market at a who makes money off of authors (and rarely, reasonable price then you won’t be able if ever, because of book sales). to touch as many lives. This isn’t about complimentary copies. This is about authors having to buy their books at So what if an author sells his book out of his wholesale to own copies of their own book— trunk, at a conference or after a talk? That’s the book they worked hard to write, the one kind of the point. The publisher makes money 15