It's November! Yay!

Yes! It's NaNoWriMo!

I don't know why I get ridiculously excited about it when I'm not going to be participating (much). I love NaNoWriMo but this year there's too much work and a new boyfriend I'd rather not ignore for the sake of bad prose. Or maybe we could co-write a really bad, sappy romance novel... hmmm...

This has been reading week and it has not been relaxing in spite of not having classes. We had a value engineering exercise assigned. Value engineering is about as exciting as it sounds. Basically, it's all about calculating what happens to costs when you have longer or shorter print runs and when you pick certain formats and types of papers.

It's all very boring spreadsheets and Excel work.

However, it is interesting to see how the unit price of each book goes down when the number of books go up. Basically, the more books you print out, the lower the price of each individual book. And this is because there are set initial costs for setting up the printing equipment as well as set editorial costs which are what they are regardless of whether you print 10000 or 1000 books.

They look something like this: 850GBP for the first 1ooo copies

But then, for a certain amount extra (the run-on), the price is much lower, e.g. 35GBP per 1000 run-on.
The figures are examples only, there's no set amount as it depends on many factors such as paper, format, printer etc.

This is tricky in a way because although more books means you can sell each for less (usually good marketing-wise), you also have to pay more in advance before you see any money back from the book sales. It's a balancing act between how much you want to spend outright, how good a book you want to produce and what you want the retail price to be. I might post my spreadsheet after everyone's handed theirs in if anyone wants to see what it looks like and make their own conclusions from it.

It's really quite interesting but I was promised no maths and I was clearly lied to.

I think it might be informative for authors in particular as there are figures about royalties. They can also see who's really making money out of their prose (and it's not really the publisher, sadly).