I'm the Publisher at KidPub Press, just wanted to add my voice to the conversation. No publisher keeps 80% of the cover price, whether they are a large house or small. When we sell a book to a retailer such as a bookstore, they require a 50% discount.
Agreed. And distributors with full sales services are even worse: they expect anything up to 65% discount! But they do get your books into bookshops nationwide, and according to a report released last year by The Bookseller around 68% of sales are made in those bookshops, with more than half of the rest of sales--including online sales--dependent on prior selection in those physical bookshops.
Selling on Amazon is similar; they take around 35%. Print , paper, and binding costs typically run to 20%, and our authors receive 20% in royalty. That comes to between 75% and 90% of the retail price in direct costs. From that 20% or so left over I have to pay editors and designers, cover the cost of marketing, advertising, technology, and so on. Somewhere in there is a few percent left over for profit.
So far so good: I have a few quibbles with some of your figures, but not enough to bother with here.
I'm not complaining at all...I love the publishing business. I don't think that most folks understand the business model, though.
Don't worry: I do. I've worked in publishing for over a quarter of a century and am happy to fill in the missing bits for anyone here who doesn't understand.
And while we're discussing the subject, what sort of experience do you have in publishing? How long have you worked in the business? Can you name a few agents or publishers where you honed your skills? Or perhaps tell us about a few books you brought to the market, and how well they did?
KidPub Press is set up as a subsidy press, not a vanity press,
BLEEP! Rhetoric alert! "Subsidy press" is a euphemism for "vanity press" and if you don't realise that, then there are probably all sorts of other things you don't realise about publishing too.
and one of our major goals is to help kids experience the thrill of being published.
The real thrill is in knowing your writing is being bought by readers because they love it; not in having your name included in a book which is bought by people (parents, family, friends) who want a copy because your name is in a book regardless of the quality or expense of the book itself.
And before you argue: last academic year the school that my ten-year-old goes to self-published a book which was a great success: they'd previously got caught in a "we publish kids' stories" scam which sold them books at £18 per copy; their self-published version retailed at under £4 and was much better in quality and content. Oh, and yes: I helped them with that book and it's now a flagship project which several UK LEAs are using as an example to follow.
We do take a fee for publication, which covers the cost of production.
Then you're definitely a vanity press.
We do a light edit, design a cover, produce and print the book, send out press releases, market to bookstores (our books are available through Baker and Taylor), handle sales, and pay royalties.
I'm pretty sure that Baker and Taylor is a wholesaler, not a distributor. I'm sure someone else will come along and let us know for sure.
A vanity press prints your book in whatever form it is given to them in.
Not necessarily: some vanity presses edit the books they publish. A vanity press is a publisher which makes money by selling its books to its authors, rather than by selling its books to new readers. Who do you make most of your sales to?
Many of our authors sell only a handful of copies, but a few sell 100 or 200 copies or more.
That's horribly low. Even flops from trade publishers usually sell a few thousand; the book I worked on with my son's school sold over 500 copies despite there being fewer than 90 children in the yeargroup which put it together.
No matter how many they sell, the kids are like rock stars at school when they show up with their book and their friends see them in the news and on Amazon.
How many of the books you've "published" end up on the news? And how many of the parents of the kids involved end up out of pocket because of the fees they've paid you? They could do this via Lulu or similar at no cost at all: it seems to me that you're exploiting those parents in order to make money for yourself. I could be wrong, of course: and if I am, I'm sure you'll explain why. I'd love you to.
It sets these kids on fire for writing and gives them a huge confidence boost that they will carry with them for a long time. I think that's really the business we're in.
My eight-year-old neice had a poem published in a dodgy anthology last year. While the anthology did appear on Amazon not a single copy appeared on the shelves of her local book shop. Every day she had to walk past that book shop on her way home from school; every day she asked her mother if they could go in and see if the book was there yet. I'm friends with the owner of that bookshop and eventually I sent her a copy and asked her to put it on the shelves to coincide with my neice's walk home. Just so she could have that thrill. My friend did: she even tried to order three copies of the book. But the "publisher" concerned had such punitive sales conditions that she couldn't afford to.
If I hadn't have sent that copy to my friend's book shop, my neice would have been horribly disappointed. Her confidence would have been shot dead. You have no idea how much it meant to her to see "her" book on the shelves; and how broken-hearted she was each day that she walked past that bookshop and couldn't see it there. I shouldn't have had to intervene; and most kids who have felt that same excitement don't have clever aunts with bookshop-owning friends who are willing to help them out.
Perry Donham
KidPub Press
http://books.kidpub.com
Perry Donham, I don't like the business you're in and don't see how it has anything to do with the publishing business I've worked in for so long. Do please explain to me how mistaken I am, and how you're not exploiting the children you publish. I'd love to hear your side.
