The economics of scale apply here: It's cheaper to print a 900 page book when you're printing 20,000 of them than it is to print that same book, per unit, at 4,000, which is what small reprint runs often are.
As recently as, oh, sometime last week, my understanding was that one way to justify smaller initial print runs was because it was easier to just go back and reprint the book when copies sold out. An initial printing of 20K and three subsequent 2500 or 5000 copy reprints was better than sales of 35K out of a 50K print run because there was no wastage (numbers simplified for the sake of discussion).
CODE came in at about 125K as the result of ruthless cutting on my part. Looking back, I probably should not have done that, both for the sake of the book itself as well as my future word counts--for subsequent books, I struggled to bring in 145-150K word counts, which in my case came out to about 625 manuscript pages. I have a 125K limit (give or take some wiggle room) written into my contract. Obviously, I wiggle quite a bit.
But now it seems as though fewer and fewer books will be reprinted, even though the demand may be there. I don't know what to say to that, except that maybe I should hope that rumblings come to pass and Jani 5 does indeed come out in trade paper format.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2004-09-10 06:43 am (UTC)As recently as, oh, sometime last week, my understanding was that one way to justify smaller initial print runs was because it was easier to just go back and reprint the book when copies sold out. An initial printing of 20K and three subsequent 2500 or 5000 copy reprints was better than sales of 35K out of a 50K print run because there was no wastage (numbers simplified for the sake of discussion).
CODE came in at about 125K as the result of ruthless cutting on my part. Looking back, I probably should not have done that, both for the sake of the book itself as well as my future word counts--for subsequent books, I struggled to bring in 145-150K word counts, which in my case came out to about 625 manuscript pages. I have a 125K limit (give or take some wiggle room) written into my contract. Obviously, I wiggle quite a bit.
But now it seems as though fewer and fewer books will be reprinted, even though the demand may be there. I don't know what to say to that, except that maybe I should hope that rumblings come to pass and Jani 5 does indeed come out in trade paper format.