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

Re: breaking down some line items

[jackfirecat.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I liked the line about 'production bumped it up to x print run to save money in case it was a best-seller'. But how many books are best-sellers? If you instead reduced every print run on principle, you would indeed be caught out by the rare best-seller, but so what. The reprint would be slightly more expensive than having some extra copies from the first printing, but you would have saved from all the other printings that didn't turn out to be bestsellers.