Pulped Fiction

Have you ever gone to a used book store and found uncorrected proofs for sale?  Some store owners give them away.  In the same store you might find multiple copies of a book that had been a best seller, once upon a time.  It all has to do with how publishing works.

Once a book has been accepted for publication, the publisher has to guess how many might sell.  Although this is an educated guess, it always involves a risk.  A friend in publishing told me that’s way it’s always important to point out a book that is similar to yours.  A unique book is high risk.

For a while there, anything vampires would sell.  I think we might be seeing a kind of dawn rising on the vampire genre (now that I’ve written a vampire novel), but because of the—love it or hate it—success of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight saga, everyone wanted vampires.  They sucked in money.

A traditional publisher will send your manuscript to a copy-editor and then a typesetter.  The author gets proofs, and when production time is near, uncorrected proofs are sent for free to readers for blurbs.  The old name for these was “puffs.”  If an expert likes the book, they say, so should you.

Many of these proofs find their way to second-hand book shops.

A print run is determined.  Like most manufactured items, unit price goes down as quantity goes up.  The lowest print run is determined by the publisher’s margins; margins are profits minus costs.  A book that “makes its margins” earns an overall profit.

Books that fail to do so have a sadder fate.  If the project is an utter flop, the publisher will accept many returns from book sellers and pulp them.  Yup.  They recycle the books.  If a book has made a reasonable profit and might sell more if the price drops, it may be remaindered.

Remaindered books show up on bargain tables in both new and used book stores.  They are sold to stores at cost plus ten percent.  The publisher makes some money off of this, and so does the bookstore.  Most author contracts stipulate that the author doesn’t.  Remaindered books are intended to recoup costs.

In the used book store they may all look the same.  The history of the many books can be quite different.  Since each book is a calculated risk, it pays for authors to know a bit about how the industry works.