February 3, 2006
Well, the blog was down most of the day, but when I got on I was going to write about bullshit and why there's so much of it on blogs, when RJ Baker asked a great question, and I tried to answer it in an intelligent fashion (or whatever passes for it in the bullshit world of the blogosphere). Here it is:

Mark;
I don't understand the dynamics of Hardcovers for new authors - the economics don't seen right. How can the book buying public be expected to shell out $25+ for an unknown author. Does it have to do with library sales? Why not trade paperbacks. It seems like the new author at least then has a fightling chance for someone to spend $10-$15 and everyone should still be able to make some scratch this way.

John D. MacDonald, an author I admire and respect, put out most of his in mass market paperback. I have read where he made more money this way. Some were eventually published in hardcover, but most came out originally in paperback.

What do you think?

Always a worthwhile question, RJ, and I wish I understood it. I suspect it's part prestige. The rest is probably library sales, which can be considerable, in that there's about 10,000 libraries in the U.S., and they often buy multiple copies of more popular books because they wear out.

It's important to remember that, by and large, paperback originals don't get reviewed as much. This is probably the alligator eating its tail thing. They may not get reviewed as much because the publishers don't send them to reviewers as much, focusing their energies on the hardcovers, because they have more invested in them. There's also a collectibles market in hardcovers, although I really have no idea how big that is.

As a book reviewer I do actually review paperback originals if I'm interested, and from time to time even paperback reprints. My editor reviews romance novels, which are predominantly paperback originals.

I see no shame in being a paperback writer. (Gee, and we even have a theme song thanks to the Beatles). The advantage to being in hardcover is if you have the hard/soft deal, so you can get more money. And of course, there's more money in it for writers and publishers if the hardcovers take off. The royalties tend to be a bit higher on hardcovers versus paperbacks. 12-15%, I believe. On trade paperback 10% is typical and on mass market paperback it's around 6-8%. So, oddly enough, the more the book costs, the higher your percentage, the more money you make.

Here's an odd little tidbit and I have to take it at face value. An agent I had a conversation with a few years ago notes that at one time you had hardcover publishers and you had mass market paperback publishers who predominantly bought the rights to reprint the paperbacks from the hardcover publishers. The deal was often a 50/50 split with the author. In other words, the paperback publisher paid money to the hardcover publisher to reprint the book, and the hardcover publisher gets half that money and the author gets half.

Along comes a gentleman writer named Stephen King, says this agent, who writes a novel called "Carrie," which sells to Doubleday for the whopping advance of $2500. (Larger than mine over 30 years later). There is a pre-emptive bidding war by New American Library and NAL offers $400,000 for the paperback rights. Doubleday gets $200,000 and King gets $200,000.

King becomes a bestseller over the next few books, one of Doubleday's top authors, movies, brand name, etc., and he and his agent try to get a bigger cut of the paperback pie because, after all, Doubleday doesn't do a damned thing for that money. It's essentially an agent fee by the publisher. Doubleday says nope and King walks.

This agent claims the publishing biz, which was dealing with a lot of huge paperback reprint deals in the '70s and '80s, starts restructuring to solve this problem, essentially offering hard cover and soft cover under the same deals, so they don't lose out money to the reprinters, etc., blah, blah, blah.

My guess is it's largely true, though King is one of several authors during that era who probably kicked up a fuss--say Harold Robbins and Jacquelyn Suzanne and the guy who wrote The Godfather, whose name eludes me at the moment. The '70s had a lot of blockbuster authors like that. Now, I wonder, if it isn't shifting back a bit. Especially with attention being made on trade paperback, the gradual shrinking of the mass market paperback volumes.

I also note with interest that Paul Levine's two new books in his new series, Solomon v. Lord and The Deep Blue Alibi, were brought out 4 or 5 months apart as paperback originals. The third book won't be out until fall, about 9 months or so later, and I don't know if it will be pb original or hardcover, but the rationale was they would put out the cheaper pb originals to more quickly build up a readership, and if that worked, slowly shift to hardcover. Sometimes that works--check out Harlan Coben--and sometimes it doesn't. But it seems logical to me, and if it works big-time for a few authors, more and more publishers might try it.

I'd love feedback on this subject from authors who have a clue.

Best,
Mark Terry