Book Prices

[Dana King]

(Also posted on One Bite at a Time.)

Interesting article in Slate magazine this week by Jack Shafer, about e-book pricing. The entire article is worth reading, but something he brings up in the first paragraph interests me more than the rest.

According to Shafer, publishers routinely sell books to retail booksellers for half the cover price. This is true of both hardcover version and e-books, so a publisher is charging the bookseller $12.50 (more or less) for a license of electronic content. The money saved by not having to produce a physical copy, ship it, and pay for returns is not passed along.

Another good question is why Amazon charges the same for the new Dan Brown as for a reprint of The Maltese Falcon. (We’ll leave the relative merits of the books for another discussion. Or not.) Does it make sense to charge more for an e-book, which costs them virtually nothing to ship and warehouse, than for the equivalent paperback?

Part of the problem with the book industry is that books, especially new hardcovers, are expensive. The new Michael Bay explode-a-thon at the multiplex is $9; the new Elmore Leonard is $25. While readers and writers will argue (correctly) the Leonard provides more hours of entertainment and more actively engages its audience, most consumers just see the price tags. They aren’t all that interested in how actively engaged they are, or they wouldn’t be going to see Michael Bay movies in the first place.

The publishing industry is hurting, no question, largely through its refusal to adapt its outdated business models. E-books may be this year’s Big Thing Of The Future, but they still have to face the hurdle of getting people who enjoy the tactile sensation of holding a book and turning pages (people like me) to convert to e-readers. Given the choice of going to the local library, waiting a year for a paperback at $7.99, or paying $25 for the new hardcover, the new hardcover is Choice #3. If I’m willing to wait the year for the paperback, the e-book has nothing to interest me at all.

I like to support working authors and local booksellers all I can, but I read about 65 books a year. That many new hardcovers at $25 each, plus 6% Maryland sales tax is $1,722.50 that has to compete with my mortgage company, the University of Maryland, my doctor, the oil cartel, State Farm, groceries, clothing, and the taxes of various jurisdictions. The full-price book purchase comes pretty far down that list, and reading is an integral part of my life. I don’t read as much as many of the people who will read this, but I probably read more than 95% of the population at large. It might be time for publishers to start looking for ways to get more books into the hands of more people, instead of trying to bleed every last penny out of a stagnant or shrinking existing sales pool.

[John McFetridge]

Yes, I don't think traditionallists are that way simply for tradition's sake. I think publishe's are lookig at every aspect of the business and have found this model is the one that works best.

But different publishers use different methods. Hard Case Crime issue original mass market paperbacks. Crimespace member Sandra Ruttan's last couple of books have come out as original mass market paperbacks. Almost every small press issues books as original trade paperbacks.

But so far, the bestsellers have been overwhelmingly issued first as $25.00 (or more) hardcovers and then gone to paperback.

[I. J. Parker]

I think John is right. The people who buy new releases don't care about the price. They like to hold that glossy hc in their hand. The rest put their names on the "hold" list in the library. Mmpbs generally are reissues of a title a year later. They do sell well and keep the author's name before people's eyes. To me, that is still the best of the possible scenarios -- if you can get it.

[B.R.Stateham]

Sell a hardback for $10 and you'll see a major shift in buying. Send a manuscript to a publishing house in Mexico if you have to find a publisher who can do the printing that economically. Gut the established format of printing and start over.

Just because traditionalists will say 'It's not done that way' doesn't mean it can't be done that way.

[John McFetridge]

Yes. But as IJ points out, first the reader has to know about you, so the book needs to be reviewed and right now that means hardcovers. So what usually happens is an author has to have a few books published and well-reviewed enough to GET a paperback deal.

I'm not sure if $10.00 or $25.00 are really the choices for taking a chance on a new author. It's probably more like $25.00 or free from the library. I think that's how most people discover authors that are new to them, but rarely are they NEW authors.

[Dana King]

John, I know you're right in principle, from an economics standpoint, but don;t you think a reader might be more likely to try a new author for $10 rather than $25?

[I. J. Parker]

Hardcovers spell prestige and reviews in important venues. I wish it weren't so, but it is. The really important reviewers have to review bestsellers part of the time. When Michael Connelly has a new book out, everybody reviews it. The same is true for Cornwell.
Tradepaperbacks fall somewhere between hc and mmpb. The first thing I noticed when I switched to Penguin and trade paper was that I got only a tiny portion of the former reviews(Booklist and Library Journal stopped reviewing altogether), and if reviews appeared in major papers, they were a couple of sentences long and bundled together with other books. So to some extent the format spells to readers how important a new book is -- that and the amount of money spent on marketing.

Mind you, in spite of all that, some reviewers have been very good to me. I'm grateful. I have no other way to promote my books.

[John McFetridge]

No, see, IJ's point is that making the books cheaper doesn't sell any more.

I would like to see the end of hardcovers which I think are only really a marketing tool anyway - putting a hardcover book in a bookstore is more like putting up a poster, it's really only there to sell the ten dollar paperbacks later and I sure hope no one is complaining that ten bucks is too much for a book. Or at least shorten the wait time between the hardcover and the paperback.

For that to happen, though, people would have to start buying a lot more original paperbacks and a lot fewer hardcovers. We keep hearing about all these problems with the publishing industry, but someone just sold 600,000 copies of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," so now that publisher is coming out with the "special hardcover edition," of it.

But once you get past the bestsellers, most books sell a few hundred copies, maybe a thousand. Do you think Harcourt would have sold more than that of my last novel if instead of $25.00 they'd charged $10.00? I don't think that was the problem....

[B.R.Stateham]

Thank god for Ebay. It's cutting the throats of a lot of writers, but what can a person do? Twenty-five clams for a hardback book is just outrageous, and I'm not interested in whatever the reasons are for it.

Sooner or later someone is going to come along and make a book cheaper. A lot cheaper. And when that happens . . . .

[I. J. Parker]

I have not noticed any appreciable difference in Amazon sales between my books when one goes on half-price. Maybe it sells a couple of extra copies a week. More importantly, when this happens, sales of the other books tend to decline. People look and compare and tell themselves: "Hell, if I can get one of those for 5 bucks, why should I pay 11 bucks for the others?"
As for the Kindle effect: I just heard from a fan who was desperate to get HELL SCREEN on Kindle (impossible, as the rights are in limbo). He bought his wife a Kindle because she has Parkinson's and fell in love with it. She wouldn't share, so he bought his own. Now both refuse to buy print novels.

[John McFetridge]

I wish books were cheaper, too.

Even though I'm pretty much a socialist (Canadian, afterall), I do believe in the free market enough to feel that the cost of production isn't really a big factor in the cost of the item - it has more to do with what the market will decide. So, whether it's new or a reprint, hardcover or electronic - none of that matters.

The thing about books is that they are a larger time committment than movies so there's a much smaller market. I think you'll be in a very small minority reading more than one book per week. I bet most of the people who buy that new Elmore Leonard hardcover buy fewer than 12 books a year. Lowering the price (as much as I'd like to see it) probably wouldn't increase sales very much.

And that's the thing about a free market, it isn't driven by the most amount of sales, it's driven by the highest profit. If publishers can make the same profit selling fewer books for more money, that's the way they'll go. It requires less up front capital to print and ship, fewer returns to be dealt with, etc.

What I think will affect the book business and pricing the most is offering every version of a book - hardcover, paperback, e-book - at the same time. Then the market will really decide what it wants.