Have you done your market research? What's the size and make-up of your intended audience, do they prefer e-books or chunks of dead tree, do they habitually bro

Have you done your market research? What's the size and make-up of your intended audience, do they prefer e-books or chunks of dead tree, do they habitually browse bookstores or buy online -- or do they not tend to read books at all, but prefer a different written format (magazines, piece-works, chapbooks, or the like)? How much of the potential audience do you think your marketing channel(s) can reach and how high a conversion rate do you expect to get? From that point, how many books do you expect to sell? Only once you have a ball-park figure for the market can you run a title P & L sheet and use it to do what-if modeling considering different printing technologies (POD, conventional offset, or whatever). Intro to P & L calculations: http://www.bizmark.net/publishing.htm http://www.bizmark.net/publishing.htm Hint: marketing and distribution are key. The distribution tail eats around 60-70% of a conventional publisher's lunch -- the SRP for which books are sold -- and it you don't pay very close attention to your distribution chain you'll run the risk of seeing it eat your profit margin. (As the old joke puts it, the easiest way to make a small fortune in publishing is to start with a large one.)