nickkokonas

Hi -- I'm the co-owner of Alinea... the restaurant and group.

While they are in different industries, I owned a derivatives trading group for years, run a tech startup (Tock), and am getting a bunch of emails from folks thinking I started this or am affiliated in some way.

So... while I dislike conflict, I really don't like be associated with something I have no control over. There will be an incoming email shortly.

both of those costs are mitigated today. Marketing through social media channels is very cost effective. Amazon controls about 2/3rds of all book sales so go on there. And fulfillment and inventory is easily handled at a fixed cost per book by a third party... we're using www.blackbox.cool

actually that part is easy. You can use a fulfillment company and the costs are known and passed to the consumer. We are using www.Blackbox.cool to do it this time around. Last time we used Warepak

In order:

1) the different factors are: number of photos, quality of paper, quality of inks used (bigger difference than you'd imagine), 6 color offset printing, full bleed on every page, veneer on every photo, quality of binding. If you look at most cookbooks there is a LOT of writing and pages that contain no images. That's intentional.

2) I think 10 Speed did OK on our book since we sold so many. If you do the math from the numbers I gave you can see that they likely made something on the order of $390,000 on our book (this is a very rough estimate). And they took virtually no risk, beyond their time. That said, they did this as a vanity project in order to attract other authors to the imprint -- that was stated from the beginning.

3) Whether there is room for someone else to create an imprint to do this -- I'm not really sure. It's very different to do it as an individual than it is to take on a lot of overhead and put out dozens of titles per year. The point is that the winners pay for the losers... but as an individual you don't have to worry about that.

4) Thanks for the links! I'm going to order that Voynich now -- oh wait, no I'm not... it's $8,000! There are a few publishers that do amazing art quality books and do them very well. But typically they are priced much higher than mass market books, even high end ones at $50 or $60.

5) The 'super amazing' cookbook fits in because it proved to me that the margins were way better than I ever imagined. And frankly, after speaking with the editor that ran that imprint I really felt like she knew I would figure that out and did everything to try to convince me I was going to fail. At this point that book has sold something north of 500,000 copies and the restaurant / chef has IMO received a fraction of what they should have. You're looking at something like $12,500,000 of wholesale revenue from one book alone, maybe more, and the royalties were likely paid at 12% to 15% of cover price after recoup of advance. That's $6.50 per copy. Rough estimate: $3M to the writer. $8M to the publisher, lifetime.

I agree with your conclusion that max. profit occurs with a relatively low quality level... (Hollywood Sequels anyone?)... but that for an individual author it's easier than ever to spurn the system especially if you already have a following through your main profession.

You can easily hire a professional copy-editor. In fact, in many instances publishers hire outside third-party experts depending on the subject of the book.

Publishing a text-only book with no or minimal pictures is shocking inexpensive.

Thank you! I'll let Allen and Sarah know... and reach out.

Always exciting to get something up on the hacker news board... weekly reader here for a long time.

Happy to answer any questions you may have.

-- Nick