The Notebook

A fun thing has happened in the publishing world today. US booksellers are now requesting a 40% discount on purchased books.

This is how it works:

A publisher intends to sell a book for $15.

A single book costs $10 to produce. This is the physical, material cost, hot off the press.
In large-scale operations, the cost of production can get as low as $0.01, but this happens when you're printing thousands of copies at a time. It's all copy/paste, streamlined, very efficient.
Print on Demand services, such as IngramSpark, don't do this. Every book costs $10, whether you order 1 or 1,000.

So a bookseller comes along and says, "I can't pay retail price for this book. Give me a discount on the wholesale."

For large runs where printers can print 1,000 copies for pennies each, it's nothing for them to give such discounts. For US retailers, the minimum allowable discount was 30%, but the ideal has been 55%. So the printer can print a book for $0.01, sell it to a retailer for $4.50, who then sells it to the end customer for $15.

For PoD services, they're not going to lose money. If a book costs $10 to produce, they're not going to sell it to a retailer for less than that $10. But a retailer isn't going to buy the book for $11 and then sell it for $15. The profit margin is too small.

It's not fun. It's not fair. To anyone. So let me tell you what's going on with my end of things.
 

If you are buying through Amazon, B&N, or anywhere else, some book prices are going up. I've been skimming as much as possible, but with the adjustment, some thresholds got crossed, where profit turned into loss. If it wasn't a loss, I didn't change the price, but let me fair warn you, this will not last forever. It just won't. As an example, after the adjustment, I am literally making one single penny profit for every hardcover copy of Wolf Pack sold through retailers. Most of the rest are under a dollar as well. I hate raising prices, but it's really coming down to the wire.

The good news (for now) is that prices will remain the same if you buy through my website. Cost of production is not going up (at the moment) so I can still get the best rates. Similarly, digital prices are not going up, so you are welcome to buy an ebook at the best price possible.

Note that as of right now, this only affects US retailers.

Let's go Brandon.