How Are We Doing?

Updating a P&L after publication date.

Back in March, I wrote a newsletter that walked through a P&L for an upcoming title, to show how we project expenses and revenue for our books. I thought it’d be interesting to update this P&L with you all today, six weeks after publication, to show how accurate—or not—P&Ls can be.

Here is what our P&L for Cleveland in 50 Maps looked like before we started production:

Here are the numbers as of December 1 (everything below is pretty much true but also sort of fake news, to protect my business secrets ;)

For sales, we are definitely doing well, and on pace with what we projected:

—We have about 1000 copies through our distributor, with zero returns (yet!). We projected a total of 2500 with 625 returns, so I would say we are on pace, and this time next year the projected and actual tables with match up.

—We have sold about 600 copies directly. We are definitely beating our projection of 600 here (yay!). Plus, this number is more in flux than it appears, because of some outstanding i…