The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know®

The last three are all about the same size, in the middle triple digit millions in annual sales. Harper Collins is about the size of all three of them, or about $2 billion in sales. And Penguin Random House is about the size of all four of them put together, or about $4 billion in sales.

Within a publisher, an imprint is, effectively, an “operating unit” working with shared central services. In most big publishers where we know the practices, the imprints are assigned notional profit-and-loss calculations that often affect the bonuses of the staff of those imprints. The head of the imprint, who could be an “editor-in-chief” or a “p

By far the biggest provider of printed books—mostly through one-at-a-time print-on-demand—for indies is Ingram’s venerable Lightning Print operation.

One is that Amazon very early persuaded Wall Street to look at them and value them with different standards from those they applied to all other companies. That is, Amazon said, “We are going for building up our customer base and our market share, and, by doing that, building the engine that will deliver profits in the future,”

One question for the future is whether text-to-voice (TTV) tech becomes so good that production is hardly needed at all or, even more threatening to publishers, a consumer can simply “apply” a TTV app to an e-book text and make their own audio. We’re

At the stage of assessing whether a publisher will pursue a given book project, various stakeholders at the publishing house have to assess the financial side of the book in question as well as its quality and suitability for them. Specifically, they have to come up with a budget for the book, known as a P&L, or profit and loss statement.

There are several: books don’t die anymore and disappear from the competition, and in fact, books that were thought to have died have been brought back to life in the digital no-inventory-necessary world. That adds further competition to face each new book as it is published and makes the challenge more difficult for each new commercial effort.

Ingram began in life as a “wholesaler”: a company that “carries” in its warehouse the books of many publishers to allow stores and libraries to purchase the books of many publishers through one vendor. Over the past four decades, the company has expanded its service offerings considerably as a distributor and a provider of short-run printing servic

All the above-mentioned nontraditional formats have seemed as if they would swamp the traditional business at different times, but instead each has peaked in popularity and the voracious readers have then either shifted to a new format or have been supplanted demographically by a new crop of readers looking for a way to slake their insatiable deman