Status Report: Paperback Fuckery
Jul. 26th, 2025 07:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
This is gonna be a quick one. I'm doing the math on print-on-demand paperbacks and this is so dumb.
It costs about $5.50 to print a 300-page paperback. That's not the dumb part, that's great. Technology is wonderful.
Here's what's dumb. I've got a few distributors that take IDK 45-50% royalties on print. Here's how that calculation goes: the distributor takes their cut off the retail price, subtracts the print costs, and the author gets the remainder. So assuming I didn't screw something up somewhere...
Selling through D2D:
- If I price that paperback at $12.50 I make 15 cents in royalties.
- If I price it at $19.99, I get $3.48 in royalties (roughly what I'd make on a $5 ebook).
According to the Amazon calculator, I'd get (I think?) $1.70 in royalties for a $12.50 book they print.
Selling direct from my own website:
- If I price that paperback at $12.50 I make $6.86 in royalties after printing costs and payment processing fees
- If I price that paperback at $19.00 I make $11.66
I haven't even looked at Ingram Spark yet. asdklfja;sdklfj I'm hoping I'm fundamentally misunderstanding something here.