>>BUT 40 DOLLARS!!! I feel like I’ve just been slapped in the face! I may be looking at this the wrong way, but what is this? It just seems that just because it's the first it's being overrated, inflated propaganda even, I’m a young father of two with a thirst for information and a wife in nursing school, we live week to week and often times day to day, if I can't afford this how can the little boy or girl down the street afford this? It’s b:s: ---
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there are a couple different ways of pricing a book.
one way is to try to estimate what a young father of two living day to day could afford to pay, and then write/produce a book that will come in under that price cap. This is not an unreasonable exercise in market analysis.
another way, often chosen by an enthusiast who's writing to communicate about a subject he cares deeply about, is to write the book he feels needs to be written; illustrate it the way his standards dictate it should be illustrated; and then let the necessary production costs determine the selling price. This is also reasonable if the market can absorb the neceessary number of books at that price.
i know a little bit about this because i've been in journalism more than 40 years and for 15 owned my own publishing company, and I'm the author of two books on finches, books that were published by another company specializing in pet books. that company's motive was profit, so its calculations took into account not only the length of text, but the numbers and size and quality of illustrations, and an additional important factor--the size of the potential market.
I wouldn't know a rhodowhichamacallit if it bit me--perhaps it would. But I suspect there's a smaller universe of people eager to buy a book at any price on that subject, than there is interested in buying, say, your example of a book on corn snakes.
printing production and costs are directly related to quantity--to the size of the press run. By the time color separations are made for each photo, and each page is laid out and prepared for production, and the proper inks put in the proper presses and the press run has begun, and the startup (flawed) pages discarded, more costs may already have been incurred by the printer than he'll pay for the paper to print the next thousand copies. I've been in situations with my company where the first thousand copies of a publication cost the same as the next FIVE thousand copies would cost, if we continued the press run.
So it's a complex issue. Interested people have the option of encouraging their libraries to buy the book, of course. Or the author/publisher could have elected to put together a cheaper book, but maybe you wouldn't have wanted one with a handful of black and white photos. In between that extreme and a production values approximating a coffee table art book, a choice had to be made.
I don't now the circumstances of this particular book. Is the author the publisher, too? Does he make money off each copy sold? (and conversely, does he lose thousands of dollars if he ends up with hundreds of unsold copies?) Or is there an outside publishing firm? If so, does he get royalties, a payment for each book sold? Or does he get a flat fee? When TFH published my first bird book, I worked many hundreds of hours writing it. I took photos and collected photo contributions from others. After the book was published i ran across it in stores across the U.S., and in pet stores in Australia and the UK. I don't know how many copies sold worldwide, but it was later reissued with a new title and cover and slightly modified layout. My pay in its entirety was, I think, between $900 and $1200.
what if the author were paid the same hourly rate, for writing the book, that he/she makes at his/her day job: would you think that warrants increasing the price of the book, if that were necessary to cover that cost? How much is fair for the author to be paid?
It may be unfortunate for some people that a cheaper book wasn't produced. But depending on the size of the market, and the quality of the product, the price may not be out of line at all. Calling it bs is really, really jumping to conclusions.
imho
terry dunham
albino tricolors
