2018 Releases

Apart from Star Trek all the new paperbacks I’ve got in the last couple of years have been trade.

 

Star Wars books are now all hardcover (except for some of the young adult books) and are reprinted in MMPB a year or so later at 9.99. That makes Trek in MMPB at 7.99 a bargain. Doctor Who books went from MMPB to MMPB-sized hardcovers to slightly larger hardcovers since the new series started. I won't be surprised if TP becomes the format of choice when Trek returns to regular publishing.

As someone who works in the publishing industry, I believe e-books should be substantially cheaper than printed books as fewer resources go into manufacturing them. Once files are ready for publishing, it takes seconds to make an e-book but days to make physical books and more days and costs to deliver. As a Doc Savage fan I love that publisher's pricing stages for new adventures. Hardcovers are 34.95 or $39.95 depending on length and contain bonus articles and photos in the back which are not available in TP or e-book. The TPs are 24.95 and the e-books are 5.99.

 

Well ebooks are not exactly doing a booming business right now either and seem to be on the decline since they’re height in 2012-13.

 

They're printed in Trade here as Hardbacks don't sell in Ireland.

 

But when books are published in the thousands or tens of thousands, then economies of scale kick in and that difference becomes a matter of pennies per copy. Most of the cost of a book isn't for its paper, it's for the extensive labor that goes into creating and editing its content. By analogy, you can get 50-100 blank DVD-Rs for around the same price as a single DVD of a feature film, because the information, not the physical substrate, is the valuable part.

 

If the contract was signed tomorrow what is the earliest we'd see the books start back up?

 

Probably the fall, maybe late summer.

 

We wrote about this situation over at TrekCore:

http://trekcore.com/blog/2017/12/book-report-star-trek-novels-take-a-break-in-2018/

Nothing super newsy for the folks in this thread (we used several quotes from this forum) other than the David Mack speculation about his Kelvin Timeline book potentially seeing the light of day again.

We tried to get S&S to comment, but alas, they declined.

 

Even if the material cost was exactly the same and the print copies had 100% sell-through, the publisher is still getting more money per ebook sold (at least 70% of MSRP for an ebook versus 50-65% for print). The ebook prices should be below MSRP of the print copy.

And if a publisher isn't going to allow retailers to set the prices on their titles, then it behooves them to keep an eye on the market price of the print copy and adjust the price of their ebooks accordingly. (And if it means they make less money because the discount is coming out of their share instead of the vendor's... well, that's the cost of doing the pricing yourself instead of letting them be treated like any other good.)

 

I've been expecting this move for years. Yes, S&S would sell fewer copies due to the price point, but the would make it up on the margin.

 

I can't speak for Pocket, but mass-market publishing is also enormously inefficient when it comes to the wholesale market: grocery stories, drug stores, newsstands, airports, bus stations, military bases, etc. (About half of what you ship ends up pulped.) And that market has been struggling for years, giving publishers less incentive to put out cheap paperbacks for the wholesale market. Libraries, on the other hand, are probably more likely to order a durable trade edition than a flimsy mass-market paperback.

Does that matter where on-line sales are concerned? Good question.

 

I'd like to read those!

 

Maybe unsold copies should be passed to charity shops to raise money for good causes.

I give books I have read to an animal welfare charity which has an outlet a short walk away.

 

Alas, the way it works is that the covers are stripped off and returned to the publisher for full credit. Without that, a retailer could conceivably keep or sell all the books, then claim they donated them to charity and get a full refund from the publisher. We need proof the books have been destroyed before we can credit the retailers for unsold copies.

But I appreciate the thought: I donated a ton of old books to our local thrift shop when we moved this summer, and recently dropped off some surplus Tor books at a local free library.

True tale of horror: I once visited a site no author or book lover should ever see: a wholesale distribution center in Florida where unsold paperbacks were being stripped and pulped on an assembly line. It was like an abattoir! . .. the slaughterhouse of authors' dreams . . .

 

Mills and Boon novels were used to build a motorway in the UK. People are driving over love.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/west_midlands/3330245.stm

 

The same thing happened to original prints of the Wicker Man

 

Now that’s just conspiracy theory

 

I was told once that some pulped paperbacks are used to manufacture fireworks. Now whenever I see some fiery bloom in the sky, I wonder what critically-acclaimed but underselling novel is bursting into a shower of sparks before my eyes.

 

So, to still be that guy...
Comparing the standard Star Trek MMPB to a recent general TPB and Disco TPB, I still don't get/appreciate why the first two books are both £7.99, but then the Discovery novels jump up to £12.99

PS, Golden Boy is amazing and everyone should read it!

 

Well I for one don't like the trade paperback format because it is too big.
It doesn't fit in my shelves and as I read in the train every day, a big book is annoying
and ebook is no good for me, I still have not finished Rules of Accusation yet !
So in my case, mmpb is the best way