At 07:02 PM 12/5/2003 +0100, Tony Chalkley wrote: >maybe it would not be a bad idea for the publishers >(seeing as two of them are on the list) to explain their market (and I don't >mean by this "justify their prices"). What a print run on the average >facsimile is, who buys it, etc.
Justifying the prices is part and parcel of any project. The target audience for any project varies. Many years ago, in a thread called How Much Does it Cost? right here in this group, someone complained about the price of a particular Minkoff facsimile. It was quite a lengthy thread and among others, I posted there a lengthy article about one of my facsimiles. I did not identify it by name at the time, but at a later time I made it clear that reference was made to the St. Petersburg Swan Manuscript. Here is the story in a nut shell. It cost me, out of my own private pocket, $16,000.- to produce this facsimile. I printed 500 copies. The traditional rule of thumb in the publishing industry is that the suggested price list should by 7 times the cost. The reason for that is that very few copies are sold directly to the end users. It happens sometimes, but the distribution scheme in place is comprised of the publisher>main distributor>subsidiary distributors>dealers. They all get a cut. The cost per copy is $32.- Applying the rule, the list price should be $224. As you can tell from my on line catalogue, the suggested list price for this book is $98.- In my estimation then, there was no way I could sell the book at all if the price was over the watershed number of a $100.- Now if I sell the book directly, I make a few bucks on this one copy. If I sell it through the distribution scheme, my average take is about 28% off the list price, i.e., $27.44 which is below what it cost me to produce. I lose money. On the average, most of my sales are through my distributors. very few of them have been directly. I ceased my mail order operations in 1996, and only in the last couple of month I finally established a shopping cart on my web site. So far, I sold one copy of this book through the web site. Thank you friend, you know who you are. You can easily calculate how many copies I need to sell in order to recuperate my investment, and that is _before_ I made in single dime on the deal. Unfortunately, since its publication in 1994, nine years ago I sold a grand total of 120 copies, most of it in the first couple of years. Since then, the rate of sales is about 3-4 copies every year. which is not enough to generate any royalties to the two editors, Tim Crawford and Pierre-Fran�ois Goy who did a tremendous amount of work in preparing it. It will be many years before I cover my costs on this book, and many more before I see any profit at all. That is why all this bravado about greed, monopoly, tyranny, is so hurtful and so unfair. And that is why there is no chance I will ever publish another facsimile. As soon as I did, the predators will be on it, if it is was sexy enough. The only think that protects me from them in the case of the Swan is that it is not a well known or well understood source. Matanya Ophee Editions Orphe'e, Inc., 1240 Clubview Blvd. N. Columbus, OH 43235-1226 Phone: 614-846-9517 Fax: 614-846-9794 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.orphee.com
