The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know®

“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

With the benefit of hindsight, we can identify at least four substantial differences between Amazon’s approach to e-books and the prior efforts from tech giants Palm, Microsoft, and Sony and a whole slew of start-ups that had tried to make what seemed like an obvious business work for over a decade without very much success.

bookstores. All of these stores need to be “covered” by sales representatives who pitch each individual book title to a buyer for each store (chain buyers buy for many stores, of course) in advance of its appearance, using a catalog and a book jacket to “present” the title.

Self-publishers would maximize their e-book revenues by individually loading the e-book on each self-publishing platform: B&N Nook, Kobo, Apple iBooks, Google Play, and even a smaller marketer like Smashwords. If you go directly to each of these platforms, you will pay no fee to a distributor.

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

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 stor

Rights might also be sold to use part of the book in some way, in a magazine or a collection of material including some from other books; these are called “first serial rights” if the portion in question is published first in such a venue, as a way of drumming up interest for the book that is appearing soon.

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 hous

The retail price is also the basis for the publisher’s price to retailers or wholesalers, expressed as a “discount” off the retail price. For stores this is generally in the neighborhood of 45 percent off retail (so the store would “buy” a $20 book from a publisher for $11) and for wholesalers and very large retail accounts like Amazon or Barnes &a