The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know®

Online sales today represent more than half of all sales for most publishers, and they’re still growing.

In 1985, there were twelve key trade companies for whom we were able to get estimates of earnings. When we applied 2015 ownership to these twelve companies, the number shrank down to six companies that now controlled the volume encompassed by the twelve in our estimate in 1985. The top three companies in 1985 covered 48 percent of the trade busines

It can take seventeen hours of audio, delivered via download or in a chunky box of CDs, to completely read what was originally a 450-page book. And the industry rule of thumb is 6.2 hours of studio time for every finished hour of audio.

From the beginning of time as far as we can see, publishers have been most comfortable viewing each title as an individual profit center, as we discussed in Chapter 2, explaining the utility of a P&L at the acquisitions stage. It is usually easy enough to recognize the revenue attributable to a particular title and, of course, the direct costs

As the cliché goes, the internet changed everything, and more than two decades after it arrived, it hasn’t finished changing things yet. The movement of sales from brick-and-mortar stores to online retailers, which overwhelmingly means Amazon, and the new reality that consumers find out about books largely through online channels have required publ

Today all the companies that publish for the mass-market channel also publish trade books, and most of the mass-market books sold today are sold through trade channels. Because trade publishing is so broad in what it includes (any conceivable topic), audiences (across all ages and levels of seriousness), and formats (hardcovers, paperbacks, e-books

“Amazon’s book sales have continued to grow by double-digit percentages, year after year, both in print formats (hardcovers and paperbacks) and in digital formats (e-books and downloadable audiobooks). On the print side, the source of Amazon’s rapid growth splits roughly 50/50 between the zero-sum cannibalization of print sales drawn away from shri

How do publishers calculate their profits? Here’s how book-publishing economics actually works. A publishing house has overheads that are reasonably fixed: primarily rent and salaries but also travel and entertainment, insurances, legal and accounting, and the costs all businesses have to keep operating and keep their doors open. Unless there is so

And fourth, Amazon had the regular attention of almost every online book purchaser.

That includes the narrator’s recording time, editing time, and then quality control. What is significant is that the cost of production for an average unabridged title has come down from an average of $25,000 in the ’70s and ’80s to between $2,500 and $5,000 now.