The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know®

They also divide rights sales differently. Rights sales typically include sales to publishers in other countries and/or languages, or for “serial” publication (an excerpt in a magazine), or for a format (audio, perhaps, or something more unusual like a “promotional hardcover”) that the originating publisher doesn’t do.

Third, Amazon’s pricing strategy for the device and content reversed the normal razors and blades approach, which we discussed in Chapter 5.

Book contracts cover a wide range of issues, and therefore, agents’ changes to them do as well, from who gets to approve the cover design to who gets to sell the translation rights, and many questions in between. But the “deal” that is made comes down to royalties, advance, and rights, typically. The parties involved may go back and forth on these

Overall, returns have gone down as sales have shifted from retail stores to Amazon. Amazon’s returns are lower, probably without exception, than other retail accounts. Generally, the accounts that sell bigger numbers of fewer titles (like mass merchants) have higher returns and those that stock a broader array of titles, including a lot of backlist

“Returns” are the convention by which a publisher’s bookstore and wholesaler customers may send back unsold copies of a book and have most or all of the purchase price credited to their account.

Today there are five major US consumer publishers capable of publishing books in all formats and in all topics and consistently delivering bestsellers. They are Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster.

But in almost all cases, individual title marketing begins many months and perhaps a year before the book is published. Sometimes this work is merely “audience identification” to enable better targeting. But sometimes, in the internet age, publishers will start “teasing” a book’s forthcoming appearance to online audiences long before publication.

But they often kept their set prices higher than $9.99 and had, of course, reduced the share for intermediaries from 50 percent of the retail price to 30 percent.

What we’ve not yet addressed is the $1.25 billion consumer nontraditional US book industry—books created by individuals or entities that are not commercial publishers—that accounted for 297 million units sold in 2016. This is a full 20 percent of the roughly $6 billion traditional US trade book market.

Publishers must provide increased access to much more data—beginning with pre-publication meta-data that can be put to use in deciding where and how to spend publicity and marketing budgets up front. And then publishers need data from the field on inventory by type of account, and by region, and they need detailed point-of-sales data. Designing, st