Since the subject is on books of late and a lot of jewelers are
small operations and very into “do it yourself” kind of things I
would like to mention a service I know of.
It is called Create Space and is a subsidiary of Amazon.com. They
offer “print on demand” services for books and make them available
on Amazon.com, your own website and possibly other places too
depending on the service selected. The cool thing is that it is set
up to be as simple as possible and it is VERY low cost relative to
traditional publishing methods.
I have not used the service myself but I have been considering it
for a while.
They charge no set up fees as long as you make your book available
for sale. They will give you and ISBN number for the books you
publish with them.
You submit the book as a formatted PDF (not too hard for somewhat
computer savvy people).
They print the books as there are orders for them so I do not think
that there is any cost to you the publisher unless you sign up for
the “Pro plan” which seems to cost $39 and gives you a higher
percentage cut of your book’s sale price.
Amazon then takes a cut of the sales price of your book (this is how
they make money it seems), they have a calculator that tells you how
much based on the sales channel, size of the book, number of pages,
whether it is color or not, etc.
A couple of simulations I ran:
An 8x5 inch 150 page B&W book (I think all covers are color) with a
retail price of $16.00 would leave the author with a royalty of
$8-$5 depending on the sales channel without the pro plan and with
the plan a royalty of $10-$7. The coolest part is there seems to be
no cost and you are not bound to them if you want to publish some
other way in the future. If you want to buy 10 of these books
yourself for your own use or to give to friends they will cost you
$4.50 each, or if you have the pro plan $2.65 each. These prices do
not seem to change a lot with quantity.
A full color book with bleed (pictures that go all the way to the
edge of a page) of 100 pages and a size of 8x10 inches with a retail
price of $35 (think pictoral history of your work or other things
which could increase sales of your jewelry!) you would get a cut of
$14.25-$7.25 per book depending on sales channel. With pro plan it
becomes $20-$13 as your cut and to buy the books yourself runs
$13.75 each OR $7.85 each with the pro plan.
More info can be found here
http://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/
I have no affiliation with Amazon or Create Space nor I have used
their service yet but it seems really cool and I am all for more
good books on metalworking and gems!
Regards,
John Dyer