How will the biggest publishers respond to the changing marketplace? First of all, publishers will need to be acquisitive to support overheads. Their sales forces need a minimum number of books to sell to support them; their warehouses need a minimum number of books to ship to be viable. Print

As we write, Amazon is also moving aggressively to build a brick-and-mortar store capability, the future shape of which is still unknown. But since Barnes & Noble is candid about shrinking its bookselling presence, mass merchants are finding books less attractive than they used to be, and independent bookstores are, at best, growing slowly, it

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

With Microsoft pushing the CD-ROM concept, the conventional wisdom at the time was that products delivered on floppy disks, with so much less “richness” than what a CD-ROM would hold, wouldn’t be competitive in the new razzle-dazzle marketplace of products that CD-ROM drives in every computer would create. And thus began a wild goose chase that las

For a variety of reasons, publication of a book usually still takes as much as a year—from creating galleys (which we discuss more in Chapter 3) early in production for publicity after publication, in order to allow plenty of time for popular revenue venues that are inundated with new books every day, to getting “preorders” from the public and “adv

the companies that merged in 2013 to become Penguin Random House (PRH)—in 2016 they are said by Publishers Weekly to have had €3.7 billion in revenues, on the backs of 15,000 new titles worldwide. Let’s assume that their backlist is three times as large as the frontlist, so real annual revenues per title across a universe of about 60,000 titles wou

What does the nontraditional publishing world look like beyond Amazon? Although Amazon dominates this market, some choose to publish through channels beyond Amazon because Amazon doesn’t reach other bookstores much at all, doesn’t reach other e-book formats, and really hardly scratches the surface on libraries with print books.

Stores routinely order books before they’re printed to arrive as soon as they are printed. These are the “advance orders”: the books in place for purchase on the official publication date (about a month after books ship). That’s when reviews are to run and books are in place for consumers to buy.

Of course, galleys today might not be printed; they might be electronic or “e-galleys” instead. There has been a service for more than a decade called NetGalley, which makes it easy and much cheaper than it would otherwise be to distribute physical proofs to get the book in front of potential reviewers.