2009 Fall Book Preview With Covers

[BillJ]

My wife asked me if I wanted New Frontier: Treason last night while we were at the bookstore. My simple answer was, "not at that price" and picked up "The Time Ships" by Stephen Baxter.

The Time Ships? Good choice.

As for how much audience Pocket can afford to bleed if/when they make the jump from mass to trade, only their accountants know for sure.

About one hundred pages in. It is a great read so far.

Hopefully Pocket knows what they are doing with the print line.

 

[BillJ]

4) You're really saying that this is annoying you now? In the Ordover years, he routinely divided one story across several MMPB books. THAT was paying twice as much for essentially the same content. Recently, books have been far longer, giving way more content for the same price.

At least that way I could gauge whether the content was worth the price. Buy one book and if I didn't like it I wasn't on the hook for the price of the other one or two.

 

[DimesDan]

I rather like Trade sized books, to be honest, they arn't that much bigger than a Mass Market anyway. As for price, the last Star Trek Trade I bought, Shards and Shadows was £9.99, where as the last Star Trek Mass Market, Full Circle was £6.99, ok, yes it's a bit more expensive, but not twice as much!

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

I'm just not that comfortable with the floppiness of them - they don't feel as solid as hardbacks or MMPBs. It's probably just a 'me' thing, but I don't like it - I consider it fine for anthologies like Myriad Universes and the various anniversary books for the different serieses, but for a novel, I'd prefer either hardback or MMPB.

 

[Thrawn]

This all makes sense. But what changes when you're dealing with a very niche product like Star Trek? How many readers can Pocket afford to bleed by making this move before things become unprofitable?

My wife asked me if I wanted New Frontier: Treason last night while we were at the bookstore. My simple answer was, "not at that price" and picked up "The Time Ships" by Stephen Baxter.

In all fairness, if you buy from amazon.com, the trades are only $3 more than the MMPBs. A lot of non-Trek MMPBs are as high as $10 anyway, and the trades are only $10.88. $2.88 doesn't mean a lot to me, and .88 means even less.

But if that's a dealbreaker for you, whatever.

It's also, as far as I know, an open question whether or not the trade novels will be republished as MMPBs.

 

[BillJ]

This all makes sense. But what changes when you're dealing with a very niche product like Star Trek? How many readers can Pocket afford to bleed by making this move before things become unprofitable?

My wife asked me if I wanted New Frontier: Treason last night while we were at the bookstore. My simple answer was, "not at that price" and picked up "The Time Ships" by Stephen Baxter.

In all fairness, if you buy from amazon.com, the trades are only $3 more than the MMPBs. A lot of non-Trek MMPBs are as high as $10 anyway, and the trades are only $10.88. $2.88 doesn't mean a lot to me, and .88 means even less.

But if that's a dealbreaker for you, whatever.

It's also, as far as I know, an open question whether or not the trade novels will be republished as MMPBs.

Not everyone shops at Amazon! I actually like to inspect my merchandise before purchasing it. Guess that makes me old school. And yes $2.88 is a deal breaker if it is presenting the same amount of material.

 

[JWolf]

I hope they tank. I think TPB are an abomination and should go away forever.

Remind us you said that when you hit 50 and your eyestrain is wishing for bigger size font.

I'm 46 now and I don't have any trouble with smallish size print.

 

[Therin of Andor]

book stores are idiots if they think trades are better.

Their market research tells them that stocking and selling trades is more profitable.

But one look at current bookshop formats tells us that they've given up catering to certain groups of customers, knowing that they'll buy their regular "must-have" book items online. Many bookshops are now stocked prominently with vaguely book-related toys, games, action figures, book lights, Tshirts and jigsaw puzzles. Trade paperbacks fit this range of impulse-buy, gift-giving items.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I'm 46 now and I don't have any trouble with smallish size print.

I'm 50 - and at 46 small font didn't worry me. Good luck.

Not everyone shops at Amazon! I actually like to inspect my merchandise before purchasing it. Guess that makes me old school.

Exactly. And part of a steadily reducing minority. SF readers and music soundtrack collectors have been trailblazers in the online-buying revolution.

 

[JWolf]

If Trek goes Trade, I hope nobody buys them. I hope they tank.

Oh, that's a nice sentiment to express on a forum frequented by people whose livelihood depends on people buying Trek books! So you want us all to go broke just because you don't like a particular format? How compassionate of you.

And if, as Defcon says, you mostly read eBooks, why should you care whether the hardcopy books are in MMPB or trade?

I'm not saying to stop Star Trek books. but if they go trade where it's not needed, then I do think sales will drop as people who dislike trade will not purchase or not purchase as much. Also given the way eBook prices are at present, trade will increase eBook prices as well. So overall, going trade where trade is not needed is a lose-lose situation overall. I do understand trade when the word count is high enough. But otherwise, forget it.

 

[BillJ]

I'm 46 now and I don't have any trouble with smallish size print.

I'm 50 - and at 46 small font didn't worry me. Good luck.

I don't think Pocket is worried about whether you can read the font or not.

 

[Thrawn]

Not everyone shops at Amazon! I actually like to inspect my merchandise before purchasing it. Guess that makes me old school. And yes $2.88 is a deal breaker if it is presenting the same amount of material.

So will you boycott any publisher that raises their prices 50 cents?

This seems like an extremely silly attitude to me.

 

[AN_D_K]

If all books were TPB, then wouldn't we need a bigger size for the books we want to stand out more?

 

[BillJ]

Not everyone shops at Amazon! I actually like to inspect my merchandise before purchasing it. Guess that makes me old school. And yes $2.88 is a deal breaker if it is presenting the same amount of material.

So will you boycott any publisher that raises their prices 50 cents?

This seems like an extremely silly attitude to me.

You're talking apples and oranges and you know it. A fifty cent across the board increase is expected from time to time. Charging $8.99 for one ninety thousand word novel and then charging $16.00 for another ninety thousand word novel is ridiculous.

 

[JWolf]

If all books were TPB, then wouldn't we need a bigger size for the books we want to stand out more?

ACK!

 

[Thrawn]

I'm not saying to stop Star Trek books. but if they go trade where it's not needed, then I do think sales will drop as people who dislike trade will not purchase or not purchase as much. Also given the way eBook prices are at present, trade will increase eBook prices as well. So overall, going trade where trade is not needed is a lose-lose situation overall. I do understand trade when the word count is high enough. But otherwise, forget it.

But it doesn't matter if sales go down a little bit, because they make more money per copy sold. And you only have your guess that the sales will go down too much, with no evidence at all, when a ton of (admittedly circumstantial) evidence shows that trades DO make more money.

So, tough shit. Deal with it.

 

[Thrawn]

Not everyone shops at Amazon! I actually like to inspect my merchandise before purchasing it. Guess that makes me old school. And yes $2.88 is a deal breaker if it is presenting the same amount of material.

So will you boycott any publisher that raises their prices 50 cents?

This seems like an extremely silly attitude to me.

You're talking apples and oranges and you know it. A fifty cent across the board increase is expected from time to time. Charging $8.99 for one ninety thousand word novel and then charging $16.00 for another ninety thousand word novel is ridiculous.

This is also silly.

Like, I'll pay $75 for a 2-hour concert if it's Dave Matthews Band, because I like them better. But I may only pay $20 for some other band I don't know as well, because I like them less.

You're not paying for the number of words, you're paying for their content.

You may as well complain that Troublesome Minds and Crucible:McCoy were the same price; the latter was something like 4x as long as the former. Do you refuse to purchase Troublesome Minds?

 

[BillJ]

So will you boycott any publisher that raises their prices 50 cents?

This seems like an extremely silly attitude to me.

You're talking apples and oranges and you know it. A fifty cent across the board increase is expected from time to time. Charging $8.99 for one ninety thousand word novel and then charging $16.00 for another ninety thousand word novel is ridiculous.

This is also silly.

Like, I'll pay $75 for a 2-hour concert if it's Dave Matthews Band, because I like them better. But I may only pay $20 for some other band I don't know as well, because I like them less.

You're not paying for the number of words, you're paying for their content.

You may as well complain that Troublesome Minds and Crucible:McCoy were the same price; the latter was something like 4x as long as the former. Do you refuse to purchase Troublesome Minds?

So explain to me what is so special about Treason that doesn't apply to Open Secrets?

 

[Thrawn]

So explain to me what is so special about Treason that doesn't apply to Open Secrets?

More people buy New Frontier. Or, more accurately, more people consistently buy New Frontier; it has more loyal fans. It is thus a more valuable product to those people. So they charge more. Which is exactly the way every other industry works.

Either way, your position is logically inconsistent. If it's ok with you to pay $8 for a 40,000 word novel, it shouldn't bother you to pay $11 for a 60,000 word novel. You're getting more words per dollar. The fact that you can get other 60,000 word novels for $8 should make you happy, but clearly, your minimum word per dollar rate is 5,000 so you should be willing to buy any book that gives better value than that.

Or you're arguing illogically. Which is your prerogative, I suppose, but what you're annoyed about is not that you get charged more for the same number of words. That's purely nonsense.

 

[BillJ]

So explain to me what is so special about Treason that doesn't apply to Open Secrets?

More people buy New Frontier. Or, more accurately, more people consistently buy New Frontier; it has more loyal fans. It is thus a more valuable product to those people. So they charge more. Which is exactly the way every other industry works.

Either way, your position is logically inconsistent. If it's ok with you to pay $8 for a 40,000 word novel, it shouldn't bother you to pay $11 for a 60,000 word novel. You're getting more words per dollar. The fact that you can get other 60,000 word novels for $8 should make you happy, but clearly, your minimum word per dollar rate is 5,000 so you should be willing to buy any book that gives better value than that.

Or you're arguing illogically. Which is your prerogative, I suppose, but what you're annoyed about is not that you get charged more for the same number of words. That's purely nonsense.

Let's try this from another angle. What precluded New Frontier: Treason from being published as a MMPB? Other than having Peter David's name on it? Is there any additional content that couldn't be included in a MMPB?

To me this simply comes down to price gouging, and whether other industries do it or not, doesn't make it right.