When is a book's niche market too small

What's your genre, or what's the book about?

It entirely depends upon the economics of that particular book. As a rough rule of thumb, you want to be making a 50% margin on every book. That is, the money that you expect to take in should exceed the money you spend on production, royalties, freight etc. by 50%.

Supposing your book costs a dollar to print and sells for ten dollars. As author, you may be getting a royalty of 10% of purchase price. The bookstore will pay the publisher, say, $5 for the book. Against that, you set a dollar for every copy for production; plus a dollar in royalties; and, say, a thousand dollars for the setup costs.

If the publisher expects to sell 5,000 copies they will be taking in $25,000 and spending $11,000 - a very healthy profit. On the other hand, if they only expect to sell 1000 copies they will be taking in $5000, losing stacks of cash. In this example, the minimum number of copies the publisher needs to sell is 3,300; so the size of market that implies is a pretty big one - I've seen plenty of 5000 copy first printings for the entire UK trade.

In real life, of course, you may be faced with higher discounts, so that the bookstore is paying the publisher 40% of cover price or less; lower cover prices; higher setup costs; higher print costs, especially for hardbacks; all of which tend to reduce margins. And the fewer copies you print, the more expensive it is.

Another factor is that the publisher's sales force may not be geared up to sell particular kinds of books or to sell into particular markets. There are certain types of product - calendars and stationery, for example - that have a really hard time selling, because book stores find it more convenient to place large orders with specialist publishers instead. So, whereas we can publish good products, we may not necessarily be able to get them into shops.

allenparker said:

Of late, I have received a couple of rejections that simply stated that the market for my manuscript is too small. These were from regional publishers and one agent. How small is too small? 5,000 people? 25,000 people?

I could assume that if there is a niche market of 5,000 people, and you expect to sell to maybe ten percent, 500 books would not be an acceptable market. If there were 250,000 people anda you reasonably expect to sell to five percent, 12,500 books might have a better chance.

Where is the point at which publishers begin to say that the project is not worth the effort?

Allen

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Hi Allen,
I'd be interested to know if you're trying to get published in the US or elsewhere, and like Cathy, I'd like to know what your genre and topic are. Torgo has the economics of it right.

It's going to depend upon the publisher, the size of the print run necessary for the publisher to make a profit, and the marketing niche that you're aiming for. We'd really need to know just a touch more facts than you're giving in your question. For instance, non-fiction or fiction? Specialized small niche or very large market?