Commercials/Financial decisions

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Financial/commercial whizzery such as ...

  • Pioneering treatment for combining content
  • Modelling costs/profits from different content systems
  • Break-even calculations (tools and philosophy)
  • Changing cycle (this one involving actual maths - gasp!)
  • pie chart
  • Changing the way the biz thought about "sliding" costs (costs that increase with every copy you sell, eg print/specs/colour/sheetmaps) and "fixed" costs (costs that you spend once, then reap the benefits)
  • ...and cultural stuff too, like changing the way commissioning editors treated commercial decisions.

As Associate Publisher, I had some financial responsibilities for all the guidebooks commissioned from the Melbourne office, which meant (print and English only)... coins

  • 96 titles (40,000 pages)
  • 3,500,000 sales
  • revenue $43,500,000
  • profit $22,000,000
  • costs $21,500,000
Or, per year, 32 titles (14,000 pages), 1,750,000 sales, $16M revenue, $8M profit, and $7½M costs.

(Note this is print only, and English-language only. There was approximately another 10% on top of this in ebook/online-PDF sales, and foreign-language print sales.) drop-in post-it note