About Publishing: Can I get an idea what it's like?
David C:
A few comments
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We've done our share of handling books, and I'd say that the reasonable limits of a garage operation start to overflow when you're talking of a thousand-copy print run. A couple hundred copies of a book you'll still store comfortably at your home, but more than that will practically require some sort of semi-professional arrangement.
Hmm, Eero, by any chance do you have a more specific measurements? I know you've done actual print runs before... Would 500 books be too many to fit into 1 car stall of a garage, or would it take 2?
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working on a half down, half net 30, which is what we used to demand out of all of our printers
I get the half down part, what's the half net 30 mean? Does that mean +30% on delivery and the rest when sold?
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1000 is a big print run! Can you really sell that many? I'd do a short print run first and see how it goes, personally.
I picked 1000 because somewhere (I thought) I heard that if you did do a print run, that's the minimum you'd want to print.
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The cost of having a basic web site is pretty small - tens of dollars annually. Having a specific domain increases the costs somewhat. Setting up PDF delivery is technically intensive, but not expensive.
This is within my realm of knowledge. I was kind of wondering more about bandwidth, but you know, if I'm getting the kinds of bandwidth drain that'd be considerable, I probably wouldn't care, because I'd be selling that many copies...
Eero Tuovinen:
Exact measurements depend on the dimensions of the book you'd be storing, obviously. You can calculate this stuff yourself by figuring out the dimensions of your book and multiplying the volume by the number of books. I'd say that you probably could fit 500 books into your garage, unless they were particularly large books or you had to have room for something else in there, too (like a car). The sort of small softcover books indie designers tend to favour won't take much space at all compared to big hardcover tomes.
guildofblades:
>>Hmm, Eero, by any chance do you have a more specific measurements? I know you've done actual print runs before... Would 500 books be too many to fit into 1 car stall of a garage, or would it take 2? <<
Space requirements will very much depend on the size of the book. Back in 97 when we order 2,000 copies of the Dark Realms RPG (a 100 page digest book), the whole print run came in about 16 boxes, each about the size of a 5,000 sheet case of copy paper. Space wise, that could all be stored packing boxes under and on top of a decent sized office desk, though they were stacked 3-4 boxes high (ala, over my head in height).
Now, by comparison, a similarl sized "case" of a few of the larger D20 hard covers we recieved in on liquidation have about 20-25 books in them. These would be 200-300 page 8.5" x 11" soft or hard cover books. So a print run of 1000 of those, at 25 per case, would take up about 40-50 cases. This is still very much able to be fit into 1 stall of a two care garage.
Honestly, if you were to invest in some heavy duty, multi shelf wooden shelving that would let you partition your 1 car stall into multiple storage slots (recommended that the lowest shelf be at least 6" off the cement floor to avoid small floods or even just moisture from the cement transfering to the boxes and books), my bet is that you would have storage room for up to 6 to 8 such print runs, especially assuming a sell down in on hand inventory on the previous ones printed over time.
Now, that said, a 1,000 print run in todays environment is some hard work to sell. Doable, but not easy. You might be better served starting a bit smaller. Its always tempting to print larger to get a better per book price, however, an important accounting principle that MANY new publishers fail to grasp is that you ony get the write off the cost of a product once it is sold and you only get to write off its "cost of goods sold". The important part there is cost of goods "SOLD". Example.
You print 500 books at $4.00 per book. Cost $2,000 to print. You sell all 500 books, so your cost per book "sold" works out to be the same $4.00 per book you paid to have printed.
Or you print 1,000 books at $3.00 a book. Cost you $3,000 to print. You sell 650 of them. In this case, your cost of goods sold is NOT $3.00, its that $3,000 you spent on printing divided by the 650 units you sold. Basically $4.62 per book sold.
So, printing "more" to chase after the better price per book is not necessarily actually cheaper. Depends on how many you can ultimately sell. The difference between those two scenarios also has tax implications and the second scenario will end up costing you more still.
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.guildofblades.com/retailgroup.php
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com
Willow:
I just want to chime in to respond to this:
"I picked 1000 because somewhere (I thought) I heard that if you did do a print run, that's the minimum you'd want to print."
I strongly disagree with that. My first print run for Awesome Adventures was 25 books. It took me six months to sell all those books, selling it to friends and people at cons. I'm considering doing a larger print run and being an exhibitor at a con; I'll be looking at about 100 copies for that.
greyorm:
I ran with 30-copy print runs of ORX, which mostly sold out each quarter I did a print run (but the last batch took two quarters to sell out). Had I known the sales numbers going in, I might have done a print run of 100 and saved myself a little money on printing. But I didn't.
If I were to re-release a new version now, I would do a print run of 100 and would expect to sell out of that in around a year-and-a-half. If it sold out faster than that, I might decide to go with a larger print-run afterwards, but that would really depend on just how fast it sold out. A big number of sales early can simply be (usually is) a bump that slowly trails off.
I would never expect to sell 1000 books, not unless there was already a huge, proven market demand for my game. So do a small test first and see how quickly those go. You may be spending more per book, but you won't end up basically sitting on a pile of spent money afterwards when sales slow down or stop altogether.
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