The price we pay

Socially, being a geek and a gamer is far less of a stigma than it was even just 20 years ago. There's still some bias against us in some fields, and from some quarters, but, compared to yesteryear, it's minimal.

However, again, I'm digressing on a tangent.

This post is about prices in hard currency.

A lot of people bemoan the rising cost of miniatures, particularly singling out certain big companies. These arguments tend to ignore the fact that the price of magazines, comic books, books, technology, food, and everything else has also increased in price by a similar amount. In actual fact, compared to 25 years ago, in many ways, miniatures are a lot cheaper in real terms.

20 years ago I was a student. I had £45 a week for food, stationery, printing, clothes, drinks, transport, books, mobile phone, miniatures, and all other incidentals. Nowadays, £45 would be a struggle to get by on, with the essentials needed covered, and no spare money for music, a mobile, travel, books, periodicals or miniatures.

Rather than rant and rail about the price of miniatures, i thought I'd, instead, take a look at the break down of the price of a book. The nearest one to hand has a nice round RRP of £20. Of that £20, though, how much do the different people involved get?

The author, without whom the book wouldn't exist, will, if they have a good contract see £2 per copy, 10% of the cover price. Only the biggest names in writing, though, have contracts that good. Most established authors will see only 5%, or £1. Many books are written under an advance: the publisher pays the author a sum in advance, and thus the author will only receive royalties, or payment from actual sales, once the advance is earned back, sometimes with interest.

The printing, binding and logistics of getting a codex to distribution centres can vary greatly - different paper finishes, colour plates, etc., all affect the cost. For convenience, we'll assume that the book is a 300-ish page casebound (what hardbacks are called in the industry), with colour limited to the cover and dust jacket. Assuming a print run of a couple of 100,000, we're probably looking at about £1 per copy.

So, £1.50-£2 thus far for a £20 book. This seems like a good cash-cow.

What we haven't accounted for is the additional labour and other overheads. A book requires an editor, typesetters, proof readers, and to pay a commission for the typeface. Then there's the cover art, layout design, and the purchase of an ISBN and barcode. These can easily take the cost to over £5 higher.

Still, that would give a publisher a profit of £12 per copy.

That, however, would rely on the publisher having sold all copies in advance to people who are on-hand to collect their copy the moment it arrives from the printer. No book has achieved that and been a success. Even if the book is sold to the public direct from the publisher, there's the cost of warehousing, distribution, packing, security, insurance, etc.

Most books will be sold through bookshops. Book shops have a huge item count in general, so a book can sit for days or even weeks without a single copy selling. While it's not selling, the bookshop has to pay rent, security, insurance, staff, utilities, etc., on top of any costs for getting the stock from a warehouse to the shop, and so on. As a result, few bookshops will pay more than 50% of the cover price for a codex.

So, a £20 price tag gives maybe £1 to the author, maybe £1 to the printer, maybe £5 to all the additional staff and subcontractors, £3 to the publisher and £10 to the retailer.

Of course, most retailers will run promotions, selling books for significantly under cover price, and have huge overheads like wages, so that £10 doesn't actually amount to much.

The £3 that the publisher makes per copy, though? That's still a sweet deal, isn't it? Except that it isn't. That £3 will often be swallowed up in advances for future titles. Then there's the possibility that a title won't sell as well as expected. The publisher, generally, can't demand that the author repay the advance, and after a while bookshops will start sending remaining stock back, demanding a refund if they didn't have a sale-or-return deal. Should a book turn a profit, that £3 will often get swallowed up preparing the next print run, a revised edition, or an airport or paperback edition.

We are taught to look at prices on the basis of what we get for the money. What we should be looking at is why prices are what they are. Buying a book at £20 isn't giving the author £20, it's giving a lot of people 5, 10, 20p.

Buying a model kit at £50 isn't giving the manufacturer £50, it's paying a fragment of the wages of the staff, the expenses of rent, tax and utilities for your local model shop, distribution costs, wages and so on for potentially hundreds of people.