Sublime

At the stage of assessing whether a publisher will pursue a given book project, various stakeholders at the publishing house have to assess the financial side of the book in question as well as its quality and suitability for them. Specifically, they have to come up with a budget for the book, known as a P&L, or profit and loss statement.

After book clubs had become established, the next great nontraditional publishing wave was of course the mass-market paperback revolution—the “dime-novels,” “pocket-books,” or—in industry parlance—“rack-sized” paperbacks that began to impact the industry in earnest in 1939, only a decade or so after the book clubs first shook things up.

By far the biggest provider of printed books—mostly through one-at-a-time print-on-demand—for indies is Ingram’s venerable Lightning Print operation.

I won’t go into much detail here, other than to say that, conceptually, I think of these books fundamentally as content (and therefore traffic sources), rather than products (to make money from). Sure, our regular customers also like to buy our books, so it works both ways. However, fundamentally the role of books, to my mind, is to reach new audie

The morality of a great writer is not the morality he teaches, but the morality he takes for granted.