The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know®

First and foremost, Audible, now Amazon’s audiobook arm, is a technology company at heart, having started out in 1998, two years after opening its doors, by launching a digital audio player some four years before the iPod came out. It was limited in what it could hold but had the seeds of the company’s philosophy in effect to this day of uniquely e

What makes the book business different from all other businesses? In a single word: “granularity.” There are just so many more books than there are movies or TV shows or albums of music, and that effect alone would create massive differences in audience identification and marketing strategy. In figurative terms, Hollywood has always produced hundre

Most nonfiction books are acquired from a proposal describing the book and its audience, an outline or table of contents for the entire book, and a sample of the book’s writing, which might be a couple of chapters. For fiction from a debut author, more—perhaps the entire manuscript—would be required upfront for a house to make a purchase commitment

What’s in it for them? Agents make a percentage of what the publisher pays the author—typically 15 percent of the advance and subsequent royalties—but they get paid only if the book is sold to the publisher.

There are several: books don’t die anymore and disappear from the competition, and in fact, books that were thought to have died have been brought back to life in the digital no-inventory-necessary world. That adds further competition to face each new book as it is published and makes the challenge more difficult for each new commercial effort.

Large houses almost always base their volume royalty rates on the retail price; smaller houses frequently base it on the net money received by the publisher. This applies to royalty rates on export sales as well.

Here’s the deal: for virtually every new distribution channel or new publishing format since the seventeenth century when the ubiquity of movable type allowed publishers to pre-sell long expensive works in low-cost installments known as “Fascicles,” the early adopting consumers have been the book addicts, the readers who have not been able to get e

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

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