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PDF Industry - How do we help it grow?
- Thread starter rpghost
- Start date
Wulf Ratbane
Adventurer
Fast Learner said:
I agree. Folks seem to have it backwards. You set your cover price at 10x your costs.
You don't call the printer and say, "I'm planning to put a cover price of 29.95 on this," and the printer says, "Oh, I guess I'll charge you 2.99 a book for printing then."
A print run of less than 2000 books is not cost effective for any printer; you'll have to expect somewhat higher costs per book for a short print run because so much of that cost is in setup fees. Print more books and you'll spread that setup cost out. For a full color interior book and only 1000 copies, $11k seems roughly in line with quotes I have seen.
That said, even though I wouldn't say he was "robbed," I don't think it was a very wise decision. It will be very hard to recover that investment. If you sell through the usual channels-- that is, the three tier system of distributor-retailer-consumer-- you recover 40% of the cover price. (The remaining 60% of the sale price is divvied up among the rest of the tier to make their profit.) At 27.99, that means you'll make $11.20 per book. You'll have to sell almost every copy just to break even-- no profit.
That said, if you're selling the book direct from your website, you'll make more, but you'll have to sell 500 copies to meet your printing costs. I can't speak for the popularity of coolminiornot, but I would be surprised if you can sell 500 copies.
I hope I am wrong! Good luck!
Wulf
Philip, just checking, you got 3000 HC, FC copies printed for $11,500 or for $10 each? Did that include colour seperation? If the former I'm definitely going to check out Sirivatana.
I'll put it another way, I paid $7k to get the book colour seperated and plated, and $4.5k to get 1000 copies printed. So my cost per unit goes down dramatically the more copies I print, but here's the trick of it; there's no advantage to printing lots since the printers are more than happy to print me up another 500 copies later, if I need it, without charging me the plating costs all over again. I've currently got 580 out of 1000 left, so am quite close to break even.
The reason why I brought up such low quantity runs is because of something James mentioned about the poor response to POD (due to perceived poorer quality?) and that 500 units in the e-publishing world is considered a hot seller. If you could reliably expect selling 500 units via the e-publishing route for a 100 page B&W book, let's say it's a core rulebook, why not just get 1000 copies printed? It'd cost $5k to get it done and shipped to your door step. If the book sold out, it'd cost $3k or less to get another 1000 copies.
[snipped my previous reply] I was just rereading the whole thread, and it seems that publishers already are using PDFs to gauge public opinion before deciding whether or not to go to print; I'm referring to the top 10 sellers and the observation that most of them have already gone to print (I wouldn't know, as an outsider to the RPG world so I'm going to assume this is true). So maybe a good way of educating people about PDFs would be to get RPGNow to take a couple of these books that have "made it" and sell them on consignment at conventions, rather than giving out demo CDs.
I think there's no real problem with PDF publishing if you're near the top of the best seller range that does 500 copies or more in PDF sales. If I had a title that was doing that well I'd just use the profits from the PDF sales to fund printing (B&W internal, HC FC cover would be $5k max for 1000 copies). That's where the synergy between PDFs and print publishing lies I think. Would this be the way that most publishers decide whether or not to do a print run?
The real problem seems to be at the lower end of the scale, the 200 or less copies sold. Taking my outsider's point of view with a pinch of salt, it seems like anything that could possibly do well in print (where the real money is at the moment?) has already been picked up by a publisher based on the PDF sales already, everything else will not make the jump to print.
It's been previously mentioned on the thread that customers aren't at the level yet where they are prepared to consider PDFs as a main stream alternative to physical books. In the meantime, I would view e-publishing as a useful market feedback tool to see if a product would sell in print before actually publishing; it's like a focus group that pays you. I would then aggressively try to make money out of print editions of the PDFs that did well and focus my development on similar titles.
I don't think I'm saying anything that the folk who've made the jump to print don't already know: low print runs aren't as expensive or capital intensive as you might expect, there are many alternate distribution channels especially if you're only trying to sell 1000 copies. It seems to me that the synergy between e-publishing and printing is obvious, if you have a good e-publishing run you've raised enough money to do a print run, where you can make serious money if you manage to sell the book, which you probably will since you had a good PDF run!
I'll put it another way, I paid $7k to get the book colour seperated and plated, and $4.5k to get 1000 copies printed. So my cost per unit goes down dramatically the more copies I print, but here's the trick of it; there's no advantage to printing lots since the printers are more than happy to print me up another 500 copies later, if I need it, without charging me the plating costs all over again. I've currently got 580 out of 1000 left, so am quite close to break even.
The reason why I brought up such low quantity runs is because of something James mentioned about the poor response to POD (due to perceived poorer quality?) and that 500 units in the e-publishing world is considered a hot seller. If you could reliably expect selling 500 units via the e-publishing route for a 100 page B&W book, let's say it's a core rulebook, why not just get 1000 copies printed? It'd cost $5k to get it done and shipped to your door step. If the book sold out, it'd cost $3k or less to get another 1000 copies.
[snipped my previous reply] I was just rereading the whole thread, and it seems that publishers already are using PDFs to gauge public opinion before deciding whether or not to go to print; I'm referring to the top 10 sellers and the observation that most of them have already gone to print (I wouldn't know, as an outsider to the RPG world so I'm going to assume this is true). So maybe a good way of educating people about PDFs would be to get RPGNow to take a couple of these books that have "made it" and sell them on consignment at conventions, rather than giving out demo CDs.
I think there's no real problem with PDF publishing if you're near the top of the best seller range that does 500 copies or more in PDF sales. If I had a title that was doing that well I'd just use the profits from the PDF sales to fund printing (B&W internal, HC FC cover would be $5k max for 1000 copies). That's where the synergy between PDFs and print publishing lies I think. Would this be the way that most publishers decide whether or not to do a print run?
The real problem seems to be at the lower end of the scale, the 200 or less copies sold. Taking my outsider's point of view with a pinch of salt, it seems like anything that could possibly do well in print (where the real money is at the moment?) has already been picked up by a publisher based on the PDF sales already, everything else will not make the jump to print.
It's been previously mentioned on the thread that customers aren't at the level yet where they are prepared to consider PDFs as a main stream alternative to physical books. In the meantime, I would view e-publishing as a useful market feedback tool to see if a product would sell in print before actually publishing; it's like a focus group that pays you. I would then aggressively try to make money out of print editions of the PDFs that did well and focus my development on similar titles.
I don't think I'm saying anything that the folk who've made the jump to print don't already know: low print runs aren't as expensive or capital intensive as you might expect, there are many alternate distribution channels especially if you're only trying to sell 1000 copies. It seems to me that the synergy between e-publishing and printing is obvious, if you have a good e-publishing run you've raised enough money to do a print run, where you can make serious money if you manage to sell the book, which you probably will since you had a good PDF run!
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Just want to mention that I agree with Clark's earlier comments here (somehow missed pages 4 and 5 [edit]) here. I just started running a game online. It's not picnic to fit books on the desk by the computer, so I do my preparation in my text prog, use the online srd (for lack of a pdf one I like) and pdfs whenever possible. It's nigh impossible to be efficient with the Banewarrens pdf while running an online game. I have to copy and paste into my text prog just to get readable chunks for various events and situations.
If I could have a good adventure in which hovering my mouse over a character's name in the text gave me the relevant stat block (with a copy to clipboard button) or other such tooltips, I'd be all over it.
By the way, I've considered those Dire Kobold adventures I don't know how many times, but I can never figure out if I can change the level or if I buy them at a certain level. If I could scale the level at will, I'd certainly pick them up. I'd pay more than usual for that, really.
If I could have a good adventure in which hovering my mouse over a character's name in the text gave me the relevant stat block (with a copy to clipboard button) or other such tooltips, I'd be all over it.
By the way, I've considered those Dire Kobold adventures I don't know how many times, but I can never figure out if I can change the level or if I buy them at a certain level. If I could scale the level at will, I'd certainly pick them up. I'd pay more than usual for that, really.
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jmucchiello
Hero
Low end? My book (Joe's Book of Enchantment) is 65 (out of nearly 2000 products) on RPGNow's All-categories, All-time best seller list (first right hand list). It's only had about 205 sales. 200 sales is golden in PDFs. This is the problem. 500 sales is a phenomenon. (I doubt even the #10 has that many sales, I could be wrong.)Chern Ann said:
jmucchiello
Hero
Yeah, I figured out I was wrong when I noticed the Book of Templates at 300+ sales was #43. Still, out of 2000 products, that's a very low percentage that break 500 sales.Dextra said:
But notice the spread, from #8 to #14 is nearly a doubling in sales.
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Fast Learner
First Post
Excellent, thanks. Their website seems to be at http://www.sirivatana.co.th/main.phpphilreed said:
I assume that price includes shipping to the US, right?
Any other third world printers with good rates? Chern still got a good price compared to any North American printers, but it's good to know about more international options.
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