The cost of a book - the authors fight back

Vertebrate MD Jon explains the current cost pressures in publishing, and has a plea for our customers.

A £20 book, bought from Amazon or any other online retailer (generally 50% of a publisher’s market) nets - that is money into our bank account - £7.20. Fortunately there is no VAT on a book.

To print that book it typically costs £2.25, although the US/Israeli war with Iran is now pushing that price up.

Across the lifespan of the book the production costs may work out at £0.75.

Marketing costs £1.00.

That leaves £3.20, of which the author and photographer share a good third.

Then we need to run the business. A publishing business drinks a lot of tea and eats a lot of cake.

If sales are a little better than expected, the £3.20s add up and good things happen - the creators get more and we can quickly move on to producing the next book. If sales are a little worse than expected, there aren’t many places we can go for help, so you lot end up having to read blogs like this.

In the twenty years I have been publishing books one thing never changes: Everyone wants a bit more. Inflation has taken the biggest toll on publishing earnings over the last twenty years. In the UK, the average price paid for a printed book rose by only 12% between 2002 and 2022. During that same period, inflation would have required that same book to cost 70% more just to keep pace. The surge in material and production costs since 2022 has further eroded that. The main barriers to book inflation have been intense retail competition and competition from digital formats.

Competition is very real, does a £20 book offer value for money? I understand that the last Vertebrate book you bought was most likely more than your monthly Netflix subscription. Our lives are busier now and books have to be good, in fact books have to be superb to warrant our attention. I have to, as a publisher, produce books like Run Forever, 31 Days, Extreme Rock and the Peak Bagging Series. Our books on the whole have to be life changing, and I don’t say that lightly - I know it is a very big ask of my authors, editors and designers.

On to my point:

Over the last twenty years that margin has shrunk, the £1 or £2 per book Vertebrate gets has been skimmed by retailers needing more discount, Amazon needing more advertising and promotion budget (only the naive think Amazon will sell in volume without promotion contributions), postage has doubled and our distributor now needs 12.5% rather than the 10% of a year ago.

There’s an old adage in publishing that you pay your printers first, your authors second and your staff last, in a small publishing company that can often mean the owner. This is fine as the owner can do something about it (I hope you’re enjoying the blog), and trust me it is a great job to have. However, sometimes the pain reaches a bit further up the ladder. Authors generally don’t make a living purely out of their writing, but what happens when they don’t feel they are even getting a fair deal? Well, they go on strike, that’s what they do.

The simple cost of producing a guidebook has gone up again - because some idiots are throwing bombs around in the Middle East. In particular the production costs to create the second volume of our Peak Bagging Munros have gone up so much the book is in serious jeopardy of not getting done.

What, specifically, is the problem? We send a route tester out to each itinerary; it is bad enough when that is across the Lake District but the cost of covering all of the North of Scotland was always going to be high, and when you couple that with rising fuel costs and tardy rollout of EV charging points, what we pay each tester is simply not enough anymore - they are on strike.

I think you know where this is going now don’t you?

There are a few things you can do:

If you buy a book directly from our website we get roughly double what we would receive for the same purchase from Amazon, and what’s more, the author gets double too.

Ideally that book would be the first volume of our Munro Bagging series; the revenue will help us and the author out, but more importantly it gives us the confidence to make some extra payments to the authors and testers to cover their expenses.

The second thing you can do is to get in touch if you know of an outdoorsy brand, or perhaps you work for such a brand, who might want to sponsor some aspect of the book.

Thirdly, if you have one of our books please review it and post on social media what you think of it. Even if you think the book is rubbish, tell us. We want to produce the best books we can; tell us what is wrong if we don’t come up to scratch.

There are a few things we can do too:

I’ve shuffled the order a bit, and for this book we will pay the author first and the printer second, it is a small thing but by getting a little extra credit from the printer we can spread the production costs a bit further.

Secondly we can give you a Munro Bagging code for 20% off if you buy directly from our website. The code is Munro282.