Through various channels in Twitter, I came across this blog entry by Stephen Pressfield.
The post is mostly about book rights acquisition, and as part of the discussion, he posted either a manufactured profit and loss statement, or one that had the identifying information removed. As a side-effect, this P&L statement reveals some incongruities between the hardcover and electronic versions of the book in question.
This is verbatim the comment I posted on this blog entry, a comment which so far has not garnered a response.
What really interests me about this P&L sheet is how askew the expenses on e-books are compared to both paper versions. Really? $187,930 in overhead for electronic books?
And the author earned $281,156 royalties on the hardcover while the publisher earned $161,116. BUT, for the electronic version the author earned $261,013 (Over $20K LESS than hardcover) but the publisher kept $487,700 in profits (almost twice what the author earned and over THREE times what they kept for the hardcover version).
Something very wrong here.
This seems to add credence to the argument that major publishers are squeezing authors. Now, as I said above, I don’t know exactly where the numbers came from, but this is consistent with other word-of-mouth reports of less-than-savory actions out of New York.
ADDENDUM: first a correction, the blog in question is Steven Pressfield, but the blog post was written by Shawn Coyne. He made some comments in response to what I wrote. First, clarification that what he posted was an acquisition P&L, a best-case for a bestseller. Second, he conceded “Your insight is spot on, though.” It will be interesting to see what he has to say about that over the coming weeks.
