Potential Price Increases for Print Products

[Rasyr]

DriveThru's recent announcement to publishers (which I have seen echoed on several Discords and forums) about the impending increase in print prices here in the US  come April 1st, 2025, means that if you  were thinking  of getting a print copy of Fantasy Express, now would be the time to do it.  Depending upon how big the increase in print costs, I may need to increase the price I sell the print  versions for (will be  trying to keep any  increases to a minimum if possible, but I won't know for sure until I see how much the  POD prices increase)

[Fidoric]

Hi Tim,
From ICE site:

DriveThru Printing Changes

As we mentioned last time, DriveThru were upgrading all of the older standard colour printed books to use a heavier paper as a precaution. HARP SF Xtreme and nearly all of the Shadow World products have made it through the upgrade process and are back on sale.

DriveThru have been in touch with all publishers to note that Lightning Source printing costs are increasing. For orders fulfilled by the UK Lightning Source plant, which covers UK, European and global orders, the price rise for black&white and standard colour are 3-4% increases on the minimum print price and on the per page count. For orders fulfilled by the US Lightning Source, which covers the USA, the price rises are more extreme, due to increasing supply costs in the USA. For black&white, the price increases depend on the size of the book, hardcover versus softcover, and page count, but range from 20% to 50%+ on the printing costs. For standard colour, the printing cost increase is approximately 12-13%. The printing cost changes take effect in April.

[Rasyr]

Yup, the US prices are increasing more than the UK prices.

Now, if the table of prices I received was correct, it looks like the price increases may not be as large for Fantasy Express as I feared, so I might be able to leave the print prices alone and not have to change  them.

Note that right now, as long as the print  copy prices do not go up too much (or not much more than what I think will be happening), then I  can  leave  the Fantasy Express prices alone.

Then again, I set my print books at a fixed price and my profit fluctuates based on the actual print costs (which sometimes do fluctuate slightly from day to day).

For publishers like the one you mention, if you look at thier prices, it is obvious that they set it so that they make the same profit on the book on every sale, so their prices fluctuate up and down

Looking at their RMU Core Law -- listed as a 287 page book

Softcover, Standard Color Book                          $42.75
Hardcover, Standard Color Book                        $47.32

Essentially,  they are getting $25 of margin off each  book....
so the Softcover costs about 17.75 to print, and hardcover is 22.32 to print.

The odd number of cents tells us that they are keeping their margins the same, so when  the print costs go up, so will the prices automatically....

Where as, Fantasy Express (which is 13  pages more), will remain the same price unless I manually go in an update  the prices.  because I did NOT  check the  box that said "Keep the Margin"

PDF + Softcover, Standard Color Book                $57.75
PDF + Hardcover, Standard Color Book              $62.32

It is obvious that they dropped from $25 to $15 for the PDF on these two....

so for a bundle, they are making $45 per book.


[update: finally found the cost calculator  for print product  and got the accurate print costs]