What a Print Run Actually Costs

People ask me what a book costs. They mean the cover price. I give them the other answer.

Tallow & Rivet is a three-person press working from a former dental surgery, and we publish three or four books a year. Below is the real ledger for one of them, a 224-page paperback novel called The Salt Ledger, printed in a run of 1,000. The numbers belong to us. They are not a benchmark for anyone else, and your printer will quote you differently. But they are true, and that is rarer than it ought to be.

The costs

Before a single copy exists, these bills arrive:

• Printing and binding, 1,000 copies: $3,400

• Editing, two passes: $1,300

• Typesetting and layout: $850

• Cover design and artwork: $700

• Proofreading: $450

• Launch night (room, wine, a very good sandwich): $400

That is $7,100. Divide by a thousand and each copy has cost us $7.10 before it has left the building. We have not yet paid ourselves. We have not paid for the postage, the packaging, the rent on the surgery or the cost of the author's tea.

The price

The cover price is $18. Do not get excited. When a bookshop buys a copy from us, it takes 40 percent off, which leaves $10.80. When we sell direct, at the full $18, the card company takes a bite, and we pay for the box and the stamp.

So the working number is $10.80 per copy. That is the figure to hold in your head.

The break-even

$7,100 divided by $10.80 is 657.4. Round up, because nobody sells four-tenths of a book. We need to sell 658 copies before the bills are paid.

Out of a run of 1,000, that leaves 342 copies of profit, if every one is sold. Never every one is sold. A typical small run goes this way: a third in the first month, a third over the first year, and a third living in a cupboard until you cry. We are trying to hit the second third before the money runs out.

What the number tells you

Here is the unpleasant bit. At a break-even of 658 copies, a book that sells 500 loses money. And 500 copies is a perfectly decent result for a first novel by a writer without an audience. So most of the time, a press like ours loses a little on each title and survives on the ones that surprise us.

That is the arithmetic of independent publishing, and it is why the people doing it are either stubborn, rich or both.

Where we cheat, legally

We keep the cover design cheap by using one typeface and two colours. We print in batches with our neighbour press to share the setup cost. We do our own packing on a long table at the back of the surgery, with a radio and a lot of tape.

None of that is glamorous, and all of it is the difference between a book that exists and a good idea that doesn't. Next week: what ink and machine you use changes the whole bill, and the argument over risograph versus offset.

Names, places and events in this demo are fictional.