In 1952, Jason Epstein, then the Editorial Director at Doubleday Books in New York, established Anchor Books, an imprint that specialized in trade paperbacks.
You know about trade paperbacks - they are the full-sized paperbacks, as opposed to those pulp paper pocket books you buy in the drugstore. Most trade paperback novels are printed on acid-free #50 or #60 pound bond paper, and are perfect bound with a laminated card stock cover. They're the happy medium between the outrageously priced hardcover novel and the relatively flimsy mass market drugstore paperback.
Back to Jason Epstein - by founding Anchor Books, he became known as the Father of the Paperback Novel. He won the National Book Award for Distinguished Service to American Letters, The Curtis Benjamin Award of the Association of American Publishers, and a Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics' Circle.
This week, only fifty-five years later, The New York Times has finally broken its Bestsellers list into hardcover and trade paperback novels. The books heading up the NYT Bestsellers List for Trade Paperbacks are the ones you'd probably expect - authors like Sara Gruen, Khaled Hosseini, and Nicholas Sparks. Some things seldom change.
The upside here is that trade paperbacks are finally getting the recognition they deserve.
I won't go into my usual rant about Bestsellers Lists, except to remind thee, gentle reader, that they represent bookstore orders, not end user (reader) sales, and that if you have a 'name', bookstores are going to order your new title as if had an expiration date. So-called Bestsellers are as prone to returns and remaindering as any other books - they just sell more at the outset.
On the other hand, major publishers have only recently begun to exploit the potential of the trade paperback. S. J. Rozan had a recent novel (Absent Friends) released in trade paper rather than going to mass market paperback after the hardcover edition was exhausted.
Have you noticed all those new-sized paperbacks in the racks at your local MegaloMart? The ones that measure roughly 4.5" by 8"? You know, the ones that are priced at $10.99 instead of the usual $7.99 for a pocket book? Is it a coincidence that the smallest size a trade paperback is traditionally printed in is 5" by 8"?
As the price point of mass market paperbacks and trade paperbacks have begun to collapse toward one another, major publishers are beginning to see the benefit of moving toward a size that can be produced on two levels - a few thousand printed on web-fed presses to satisfy the initial sales bump, and then moving the title to a print-on-demand format to satisfy backlist demand down the line.
This is called The Long Tail - the ability of a former high profile title to continue selling virtually ad infinitum in small numbers.
Back when I worked as a psychologist, I spent five years working part-time in a private practice to make some extra bucks. The owner of the practice, in order to avoid mounds of paperwork, refused to take health insurance payments (an increasingly popular practice, by the way). Instead, he allowed clients to spread payments out, as long as they didn't fall more than five sessions behind. He used to say "I've made a lot of money ten bucks at a time."
Likewise, the Long Tail, as described by Chris Anderson in the October 2004 issue of Wired, may be one of the major publishing houses' dirtiest little secrets over the next decade. Since contracts usually stipulate that the houses will control a title as long as it remains in print, and since print-on-demand books NEVER go out of print, publishing houses may be able to control a title literally forever. And, since print-on-demand titles can't be produced (at least yet) in pocket book sized editions on pulp paper, it is important for the publishers to establish a market for the larger, higher-priced trade paperbacks.
Eternal control of a title may prove to be a major cash cow for major publishers currently experiencing financial crunches. As Anderson reported in Wired, "“…What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are. In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: "The biggest money is in the smallest sales….”
Now, why might the NY Times have decided to start tracking sales of trade paperbacks? Perhaps it is designed to mold the readers' mindset to accept the slightly higher-priced, larger, eventually printed-on-demand paperbacks as an alternative to both the exhorbitantly priced hardcovers AND the easy-to-return-by-simply-stripping-covers mass market paperbacks.
Of course, nobody would ever consider accusing the major publishing houses, 80% of which are controlled by non-USA based multinational corporations, of engaging in anything that might be considered shady or conspiratorial.
That would be cynical.
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