Price of Large Landscape books
So I’ve gone through the whole process of designing and illustrating my own book, and laid it out in InDesign using Blurb’s Large Landscape (12×10 in) template. Now I go to check pricing, and it’s friggin $48.95 to print a single book in this format?!?! I’m hoping to shop my book around and get interest, but there’s no way that I could even charge close to that amount at retail. For the type of book I’ve created, I don’t think I could sell it for more than $20-30, so how the heck can I hope to make any profit when the cost of printing a single copy is more than what I can sell the book for??? Am I missing something here? Are large landscape books not actually that expensive to print? I mean, jesus christ, almost $50 for a single printing is RIDICULOUS.
NOT a happy camper.
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You, sir, don’t seem to understand economics. As much as you baulk at that price it is actually very reasonable. Yes. For a company to produce a high quality, large book (printing, binding, all the infrastructure required etc), and still make a profit – and Blurb does have every right to make a profit as it is a business, not a charity – then $50 is far from ‘ridiculous’.
You are, I suspect, doing what many people do. That is comparing things that are totally different as if they were the same. Even in the days of digital printing there is a massive economy of scale; making thousands of copies of a book enables the unit price to come down hugely. Also do not, ever, compare the prices of books you will see at real life bookstores or even the prices on Amazon or eBay from different sellers. Many of the books you will see will have been purchased by them as ‘overstock’ (unsold stock, bankrupt stock, over-ordered stock, returns, slight misprints etc) for a fraction of their original production cost – thus the resellers can sell them at what actually are ‘ridiculous’ prices, in terms of being very low, and still make a profit.
Please, for the sake of sanity, can people please start thinking about things before spouting off rubbish about prices.
ps. You are very, very, very unlikely to make a profit on Blurb, or any print-on-demand service for that matter, because most of the public hold your own attitude to prices. If people stopped and considered what they were paying for instead of doing silly comparisons in their head then they wouldn’t have a problem with paying $50 and people like you could make a fair profit. It would be called ‘fairness and sustainability’ – something that is sadly lacking in today’s ‘give me everything for nothing’ culture.
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I have often wondered this as well. You cannot ever hope to sell a Blurb book for the price you pay to have it made. It is a disappointment. i would have ordered at least 20 of my book and more as I sold them. And the same with future books I am making. But at $80 each that is just not going to happen.
So they made $80 from me and not the profits they would have made from many books priced at $25. I say $25 so I could sell it for $29 which is probably as much as I could ask and reasonably expect to sell them.
I am sure this holds true for many book creators. I will never understand it.
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Prehaps you should research how much it did cost before the ’invention ’ of the internet, getting one or a few dozen books printed was out of the reach of almost everyone. I have published a large landscape book 13" by11" , and consider a bargin, in the region of $90 have sold only two copies. and oneof those was the one I bought, but very very happy to have given away over 700 pdf versions for free. Divingbrit Living in the real world
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