What is everybody reading? asked someone.
I'd like to ask a slightly different question: What can people afford to
read these days?
More and more science fiction novels are being published in hard
cover first, and only later in mass- market paperback. "Hardcover"
means expensive--- for example, the cover price of C. J. Cherryh's
Destroyer is $36.00 Cdn ($24.00 US), before tax. She's my favorite
writer above all, and for her (and one or two others) I'm willing to pay
what I have to in order to get the newest books as soon as they appear.
But for most writers, I have this dilemma that if I pay that much for
one hard-cover I have less to spend on paperbacks which are roughly a
third of the price (the paperback edition of the previous novel in the
same series, for comparison, was $9.99 Cdn or $6.99 US).
For the writers' sakes, I believe in buying books rather than
borrowing them from libraries.
So why are publishers, so far as I can tell, creating a situation
where I buy fewer books rather than more?
One key piece of information I to help me understand is whether this
situation benefits the writers themselves in some way. Better royalties?
better distribution? prestige (which I don't grudge them)?
I'd be grateful for everybody's or anybody's thoughts on this matter.
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