Comment by danielheath
12 hours ago
I worked at a publisher back around 2010.
The unit cost for the publisher to put a $20 AUD book on a shelf in a book shop was about $2 AUD.
The bookstore kept quite a bit of that margin - $10 or so - but they had to pay rent & staff a store. If they were only selling $500 worth of books per day, it wouldn't have mattered if their margin was 100%, the fixed overheads would eat it all. If they could keep stock turning over quickly, the profits were impressive.
That makes sense to me. Thank you for that anecdote. I had no idea about these figures.
Also, it wouldn't have made sense to squeeze the bookshop for a bigger share of the margins, because they'd have moved our books to the back corner of the store and put something higher-margin in the highly-visible shelves, and then our volumes would have been poorer.
Most bookshops had a sizeable space dedicated to our books.