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 ...
Blog of a struggling writer.