Audiobooks, whose first organized venture in the form of recordings for the blind came at the same time as mass-market paperbacks, are now coming into their own as the fastest growing segment of trade publishing, after a period of lesser popularity.

The temptation to overprint based on price breaks was recognized as a problem with a solution by an executive at Penguin in the early 1990s. Printing contracts were changed to charge a unit price based on the previous year’s “average” print runs, so there was no evident price break for larger reprint quantities. This saved the production department

As the number of bookstore accounts to call on has diminished, the rep role has been somewhat redefined. Almost all publishers have added telemarketing sales forces to complement the role of the field reps so that accounts can get more frequent attention with fewer traveling reps in the field.

Their books represented self-betterment or continuing education delivered to your door, enabling the busy workingman or woman to keep up with the culture of the day as chosen by these companies. The publishers served as curators, as they do today.

What does self-publishing look like beyond Amazon? The lion’s share—more than half in almost all cases and more than 80 percent in many, as far as we can tell—of indie book sales are through Amazon; however, they are not alone trying to serve the indie author and fledgling publisher.

wind at the back of audiobooks. They’re cheaper to make than they ever were before and they’re now very easy—just as easy as spelled-out words—to deliver as well. It seems reasonable to expect that long-form books will gradually decline and long-form audio will grab a larger share of consumer attention for many years to come.

Trade publishers, who are the biggest, the best known, and the focus of this book, are called that because they sell primarily through the book “trade,” which is bookstores, libraries, and the wholesalers—intermediaries that stock books from many publishers—that serve them.

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

“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.