"A publisher recently contacted me to explore the possibility of me writing a book for them. The terms, which I believe are fairly standard, are you make about $1 for every book sold, or about 5% of the total revenue. A technical author can expect to make about $10'000 if their book sells well. The publishing house makes about $200'000 on this, with the rest going to distribution and book stores."

I'm not directly in the publishing industry, but I've been a technical reviewer on several books and have a fair number of friends who are authors/editors - mostly in the non-fiction market.

From what I've experienced those publisher profit numbers don't make sense.

Let's assume 5% author royalties (which, in my experience, is the low end 5-15% is the normal range, upper end for track record very successful folk — more for some publishers in some contexts), so that $10k = $200,000 total sales for the book.

Typically the publisher will take around 45-55% of that $200k (including what they pass onto the author). The rest will go to distributers & retailers. Let's take the upper end of that.

So 55% of $200l = $110000 to the publisher.

- the author royalties = $100k
- 10% printing costs = $90k
- 15%ish for pre-production = $75k

So absolute best case it's more like $10k vs $75k. Then there's marketing, the fact that most authors don't earn out their advance, the shenanigans over book discount, etc. So the profit to publishers coming out of that is often significantly lower.

See http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-cost... and http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/03/book-cost-analysis-cost-... for some examples of real world publisher cost breakdowns.

(The slice taken by marketing in the first example above seems high from what others have told me. Its also a somewhat simplistic breakdown since it ignores some of the long-term costs from publishers that aren't related to "books" directly. e.g. the advances to authors who never get published, etc. - so the potential publisher profits aren't quite as large as they appear here - there's other overhead outside the printing/distributing/selling books bit)

It's also something Charlie Stross has posted about a fair bit see this collection of posts http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...

"Now compare to people like Brennan Dunn who have made $100'000 or more from their books, by publishing online and capturing 90%+ of revenue. You don't need a publisher for distribution. You don't need a publisher for typesetting. If you need an editor or proof reader you can hire one for maybe $10K."

That's the best-case success case. Which is nice. But not common. Almost everybody I know who has gone the self-publishing route has ended up with the high-hundreds and single-digit-thousands.

They'd have got more from a publisher advance. They'd have also learned a lot more about how to write a good book from the publishers — since they're in the business of helping their authors be profitable.

Is a traditional publisher the right route for everybody. No. But neither are they the rapacious idiots who are exploiting authors that some folk portray them as. Almost everybody I know who went the traditional publisher route felt they got value out of it. Many of them are more than technically literate enough to go the self publishing route if they had wanted to (and some of them have for other kinds of product/market).