It has long been established practice for trade publishers to print that price on the book’s jacket or cover and, in general (even today), most stores usually sell most books at the prices marked by the publisher.

The Audio Publishers Association survey says that frequent audio listeners are under the age of thirty-five. And overall the users are about 90 percent adults, which makes sense given the visual nature of so many books for children.

Then each book has two kinds of costs: the investments required to publish it at all (author’s advance and what used to be called design and typesetting but which would now be better described as “creating a print-ready file”) and unit production costs, the “paper, presswork, and binding” of the actual printed units. There is virtually no

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

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

The publicity and marketing planning that is done most effectively when the manuscript is complete—both because then the house really knows what the book is and because at that point the publisher can plan the publication schedule without the variable of how long it will take the author to finish writing—means there is little incentive in most

Editors also have to ask themselves, once the projected sales and revenue for a book have been sharpened with input from colleagues around the company, whether the expectations (a) meet those of the author and agent, or whether there is likely to be a disconnect there; and (b) whether the scale of the book matches the amount of time and work the

The biggest publishers get nearly all their books through agents, so agents are effectively both scouts for new material and gatekeepers acting as editorial filters before publishers even see a work.

Publishers will also need to change their marketing practices. They must create cheaper ways to reach consumers. That suggests both “vertical” websites, where they could get “relevant” traffic for some of their books, and “email lists.” The big publishers have been collecting email “permissions” (an idea first articulated by digital thinker Seth