Is your company feeling the profit squeeze? You’re not alone.

“It’s so expensive to publish books,” says She Writes Press publisher Brooke Warner. “Labor is expensive. Printing is expensive. Shipping is expensive. The margins on books are so tight, and the costs just keep going up.”

All Directions

Indeed, the pressure on profits seems to come from all directions. At Sunbury Press, CEO Larry Knorr cites price increases from service and printing vendors along with rising wages for staff as contributing to the squeeze. “Ingram also switched to requiring wire transfers versus credit cards for payment,” he says. “This shifted the cost of credit to us from them.”

Adding to the challenges, Knorr notes “a deluge of returns” in the fourth quarter of 2024. “This held us back from a strong year,” he says. “Returns are a very inefficient aspect of the business, and we are looking to curtail them as much as we can via better planning.” Other publishers note the impact of inflation and tariffs, which, as of this writing, remain in a state of flux. “We heard at PubWest that both paper and metal prices will be increasing due to the tariffs,” says Amy Barrett-Daffin, publisher at C&T Publishing. “We also see the impact of inflation on printing, freight, and shipping costs. All of these continue to rise, and independent publishers do not have volume or leverage to manage these cost increases.”

Crossed Crow Books President Blake Malliway says tariffs are also cutting into his bottom line. “The biggest issue we’ve faced recently [is] the growing tariffs on imported goods, especially for the tarot and oracle decks that we publish,” he says. “Pricing was fixed and files were sent to the offshore printers long before these tariffs went in, so to be slapped with these fees and not being able to offset them with an increase in pricing makes publishing decks pretty unrealistic.”

Profits can even stall over something as seemingly far removed as contract language, a lesson hybrid publisher Bryna Haynes of WorldChangers Media learned the hard way. In her first year in the business, her contracts failed to include clear author deadlines and extension policies. Four years later, she’s still dealing with a backlog of tardy projects, cutting into her revenues.

The Manufacturing Side

Book manufacturers are getting hit by the profit squeeze, too. “Initially, we mostly tried to eat the minor increases to remain competitive,” says Total Printing Systems President Rick Lindemann. “But it didn’t take long before we were forced to pass along the increases, increasing our overall pricing.”

A board member of the Book Manufacturing Institute, Lindemann notes that paper prices are a huge factor in the rising cost of manufacturing. “Mills had been taking supply out of the market off and on for years,” he says. “But the pandemic gave them the excuse they needed to ‘right size,’ reducing capacity to a point where supply and demand has forced prices to remain high even years later.”

Lindemann says he has come to expect paper prices to increase by a few percentage points every six months or so. But for coated paper, prices fluctuate even more. “Coated paper in North America is only being produced by about three companies right now,” he says. “So, coated paper could still have a fair amount of volatility for the foreseeable future.”

Tariffs may cause additional scrambles in the paper market. “We purchase 90% of our paper domestically, so for the most part, we should be okay,” Lindemann says. “That being said, the other 10% we get from Canada, so that could be an issue if we eventually have to change to a domestic source.”

Printing Options

With costs rising, should publishers opt for offset or digital printing?

“In general, I believe 90% of the titles printed don’t ever need to be produced via offset,” Lindemann says. “In most cases, unless the publisher is certain they’re going to sell more than 5,000 copies of a title in the first year, they are better off producing just-in-time inventory digitally.”

Noting a “substantially higher unit cost” with print on demand (POD), Malliway opts for printing inventory for a full year of sales on most titles. “Afterwards, we switch to [a] replenishment model where we invest in smaller runs just to make sure inventory is on hand and immediately ready to go out as soon as an order comes in,” he says.

If Malliway has reason to doubt how well a title will sell, he may only print enough copies for the first six to eight months of sales. “Scaling back on those first runs allows us to take a more calculated risk on new authors without so much upfront investment,” he says.

At her hybrid company, Haynes benefits from having authors fund the print costs. “I’m actually seeing more authors interested in investing in print runs versus POD because of the quality of the product and the earning potential with bulk sales,” she says.

Sunbury is moving in the opposite direction. “The costs of capital and logistics are making offset less attractive, especially for fiction titles,” Knorr says. “Over time, we have decreased our on-hand inventory and shifted more to POD.”

Workarounds

Characteristically creative and nimble, independent publishers are finding tactics to salvage profits despite the squeeze. “The primary way to beat the cost increases is to scale up,” Knorr says. Sunbury has increased its schedule by 20% this year, and they’re adding more interns to their staff.

Sunbury has also dropped its publicity service, turning instead to in-house, AI-assisted PR efforts. “Our sales are up ever since,” Knorr says.

Malliway studies return figures to see how he can better tip the scales in his favor. “We try to scrub our highest returns at the end of the month to see if we can figure out why,” he says. “We try to push a bit more focused marketing to our higher return titles to see if we can give them a small boost in sales.”

Lindemann suggests publishers work with their printers to get the best value for their dollars. “If you’re able to align your book’s format to your printer’s optimal [trim] sizes, you should be able to use the least amount of paper possible,” he says.

Publishers can also cut costs with their paper choice. “Depending on the style of book, there can be many paper options to choose from,” Lindemann says. “Simply going to a lighter weight of paper can make a decent difference in the overall book cost.” For publishers using a natural stock, he notes that groundwood can reduce the paper price by 20% or more.

For publishers looking to maximize their profits with direct-to-consumer sales, Lindemann suggests partnering with a printer for storage and fulfillment. “Many can offer print-on-demand services, too, to keep your books shipping even if you run out of stock for a few days,” he says.

Joining Forces

To leverage their purchasing power and maximize efficiencies, publishers are turning to cooperative ventures such as The Stable Book Group and the Publishers Cooperative.

The Stable Book Group is a parent corporation that brings successful independent publishers under one umbrella, where they share services while maintaining editorial independence. For Warner, whose She Writes Press has joined the book group, cost efficiencies are but one advantage.

“This was really about wanting to have a thought partner in the publishing space,” Warner says. “Publishing is challenging, and I was interested in working with people who are forward-thinking about indie publishing and the future of publishing. This is a tough industry, and the more minds on a problem the better, as long as you’re aligned in your vision.”

The venture has only recently launched, but Warner says member-publishers are already anticipating savings through both efficiencies and economies of scale. “The bigger you are as a group, the more you stand to benefit from economies of scale and volume discounts,” she says. “We are looking at how to get competitive bids by using PerfectBound, which is interconnected with The Stable’s imprints. We’ll also be [looking into] how we can ship more efficiently by grouping our shipments.”

As six imprints work toward common systems, challenges will inevitably arise, but Warner notes that these are also opportunities for reinvention and resetting. “The point is great, salable books,” she says. “This validates everything I’ve ever stood for—that we need to be judging a book on its merits and not on how it gets published.”

The Publishers Cooperative is more an aggregate of existing companies and their business structures. That difference aside, its goals mirror those of The Stable Book Group: to increase profitability through shared  buying power, operational efficiencies, and knowledge.

With the help of consultants, members Gibbs-Smith, Schiffer Publishing, Mountaineers Books, and C&T Publishing launched the Publishers Cooperative in 2021. It has since expanded to include Adventure KEEN, Soho Publishing Company, and Mango Publishing Group. The Stable Book Group is a member, too, and additional publishers are looking to sign on.

Member publisher Amy Barrett-Daffin of C&T Publishing says the cooperative is testing its shared buying concept with printing, freight forwarding, and shipment consolidation. “We are already seeing a significant decrease in costs across the board,” she says. In the future, the cooperative plans to add more group purchasing options. Barrett-Daffin points to “great results” in a proof-of-concept effort involving international printing, led by Schiffer Publishing. “Our next effort will be to work with US printers to do the same proof of concepts,” she says.

Barrett-Daffin urges publishers who are doing more than a million in printing annually to consider joining the cooperative. “We are able to share information and learn from each other in a way that is unique and wonderful,” she says. “My favorite part of each meeting is when we check in and share news and ideas.”

Doing More with Less

No one wants a profit squeeze. We would all rather see profits soar. But economic and market conditions don’t always cooperate.

Malliway sums it up this way: “We’re trying to do more with less now, which is easy for me to say on paper, but we’re still trying as a company to figure out how to do more with less.”

With the impact of higher costs, tariffs, and returns, that challenge is likely to continue into the foreseeable future. But independent publishers are resilient. Whether by changing course or banding together, they are finding ways to adjust.

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