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Debbie Elicksen
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Book publishing tips
Added by Debbie Elicksen
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Book publishing tips
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Inside the NHL Dream; Loyalty, Intensity, and Passion; Future Prospects; Positive Sports; and Self-Publishing 101 are all available on Amazon. The Book Publishing 101 physical series is available through my website at www.freelancepublishing.net; th…
These are a few of the 90+ books I've edited and/or project managed to print
Comment Wall (1 comment)
- At 6:19pm on September 28, 2009,
Debbie Elicksen said…
- I admit I have not always embraced e-books, but with the new readers out and ever-changing technology, this is definitely the future. What I also like are the possibilities. Personally, I'm getting tired of lugging books around -- especially if they don't fit in my purse. Sitting in a doctor's office, it's not always convenient to carry a laptop to read a PDF, nor is it comfortable carrying anything larger than a pocketbook if you've walked or taken a bus to that doctor's office. Kindle and the Sony Reader have made it so you can carry a book, read it any time, and not be weighed down by extra pounds of carrying material.
Print is so expensive, and it is not getting cheaper any time soon. It's so expensive, it makes it difficult for most people to afford publishing a book -- even traditional publishers. Every year, the paper stock list offered by printers gets smaller as some stocks get discontinued. The expense keeps rising on paper because of mill closings, fires, and shipping costs.
An ebook can still be professional, and it still can have an ISBN and Cataloguing in Print number. You probably don't need to spend a lot on layout. In fact, I crunched some numbers.
For an average-sized printed book of 150 to 200 pages, layout and design with a professional graphic artist that does not work in an agency might range from $2,000 to $3,000, depending on how difficult the layout is and if there are a lot of revisions. Minor revisions do not add up too much (changing a word here, finding a comma here...). Major revisions are those that require reconfiguring the layout.
Printing costs for the same sized book via offset can be about $5 per book for 1,000. That's $5,000. For 2,000 books, $3 per book or $6,000. Digital costs might be $9.00 per book for under 250 books and around $7.00 per book for 500.
Professional editing will vary, depending on the size of the book, but this is certainly something I'd highly recommend, even if doing an e-book. If the words aren't professional, there's no amount of dressing up the outside that will make up for that. But on the average sized print book, editing is usually around $2,500, plus project management is $1,800. So add all that up and you're looking at over $10,000 for a printed book.
You can see the cost of a print book is quite expensive if you don't have a built-in market to sell it. For example, professional speakers will sell books either to the organizers that book them -- for all their guests, or sell them at the back of the room. In many situations, a print book is still a viable marketing tool. However, even corporations have cut back drastically on printing their annual reports. They may do a few hundred, but offer it online as an e-book for most of the shareholders.
So in crunching the numbers of an e-book, here's what I came up with. A professional cover design and a formatted internal layout put in PDF form: $1,000. That also includes the (Canadian) ISBN and CIP applications and coordinating with the designer on the cover. For an average sized book, add another $2,000 for editing. And editing is not just a read-once deal. It's intensive and involves this:
Editing includes substantive/structural edits (clarifying or reorganizing content and structure for flow); stylistic edits (smoothing language, non-mechanical line-by-line editing); rewriting (reworking paragraphs that might be too long for direct quotes from other publications re plagiarism concerns); and copyediting (editing for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and other mechanics of style; checking for consistency etc.). They are proofed both electronically and in printed form. The manuscript is also flagged for anything that might be construed as libelous and plagiarism.
So given that an average sized e-book is only $3,000 to produce with professional editing, that's over $7,000 difference from the cost of producing a printed book.
I have decided that my next book will be an e-book.
I just thought I'd share this with you. If you want to consider this or even the print option, feel free to message me for guidance.
Debbie
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