What does it cost to produce a book?
Why small presses in the UK are struggling - and what can be done about it.
These are hard times for publishers.
Don’t let me unduly alarm you. Almost as soon as Gutenberg started producing his Bibles in 1454, publishing enterprises started discovering that market forces were against them. In fact, one of the earliest bankrupts was Johannes Gutenberg himself, who called in the receivers in 1456, just two years after he began printing.
Since then, there has probably never been an era in which publishers haven’t had something to complain and worry about. But there has also never been a time when publishers haven’t muddled through. Nor has the demand for printed volumes significantly waned. In the long term, I’m sure, publishing will survive.
In the short term, however, there are real problems. So let me alarm you a little. Here in the UK, the publishing industry has been hit especially hard by the combined effects of Brexit, the war in Ukraine and the incompetence of the previous Tory government, and publishers using printers in the Far East have been hit by global increases in transportation costs. Like everyone, we’ve had to deal with increased inflation and decreased consumer confidence. We’ve also had extra pressures of our own. The war in Ukraine, for instance, had a huge impact on European paper-supply chains – because until that point a large percentage of wood pulp came from Russian and Ukrainian forests.
For our small company, Galley Beggar Press, the cost of producing a book has more than doubled since 2015. Back then, in response to a social media post which asked what on earth publishers were doing with all the money, we published a breakdown of the production costs of a ‘typical’ book, and the sort of profit margins that this typical book, and print run, might see. The figures in 2015 were tough enough, but we thought it was time to run those calculations again.
Before we get into the numbers, a few caveats. These are ballpark figures and also personal – based on general knowledge of the trade and the bills, estimates and cash-flow sums that we deal with every week. Costs vary from print-run to print-run and publisher to publisher – but this survey should still give you a good idea of what publishers have been up against. And since we small presses are so often the canaries in the coal mine, they should also give an indication of some of the challenges to come for bigger publishers too.
These costings are based on a print-run of 3,000 copies. As around 40% of the costing is the initial set up, unit costs go down the more copies you print. In 2014, for instance, after our second title, A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing, won the Women’s Prize, the unit cost was 47p for a 27,000 print-run; in 2023, an 11,000 print-run of our Booker Prize-longlisted title After Sappho was £1.73 per unit.
Ordering a very high print-run to bring down the unit price, however, is a limited option for smaller publishers and the literary imprints of even the bigger publishers. Meanwhile, even a print-run of 3,000 represents a significant risk for many small publishers – and plenty of books will have smaller runs and higher unit costs as a result. It is also worth pointing out that these costs are for non-illustrated books, and as soon as you factor in their requirements (most notably, heavier paper) the unit costs go up even further.
Distribution and discounts
When you sell into a bookshop, the bookseller (and wholesalers such as Gardners) will require a discount. This is the amount off the cover price that the retailer pays. Generally, the price for which the bookseller buys the book from the publisher is less than (roughly half) what the consumer ultimately pays at the till.
For the ‘big booksellers’ and chains, the retailer discount will vary according to the publisher and the number of copies that they buy in. The big shops in the UK, Waterstones, Foyles and Blackwell’s, in our experience, do take into account the size of a publisher and its capacity for discounting. For orders of under 400 units, the discount will be roughly 50–55%. For much larger orders (which would require a larger print-run, and are thus not directly relevant to the above figures), the discount might be anything from 60–68%.
Independent booksellers and shops generally either buy in from Gardners or ask for a lower discount of 45%.
This is all on a sale-or-return basis, which means that if a bookseller doesn’t sell a book, they can return it. This is a hangover from paper shortages in the Second World War. It’s something booksellers still need (they are also up against huge challenges) but we’re the only industry I’m aware of that has this system.
Summing up
What does this all add up to? Here’s one example:
If a bigger bookseller buys in 600 of your titles (£8.99 RRP in 2015, £10.99 in 2023), using a 50% discount, in 2015 the publisher will be paid £2,697; in 2023, £3,297. That is… an increase! (Thanks, bookshops!) Or it would be an increase if you excluded all the other factors. Let’s break it down.
The author – who, after all, wrote the brilliant book – needs a royalty. At Galley Beggar, this is generally priced on the basis of net receipts (ie the amount we receive from the bookseller), not RRP, and on a rising scale (an ‘escalator’). It might look like this: 10% of net receipts up to 3,000 copies; 12.5% after that (up to 5,000 copies); and 15% after that. (This royalty is higher than the industry standard and we’d love for it to be higher still. We are writers ourselves, as well as publishers…)
So, after the royalty payment, you have: £4.04 per unit (2015) and £4.94 per unit (2023). There’s the 25% distribution1 fee as well, which leaves: £2.92 per unit (2015) and £3.57 per unit (2023).
Oh wait! We haven’t included returns (unsold copies sent back to us by retailers). Let’s be optimistic, and say a 7.5% return rate – and we’ll have: £2.23 per unit (2015) and £3.04 (2023).
OK! So finally, let’s take off the actual cost of producing the book itself: £1.30–£1.80 in 2015 and £2.83–£3.50 in 2023.
That leaves us with, in 2015: £0.43–0.93; and in 2023: £–0.46–£0.21.
Profit margins haven’t just halved – they’ve plummeted.
These pressures are being felt across the industry, but they tend to hit small presses first. To go back to the impact of the Ukraine war, for instance, most larger publishers will have had reserves of paper that will have helped tide them over the initial rises in print costs in 2022. We’ve heard that these reserves are now coming to an end, so they’re likely to start feeling more of that pain now. But in the meantime, small presses have been up against it for over two years, during which time we’ve lost Red Dog Press, Bearded Badger Press, Henningham Family Press, Wrecking Ball Press, Fledgling Press, Sandstone Press and Handheld Press, to name just a few.
When Handheld Press announced they were winding down, founder Kate Macdonald spelled out the issues in The Bookseller: ‘the refusal of paper prices to go back to where they were before Brexit, and the Ukraine war and the rising costs of the overheads… The cost-of-living crisis, which shrinks the amount of cash available for spontaneous book purchases on the high street and by our committed online customers. Being unable to sell our books into the EU directly any longer, without doing unfeasible amounts of customs paperwork for each sale.’
What next?
This tallies closely with our own experience at Galley Beggar Press – and with the worries that several other publishers have privately expressed to me. We’re all facing similar pressures. We all know it’s hard. The question that remains is: what can be done?
There isn’t an easy answer, given the wider forces that are affecting the industry and the financial constraints on our new government.
My dream would be to see the return of something like the old Net Book Agreement, allowing publishers to set prices and have more certainty about their returns and discounts. More possible perhaps would be an industry-wide recognition that book prices need to rise. Also, more recognition that books are beneficial to society and do more than bring in financial returns. It would help everyone, for instance, if there were business rate and tax reliefs for bricks-and-mortar booksellers. It would also greatly help if the Arts Council were able to give more direct support for book production and literary excellence than they are able to now.
More immediately, the best solution is probably the one that has ensured publishing has survived this long: lots of people buying lots of books. Buy direct from publishers, buy from Waterstones, buy from your local independent. You are buying a stake in the survival of our world of letters.
Fondly,
Sam
A version of this article first appeared in The Author, the quarterly magazine of the Society of Authors. It was co-written by Eloise Millar, my co-director at Galley Beggar Press - and my much better half. My thanks to Elly - and to the Society of Authors for commissioning this piece in the first place and for so generously allowing me to share it here.
One more thing…
A very directly helpful thing you could do for Galley Beggar - and the wider UK bookselling world - would be to buy this lovely special edition of our last book Waterblack we did in association with Waterstones. Thank you!!!
A distributor is someone that most mid-sized and smaller publishers partner with, and pay to sell books into bookshops. (The ‘Big 5’ publishers largely have their own.)
Distributors offer a variety of services at different price points, but for distribution that includes: repping (a team of also representatives who travel to bookshops all over the country, presenting your books); negotiating deals; and fulfilling bookshop orders, including warehousing the books themselves. Distribution costs have also risen steeply but will generally come to around 25% of monthly sales.
Excellent article Sam. Just yesterday someone at work, who had ‘found out’ that I’d had 4 books published asked me what I was doing there. I explained that there wasn’t much money in publishing. They said not to worry, one day I might make it. My answer, these days, is that I have made it. I’ve been published. Making money and being published are not the same thing.
I’ve repeated this statistic a number of times now. When my first book, The Lodger, came out in 2002 it was £10. When my latest book, Saltburn, came out in 2025 it was £10. If we take into account inflation the cost of a book should be 2.5 million and I could retire to my Parisian garret.
What can we do? Again, at work, I hear people say they won’t pay more than 99p for a book - on kindle. I don’t buy books from Amazon. You don’t have to be ideological about it. It’s a simple fact - Amazon have quite enough money, so spread it around. Buy books, as you say, from indie shops, from the publishers. Support your community. Lend books. Borrow books. Go to the library.
Thanks for the mention of Bearded Badger. They published the book before my last one. They are back. Paul, the Bearded Badger, has been doing pop ups over the summer, is running a couple of book clubs and a new minty fresh edition of Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel is on the way. And if we’re talking print runs - there’ll be 50 copies, which will be available online or from one of the pop ups. For me, that’s success and I won’t be beaten down and told otherwise 😂.
Many thanks for this - the economics of publishing are peculiar even by the standards of other industries, so it's always super-useful to have them laid out so clearly.