Paper is manufactured in sheets. When you hold a blank piece of paper you’re holding a sheet, not just a page. A sheet of paper has two sides — the front side and the back side. When you print on paper you have two pages — the front is page one, the back is page two. In printing, by definition, a page is always one side of a sheet.

If you draw 24 pages for your book then you need to order a 24 page book (which will use 12 sheets of paper — one drawing for each side of the sheet of paper, and thus two pages).  If you intend that the back-side of each drawing should be a blank page, then you have to order a 48-page book.

Don’t count the front and back covers. The cover is a separate issue as it is always a single double-wide sheet of paper with full-color printing on one side only.

Your profit is always the difference between what you sell your book for and what you paid for the book. Reducing that profit, though, are the costs of getting and delivering the books to the final customers. As a result, you should always try to anticipate your direct fulfillment costs (things such as shipping costs to get the books, and then the cost of shipping envelopes/boxes, packing materials, address labels, packing slips, and the time it takes to prepare and send the books to the final customer--these, all told, can easily add up to $2.00 to the cost of the book to you--assuming the customer pays for shipping charges).

Flying Chipmunk Comics Press offers the services of selling the books through other channels, such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Baker & Taylor; as well as supporting direct bookstore purchases. These secondary services require that the book be sold to them at a discount from the normal retail price offered by you. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc., will not list a book unless they have a 30% discount off the Retail price. While this does reduce your profits, being able to sell your book everywhere through Amazon and Barnes & Noble adds a convenience to customers that can add substantially to your sales.

Bookstores purchase their books from distributors like Baker & Taylor and Ingram Distributors. If the book has only a 30% discount available, B&T and Ingram offer the book to bookstores with only a 5% discount. This low profit means most bookstores will purchase the book only if a customer specifically orders it. B&T and  Ingram will give a 30% discount to bookstores only if they themselves receive a 55-65% discount first. So, if you want to have bookstores carry you book, you will have to make it available with a minimum 55% discount. This is not a split discount between Amazon and B&N, and Ingram and B&T, the discount is the same to all of them.