Authors and Self-Publishing

[Mason Malmuth]

Hi Banana:

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Roughly how big are your initial print runs for a book? For example is the first printing kept small to test the market, with a large second second printing or is the first printing quite big to reduce the marginal cost of each book?

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Up to 50,000 which is a very large amount. We do it to reduce our unit cost per book, but if we can't project these type of sales, we will go with a lower number and sometimes that number is much lower (and sometimes our projections can be quite off, especially as the market changes).

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Are the print run sizes the same for all titles or do you adapt it for each particular title?

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We adapt. At this time print runs can be as low as 5,000 and when we did the second printing of Harrington II we ran 100,000 (which was our largest run ever).

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When would you decide to reprint a book? i.e does it have to sell a certain % of it's run within a maximum time scale to considered?

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A rough guideline is when we have about a three month supply left and we still feel that there is some interest in the book. However, we try to print books together when possible to reduce costs, so this can cause us to get away from the three month guideline.

Best wishes,
Mason