Until it's actually printed in late August, my new book POLYFACE DESIGNS with engineer and former apprentice Chris Slattery will continue to be teased on these Friday blogs.

             Today features the cover and some diagrams of the Millennium Feathernet, our pastured egg production model.  Both artistic and practical, these drawings offer step-by-step instructions for assembly.  Companion text offers all sorts of construction tips.

             Many of you are now asking about price.  Today, I'm going to roll back the curtain on book financials and I'm going to give you the price. But first the context.  In the book trade, all wholesale prices are 50 percent of the cover price.  Distribution runs 30 percent of that.  So follow the math:  a book that sells for $20 wholesales for $10.  Distribution takes $3.33 of that, leaving $6.66 for the publisher.

             Actual printing and getting it to a warehouse will run $2.66, which leaves $4 profit.  That is why publishers pay authors only 7 percent of the cover price:  in this case, that would take another $1.40 to the author, which leaves $2.60 for the publisher.  The point is that the cover price, while often never exercised, establishes the wholesale amount; it is this price that drives everything.  The deep discount rewards the final seller--bookstore, Amazon, magazine bookshelf section for its costs in marketing, display, packaging, and shipping.

             Now let's dig into printing costs.  They vary a lot from type of book to type of book and printing volume.  The more you print, the cheaper because the press set-up cost (making the plates) is the same whether you print 2,000 or 100,000.  This is why the on-demand printing offered by outfits like Amazon is incredibly expensive, often double or triple what regular volume offset printing costs.

             Another huge printing difference is whether the book uses 4 color or just black and white.  And the binding.  Because POLYFACE DESIGNS is 568 pages and 11 X 8.5 and we expect it to be taken out to shops with wear and tear, we're doing a Smythe binding, which is much stronger than typical perfect bound.  The result of the colors, size, and heavy binding on POLYFACE DESIGNS means our printing cost will run nearly $12 per book, even if we do a press run of 5,000.

             As a result, we're going to put a cover price on it of $90 (don't worry, nobody will pay $90 for this book) with wholesale at $45, less distribution of $11, leaves $34, less printing of $12 leaves $22 to be split between Chris and I for our year's labor and explanation of a life's work.  Just one of these drawings is worth the cover price, but we're going to offer it at $75 for presale.  Depending on how that goes, we may not offer it on Amazon until after Christmas--it'll be available through the Polyface Gift Shop until we release it to Amazon.  We'll have $60,000 out on capitalizing the printing. Chris has $20,000 in special software to do these diagrams. Our goal is to sell 1,000 by Christmas to get our initial investment back.  That's the transparent look behind the curtain of publishing.

             Around Aug. 1 we'll begin accepting orders and payment with shipping to follow either before the end of August or right at the first of September.  Whew!

You now know more than most about the world of books.  Thanks for hanging in there.  And thank you for your interest.