Would it be worth the paper it was printed on?

[estaratshirai]

I mean this question literally.

This book, formatted for the appropriate size, is 600 pages. According to Lulu's estimates, Devourer on the cheap paper would cost $15 per unit to print. (This, friends, is what we get for not buying in bulk.) They recommend a retail price of $30. I myself would be perfectly happy at negligible profit margins, since I

Comments

[lwood]

So, in the wide wide world of PoD, there are basically two tiers of pricing and service:

1) The Fancy: these are houses where you hand them a basic MS Word document and they do everything from there: real editing, proofreading, cover design, serious layout business, etc. They pay for this by selling you a pile of marketing services that will be of variable value. In the case of a fanfic novel, you already know your market and your audience-the value of such marketing services goes from "dubious" to "nil". This is your AuthorHouse, your iUniverse, and so on, and they are spendy. Don't know if they're worth it, but I'm highly skeptical of them.

2) The DIY: these are outfits where the more work you are willing to put into making it look like a pro manuscript, the less it will cost. This is a field of about three people: Lulu, CreateSpace (owned by Amazon), and Virtual Bookworm (the dark horse and distant third). Someone like me, who happens to know a thing or two about desktop publishing, layout, and design, can do pretty well here, or if you're not up to that, they will offer those services for a fee (duh). They don't offer bollocks marketing services, but with, say, translations of obscure Icelandic sagas, we know our niche and our audience and can already market to them tolerably well.

With Lulu, you're obviously in DIY land, and yay that. I don't know if you know your way around InDesign or Quark (do I dimly recall you edited a magazine for FoI or summat once upon a time?), but obviously with the big packages you can look just like the pros, because you're using the same tools they do.

The next things that determine price in a big way are paper size and distribution. Pocket paperback (4.25" x 6.875") is very expensive in PoD; going with the standard US trade paperback size of 6"x9" will save you money and widen your distribution options-check out the pricing on Lulu and you'll see straightaway why most PoD books are 6"x9". The Troth, out of all its books, has only ever done one mass-market paperback, and that's our new military manual-aimed to be worn in the pocket of an active serviceman's uniform, that's the size it has to be.

As for distribution-again, niche market, and with fanfic, unless one has permission from the copyright holder to take such liberties with the sandbox, you want to be very careful about that. Indeed, the fanfic anthologies I've worked on have been run off at local print shops (many of whom can do "perfect bound", aka paperback binding right on site) specifically to avoid Imperial entanglements of this nature. I hear all sorts of craziness goes on nowadays with fanfic novels and PoD, but that's a little higher on the radar than I like to work. My personal feelings aside, though, having an ISBN or being fetchable via Amazon aren't things that are going to matter much to you (assuming ONLY PoD distribution)-so save money and skip that too. The Lulu Marketplace should really be enough to get on with here.

eBook selling is a whole different ballgame that I'm not addressing here.

Make sense?

[estaratshirai]

*nods* To be clear, the novel isn't a fanfic. It's all me. (I have written novel-length fanfics, yes, but I just put them on the internets for free, precisely because of that whole Imperial thing.)

I did run the journal for the FoI, and I am doing the formatting myself, along with a friend who knows the relevant programs. Other than my pretty pretty cover, I can keep my cost close to nil. Likewise, because I have a ready market to start from and no particular reason to care if it grows beyond that or not, I doubt I'll spend on marketing. Lulu provides an IBSN for free, so if I offer PoD, I only have to pay if I want Ingram and brick-and-mortar stores to carry it.

So my main concern here is the per-item printing cost, and what that does to unit price. Playing with Lulu's calculator I was able to massage it down from $20 to $15; I was wondering if anyone knew of a cheaper way out that still made for a decent book, or if this is really just the price range everyone doing indie publishing has to deal with.