The Grand Illusion
I enjoy your writing and own most of your books, which I buy new because I like to support writers. Being on a retirement budget, I wait patiently for the Mass Market Paperback editions, which also fit on my shelves. However, the prices on your recent series have been rapidly climbing. Mass Market Edition of Contrarian at $15.00??? Is your publisher trying to encourage us to turn to the resale market?
No… Tor isn’t trying to cut readership. It’s a sad fact, but inflation has also hit publishing costs. I understand your amazement and frustration, but it’s not just Tor. Contrarian runs 750 pages in the mass market edition. I’ve done a spot check of current mass market paperbacks of approximately the same length as Contrarian, and I’ve found quite a few, from various publishers, in the $13.00-$15.00 range. There are several reasons for that. First, the price of paper and everything else is up. Second, the overall sales of mass market paperbacks have dropped enormously, most likely because ebooks cost less. As a result, for better or worse, from here on out, it’s unlikely that any of my upcoming releases will be available in mass market paperback. The only print versions will be hardcover and trade paperback.
The problem is that I write large books. Large books have lots of pages, which requires more paper. Almost all of the recently published mass market paperbacks around the same length as Contrarian that I could find (and there weren’t many) are priced in the same range. The vast majority of books listed in Locus are half the length of Contrarian in hardcover and sell for about $5-$7 less. If I didn’t sell reasonably well in ebooks, I doubt that Tor could afford to publish my long novels in print format at all.
I realize that’s hardly comforting to you, and it’s certainly not to me, but the way matters are going, according to many professionals throughout the field, fewer and fewer books, especially long ones, will be printed or reprinted as mass market paperbacks because the physical production costs have increased so much. It also means that I won’t be writing really long books and/or they’ll have to be split into more volumes.
Thank you for the candid answer.
Could you explain the difference between a Mass Market vs a Trade paperback?
The mass market paperback is the “traditional” paperback that measures roughly four inches by six and a half inches. A trade paperback has roughly the same page size as a hardcover, but has a paper cover.