If there’s a book coming out that you really want a physical copy of, you usually only have the option of purchasing the hardcover – at least at first. If you’d prefer the softcover, you typically have to wait until the book gets reprinted months or even years down the line.
For longtime readers and book buyers of the nonfiction variety, this is a familiar cycle. And over the past few years, it started to change – but for the better?
Jeffrey Trachtenberg is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who covers book publishing and media. He joined the Standard to explain what it means that some paperback releases are on the decline. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Just briefly, can you explain why it is that when publishers release nonfiction hardcover books, they do that before the paperbacks? What’s the thinking here?
Jeffrey Trachtenberg: Oh, they make twice as much money. Typically, a new hardcover is roughly twice the price of a new paperback.
Well, that makes sense then. So basically the idea is to get as much as you can before you go out with that paperback.
And yet, as you report, publishers are printing fewer paperbacks in the nonfiction genre. New adult nonfiction paperback titles have dropped off 42% in the past five years?
That’s correct. And there were a wide number of reasons for that falloff, including the fact that new books are published, typically, in hardcover and e-book and an audiobook.
So if you don’t want to pay $32 for a new nonfiction hardcover book, you could immediately buy the $15 e-book or you could listen to it on audio, and audiobooks are the fastest-growing segment of book publishing today.
So you’ve got these two relatively new formats competing basically with the paperback, which doesn’t come out, often, for another year.
So squeezing out paperbacks – is that how you see it?
I do, especially for hardcover books whose sales are modest, mediocre, whatever. Not blockbuster totals.
I know that you were really looking at nonfiction titles here, and we should underscore that. And so you don’t have any facts and figures here, but is it your sense that this is happening in other parts of the industry as well?
No, I think certain paperback genres are very healthy. You look on TikTok and other social media platforms and people who are influencers today, people who are talking about books, they often hold up a trade paperback.
Trade paperbacks are less expensive, easier to carry, and publishers are putting more and more effort behind trade paperbacks in areas like romance and fantasy and romantasy.
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Very interesting. All right, so now you talked with some authors for this story, I understand. How do they tend to feel about the decline of paperback releases?
Well, it’s a personal setback. It’s not so much that they’re losing money by not having a paperback, although they are, but many people view having a paperback as a second bite at the apple – an opportunity to reach younger readers who maybe can’t afford the price of a hardcover.
And when you’re trying to build a career, you’re thinking, “well, you didn’t buy my hardcover, but if you bought my paperback and you liked it, chances are you might look for my next book and maybe you’ll buy that book as a hardcover.”
So they’re trying to build a career. When you don’t have a paperback, it means you have one less opportunity to be on the bookshelf. And we all know discovering books online is very difficult.
You know, I hear what you’re saying, and it all sort of makes sense when you hear what those authors say from their perspective. But this is a huge industry, and publishers, it’s their business to know what’s going to work and what’s not going to.
And when you’re talking about a nonfiction title that perhaps hasn’t been a blockbuster but could have a better life, or a second life, in a paperback, surely they must have done the math. They’re not going to leave that money on the table.
Well, it’s a push-pull situation.
Maybe they would like to get the paperback out, but maybe the retailers say to them, “well, we’re only going to take a very limited number.” Then they go back and they do the envelope math and they think, “well, if they’re only going to take a couple thousand, how am I going to make a profit? So why is it worth my time to print them?”
So it’s not just the publisher alone, it’s a question of how many copies will a retailer take? And every retailer has sales data today that helps them make their decisions about what to stock.
And I guess it would be a lot cheaper if you’re putting out the audiobook compared to putting out a paperback.
Well, you have the audiobook ready to go, and the audiobook has become a hugely popular format, and I don’t think there’s any question that audiobooks and e-books are eating into the nonfiction paperback demand.
It’s very interesting. What do you think’s next here? Do you see this trend continuing?
I do, and I’ll tell you why.
I think publishing agents have told me that the era when a publisher could take a hardcover book, put a new cover on it for a paperback, launch a new marketing campaign, and gin up attention for the paperback launch has pretty much come to an end. In other words, there’s no second opportunity to remake a title.
I think if that’s actually true, it sort of suggests that we’re going to see fewer and fewer nonfiction paperbacks in the years ahead.
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Not everyone is issuing paperbacks, of course. You talked with a particular publisher that’s sort of taking the everything-in-above approach.
Turner Publishing in Nashville, Tennessee, prefers to issue all formats on the same day — that would be the hardcover, the paperback, the e-book, and the audiobook.
And they have a reason for that. They feel that a year later, people have forgotten what nonfiction book they were thinking about buying in paperback, and that today’s reader wants to have a wide variety of choices, and that there is a limited window in which to promote a new book. And that window really is weeks one through four.
So their thinking is, why don’t we take our best shot to get the most attention possible for every format in the book? And even if our hardcover sales dip a little bit, revenue per title actually will go up. It’s a very interesting approach.
