Sublime

Mike’s father, Leonard Shatzkin, introduced a different way to sell backlist in 1955, by which Doubleday automated backlist replenishment for the stores in response to inventory counts the reps reported after their visits. This technique propelled Doubleday from one of many publishers to an industry leader, particularly for backlist.

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

McCormack is quite certain that the practice of measuring a book’s potential “contribution,” rather than creating an artificial P&L that incorporated an overhead percentage, was a primary driver of St. Martin’s period of profitable title growth.

And fourth, Amazon had the regular attention of almost every online book purchaser.

The publishing future for smaller publishers is ambiguous. On the one hand, there are services that eliminate the need for a large, expensive overhead organization.

Bookstores receive books either directly from publishers or from a trade wholesaler.

Online sales today represent more than half of all sales for most publishers, and they’re still growing.

Retailers and other sellers, like mail order or web catalogs, who sell books as a sideline to other merchandise that is more central to them, are increasingly important accounts, particularly to nonfiction publishers.

The question will be this: what does the “established” publisher have to add to the marketing and distribution of a title? As long as there are lots of decentralized bookstores, publishers must call on them, take orders from them, and ship to them. But as and if the ecosystem becomes more online, more e-book, and physical retail becomes more Amazon