Those of you who have been with Irreal for the long term know that I’ve always been highly skeptical of the publishing industry’s claim that almost the whole cost of publishing a book is editing and marketing and that things like printing, storing, and shipping the physical book represents a negligible part of producing and selling a book. The subtext is that self publishing won’t really result in greater profit for authors. Writers like Cory Doctorow have taken on the whole process and even accounting for economies scale found that the printing and shipping were major costs and writers can, in fact, increase their profits by taking on more of the production cycle.
If you’re an author wondering how to maximize the return on your books, Michael Lucas has a very interesting post that follows the money on a typical book sale. Lucas considers the market for physical books which seems a harder problem because rather than selling easily transferred bits, the author needs to produce and ship a physical product. The post considers various ways of handling the pipeline and shows the author’s share of a hypothetical \(\$10\) cover price for each of the strategies. It’s an enlightening post and well worth reading if you’re a writer considering selling your books on your own.