Fun Stuff > ENJOY
The Amazon Kindle and other E-Book Readers
Alex C:
I can think of a billion uses for MM, but not a one of them has to do with book publishing. Clarification please?
TimA:
Sorry, Mass Market.
ackblom12:
Yeah, I can honestly say that after having to move multiple times with 8+ heavy fucking boxes of books the Kindle is something I'm seriously coveting. I am going to be waiting until the 2nd gen at least, but I'm really excited about it.
Joseph:
--- Quote from: TimA on 26 Dec 2008, 07:34 ---Most books, especially genre books, are released in MM initially. You actually have to have some kind of sales record or sales expectations going in to make the bump to trade paper or hardcover.
--- End quote ---
Where are you getting this from? Maybe this was true thirty years ago, but this certainly isn't the case now, in my experience (some genre books, especially romance, being an exception). My mother and grandmother have had books published, and every one of them, as long as I've been old enough to notice, has appeared first in hardcover, followed by a TP. I go in lots of bookstores, and the recent fiction is almost always hardcover, or, if slightly older, TP. It is a rare book that I see published in a MM sze, unless it is something like a mystery or romance, or has a movie adaptation.
TimA:
I'm getting it from being a writer, and having lots of friends who are writers, editors, agents and publishers. I will emphasize that my knowledge is mostly genre based. Publishers focus their hardcover spots on established writers, or writers they feel are about to break out. And the hardcover > trade > mass market time gap is usually a year for each step. There are some publishers who do nothing but trade paper, and there are others who do nothing but mass market. Large houses run the whole gamut... it just depends on their publishing strategy.
My local Borders, for example, has a shelf of New in Hardcover. A little further on it's New in Trade, and then another shelf that's New in Mass Market. And yes, some books are moving from HC > TP > MM, but not all. Not even most. Beyond that, though, if you walk back to the stacks there are dozens of books back there that are newly published but aren't getting pulled out and put on their own shelf as being new. It's just the nature of the business. Too many titles, too little space. I could go pull the latest Locus magazine and count out how many titles are coming out this month, and what their formats are, but that's a lot of work and I'm supposed to be writing rather than reading the internets. I'm happy to expand on this if you'd like, but I think we may be suffering a little subject creep.
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