Quote:
Originally Posted by Apache
A friend in the text book publishing business told me that they used to pay professors if they required students to buy their books. And that professors also change books every couple of years to prevent the students from using used text books.
Apache
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This I know to be true. That is what publishers I worked for did back in the 80s and early 90s. Whether it is still true or remained true after I left working as an employee, I cannot say, but during my employee tenure it was most definitely true.
I can also say that during my employee years the way a textbook's (ie, a book intended for classroom use) price was set was not based on cost but based on what marketing believed could be charged but not less than a certain percentage above cost.
Non-academic books (ie, non-textbooks not intended for classroom use), like novels, had prices set other ways, primarily by what other publishers were charging for similar books. "Similar" meant, for example, MMPB Romance Fiction, that is the type of binding and the broad shelving category. There was an informally agreed upon price range; one book might be $7.95 retail and another $9.95 in the same category, but none were $10.95 and only certain series were less than $5.95 (the prices are given as examples and should not be taken as the correct prices; I don't actually remember what the specific prices were back in the late 80s). Hardcovers were generally priced at double the MMPB, although that was not cast in stone. However, there was an informal ceiling price.
If you could trace pricing easily, you will note that prices rose in tandem across publishers. When hardcovers rose to $2.00 at one publisher, the other publishers quickly followed suit. There was enough variation that no antitrust collusion could be charged -- at the time.
Setting of the initial retail price for MMPBs and hardcovers was based on predicted sales and costs; there was generally a margin that was expected by the publisher. The costs to produce a MMPB and a hardcover (excluding distribution costs, just production costs) were identical except for the actual cover cost and the dust jacket. The hardcover with the dust jacket generally added less than $2 to the production cost for an average print run. All pricing was based on the initial print run which was the publisher's best guess as to how many books in the specific format were likely to be sold within a specified period of time. Subsequent print runs cost less to produce overall because many production costs were not repeated (eg, editing, design) and a book that went through multiple print runs (think, eg, a John Steinbeck novel) had decreasing unit costs and thus higher profits.
One important thing to remember about publishing that is not true of most other industries, which is that it is the large-volume sellers that support the publication of the low-volume sellers. In the absence of a Steinbeck novel that brings in revenue for decades, some other low-sales author would not have been published. Of course, self-publishing today changes that equation but not by much.