P&Ls and how books make (or don't) money

[alg]

Profit & Loss/Profitability & Liability: How Books Make (or Don't Make!) Money

A basic outline of what happens when an editor buys a book and wants to publish it. This is very much a basic look at publishing and publishing finance, with some explanation of terms commonly used by the marketing and sales departments.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Thanks for leaving the math in! And for using real-world type figures, not completely made-up far-too-large bogus numbers. Because it was clarifying the details where I really learned stuff from this (having hung around with real live authors and some editors and agents for a few decades, the basic outline was already fairly clear to *me*, though I know how rare that is in the world at large).

De-mystifying publishing is a worthy goal all around. Publishers can get more sympathy (and be beat up more for any actual bad things they may do, and less for how things work), new authors are less subject to exploitation by scammers, and book buyers can understand just how lucky they are that *anything* they like *ever* reaches the shelves :-).