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Without Price

Books are a funny business.  You may have noticed that Amazon sells books for less than the cover price.  What might not be obvious is that the price of the book printed on it is a suggested retail price.

A friend works in publishing.  He tells me it is unlike any other business.  For example, when publishers sell books to a wholesaler, unlike almost no other industry, they must be willing to accept returns.  If Barnes and Noble buys five hundred copies and only sells fifty, the publisher has to take the stock back and mark those sales as losses.

For reasons such as this, and declining print sales, publishers have to be careful about the print run.  Too much stock costs money to warehouse, and if it doesn’t sell, it gets marked down.  These deeper discounts lead to remaindering, which is why you can find bargain books at B&N.

Pricing a book is a bit of a guess.  Part of it has to do with how expensive a book is to make.  The larger the book the more expensive, obviously.  Most books aren’t expensive to manufacture, physically.  The real costs comes in the number of people involved in making and selling it.

Most books don’t sell as well as a publisher hopes.  We’ve all read about the unexpected run-away successes (The Martian, The Devil Wears Prada, Robopocalypse) written by authors largely unknown at the time, or at least not household names.  Such run-away successes help to make up the money for books that don’t do so well.



If you’re like me, and I suspect many writers are, you know when you’ve produced something good.  You can feel it—it’s something fresh and vibrant, unlike what anyone else has done.  You have a natural pride of accomplishment, but the publishers are deaf.

Part of it is that book prices don’t represent the real costs of staying in business.  I don’t say that excuses sending a form letter to an intensely creative person dismissing a book with a word, but it may help those of us who struggle to understand it.


The bottom line is the bottom line.

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