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The Problem with Print on Demand and the Magic of 3,000 Printed Copies of Your Book
The important ways this number matters for self-publishing authors and indie publishers
These days it’s quite easy to publish a book with minimal startup costs. New technologies and platforms bring this creative option into the realm of possibility for nearly everyone and this has many wonderful upsides that you probably already know or can imagine.
But I want to tell you about a different time, not all that long ago, when these options weren’t available and we indie publishers only published books that we thought — rather, knew — would sell at least 3,000 print copies, ideally in the first year. Speaking very broadly, that’s the amount that would cover our initial productions costs, generically in the $10,000 range, and start covering our labor and overhead and inch us towards profit.
It was tough, but it instituted a sort of discipline. That is, no putting out books for the fun of it or cause we liked them a lot. We only bothered to publish the books we firmly believed met these criteria and then some. It was a minimal threshold and a reality check: Don’t put time, effort, resources into books that others won’t buy.
