Costs

[IanBruntlett]

Hi All,

Various messages have been posted by people saying stuff like "xyz is expensive to produce so we don't do much of it".

I would like to know about costs/payments.

1. How much is 1000 words of text worth? Presumably there will be differing rates between, say a MGT product and Signs & Portents.

2. How much is a black and white picture worth?

3. How much is a colour picture worth?

4. What is a typical salary for someone working in the RPG field?

TIA,


Ian

 

[barnest2]

1. How much is 1000 words of text worth?

Ooh, ooh, I know this one. For S&P, I've been told it's about 2 cents per word, so 1000 words is $20, or about £10

 

[rust]

The costs tend to vary widely, but to give an example from the upper end
of the publishing industry, these are the prices a first class company de-
mands for editing and proofreading of short manuscripts:

Word count less than 1,500: 150.00 Euro
From 1,501 to 6,000: 175.00 Euro
From 6,001 to 12,000: 245.00 Euro

An average text page of a Traveller supplement probably has about 1,000
words.

An example for printing, from the lower end of the publishing industry (in
fact, a well known but less reliable company):

Standard paper, paperback, black and white only, US letter size, perfect
bound, 200 pages = 500 copies cost 3,675 USD.

The payment of authors and artists ... well, in the end whatever the pub-
lisher is willing to pay and the author or artist willing to accept, this is wi-
de open and ranges from a few free copies to considerable sums of mo-
ney.

An important factor of publishing is the share of the final price that is de-
manded by the distributor. Over here this is on average between 40 %
and 60 %, so of each 100,- Euro of books sold only about 50,- Euro actu-
ally go to the publisher.

Amazon officially demands only 17.25 % plus ca. 1,- Euro for postage for
each book, but there are (unconfirmed) rumours that the actual share is
a bit higher.

 

[Kromodor]

Another way is to Self-publish.

But you need pretty savvy marketing channel/skills because you will offer you book alone.

Means you have to contact each distribution network yourself and usually they don't like self-publishers at all.

In short - bigger marge for you, a lot more work for you, which usually relates to more costs for you.

Yet some authors do it and do it successfully.