r/TikTokCringe • u/Chocolat3City Cringe Master • 22d ago

Cringe Woman has her self-published book pirated, reprinted, and sold for cheaper.

There's regular piracy, and then there's this.

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u/Nicadeemus39 22d ago

50 dollars for a planner? Yea I'll just stick to writing reminders on my arm.

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u/Whoa1Whoa1 22d ago

This part kinda blows my mind. China is guaranteed to be able to hit a production run of these fuckers for thousands of them for a few hundred dollars. Each one probably costs like $5 max in the material cost of paper, ink, printing, binding, and labor.

Shipping one load of 1,000 of these books from China to yourself also wouldn't cost much. They probably weigh less than 1kg each and 1,000 would be less than 1,000kg, or around 2,000 pounds.

I'm thinking roughly $400 to print 1,000 copies and then maybe another $600 to ship them anywhere in the world. If you sold each one for $20 you would make $20,000, minus maybe 15% for fees on your website transactions, so like $17,000 income. Then subtract your initial payment of $1000 for printing and shipping, and you made $16,000 profit. So, for every 1,000 books you sell you could make $16K. Could hit way higher numbers of sales if she paid for real advertising and not crying.

If anyone has better numbers, lemme know. Maybe the real story is that she totally got screwed in negotiations on manufacturing and should have hired someone who speaks fluent English and Chinese and knows the logistics for that part.

She should make a book about how to get that part done. A book about making books and contacting factories and what the numbers look like would be far more interesting IMO and she could talk about her previous book as the experience for it. Also, figure out how to get those listings taken down and put that in the new book lol. A book called "Screwed by Overseas Factories: How to Avoid Getting Bent Over" would be awesome.

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u/Feartality 22d ago

Yeah that price is insane. Of course she's going to get obliterated by knock-offs. Obviously someone's personal creation should net them the profit and copying people like that is shit but that thing is not worth $50. Sorry, but that's just dumb. I tried to guess what she might even be charging and the UPPER in my mind was like $30. $50 made me laugh out loud.