Adventures in Mamboland
"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen
Yeah. That sounds about right.
Yeah. That sounds about right.
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Print On Demand
Date: 2003-07-27 06:21 am (UTC)(Hm. Looks like it's scheduled to emerge from beta tomorrow, according to the website.)
The problem? Cost. CafePress publishing charges a flat fee of seven bucks for a perfect binding (the type you see on normal books, as opposed to the self-explanatory saddle-stitch or wire-O), plus three cents a page, works out to the stereotypical two-hundred-page novel being thirteen bucks. That's with no profit on your end.
(Coincidentally, two hundred pages is the point at which a saddle-stitch book costs the same as a perfect-bound. Anything more and perfect is cheaper.)
Now, your average trade paperback retails for about $14, and that cost already includes things like marketing and shipping. Figure twenty bucks for our two-hundred-page novel, easy. And who wants to pay that much when they can get two trades from Amazon for that price?
CafePress sez size is irrelevant, so you could maybe make some money with RPG books like this, which typically retail for twenty bucks. Or computer books, or anything where people are trained to expect to pay more. But probably not in the mainstream market, not yet.
(Other problems include things like layout and editing being Tougher Than You Think (there's a reason publishers pay people to do them) and marketing in general.)