Pricing DWG’s Instant - Books Editions

Discovery Walking Guides Experience
At Discovery Walking Guides (DWG) we’re into our second decade as a conventional publisher and feel that we are a bit more scientific than other publishers in pricing our products as we do ask our DWG Client Family what they think. For our Walk! UK series of books we asked which type of binding they would prefer, given that ‘wire-O spiral binding’ compared to traditional ‘perfect bound’ would mean the books had to be priced at £12.99 rather than £11.99. Replies to DWG’s e-mail poll of our clients showed 84% in favour of ‘wire-O spiral binding’ even though the resulting books would cost a £1 more - DWG’s Walk! UK series was published in ‘wire-O spiral binding’ with a recommended retail price of £12.99.

Instant-Books Editions of Discovery Walking Guides Books & Maps
Instant-Books faces a slightly different dilemma in that ‘digital downloads’ in UK are subject to VAT at 17.5%, while conventional books and maps are Zero Rated for VAT. When converting DWG titles into Instant-Books Editions we decided to drop the ‘printing cost’, along with our ‘pick, pack, post’ costs of supplying DWG titles by mail order.
The result, after taking into account a warehousing and financial risk cost, is that we could offer an Instant-Books Edition of a DWG £12.99 book at £4.99 while paying our Authors the same amount of royalty per copy sold; that whopping 40%! Now they make more if they sell an Instant-Books Edition than if they sold the conventional book!
For DWG’s ‘Tour & Trail’ maps the situation is slightly different as Instant-Books will be offering a slightly different product in technical specification. Tour & Trail Super-Durable Maps at £7.99 are widely recognised as great value maps but we will be pricing these Instant-Books Editions at only £2.99 per map sheet; yet as the author I make a higher royalty on the digital Instant-Books Editions.

A General Pricing Model for Instant-Books Editions
DWG’s policy on pricing digital Instant-Books Editions is that the saving we make by having a digital product are passed to the buyer of that product, while the author earns as much (or more) as selling a conventional book.
Taking out the costs of producing, storing and delivering a coventional £12.99 book mean we can sell the Instant-Books Edition at £4.99 with Instant ‘no cost’ Delivery.
Our client gets a £12.99 book for £4.99 in digital form. Our Author gets a £1.70 royalty, compared to £1.30 on a conventional book.
Even ‘HM Revenue & Customs’ gets £0.74 VAT, compared to Zero on a conventional book.
It’s an ‘everyone wins’ situation.

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