Well, scientific publishing for open journals is like 1000 USD per article. for compiling a latex file that you’ve already written….

you made a lot of words!

Open journals are those which are available online on the web, for free. A lot of journals have open counterparts.

@GeneralJist You're not going to make money with this. You'll just spend $6K and maybe sell 1 copy, probably to a friend or family member, Publishers pay you money if they think it's any good. Just self-publish.

Reputable publishers never charge authors money. Their business model is to pay the author for the rights to the book and then make that money back plus profit by selling the book.

“Publishers” that charge the author are scam artists preying on naïve wannabe authors whose work isn't good enough to be published. Their business model is to get paid by the author for doing nothing. Run away!

a light breeze said:
Reputable publishers never charge authors money.

I think you need to be careful with your terms there. The ones you talk about might not send an invoice expecting to be paid for services, but they absolutely charge them money. Instead it is a matter of when the money is collected.

For the actual marketplace, the bulk of reputable publishers are fee-only. You pay exactly for the services you use, it is a business-to-business transaction. It's just that most people don't experience it that way, they prefer to work through an agent or other group that handles the business side, so it doesn't look like a business-to-business transaction.

The perspective being discussed, where publishers front you the money while you develop it, then the publisher pays all the costs to edit and print and distribute and market the book, where the publisher is willing to invest fortunes to get the small book published worldwide with a half million copies in the first printing, those are the deals everyone dreams of but statistically they're absolutely unicorns. The publisher is taking a risk, sometimes an enormous risk. For a small author they may be willing to put up 20K-50K for the project, fronting the author a couple thousand if they really think the book is good an fills a niche they have. They'll put up the money, for the 20K-50K investment on their end they'll be pulling out money on the 40K-200K range, gambling on the product's success. Even if neither the author nor publisher uses the words, it absolutely is a high interest loan to pay for risky business services.

In those deals the author does not pay anything up front, instead it comes out of royalties, but the cost can easily be 2x to 5x what it would have been had the author paid as a fee-based service up front. “No money down” is exciting and can open doors to people, but it isn't cheap.

frob said:

For the actual marketplace, the bulk of reputable publishers are fee-only. You pay exactly for the services you use, it is a business-to-business transaction. It's just that most people don't experience it that way, they prefer to work through an agent or other group that handles the business side, so it doesn't look like a business-to-business transaction.

That goes against everything I have read about the business, so sources please?

Books, like games and movies and music, are a hit-driven business. The publisher expects to lose money on most books they publish. They have to make enough money from their hits to cover their duds. That's the primary service they provide: fronting money to gamble on authors in the hope of hitting jackpot when a book really takes off.

The perspective being discussed, where publishers front you the money while you develop it, then the publisher pays all the costs to edit and print and distribute and market the book, where the publisher is willing to invest fortunes to get the small book published worldwide with a half million copies in the first printing, those are the deals everyone dreams of but statistically they're absolutely unicorns.

That's not the situation I'm talking about. It's more like “we'll give you €1000 for the full rights to this book, no royalties, and see if we can make the €1000 back in sales”. It's a pretty shitty deal for the author, who ends up working for a tiny fraction of minimum wage, but it's a better deal than the “we'll take your money and your book and you'll never see either of them again” alternative. At least in the former case the publisher has an incentive to actually try to do their job.