Verso Books recently published an essay called “Bad Nostalgia” by Miriam Gordis calling to think through the challenges of the publishing industry through the lens of labor. The author asks, “What would it mean to interrogate labor as the engine behind conglomerate publishing and the core of its system failure?”
To that end, let’s sketch out some back-of-the-envelope math around the labor of publishing a book, which I’ve measured in dollars per hour. Putting these numbers together, you can see why economics is the “dismal science.”
The Labor of Publishing a Book
Publishing a book ultimately is about human hours. Time to write, edit, proofread, package, print, and sell it. How many hours are we talking about?
Writer: 1,000 hours
Authors are all over the map, and every book has its own challenge. Here, I’ll posit 1,000 hours for the author to write an 80,000-word novel. Let’s ignore “thinking time” and assume you can write 1,000 words in four hours (250 words/hour). Let’s say:
320 hours to write a first draft
320 hours to write a full second draft
160 hours to write a third draft after developmental edits
80 hours to do a final big edit
40 hours to copyedit it
20 hours to proofread it
20 hours to proofread it again
40 hours of miscellaneous stuff like calling your agent or emailing your editor
This doesn’t account for the time a writer might spend promoting the book or going on tour, but for this analysis, I’m looking only at the labor to write and publish the book.
Agent: 150 hours
Let’s pretend the agent finds the author in the slush pile. They have to invest a ton of time to find and sell the book. I’ve never worked as a literary agent, but here’s a guess about what it takes to sell a book:
10 hours – self-promotion, tweeting, blogging, etc. to build a pipeline of submissions
10 hours – reading 100 queries and rejecting 90 of them
10 hours – evaluating the first few chapters of 10 queries
30 hours – reading 3-4 full manuscripts
5 hours – connecting with one author, offering representation
45 hours – working with the author on edits for the book
20 hours – pitching the book, lunching with editors, corresponding with the author
20 hours – brokering the sale, contract reviews, etc.
Most agents work for an agency where multiple people would do the work above, but to keep this exercise simple, I’m estimating the human hours it might take to find and sell the book.
Editor: 150 hours
Like an agent, the editor has to filter through some slush before getting to the work of editing. For this exercise, we’re going to ignore all the business stuff editors might do, such as staff meetings or attending trade shows. The labor of a book itself might include:
10 hours – reading 35 relevant agent pitches and some first chapters
30 hours – reading 3-4 full manuscripts
5 hours – pitching other people in the publishing house; market research for a title
5 hours – connecting with the agent/author, offering publication
80 hours – developmental editing with the author
20 hours – negotiating more stuff with the author, editor, marketing team, etc.
Line Editing: 50 hours
In a perfect world, a line editor / copyeditor / fact checker works through five pages an hour, which is 50 hours for a 250-page book.
Proofreader: 25 hours
In a perfect world, a proofreader works through 10 pages an hour.
Book Design: 50 hours
Software can speed this process up, but using the old-fashioned method of laying out a book and designing its cover in In-Design nets you:
20 hours for interior layout
20 hours for cover mockups, revisions, and various formatting versions
10 hours for mocking up some bookmarks, bookplates, release images, etc.
Marketing: 25 hours
Publicity is a whole other thing, but here I’m putting down 25 hours for writing the jacket copy, putting together a press release, inputting metadata into a system, etc. This probably takes more time, but I’m trying to use round figures for this exercise.
Grand Total: 1,500 hours
Again, you can change the assumptions, but 1,500 hours is feasible for writing and preparing a book for publication. Of course, publishing has other costs such as printing, and once a book is published, there are other domains of labor—warehousing, picking, shipping, publicity, reviewing, retail sales, etc. etc. But, if we’re solely looking at the labor of writing and publishing the book, 1,500 hours is a fine number to work with.
The Value of Labor
Much of publishing is a “labor of love,” but what is a reasonable dollar value for those 1,500 hours? What is the “price” for the labor of writing and publishing a book? For this exercise, I’d suggest $50/hour, which is in line with the Editorial Freelancers Association recommendations.
To keep things simple, I’m using freelance hourly rates because when businesses hire an employee, the hourly labor costs are obscure. An employer pays for half the FICA taxes, for example, as well as paid time off and other benefits. Not every hour an employee works is billable.
Whereas freelance hourly rates provide a billable hour approach to valuing labor. For comparison, a rate of $50/hour times 1,800 billable hours equals $90,000/year as a contractor, which equals roughly $75,000/year as an employee. The challenge with this exercise is that American labor rates are so uneven. In Manhattan, $50/hour doesn’t go very far, but in rural South Carolina it is a king’s ransom.
Putting it All Together
If it takes 1,500 hours to produce a book, and the value of the labor is $50/hour, then the labor value of a book is $75,000—but this is only for writing and publishing. All the other aspects of the publishing system require more labor, which is outside the scope of this exercise.
What does this mean for book sales?
When a publisher lists the price of a book—say $20—they sell it to wholesalers at a steep 55% discount (wholesalers take 15% and retailers take 40%). That means a publisher gets to keep $9 (45%) for that $20 book. Printing may cost $3/copy, so the publisher nets $6/copy.
In other words:
$20 sales price
Minus $11 per copy (55% wholesale discount)
Minus $3 per copy (material cost of printing)
= $6 profit per copy for the publisher to pay for all the labor itemized above
If it costs $75,000 in labor to make the book, then the book must sell 12,500 copies to pay for the labor:
1,500 hours of labor x $50/hour = $75,000
$75,000 divided by $6/copy = 12,500 copies
I’ve said in other contexts that the challenge with publishing is there are too many writers and not enough readers to make it a viable business. Accounting for labor with the numbers above, it seems someone is getting short-changed on books that sell less than 10,000-15,000 copies.
Considerations: Inequality and Incentives
I’m not here to make an argument about the labor of publishing and who should make what. Most people in this business are overworked and underpaid if we’re using $50/hour as our basis for a decent hourly labor rate.
The exercise does reveal a few interesting conclusions, however. You can see from the math above that the biggest chunk of labor is writing the book, yet most publishing contracts assign authors an 8-10% royalty rate, meaning the author might receive up to $2/copy on a $20 book.
If the publisher nets $6/copy after printing and wholesale discounts, the publisher profits $4/copy, the author receives $2/copy, and the agent receives 15% of the author’s cut, which would be $0.30/copy.
Let’s dig into the players a little more:
Authors
If an author gets $1.70 per copy (the $2 royalty minus the agent’s 15%), the author needs to sell almost 30,000 copies to pay for their thousand hours of labor. Very few authors sell at that scale, which means being an author is a “labor of love.” Hence the adage, “Don’t quit your day job.”
Agents
Agents don’t have as many hours invested as authors, but they still need their books to sell a ton of copies to turn a profit. If the author gets $2/copy, the agent’s commission is about $0.30. Multiply 150 hours of work times $50/hour, and the agent needs to earn $7,500 from the book. At $0.30 a copy, they need the book to sell 25,000 copies to pay for their time.
In other words, 25,000 copies x $0.30/copy = $7,500, which is 150 hours at $50/hour.
Realistically, a literary agent living in Brooklyn likely needs $75-$100/hour to earn a decent living, so they need to chase books that are likely to sell 50,000+ copies (or books that might include foreign rights sales, movie options, etc.).
When I counsel authors about finding an agent, I stress that getting rejected doesn’t say anything about the quality of your book. Getting rejected by agents just means your book is unlikely to be a blockbuster.
Publishers
If my math above is right, the publisher needs about 350 hours of labor to publish a book. If the publisher is profiting $4/copy, they may be able to pay $50/hour for those 350 hours ($17,500) after selling around 4,500 copies.
Now, publishers also have other hard expenses—and big publishers have to deal with shareholders and New York City real estate—but this back-of-the-envelope math shows that publishers can turn a profit much faster than the 12,500 copies I calculated above.
As someone who has published books, I can say that 350 hours is generous. Maybe your Penguin Random Houses are spending that many hours on each title, but smaller publishers “operating on a shoestring budget” likely aren’t giving that much time for each book. I suspect most independent publishers could turn a profit selling 2,000 copies/title.
Regardless, as you will see in the author and agent calculations below, the math for publishers is not aligned with the math for authors, who need the book to sell many more copies. This tracks with my observation that publishers tend to shotgun books onto the market and then quit promoting them after a couple of months. Publishers have an incentive to get their nut and leave authors to fend for themselves.
Finally, this also points toward the importance of a book advance. A $50,000 advance better aligns a publisher’s incentives with the incentives of authors and agents.
A Final Note About Small Publishers
Despite the misalignment, publishers still need to sell a lot of copies of a book to turn a profit. Even if the break-even point is 2,000 copies, small independent publishers are going to have a hard time, which leaves them with only a few logical options:
Use fewer hours. Combine line editing and proofreading into one job, use a software system for the proofreading or book layout, spend fewer hours editing the book, etc.
Pay less money. Outsource editing and design to Fiverr or workers in the Philippines, lean on low-wage interns, beg your friends to proofread for you, etc.
Charge more per book. Good luck with that.
Sell more books. Good luck with that.
Find free money. Become a nonprofit and fundraise. A lot of independent publishers go this route, but donors have their own special needs. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
There you have it: an interrogation of the labor in publishing. The who-does-what of the labor is outside my purview (e.g., the dynamic of junior editors working overtime while senior editors have martini lunches), but I was surprised by how instructive the math of producing a book can be. It’s a grim business.