From lojbab@lojban.org Mon Aug 26 15:48:28 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: lojbab@lojban.org X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_1_0_1); 26 Aug 2002 22:48:28 -0000 Received: (qmail 52648 invoked from network); 26 Aug 2002 22:48:27 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.216) by m12.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 26 Aug 2002 22:48:27 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO lakemtao01.cox.net) (68.1.17.244) by mta1.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 26 Aug 2002 22:48:27 -0000 Received: from lojban.lojban.org ([68.100.206.153]) by lakemtao01.cox.net (InterMail vM.5.01.04.05 201-253-122-122-105-20011231) with ESMTP id <20020826224822.PWPJ29627.lakemtao01.cox.net@lojban.lojban.org> for ; Mon, 26 Aug 2002 18:48:22 -0400 Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.0.20020826170732.03228600@pop.east.cox.net> X-Sender: rlechevalier@pop.east.cox.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1 Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2002 18:47:53 -0400 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Economics of LLG publishing In-Reply-To: <20020826110230.A16895@miranda.org> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20020823191801.033504e0@pop.east.cox.net> <5.1.0.14.0.20020822200025.030c1ec0@pop.east.cox.net> <20020822141533.J2396@miranda.org> <20020821221145.GP4159@chain.digitalkingdom.org> <20020821204332.B2396@miranda.org> <20020822173131.GJ25193@chain.digitalkingdom.org> <20020822141533.J2396@miranda.org> <5.1.0.14.0.20020822200025.030c1ec0@pop.east.cox.net> <5.1.0.14.0.20020822201909.030d9dd0@pop.east.cox.net> <20020823161809.GJ25193@chain.digitalkingdom.org> <5.1.0.14.0.20020823191801.033504e0@pop.east.cox.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed From: Robert LeChevalier X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=1120595 X-Yahoo-Profile: lojbab At 11:02 AM 8/26/02 -0600, Jay F Kominek wrote: >On Fri, Aug 23, 2002 at 07:32:24PM -0400, Logical Language Group, Inc. wrote: > > As you describe it, we "break even" when our royalties hit $159, > > which I suspect would take 100 books at standard royalty rates > > (probably no more than 5-10% of sales unless you have word > > otherwise). And when we hit 200 books, LLG will have made another > > $159. > >Far better that the book be printed, than it sit and collect dust, >regardless of how little money is made. Certainly. I do not favor putting off publication, and if we could afford it, Nora and I would finance its publishing like the last time. > > Right now LLG is the publisher of our books, and we're looking for an > > on-demand printer that lets us keep our name on the books. > >Who cares whose name is on the book as long as the book is available >at a reasonable price? Personally, I've never looked at the publisher >of a book when making a buying decision, and I'm not sure what sorts >of people would. That isn't a whole lot better than judging a book by >its cover. This only matters insofar as "official materials". If it comes from a source other than LLG, some will wonder as to its credibility. This I presume is part of the reason for people wanting LLG official recognition for their projects. > > We've sold close to 400 refgrammars so far, so this seems like a > > good minimum on the 4.5 year sales potential of the lesson book > >I'd like to clarify this, just to make things clear. The number of >books reported sold at the meetings each year: > >1998: about 200 >1999: 266 >2000: 322 >2001: 360 >2002: 380-90 > >Most of the books are sold within the first year or so. Correct. That is the nature of book sales. I don't think that there really has been a significant drop off in the last year from the previous one. It tends to come in spurts, and the timing of the spurts determines the annual total. The ability to order direct via Paypal may increase orders. >If sales keep dropping off the way they're going, nobody will be buying >any in 3 years. We have the history of JCB's effort to know that the book orders never completely stop. > And if they keep going at the rate they're at, it'll take >another 20+ years to sell them off. Indeed. However, given the nature of what we are doing, every time we put out something new, we get a new wave of sales to people who order more than whatever is new. Thus when Nick's book comes out, we might sell 200+ right away (because most people who are interested enough to buy the refgrammar will be interested in getting a copy), but there will also be new people attracted by the fact that we now have a textbook, who will in turn buy the refgrammar after they see what good stuff we put out. I'm not expecting a big spurt, but 50 red books is $2000. > > (we would hope that the LLG community will grow rather than shrink > > in the next 4+ years, and I imagine that just as many would buy the > > lesson book as bought the red book, maybe more because of the lower > > price). > >It isn't going to grow unless things change. Certainly not enough to >support having thousands of books printed off. I'm not supporting thousands. Right now I'm favoring 500, with the possibility of making it 1000 if preorders are exceptionally large (like over 250). >Unless you've got some top secret plan to quintuple the community size >in 5 easy steps? :) It isn't top secret. All this good work you guys are doing is leading to steady growth; look at the size of your own beginners-list. The community MORE THAN quintupled after the refgrammar came out. And growth continues even though we've been largely stagnant in terms of products and order-filling for 5 years. With a smarter and faster approach to responding to new people, I think we will have a new spurt in the next year or so, and merely doubling the community will make our investment in so many copies of the red book worthwhile. And we've only done word of mouth advertising for 5 years. When we put out a book, I have the excuse to put notices in the newsgroups and conlang mailing lists. > > We somehow have to make money on our publications in order to support the > > organization. Or there won't be an organization in a few years. > >If you're only selling 30 books a year, you're not making spectacular >amounts of money as it stands. Hey, it's $1200 more or less, and that has been most of our income the last few years. >A far better policy is to sell via some sort of print on demand, a >wide variety of materials, with minimal markup. So instead of making >$30 of profit per person on a single item, you make $5 on their >refgram, $5 on their lessons, $5 on their dictionary, $5/yr on their JL >subscription, $5/yr on their LK subscription, $5 on their tshirt, $5/yr on >their patron membership, $2.50 on their lapel pin, $10 on their >logfest attendance, $5 when an LLG psuedo-hiree (who is donating their >services to the corporation at some reasonable rate, and getting a tax >deduction for it) translates their horoscope into Lojban. I don't think we get $5 on vanity press POD. I think we (actually the authors - I'm not sure how LLG gets into the picture if we are not the publisher or distributor) get more like $1. Which is why I am skeptical. The net on CLL copies is $28 or so, and that is because we are selling at the discount price. (If I had been smarter and gotten a thousand books from Bookcrafters rather than the 1500 from the printer that we chose, we would already have paid off the print costs with a couple thousand to spare.) Most of those items you mention we have been selling at cost. JL subscriptions (which are pure loss to us for the 4 issues, since we owe around 125 people who prepaid subscriptions) have been sold at-cost, and only around 5% of LK subscribers pay for their copies. (And we really weren't making much money on those 10c/page mail orders that supported us for 10 years.) I'm hoping we don't get too many $5 orders, because we already have problems with order fulfillment and the cost in time of filling $5 order is more than we make (even though we don't pay for volunteer time, it is valuable). And the fact that almost no one has ever ordered an "e'osai ko sarji la lojban" button when I've offered them suggests that we won't get very many. (Note that pay pal charges us 2.9% + 30 cents on each payment to us, so that we lose almost 10% off the top of a $5 contribution). I don't know the rules on donating services as tax deductions, and no one has raised the issue before now. In any event, products of donated time, like that horoscope, do not pay the bills, and I don't think they would properly count as deductible. If someone donates services that we would have paid them for, that is another matter, but we don't pay people to translate their horoscope. To the IRS, Lojban will still look like a hobby to the IRS rather than a business. Note that I have to document all these tax deductions that people take if they exceed a trivial amount. If you claim a $100 tax deduction, I'd better have sent you a receipt, or you're in trouble come audit time (the threshold I think is $75 for a single donation or $200 for the year). The IRS could take away our tax deductible status of people abuse it. >From the research I've done on mail order, you have to sell books at around 8 times the printing cost in order to truly make money at it; smaller orders probably need a higher markup. We're unlikely to ever be able to mark things up that much. CLL is being sold for a little more than 3 times printing cost. >And of course, growing the community so that you're getting all the >above from each of 1000+ people, and *then* you'll be making money >worth talking about. I'd love to see it, but I won't hold my breath. I think I've learned enough about the difficulties of mail order business to know that 1000 sales of a $5 item will almost certainly lose money. As for membership cards, there is a reason that most non-profit orgs charge around $50 "dues" for a sustaining membership (which would be something different from the LLG voting membership). You need the volume of mass marketing to make money on small orders. lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org