The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know®

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

This is spelled out by the fact that 49 percent of traditional publishers’ adult fiction unit sales in 2016 were represented by e-books and audio sales. To further cement this trend, when you look at all traditional and nontraditional adult fiction 2016 sales units together, a full 70 percent of those sales are composed of e-book and audio sales. A

How do publishers calculate their profits? Here’s how book-publishing economics actually works. A publishing house has overheads that are reasonably fixed: primarily rent and salaries but also travel and entertainment, insurances, legal and accounting, and the costs all businesses have to keep operating and keep their doors open. Unless there is so

The standard hardcover bestseller nowadays is 6'' x 9'' and an inch and a half in bulk, leading to that larger-than-life brick of a book sensation that writers of long works like Baldacci, DeMille, and others are given.

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

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.

Making a standard trade deal means the author will get broader distribution, but the price of the book will go up to the consumer (costing sales) and the share of the price that goes to the author will diminish sharply. Nonetheless, some authors find self-publishing a path to finding a publisher and, for many, the trade-off of greater exposure and

Paper, of course, is a major component of the printing cost. Houses sometimes buy their own paper either to fit a consistent look and feel or to take advantage of purchasing economies of scale.

The biggest university press publishers—and Oxford University Press, the publisher of this book, is by far the largest in the world—are complex organizations publishing in a range of formats (sometimes including subscription journals, not just books). They are generally more rigorous about the content of their books than commercial trade houses, pu