Clock is ticking

Beautifully made book, as well as the movie, but $133, I'll pass. He should have made it available on Amazon and sold it for $50. Also, he needs to work on something new, stop milking 3rd&7th "Alex"! hahahahahha Just kidding, I'm jealous really.

Well, it's easy to say "he should have just put it on Amazon" but the reality is that this does not change the economics behind the scenes. I've spoken to Alex a fair bit about this and I've been involved in shipping thousands of books worldwide, so let me set the record straight on self-publishing as the public in general grossly misunderstands what's involved.

First you have to cover the cost of printing. For a book the calibre and quality of the one Alex is doing and assuming a run of about 3000 books your cost just to get it printed is going to be $15-20 per book. On top of that add all of time required to write, layout, produce and edit and you can probably conservatively estimate about 3-4 months of solid work (and that's not considering the fact Alex already spend a year creating this project), so you can probably add another $15-20 a book just in production time. If you have to hire editors and compositors you can add more. So out of the gate your costs are going to be $30-50 per book and you've not made any money yet. To take the orders you will lose approx. 3-4% in credit card fees on the MSRP of the book price.

Then we get to the most problematic factor of all - shipping. Because no self publisher has the volume behind them to command the Amazon rates from shippers, it costs a substantial amount of money to ship books worldwide, especially if you want tracking and insurance. In many cases the self-published author will subsidize part of the shipping from their profits to try to bring this price down a bit.

Putting a book on Amazon for distribution does not help the author at all, only the purchaser. Depending on the model you select you can either pay them to warehouse and ship your books at a significant cost or you can still do all of the fulfilment yourself and only use Amazon to take the orders. However, you do not have any control over the shipping costs. Amazon sets those rates based on their own rates. So even if it costs you $50 to ship, Amazon will only charge $20 for example and you're on the hook for the difference. Add to that a commission they take for using their site and in the end you lose A LOT of money using Amazon to ship a book.

Any fulfilment you do yourself also adds to the cost of the book. It's sounds pretty easy to just chuck the book into a box and slap a shipping label on it, but trust me it's A LOT more work than that to ensure the book arrives in good condition. You can expect to pay someone a salary to do this or a per book fee around $10-15 per book.

While Alex is doing these pre-sales to get a better idea of how many books to actually get printed and to offset his initial cash outlay (the same we did with the CGschool Books), he is still likely to order more stock to accommodate future orders and also bring down the per unit printing costs. So in most cases, even with the pre-sales an author is not likely to start making any profits until those extra books sell. I know with CGschool our production costs were $60,000-100,000 per book and it took about 6 months after the pre-orders shipped before you'd start to be profitable.

So, while I'm sure Alex will be profitable in this venture, he's likely outlaying A LOT of his own cash upfront and it's going to be a while before he sees a profit. Self-publishing is not easy and there are a lot of other things I've not mentioned here that also play a large factor in costs and profitability.

Anyway, hopefully a bit of the breakdown above explains why books like the ones we used to publish and the one Alex is doing are so expensive and not the same as the $39.99 + $10 shipping you see on Amazon. Self publishers don't sell millions of books a year. We stopped publishing with the CGschool because any profits we made were funnelled back into the next book and we were never ahead. The only way to make money in self-publishing is to have a run away best seller (does not happen in our field) or to only publish one book (or in our case stop publishing).

The risk Alex has taken doing this book are pretty significant, so don't underestimate that.

Oh and for anyone that thinks working with a traditional publisher might be a better route. It's not. In many cases an author might spend a year writing a book and over the course of two years only make $10-20K. The publisher takes almost everything. You can see why.

Books are a funny thing. Technically a good book like this could save you thousands of dollars in learning/time/training so really any knowledge book should cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars, but there is an established mindset that books cost between $30-60 and that is all most people are willing to pay.