Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 4376028" data-attributes="member: 55271">Useful facts to remember.For a printed book, a publisher generally receives about 40% of the cover price. Sometimes it will be less than that (if Amazon or B&N has negotiated a steeper discount). It will essentially never be more than that. That revenue needs to pay for:  (1) Development costs (amortized over each copy sold) (2) Publication costs  For a PDF sold through DriveThruRPG/RPGNow, an exclusive publisher receives 70% of the cover price. At some other sites, publishers receive more than that. There is absolutely no way that WotC is receiving less than that if they inked an exclusive deal. (It's even possible that they make more.) That revenue needs to pay for:  (1) Development costs (amortized over each copy sold)In a situation where you're using your publication files to generate the PDF, the additional development costs for the PDF are either minimal or non-existent.So let's take a look at what this means for WotC's $35 printed books vs. $25 PDFs. For each printed copy (using the best case scenario for revenue noted above), they're receiving $14 in revenue. For each PDF copy (using the worst case scenario), they're receiving $17.50 in revenue.So that, right there, means that PDF revenue is 25% higher than print revenue. (And, remember, we're comparing best-case revenue for print vs. worst-case revenue for PDFs.)  But revenue is only the first step, because the real question is profit. Since they're using the same files for the PDF product that they used for the print product (Rouse told us that), the development costs are the same -- so we can safely ignore that.There is no way for us to really know how much WotC is paying to get the books printed. But let's pretend that it's something extraordinarily small -- say 10% of the cover price.  That assumption (which is probably a considerable low-ball) means that WotC is clearing $10.50 in profit for each printed copy of the book and $17.50 for each PDF copy. That means that PDF profit for them is 65% higher than print profit.  And if they adjusted the PDF price so that they were clearing the same profit from both sources, it would mean that the PDFs would be selling for $18. Which is roughly the 50% that I and most other people consider a reasonable upper limit for PDF pricing.</blockquote>

Verification