Please Stop Bashing Book Publishing

The publishing future for smaller publishers is ambiguous. On the one hand, there are services that eliminate the need for a large, expensive overhead organization.

From the beginning of time as far as we can see, publishers have been most comfortable viewing each title as an individual profit center, as we discussed in Chapter 2, explaining the utility of a P&L at the acquisitions stage. It is usually easy enough to recognize the revenue attributable to a particular title and, of course, the direct costs

Publishers will also need to change their marketing practices. They must create cheaper ways to reach consumers. That suggests both “vertical” websites, where they could get “relevant” traffic for some of their books, and “email lists.” The big publishers have been collecting email “permissions” (an idea first articulated by digital thinker Seth Go

How do publishers calculate their profits? Here’s how book-publishing economics actually works. A publishing house has overheads that are reasonably fixed: primarily rent and salaries but also travel and entertainment, insurances, legal and accounting, and the costs all businesses have to keep operating and keep their doors open. Unless there is so