Numbers and averages
Per Amazon there are 6,752 results for PublishAmerica, 29 for Publish America, 35 for Erica House, and 51 for AmErica House.
That's a total of 6,867 either out, or soon to be released.
Realizing that Amazon isn't perfect, of course.
Now, assume each book sells for $19.95. (I haven't checked lately, but at one time I found an average price for a full month's list, and it was $19.95)
I don't know the average page-length of a PA book, but I'll assume it's 300 pages.
Now we know that Lightning Source charges $0.013/page plus $0.90 for the cover. Cost of printing of the average 300 page book is $4.80/copy.
For various reasons that seem good to me, I'll assume that the average PA book sells 75 copies. (For every person who sells 150, someone else sells 0.)
We know that PA offers its authors a 30% discount. I will assume that most books are sold to the authors, therefore each book sells for $13.97. I'm not counting the cost of shipping at this time.
Each author gets an 8% royalty, but those royalties aren't paid on books the author buys himself, so I'm not counting those right now.
So: 6,867 * 75 = 515,025 total copies sold.
Cost of goods sold (printing) = $2,472,120
515,025 * 13.97 = $7,194,899.25 gross income.
$7,194,899.25 - 2,472,120 = $4,722,779.25 gross profit.
Now that is every penny that they can expect to see from those books, ever. Once they've filled their niche markets, that's all the potential squeezed out.
Let's play a little more. PA claims 65 employees. 65 at $10.00/hour for a 40 hour week, four weeks a month is a monthly payroll of $104,000, or $1,248,000 year. That's all the editing (such as it is), all the covers, monitoring the messageboard, taking phone orders, and so on.
Each book is worth 75 * ($13.97-$4.80) = $687.75. To cover payroll, PA has to release 1,815 books per year.
Amazon lists 3,219 books for PA for this year.
I can refigure this assuming the books sell to bookstores at a 40% discount, and the author gets 8% of that discounted price:
Each book brings in $11.97 minus author's royalty of $0.96 or $11.01, minus printing cost of $4.80, for $6.21 gross profit per book. PA would need to sell 200,966 books to cover payroll. At 75 copies per title, that's 2,680 titles that they'd have to publish in the year to cover payroll. Again, they published 3,219 this year.
So, I expect that in order to cover payroll and printing, they have to publish between 1,815 and 2,680 titles a year.
That gives them between $370,697 and $965,601 this year to pay for the townhouse, to give Willem, Larry, and Miranda a bit better pay than $10 an hour, pay taxes, rent phone lines, pay their ISP, and all the rest of the things that go into running a business.
No wonder they're scrambling for new authors, no wonder they're playing games like these New York Times ads to attempt to induce authors to buy more than those 75 copies. An awful lot is explained.
