Thursday, January 13, 2011

BookFactory

I will confess that I think AuthorsDen is a bit of an exercise in futility, but some people seem to like it.  I recieved an email today announcing the launch of there self-publishing endeavour "BookFactory".

"2011 is an exciting time for the Authors of AuthorsDen as we are launching our BookFactory self-publishing application, developed with the Author’s best interest in mind."

I would have thought that any author worthy of an initial capital letter would have more than one interest, but never mind.

"The BookFactory places the profit rightfully where it belongs, in the pockets of the authors. You earn all $$ after printing costs.  If your book costs $4 to print and your retail price is $15 – you earn $11. It’s really as simple as that."

If one assumes that 'printing costs' includes the printers overheads and presumably a healthy profit margin?  Oh, and a print cost of $4 would get you a perfect bound book with a color cover and exactly 43 pages.

In order to prove what a good deal this is BookFactory provide a Bookstore Profit Comparison chart including exactly one other servce: Lulu.  They decided (for some reason) not to show a comparison with Createspace....

2 comments:

Cheryl Anne Gardner said...

Oh good lord. Sounds like someone bought some printing equipment, and it's not even up to current POD standards because if 6x9 is the best you can offer for a trim size, then it's time to adjust your business model. Even Lulu sort of figured that one out.

I got rid of my author's den account a long time ago. I met a lot of nice authors, but it didn't get me any new readers.

DED said...

I'm not trying to defend Lulu here, but the Author's Den calculator is wrong. I put in the specs for my book (also a 6x9) and the Amazon distribution output figure for author's profit was negative for both Lulu and Author's Den. For Lulu, it should've been $1.

So they're saying I need to charge even more for the book to just break even with them. Yeah, that makes sooo much sense.