A Little Peek into Publishing, from a Micro Press Point of View

Published April 21, 2026

By Sam Knight

August of 2025, I was working on the biggest anthology I had done: Win in the End. (A fund-raising anthology for Annmarie SanSevero.

With 34 contributors, it came in around 140,000 words, nearly three times the size of a typical anthology. Not a big deal, just more pages, right?

Not really.

There are things a publisher needs to consider in order to make—or avoid losing—money. In this case, I was donating time and effort as publisher and editor, and so were all the authors, my co-editor, my cover artist/designer, and my promoter/marketer, so that wasn’t the same concern as usual. No money was going into the production of the anthology, just a lot of donated time and effort.

But if a fund-raising anthology doesn’t make money, then what’s the point?

Putting 140,000 words into my typical/preferred layout/format, 5.5″ x 8.5″ in 12-point Garamond font, with a title page for each story and a page for each author’s biographical information, I discovered I was looking at over 650 pages.

Yeah, that’s only half the pages of Stephen King’s IT, but still, I work with print on demand, not print runs of thousands where bulk orders and the ability to use “cheap” paper save money. I was looking at a print cost of nearly $11 per book.

$11? you may think. That’s cheap for a book!

But that doesn’t consider real costs. Add approximately $1.30 per book shipping, if you order in bulk and can store them. Or $5 or more each, if ordered individually. Then add in the cost of shipping it again to a customer.

That makes customer’s price $18 at zero profit. Then we have to pay the credit card/transactions fees (a typical website point of sale cost is a monthly fee ($5 to $500) plus 2.9% + 30¢ per sale) and then income tax on top of that… When all is said and done, when you set the book price at what feels like a reasonable price point, you’re looking at a serious amount of not much earnings.

Which is why I don’t sell directly. (Though many do, but that is a different discussion!)

I sell through Draft2Digital, which not only deals with the distribution of books, but deals with paying authors their royalties directly. Which means I don’t have to deal with the collection and redistribution of monies, and more importantly, income taxes and 1099 forms. 1099 forms are required for royalties over $10 and are printed on special paper and have to be purchased. Each costs about $3 per form, unless you buy them in bulk which a) I wouldn’t need that many and b) no guarantee those forms will be valid next year. Then, each form is triplicate. One for your records, one you have to mail to the author, and one you have to mail to the IRS.

Anyway, that adds up. Sometimes to more than the $10 royalty. That’s why publishers want to pay only after certain thresholds are met.

Yay Draft2Digital for making publishing something I can afford!

But back to Win in the End.

While the cost of printing was $11, the “minimum list price” for a book of 650 pages was $23.80. That meats that if I wanted Amazon or B&N or anyone else to sell the print book, the minimum cover price had to be $23.80 so Draft2Digital and the retailer could each earn enough off of a sale for them to bother.

At the “minimum list price,” royalty earnings are $0.00. Which meant I don’t make any money.

Correction. Annemarie didn’t make any money. Which was the whole point of this anthology.

So, price the anthology at $25 and everyone is happy, right? Well, that would earn Annmarie about 50¢ per sale. Maybe. Some retailers take more than others (no names mentioned to protect the guilty). So really, it would be maybe 35¢ or 40¢ per sale, and she would still have to report income tax on that, no matter how little it is.

At what point is that money worth the time and effort for her, as compared to our charity only making things more difficult?

A typical anthology from a micro press sells less than 100 copies, total, ever. (Ignore what the internet says. Most anthologies by small publishers/indie-authors sell around 50 copies, maybe.) So, 100 x 50¢ (being generous) earns Annmarie about $50 before taxes.

Yay! 40 people donating untold hours did that!

We’d be better off each giving her $1.

So, I sat down to figure out how to change the formatting to lower the cost and raise the profit.

I changed trim size from 5.5″ x 8.5″ to 6″ x 9″, which is the biggest I feel is comfortable to hold and read. It is still a common size, and readers don’t generally think anything of it until they put it on the shelf next to other books and notice it is a little bigger. That changed the unit cost to $9.36 and minimum price to $20.80. At $24.99, that increases earnings to about $1.89 per sale. Better, but not good enough. That’s too high of a price point for the typical buyer, and I wanted Annmarie to earn something useful.

So, I made smaller margins. While I was at it, I also messed with the font, using 11.5 instead of 12, which I have found is a difference most people can’t see without being told. I also played with the kerning, meaning the letters will be closer together, which again most people don’t usually notice unless you point it out to them.

I took out blank pages, which I usually use because I like each story to have a blank page before the story, so the reader is not still looking at/thinking about the end of the previous story when starting a new one. I usually use a title page for each story, because I feel like it helps each story feel special, but I skipped those as well. That cut over 70 pages, which made the cost per book nearly $1 less.

In the end, I won Win in the End. I got it down to 316 pages, half of where I started, and the price point set at $19.99, which I feel is a good one, with estimated royalties at $3.25 per sale, 650% higher than where I started, so if we only sell 100 copies, Annmarie will still get $325. That’s finally not nothing.

So, as an author, does this apply to you?

Well that if a publisher sets a word limit and you go past it, you are adding pages, which means you are adding production cost, which means you’ve lowered the profit margin for every single copy sold.

This is why publishers reject stories over word limits and why they get upset at big revisions that add to the word count. (This is also why they don’t like when writers miss deadlines. If they don’t have the final story, they don’t have the final page count, which means they don’t have… )

*****

You can read more about Annmarie SanSevero’s anthology here: https://knightwritingpress.com/win-in-the-end/)

Sam Knight is the owner/publisher of Knight Writing Press and author of six children’s books, four novels, and over 80 short stories, including three co-authored with Kevin J. Anderson. Though he has written in many cool worlds, such as Planet of the Apes, Wayward Pines, and Jack L. Chalker’s Well World, among his family, Sam will always be known for Chunky Monkey Pupu. He can be found at SamKnight.com and contacted at sam@samknight.com