I had lunch with fellow San Diego author Brian Bischof today and, among other things, we talked about self-publishing a book. Brian had a colleague who was familiar with the process and had explained it to Brian in some detail, which Brian then imparted onto me. The process sounds interesting. Essentially, you start by contacting a printing company. I take that back - you start by writing the damned book! Then, after doing so, and after typesetting it (using software tools, I imagine), you then contact a printing company. While it sounds like there are companies that will print books at quantities of one at a time, the cost to do so is too prohibitive to expect any kind of profit. Rather, you need to buy in larger increments, like 1,000 copies at a time. Checking out this grid, it looks like a 400 page book would run $5.72 per printed copy for an order size of 1,000 books.
Once you buy these books, and drop $250 for an ISBN, you can send off five copies of your book to Amazon.com. Upon receiving them, Amazon.com will handle the ordering and delivery, prompting you to send more copies when (or if) your initial 5 copies sell out. For this service Amazon takes 48% off the top of the sales price (similar to what a brick-n-mortar bookstore takes, as discussed in my earlier piece, The Economics of Writing a Computer Trade Book). So, if you can sell the book for, say, $29.95, Amazon takes $15 and you get $15 yourself, for about a $8-$9 profit, after subtracting your costs for shipping the books to Amazon.com. Given these estimates, the break-even point of your initial $5,720 is ~715 copies.
Of course, selling 715 copies probably isn't that easy to do, unless you have an outlet to market your books for free, or affordably. A Web site would help, but checking out the Amazon.com Associates report, I noticed that via my Associates ID I've only sold a tad over 400 copies of my first book, Teach Yourself ASP 3.0 in 21 Days, from the Associates program, which is less than 1% of the total number of copies sold.
Has anyone tried self-publishing? I'm tempted to try it at some point in my life, as I'd like to eventually write a non-technical book (I'll save that discussion for a future blog entry). However, those non-technical books don't sell for nearly as much as technical books (when's the last time you dropped $40+ for a novel?), which would up the number of copies needing to be sold to reach the break-even point. Regardless, if nothing else it would be kind of cool to have 1,000 copies of one book in one house at one point in time.