How do the costs of publishing a book break down?

To get the best possible answer, I sent off your question to my colleague Gary June, Chief Marketing Officer at Pearson Education's Professional & Technical Group. He was kind enough to find some time in his busy day to field these questions and the following are his "approximate" figures to help shed light on this question...

Typical trade margin ranges between 37% discount and 50%. Most books are 50%, but our more reference titles are typically 37%. Some publishers offer a bit more, others a bit less. Wholesalers work on low single digit spreads. Co-op is another 3-5 pts at most publishers.

You can't just count printing costs, you have to factor in the cost of returns and warehousing. That being said, stand-alone edition costs are in the 15% range, but the biggest problem with trade publishing and the reason it is a single digit net margin business is returns--which can run as high as 40%.

Pearson's warehousing costs are low relative to sales and our competition due to our size, but most publishers they range in the 5-8% range. So......

You can now see why there aren't a lot of people getting into the computer publishing business lately! There are better place to park your capital.

By the way, these are all estimates and the actual figures vary wildly by title and publisher, but they should give you a good barometer.