What it means
The wholesale discount (or trade discount) is the gap between a book's cover price and what the trade pays for it. A 55% discount is the industry's full rate: the wholesaler (Ingram, Gardners) keeps part and passes the rest — typically 40–46% — to the bookshop, which needs that margin to survive. Publishers who set a short discount of 30–40% keep more per copy but find that shops decline to stock the book, because the margin no longer covers the shelf space.
The arithmetic for a print-on-demand author: income per copy = list price × (1 − discount) − printing cost. A $16.99 paperback at 55% discount with a $4.50 print cost returns about $3.15; at a 40% discount, about $5.69 — but only where the retailer accepts 40%.
Online retailers selling from their own print network use their own fixed splits instead, and direct sales from an author's storefront carry no wholesale discount at all.
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