The richest man starts from a street stall

Chapter 201 Publication of Physical Books

Chen Shi returned to the company in Rongcheng and immediately called a meeting of cultural media employees.

With the establishment of Cultural Media, the employees of Shenshi Company knew that the boss was a top master.

Moreover, he was making money as fast as a clothing company, and his admiration for Chen Shi surged.

Many employees were also watching Doupo, and when handing in their work summaries, they tried to get Chen Shi to sign them.

Chen Shi bought back the physical copyrights of Materials/Empire and Doupa because he wanted to publish the book at his own expense and arrange distribution and sales by himself.

If sold to a publishing house, the average writer's royalties are 8% to 10%, and some are as low as 5%. Only excellent writers can get 12%.

As for the legendary 15% royalties, it is estimated that only writers with terrible sales results can get it.

Some people may think, why not engage in a VAM agreement, and gamble according to the sales volume.

There will also be an upper limit for betting against each other, and it is unlikely that it will exceed 15%.

If it is published normally, the cost and profit structure of a book are basically divided.

It can be roughly divided into 8%-12% for writers, printing costs, publishing houses (for large-scale printing, ISBN fees, proofreading, typesetting, etc. are all small money), first-level and second-level agents and retailers account for more than half.

If it is a 250-page, 32-mo ordinary paper-based novel, the retail price is 22 yuan.

Authors account for 1.8-2.6 yuan, and printing costs and publishers are a large part.

The printing cost is relatively transparent, mainly in paper cost and printing cost.

There is no need to talk about professional terms such as printed sheets, color orders, paper orders, and positive degrees.

A relatively easy-to-understand algorithm is to look at how many sheets of paper are used to print a novel.

At present, writing paper on the market is 5500 yuan/ton, domestic double offset paper is 6000 yuan/ton, and double copper paper is 7500 yuan/ton.

In the past, the old letterpress paper was used for printing, but now it is less produced and used, and more writing paper and offset paper are used.

Generally, the weight of a piece of double-adhesive paper (referring to the full opening, about one square meter in size) is between 60 grams and 120 grams.

That is to say, if 70 grams of offset paper is used to print the text of the novel, then there are about 1 sheets of 14g paper with a size of one square meter in 70KG of offset paper.

A piece of 70g double-adhesive paper, the paper cost is about 0.43 yuan/sheet.

A full format paper has 32 sheets of 32K paper (that is, the size of an A4 paper folded in half), double-sided printing, that is, 64 pages.

假如一册小说为250页，即需要4张纸（4张纸×64页=256页），一册小说的正文纸张成本为1.72元。

Of course, other costs and losses have to be included, and the cover paper is coated paper, as well as illustrations.

Calculated, if a 250-page novel is printed on 70 grams of paper, the paper cost is about 1.8-2 yuan.

Printing cost price = paper cost + printing processing fee + special process fee.

Among them, the printing processing fee is generally 0.45 yuan per sheet for four colors, and black ink is used for the text, which is about the same price.

Printing plants also need to make money, labor costs and machines cost money, and taxes have to be paid. Calculated, if a large number of prints are made, a 250-page novel on plain paper will cost about 4-5 yuan to print.

Therefore, the profit margin left to the publishing house is only 3-4 yuan.

If the writer takes more, the publisher will take less, or they can only reduce it from the channel.

The above knowledge was also learned by Chen Shi himself from employees who have worked in publishing houses and printing businesses.

Chen Shi doesn't want to share profits with publishing houses, let alone channels and retailers, so he arranges distribution and sales by himself.

If he retails through bookstores, he can only cooperate with publishers and booksellers and earn royalties honestly.

But Chen Shi wants to sell on the Internet and attract customers through his golden fingers.

What is the radiation limit of city outlets? Goldfinger reminds that online sales can solve it, and Goldfinger is not an Internet hacker.

Chen Shi didn't understand, and there were many things he didn't understand about Goldfinger. He didn't understand the problem of time travel, and he didn't delve into this matter.

For Shenshi Company, there were [-] personnel from cultural media companies in the meeting.

There are also many departments in this subsidiary, including marketing department, personnel department, finance department, customer department, content operation department (design and audio-visual (typesetting, image design, audio clipping), text and editing), technology department (platform technology, information Technology), New Media Operations Department.

However, many departments do not have so many personnel, or even only one personnel.

Chen Shi personally served as the general manager, but as the shopkeeper, a vice president was in charge of all matters.

Although they are both their own companies, the finance and Shenshi Clothing Company are separate and do not conflict with each other.

If Chen Shi hadn't personally assigned the mission, no one would have interfered with other companies' affairs.The company has been established for more than 20 days, and Chen Shi rarely asks about the company.

He recruited a vice president with a high salary from a headhunting company, with an annual salary of 50. He is a 47-year-old middle-aged man, Yang Hanwen.

He used to be a newspaper reporter, but later changed his career to work as an editor, editor-in-chief, and vice-president in a well-known publishing house in China, with rich network channels.

For this subsidiary, Chen Shi only told him how many books to print within two months, and what books to print, and asked him to find a way to achieve it, and then transfer the money to the subsidiary's account, leaving the rest alone.

If he couldn't do it, Chen Shi might have to fire him again.

Of course, on the first day when Yang Hanwen reported to work, he made a plan based on Chen Shi's request, and Chen Shi was satisfied with it after reading it.

After all the personnel were assembled, the personnel personnel went to call Chen Shi.

Chen Shi didn't delay much, picked up a glass of water and went to the meeting room.

Sitting in the main seat, without any nonsense, I asked Yang Hanwen directly: "Mr. Yang, how is the book number?"

At the first meeting of the subsidiary company, the employees of this company knew about Chen Shi, and unexpectedly came to the company of the author of Dou Po.

What is even more unexpected is that Chen Shi also has a large company with excellent profits.

"Boss, news came from the publishing house yesterday that the CIP data (that is, the serial number of the book number) has been released."

"That's good, we can proceed to the next step of printing." Chen Shi nodded, unexpectedly very fast.

Publishing a book is tricky.

The first step is to finish the manuscript and make it clear, and then the professionals will enter it, type it, design the layout, and design the cover.

When Chen Shi recruited Yang Hanwen, he told him that the publication time was relatively urgent, and he planned to publish more than 100 million words of materials/the complete volume of the empire and the first half of the fight.

There was no one in the new company, so Yang Hanwen directly entrusted a professional typesetting company to do typesetting. The second half of the book Material/Empire did not have any typos or grammatical errors at all, and there were very few revisions.

It took Chen Shi a day or two to revise the one hundred thousand characters at the beginning.

This book is completely uncensored.

Doupa needs more modification.

The second step of publishing a book is to apply for a book number from the publishing house. You need to submit a copy of the author’s ID card, a brief introduction to the manuscript, a brief introduction to the author, and a copy of the proof of the manuscript.

Chen Shi spent money, and the typesetting company worked overtime. The efficiency was fast, and the proof of the typeset manuscript was submitted very quickly.

In the third step of publishing the book, the editors of the publishing house apply for the topic selection, review the manuscript three times and proofread it three times, and put forward revision opinions.

After the manuscript has no problem, go through the book number procedure and provide CIP data.

The last step is to get the book number, which is to go through the printing procedures and enter the factory for printing.

At present, the third step has been completed, and the book number is ready.

Normally, it would take a month to get an ISBN.

Moreover, it is also one of the top ten literary writer publishing houses in China, with a national single number.

The ISBN fee belongs to the "intangible assets" of publishing resources (due to the limited ISBN resources of each publishing house, publishing houses rely on this to survive).

Considering the individual ISBN or serial number, the asking price varies from company to company, and the more famous the publishing house, the higher the asking price, generally ranging from more than [-] yuan to tens of thousands of yuan.

Cheap ones, maybe only a few thousand dollars.

If the published book does not meet the requirements of the publishing house and affects the reputation, the unwillingness to publish is not just a matter of money.

"Boss, do you really want to print 5000 million copies for the first printing of the two books?" Yang Hanwen asked with some concern.

The first time I heard from the boss, I thought it was a joke to print so many.

But it was still a task.

In recent years, the circulation of novels published by entities has not been pirated, and there are quite a few books that have sold more than 5000 million copies.

In China, there are many writers who earn tens of millions or hundreds of millions of royalties for a book, which shows the large circulation.

Yang Hanwen knew that the book Doupo was very popular, and maybe the physical version could also become popular, but printing tens of millions of copies for the first time was a bit hasty.

As for Material/Empire, the genre is niche and he doesn't think it will sell many copies.

"Well, the first printing of Materials/Empire is 2000 million copies, and the first printing of Dou Po is 3000 million copies."

Chen Shi nodded to confirm, this amount is nothing.

For some books in Chen Shi's previous life, the cumulative circulation of "Don Quixote" reached 5 million, and the circulation of "Bible" exceeded 100 billion.

The "Harry Potter" series of novels also has a circulation of hundreds of millions.

The data looks a bit exaggerated, but the actual number is not much different.

Materials/Empire has a total of 300 million words, a volume of about 15 words, and a set of 20 volumes, which is only 100 million sets of books.

(Note: The main text of the physical novel is about 35-38 characters per line, 20-24 lines, and the typesetting of the novel is relatively sparse, about 650 characters per page.)
Doupa has already distributed 150 million words on the Internet, and there are not so many manuscripts for review, so he only plans to publish the first 120 million words and typeset them into 8 volumes.

Doubling 3000 million copies means that the printing volume of each book is 375 million copies.

At present, the [-] volumes are only ordinary paper editions, which is the first printing run. When the ordinary paper editions are almost sold out, there will be a hardcover edition, and finally a collector's edition.

It's like cutting leeks, one by one.

There are also novel peripheral products, such as novel character cards, wall charts, notebooks, etc., which can be sold.

(End of this chapter)