Do Larger Publishers Have More Overhead?
There is a perception among some people that smaller companies are better because they have a smaller overhead. I noticed this when talking about building contractors. A friend of mine thought a large company would tack more onto the contract to cover the cost of paying office personnel. I noticed that Jeff Gerke holds that same view as it relates to publishers. Traditional Christian publishing companies have so many employees and so much overhead that they have to sell at least 5,000 units of any book in order to break even. MLP has one staff member and has such a low overhead that it needs to sell only 250 units of any title to break even. (Jeff Gerke, MLP Website ) Jeff’s assertion is that a company like Random House, the parent company of one of his former employers, with about 6,000 employees or even the much smaller Christian publisher Thomas Nelson, with about 700 employees, can’t make a profit from a book that sells only a small number of copies. That's an interesting claim...