Girl in a Smart Uniform The cost of publishing processes

I thought you might be interested in seeing a break-down publishing costs. This is what we have for this book:

Distribution 2019		8.4
IPG 2019		2.22
Set up		71
Cover		250
Edit		175
ALDL		24.75
British Library		9.67
		541.04

This has been a slightly more expensive book to produce that most of our titles. This  is because we have bought in more services as this is a book I have written.

So here is an explanation of what the terms on the chart mean.

Distribution 2019

We pay £8.40 a year per title to have our books hooked up to major distributors, wholesalers and retailers. This is an absolute bargain. It would take hours and hours of our efforts to get this done and not all would accept us. Because we do this through Ingrams / Lightning Source we have access to their visibility and good will within the industry. The figure includes VAT. But it is £8.40 we need to cover each year per title.  

IPG  

We are members of the Independent Publishers Guild which is a source of advice, information and opportunities. We divide our annual fee by all the titles that are currently in print. This figure goes down each time we add a new book.  

Set up

This is the same price for all print paperbacks and includes VAT. It costs £25 to upload the inside of the book and £25.00 to upload the cover. We pay £21.00 for a proof copy. There is an option to accept an electronic proof but we prefer to see the actual physical book. A particular point is how the colour blue translates from the screen to print. For full colour books an escalating rate is paid. Oddly though, our two full colour books, Magical Christmas and Who Will Be My Friend? both cost less to set up than the standard paperback.

Cover

We commissioned a cover here as this is one of a cycle of six books with similar covers. We pay £250 to artists and photographers if we use them but more often than not we design the cover in-house, using copyright-free images form Pixabay.      

Edit

Normally this is done in-house and we don’t pay ourselves but take a share of the profit. We’ve started using a few other editors, and have started paying them £180 for three stages of editing, as an advance, then once that is earned back awarding them part of the publisher’s profit share. In this case a professional freelance editor gave us mates’ rates.

ALDL

We have to deposit five hard copies of each book with the Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries.

British Library

We have to deposit one hard copy of each book with the British Library.

We have applied to be allowed to deposit electronically both to the British Library and the Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries. We are still awaiting a decision.

We’re shortly going to start paying our in-house editors, designers and marketers an advance. This will create greater set-up costs. This won’t affect the share of net sales that goes to authors but it will mean that a new book will only be taken on once a book has recouped its set-up costs.