In my State of the Union post, #1000, I provided some of Snowbooks' key performance metrics. Here they are again if you missed them:

• Average Sale per unit £2.26
• Average margin per unit £0.88
• Returns: 20%
• Stock value: £35k
• Sales/print multiple: 1.9x

An anonymous commenter from a business books publisher provided their metrics too:

• Average Sale per unit £11.17
• Average margin per unit £5.22.
• Returns: 6%
• Stock value: £48k
• Sales/print multiple: 2.32x

Which is utterly fascinating. Please, do post your own here, anonymously is fine (use my email address when you're posting your comment if you like - emma at snowbooks.com.) I think this would be really useful for people to see, and might provide us all with some useful insight.

I've provided more info on how to calculate these numbers below the cut.

• Average Sale per unit

Total value sales (what you get from customers) for the last 12 months
divided by
Total volume sales (how many units you've sold)

• Average margin per unit

Total margin (which is sales, minus print cost for those sales, minus other direct costs, minus royalties)
divided by
Total volume sales.

• Returns
Either
Gross sales minus net sales
divided by
Gross sales
multiplied by 100 to express as a %

Or
Total returns (if you have that data)
divided by
Gross sales
multiplied by 100 to express as a %

• Stock value
a) Calculate your average cost per unit:
Total units printed across all print runs for each title
divided by
Total invoiced print bills for each title (add up the invoice values).

b) Multiply this average cost per unit by your total stock on hand.

• Sales/print multiple
Net sales
divided by
Total print costs