basquebromance
Diamond Member
- Nov 26, 2015
- 109,396
- 27,004
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- Banned
- #21
Just to walk through the economics of this for you: Christie’s book was published by Simon & Schuster. I haven’t seen any reporting on the advance they gave him, but for the sake of argument, let’s call it $50k.1 Then there’s the PR costs—a minimum of $10k. Making the books—PP&B—runs about $3 a unit. And depending on how many copies the publisher printed, they’re then going to have to spend money converting the unsold hardcovers to paperbacks. And then they’ll eventually have to pay to pulp the unsold paperbacks.
So all told, Simon & Schuster spent at least $70k in order to sell $58k worth of books—of which they, the publisher, only take home about 50 percent. (The other half goes to Amazon.) And the likely true cost to Simon & Schuster is probably closer to 10x that number, since we’re being so conservative with our guesses.
So this thing is a disaster.
But it’s worth noting that it’s only a disaster for the publisher. Chris Christie gets to keep his advance. Chris Christie was able to leverage this nothing-burger book to get on TV and promote himself.
