Secrets Of Book Publishing
I was just reading this article: “Secrets of Book Publishing I Wish I Had Known” over at Good Experience. From what I’ve learned on a daily basis at a modest-sized independent bookstore chain, a lot of this information is exactly right.
And when you consider that the average reader doesn’t read all that much - heck, I can’t even read nearly as much as I want to - and there are so many books being published, it shouldn’t be too hard to see why 10-15 thousand copies is a successful book. And that’s 10-15 thousand dollars for the author. If we can assume a perfect market here, (I’ll get to that…) then the obvious message is: Stop writing so many books, there are too many as it is. Heck, if nobody ever wrote another new book, the publishers could keep cranking out the classics, and you still wouldn’t read them all.
And they wonder why the book is dying. It might be nice for books to be scarce enough to value them highly - but it doesn’t do much for society… Hold on - it may not even matter if people can get their ideas from the Internet.
Books are not all the same - you might have noticed. They are never going to be commodities “give me a bushel of paperbacks…”, except in the case of those “Books By The Foot” operations for decorating the homes of rich people who want a badge of literacy. What’s that kind of market called? I’ll have to go looking for it… Each book almost has its own market - but there is still some coupling among books that are not exactly substitutes. Deciding which book to buy involves substitutes if you just want to read. If you’re poor and want to read, you can pick up a used copy (sometimes from dumpsters, even), a remainder or a Dover thrift edition. If you absolutely have to have the latest book by your favorite author on the day it is released, or want it autographed, then you can’t just buy some other book. I’m tempted to say that you can buy any book, throw that in the dumpster, and claim “Sales are up by one book! All authors benefit incrementally!”
Posted by Evan Bittner Sat, 26 Jul 2008 13:15:00 GMT
