For years, people from outside the book business would look at what we did and wonder, “Don’t you do any market research on what you publish?” There were a lot of explanations for why we didn’t, but they often boiled down to one cold hard fact: “The first printing is the market research.” Until a book is out and available for sale, and people

It is not clear why this shift to foreign ownership of US publishing has happened. But one possible reason is the change in the organization of the English-language world, which took place in the early 1970s. Before that time, the English-language world was divided by overt agreement between New York, where American publishers controlled the books

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

Publishers are responsible for squeezing all the revenue they can out of an author’s book. All publishers are expected to be set up to handle the principal publication of the book as a whole, often called “volume rights,” and for that the royalties are paid on sales according to the contract. But there are other ways to get revenue that depend on

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.

Suddenly, every bestseller had competition with the copies of the same book that had sold last week or last month. The more copies it sold, the more used books could follow it into the marketplace. That meant that all the books—including books newly on the bestseller list—had used copies available at a substantial discount from the new book price.

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

big books under contract for the newly formed Amazon Publishing. However, getting those big books depended on Amazon’s being able to secure distribution for their books outside Amazon. The enticement of advances and special marketing through the dominant online bookseller wouldn’t attract really successful authors if their books wouldn’t be in

On the digital side, for the last three or four years at least, Amazon’s e-book sales growth has been almost entirely driven by lower-cost titles from self-published ‘indie’ authors, digital-first presses, and Amazon’s own in-house publishing imprints. The more established publishers have seen very little of that e-book growth; the industry’s