You are wondering how I decide which books are sufficiently profitable …

There are (or there should be)  two kinds of books to which I say “yes”:

• Those that I believe will be sufficiently profitable in the cool light of logic and with my business goals held firmly in mind.
• Those for which I consciously overrule my business judgment because the book is important or interesting to me.

I have been doing some number-crunching to help me understand which are which.  This does not necessarily mean I will refuse to publish books that aren’t in the first category, it simply means that I want to know what I am choosing to do.

After I calculate the probable cost of production and marketing, I arrive at a revenue target that I want to achieve in the first year elapsed after publication (e.g. the twelve months  from pub date of June 1 2009 to May 31 2010). Everything else is “backlist gravy” as far as I am concerned.  Since I use a pricing algorithm that makes the net revenue per book sold the same for all titles, it is easy to calculate the number of books I must sell in the first year in order to achieve my revenue target. In theory, I should only publish books that look as if they will meet this goal.

In 2008 and so far in 2009, the following books performed well enough (on an annualized basis adjusted for dates of publication throughout the year) to achieve my revenue targets:

• Should Barack Obama Be President?
• The John Boyd Roundtable
• BB-67 Montana, U.S. Navy Battleship
• Battleship Yamato: Why She Matters Today
• The Shack Critiqued
• Globalistan: An Antidote To The World Is Flat
• Iowa Class Battleship Conversions
• The Unauthorized Harry Potter Quiz Book
• The World Is Flat: Not! Cool New World Maps For Kids
• Age of Obama: A Reporter’s Journey with Clinton, McCain and Obama in The Making of the President, 2008
• Threats in the Age of Obama
• The Definitive Illustrated History of the Torpedo Boat – Volume I, Overview (The Ship Killers)

“On the bubble”–i.e., earning at a rate pretty darned close to my 12-month target, and likely to achieve the target in 13-24 months:

• In The Shadow of the Battleship
• CVN-78 GERALD R. FORD, U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier
• Persuader-in-Chief: Global Opinion and Public Diplomacy in the Age of Obama
• THE WORLD IS FLAT: NOT! Cool New World Maps for Kids
• Misquotes in MISQUOTING JESUS: Why You Can Still Believe
• CVN-77 GEORGE H. W. BUSH, U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier (Colorful Ships #3)
• A Fandom Of Magical Proportions: An Unauthorized History Of The Harry Potter Phenomenon
• CVN-68 Nimitz, U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier
• Cool Maps For Curious Kids #2:  Afghanistan

In the remaining category of “darn it, not profitable enough!” falls is everything else: conscious experiments, books published for principled or personal reasons, and simple flops.  Of course, I wish I knew why things fall into one category or another!  I have some ideas, but (like all publishers in all media) I do a lot of guessing, too.