Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
The numbers are a huge deal and not just for direct financial reasons. That's also why the used book market is not always such a big deal for authors, many of those books are out of print, and they wouldn't count toward the all-important current book numbers anyway.
|
Yes, numbers can mean the difference between an author ever getting anything more than an advance from a publication. The out-of-print issue is changing now, though, because with ebooks, many things will never go off the market again.
In the future, in some cases, instead of ebooks threatening pbook sales, it may be the existence of circulating pbooks that affect new ebook sales.
And not all used books are out of print, and some of those come back into print if they are popular enough or if the author becomes a "star" (Gene Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" is an example, I believe).