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

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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

P n L. Can you do a version for ebook sales

[(Anonymous)]

Great! I loved your breakdown. I haven't seen Part Two yet, but I'd like to know if you might consider doing a Part Three assuming similar (except for physical ppb costs) breakdown for a $6.99 ebook version? And could you come up with scenarios for the difference between letting someone like Fictionwise handle the sales versus TOR handling them itself?

Derek Benner

Re: P n L. Can you do a version for ebook sales

[alg.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I don't know much about e-books. Tor doesn't generally sell e-books ourselves -- we sell the rights to a company for a set amount (usually).

Sorry!

Re: P n L. Can you do a version for ebook sales

[(Anonymous)]

The interesting thing is that, for about a day, TOR *did* sell ebooks through Baen's Webscriptions (until various legal reasons shut that down) yet those who were able to purchase ebooks through that process all stated great satisfaction at *finally* being able to get TOR ebooks. I was one of them. Managed to snag Stross' first two Family Corporate books in ebook format - I already have them in HC. Perhaps you should research the ebook PnL potential to help convince the TOR principles as to the profit potential of ebook sales?