If I’m understanding you, it seems like you’re saying the design isn’t done in-house, but rather is done by an outside designer. Is that right? I think I imagined that a big publishing house would have enough business to keep a cover designer (or two, or five) busy full-time, but maybe that’s wrong.

If the cost is for contracted services, then yes, the total quoted in my post ($5K) seems to make more sense. I once had a web site designed for me pre-blogware (by about a year — just shoot me), and when all was said and done the bulk of the costs had gone into the site logo and artwork. Most of the functionality was boilerplate, and the little but of customizing I needed was taken care of in short order with some custom code.

Which raises another question: how much of what a publishing house provides and charges for is done in-house these days, and how much is done as sub-contracted work? Because if publishers are already out-sourcing a considerable part of the book-making part of the business, they may be in a better position to make the digital transition than they otherwise might have been.

I’m sure margins are thin, but they’re probably not thin everywhere. (And I’m not sure I would say that something like an 8% margin is ‘thin’, but that’s nagging your point.) In any case I’m not trying to make the case that publishing is like defense contract work — where you submit a $42,000 invoice for a wrench and expect to get paid for it twice, plus kickbacks.

My interest is primarily about the difference between what it costs to do X the traditional/mainstream way, and what it costs (in time, money and quality) to do X yourself, or using sub-contractors. My expectation — and this may be wrong — is that it will be cheaper to do many of these things yourself, in part because you’re not going to have any mysterious padding.

One big advantage, obviously, is that an individual’s costs don’t need to take (much) overhead into account. That’s a tremendous burden for the publishing industry to have to deal with right now. Pressure to cut staff/payroll is going to be horrendous over the next few years.

On the point of physical costs, I wasn’t sure if cover costs included the actual production of the cover itself, or just the design. Clearly the cover is a different object in terms of composition (from the pages), so that makes sense. Then again, the costs I see cited are not per-x-copies, which you would think they would have to be if the costs of the copy were a factor. I.e., a flat rate for the design, but then a per-copy cost (by the thousands, say) for materials, etc. (Which is my way of saying I’m still confused.)

In the end, I’m still interested in the cost floor for an individual, and how that relates to each step up the publishing ladder, from self-pub to POD costs to full-blown publishing house costs. I’m also interested how all this price competition will affect these prices in the future. It’s hard to imagine that things will get more expensive, except perhaps in artisanal works.

I believe the average cover designer gets about $1000-$1500 per jacket. That could take many designs — or maybe they nail it first shot.

In your cover design example, I’d also add in things like the actual physical cover. Cost of paper, cost of color, extras like foil or stepbacks. And so on.

I have no idea if the numbers you’ve quote are high, low, or just right because there are so may variables. Every house is different. The costs for a digital only publisher, for example, would be far lower. A textbook publisher would be much higher. And so on.