A Glimpse into the (not so) Lucrative Business of Academic Publishing

In what may turn out to be an annual tradition (see here for last year's edition), I unveil some of the realities of the financial side of academic publishing.  My dissertation director at Boston University was good friends with Thomas Kuhn, who (at least in the mid-90's) held the record for the most sales of a book that had been published on a university press--The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press) which at the time had sold something like 7 million copies worldwide.  That is so many standard deviations from the norm that I'm not sure that there is a number for it.  By contrast, Richard Swinburne (who is something of a philosophical superstar) told me that his best selling book, The Existence of God (Oxford University Press) had sold something like 12,000 copies.

So, the end of April is when Routledge Publishers (not a university press, but an academic publisher nonetheless) reconciles its accounts for the previous calendar year with its authors.  That is the press that Christian Thought is published on, so I get a statement about how many books were sold, and how much money they'll send me for the hours of labor that went into it.  Starting in June I registered the book on a nifty website (somewhat misleadingly called "novelrank") that tracks sales on Amazon.  Amazon is notoriously stingy with their sales figures, but they update books' rankings every hour.  This website figured out a way to determine how many of your books have sold, by tracking these rankings.  The best ranking on Amazon that Christian Thought has gotten to since June is 26,487.  That was last August and September when about 50 were sold.  In June through December, 87 were sold on Amazon.com and another 38 on amazon's UK site.  So anyway, I was curious to see how that would relate to total sales.

According to the reckoning of the good folks at Routledge, there were 47 copies of the electronic book sold at an average price of 36.38 GBP (Routledge is from London, so everything is in pounds); that seems a little expensive since the Kindle version is usually going for just over $30.  But hey, I'll take it.  There were 11 hardbacks sold at an average price of 52.12 GBP.  There were 465 paperbacks sold at an average price of 18.93 GBP.  That makes for a total of 523 books sold in 2011.  My co-author and I split 10% royalties on the electronic and paperback versions, and we split 7.5% on the hardbacks.  If you do all the math and convert the GBP to USD, you'll end up with a payday in the high three figures.  That's nothing to sneeze at, and it's certainly enough to take my family out to dinner at a restaurant with menus and waitstaff.  But we're not exactly buying a condo in Del Bocca Vista.

I'm anxious to see how the sales numbers go this year.  Will they continue to decline (sales figures in 2010 were 772)?  Or will they gain steam with textbook adoptions?  We completed all the work for a companion website (which can be found here) that looks pretty snazzy, and the Routledge people said they'd do another round of marketing for it as a textbook.  It would be nice to see several large universities adopt it, or perhaps it could become the official historical theology textbook of major league baseball.

The (not so) Big Business of Academic Publishing

I stopped by the office today and in my mailbox was my royalties check for the 2010 sales of Christian Thought: A Historical Introduction (Routledge, 2010).  Some of you may not be too aware of how all this works, and perhaps you've had a vague notion that we who publish on academic presses secretly have second homes in Tuscany and Swiss bank accounts.  So I'm allowing the internet tendency of disclosing personal information to have partial sway over my being, and I'll give some of the juicy details of this business.

When my co-author and I signed the contract, we each got a low-to-mid three figure advance on the royalties.  That means that they gave us money up front, but it was to be deducted from our later earnings.  Then upon submission of the completed manuscript, we each got another low-to-mid three figure advance on royalties.  When the book was published, we each received one hardback copy and ten paperback copies of the book, plus the offer to buy as many copies as we want at 30% off the list price.  Then, for as long as the book is in print we get 10% (5% each) of the money Routledge receives for paperbacks that are sold (and 7.5% of the money Routledge receives for hardbacks).

The book came out in July of 2010.  And evidently it did better than was expected, because it sold out of the first printing sometime in January.  The first printing was 1200 copies, so we're not exactly talking about a NYT best-seller.  Its primary market is as a textbook, and there were a few schools that adopted it for the spring semester.  At one point during the holidays, it made it up to #34 on Amazon's top 100 books on religion (which was something like #24,000 for its overall best sellers).  The price then was down to about $24 (which is cheaper than I can buy them from the publisher), but currently it's at about $38 on the site.  I could make you a deal on a signed copy if you're interested!

Anyway, my portion of the royalties (after deducting the two advances) for 2010 was in the mid three figures. When you add all of those payments together, I'm up to the very low four figures (not counting decimal points!) in money earned on this project.  I estimate that I have significantly more than1000 hours invested in working on this book, so we're talking less than $1/hour.  Such is the reality of academic publishing.  In a future post I'll explain what drives us to do such things.

Tuesday's Blog about Blogging

So I have down somewhere on my sidebar a blurb about the book Chad Meister and I are writing. I've been using this blog to start a groundswell of support that will launch the book onto the best seller list. LOL. (Aside: that's the first time I've ever written "LOL" in an electronic medium; I'm not sure if the context or syntax is entirely correct. Also I feel a little bit deceptive in that I wasn't actually laughing out loud--more like chuckling to myself. But I didn't think anyone would know what CTM would mean.)

Actually, I've been using this blog as a sort of propaedeutic to writing the book. In the evenings when I work on the book, I prime the pump of the writing by putting words down in this blog. It is interesting to me that writing anything can help the process of writing well. This is one of the positive effects of blogging even if no one is listening.

Last Tuesday when I wrote a kind of whining blog (maybe this will become a Tuesday Tradition competing with Terry's Tuesday Travel Tips here?!) wondering about the merits of blogging, two apparently faithful readers responded with encouraging comments. I followed the links to their own blogs where they were kind enough to mention Stump Speeches by name. This advertising has resulted in my Feedburner Stats yielding the following: I've gone from 2 subscribers down to 0 subscribers; and from 3 live hits in 21.5 hours down to 1 hit in the past 25 hours. Ouch! Don't put those guys in charge of your ad campaign!!

To be fair, I've had more comments this week than the others. But the moral of the story is that whether or not anyone reads this, it is getting the writing juices flowing. If that's all that comes, then it will have been worthwhile. I'm signing off to edit chapter seven.