Re: 'In The Line Of Fire' (Merged)
TheRealDeal:
[quote]
Atfter barely a week, Amazon has already put it on sale, almost 50% off
List Price:$28.00 Price:$16.80
Despite spending so much govt money to promote the book, even promoting it in the White House, no one wants the dictators book of lies
[/quote]
Sale price of all books have to recover two costs for publisher. One is publishing cost and other is overhead. Overhead includes promotion costs, advertisements costs, initial royalty cost (if there is any – ‘In the line of fire’ case, I believe it was a million dollars - I am not sure) and management costs. Most publishers try to recover their promotion, advertisement and other initial royalty costs by spreading it over most conservative expected sale figure of the book (that is critical sale figure).
Once that critical sale figure for a particular book is achieved where publisher has recovered their initial costs (promotions, advertisements and initial royalty), that particular book becomes very cheap for publisher, as after that, publisher share of sale price is publishing cost (very little), management cost (very little), nominal royalty to the writer (very little), regular advertisement if needed (very little) and profit (after critical sale volume, most of the publisher share in retail price is profit).
Thus, after achievement of that critical sale figure, publishers start cutting down the price of the book. Normally, that takes time and by that time, book becomes a spent force in popularity anyhow. It seems that ‘In the line of fire’ has achieved that critical sale figure very quickly and publisher has thus reduced the price, actually slashed it to half (even when book is still ‘hot cake’ and in huge demand, something rarely happens). This shows the success of the book is more than expected.
Same reduction in price happens if a book becomes failure and publisher is left with numbers of unsold copies. Even then, slashing of the price comes after months (that is certainly not the case with ‘In the line of fire’).
Thus, publisher slashing the price of the book while book is still hot cake, shows that book has already passed that conservative critical sale figure, publisher was thinking. I believe that if publisher had thought that book would be such a success and would sell in such numbers, we would have seen much lower initial starting retail price.
[Note: Same was true with ‘J K Rowling’ book ‘Harry potters’. Hard copy in UK came at around 8 to 10 pounds (a very low price to start because, publisher was expecting huge sale) and after that book achieved that critical sale volume, that took around 2 to 3 months, J K Rolling ‘Harry potters’ started selling at around 4 to 5 pounds, almost half the initial price.
If publisher had initial price for ‘In the line of fire’ at around 10 to 12 pounds (around 20 dollars) then it would have increased that critical volume sale needed, and thus book sale price would have stayed at initial release price (around 20 dollars) for 3 to 4 months (depending on sale) before coming down to around half that price].
[Note: This principal of critical sale volume is not only true regarding books but it is true regarding anything newly produced and marketed. That is why when an item (a new product, a new model, something that was not there in the market before, be electronics or whatever) when comes in the market, initial retail price is high, but after sometime, prices go down drastically].