Mike’s father, Leonard Shatzkin, the person who long ago laid out this framework for publishing economics, suggested that every house that believes in assigning a percentage for “overhead” to the calculation of title profitability do the following exercise. Recalculate last year’s business but throw out—pretend you didn’t publish—all the books this

Editors also have to ask themselves, once the projected sales and revenue for a book have been sharpened with input from colleagues around the company, whether the expectations (a) meet those of the author and agent, or whether there is likely to be a disconnect there; and (b) whether the scale of the book matches the amount of time and work the ed

What we’ve not yet addressed is the $1.25 billion consumer nontraditional US book industry—books created by individuals or entities that are not commercial publishers—that accounted for 297 million units sold in 2016. This is a full 20 percent of the roughly $6 billion traditional US trade book market.

Bookstore and other retail shelf space is shrinking at the same time that total title output is rising. The shift to online sales combined with the shrinking retail shelf space hurts the biggest publishers the most because their competitive advantage is largely built on their ability to put books on shelves at scale. Sales moving online could ultim