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Message: <blockquote data-quote="guildofblades" data-source="post: 3447051" data-attributes="member: 27324">>>3rd party RPG product producers make $2 of profit on each book they sell?<<Well, no, probably not. The "average" 3rd party RPG product producer probably loses money on each book they sell. Thats why the majority of them go out of business after just publishing one to a handful of books. In my years in game publishing I have seen at least 200 companies come and go.In reality a great deal depends on the company and how it operates. Is it paying its staff salaries or not? What kind of money is it spending on artwork? On freelance writing? On advertising? I can't say because every company is different. Two companies could attempt to produce the exact same $30 hard cover and one could come out with a net profit of $6 per book while another loses $6 per book. Depends on many variable costs associated with the book and its production and other variable costs like salaries and other assorted overhead like warehousing, insurance, utility bills, mortgage or lease expenses, advertising, etc, etc.I can tell you, ballpark, that the "average" new publisher that is professional enough to establish initial distribution for its products is doing "good" if it sells 500 copies of its new product upon release, followed up by a couple hundred copies thereafter. After that, you are getting into the veteran companies and non independents that are able to sell more than that. I can tell you that a $30 hard cover will typically have a printing cost in the $3.00 to $8.00 range or thereabouts if they are doing traditional printing, printing at least 2,000 and don't have full color interiors. I can tell you that the typical wholesale price on a $30 hard cover is $12.00. From that you can subtract shipping and printing costs off the top, but from there you get into a whole mess of variable costs that I could not begin to generalize.Ryan S. JohnsonGuild of Blades Publishing Group<a href="http://www.guildofblades.com" target="_blank">http://www.guildofblades.com</a><a href="http://www.1483online.com" target="_blank">http://www.1483online.com</a><a href="http://www.thermopylae-online.com" target="_blank">http://www.thermopylae-online.com</a></blockquote>

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