Sure. Of course, the immediate context of the original remarks was that of the dealer's room at a con, which I think is somewhere in between a book store and a grocery store. On the one hand, they're selling to an audience who will buy better-quality books, but on the other hand, they have to haul all their stock with them. The extra hassle of dealing with large-format trade paperbacks probably isn't worth it (even with the higher sale price (which is partly due to the distribution issues...)).
Have I mentioned lately how much I hate the way LJ comment threads work?
When the store I work at goes to a convention, we take mostly new books. It doesn't matter whether they're trades or mass markets or HCs; we'll take what's new (exception would be books by the people attending the convention, which in the case of a worldcon is half the known writing world <g>). We expect to -sell- more of the mass markets, but this is because people will often buy two of them in preference to a trade, or 3 in preference to a hardcover.
There are still fewer trade paperbacks than mass markets (or hardcovers) on a month to month basis, and many companies still go from HC to MM, bypassing the trade edition until the MMs have slowed down sufficiently to warrant a change in the format.
So I think the absence of trade paperbacks at worldcon would be more due to the absence of, well, new trade paperbacks in general; the ratios are probably the shelf ratios you'd see in a store in the genre section. (There are a lot more literary novels that are in that format, and it seems like almost all non-fiction comes out that way, etc -- but at a Worldcon, it's a bit more specific).
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branchandroot
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Date: 2004-09-10 05:27 pm (UTC)Have I mentioned lately how much I hate the way LJ comment threads work?
When the store I work at goes to a convention, we take mostly new books. It doesn't matter whether they're trades or mass markets or HCs; we'll take what's new (exception would be books by the people attending the convention, which in the case of a worldcon is half the known writing world <g>). We expect to -sell- more of the mass markets, but this is because people will often buy two of them in preference to a trade, or 3 in preference to a hardcover.
There are still fewer trade paperbacks than mass markets (or hardcovers) on a month to month basis, and many companies still go from HC to MM, bypassing the trade edition until the MMs have slowed down sufficiently to warrant a change in the format.
So I think the absence of trade paperbacks at worldcon would be more due to the absence of, well, new trade paperbacks in general; the ratios are probably the shelf ratios you'd see in a store in the genre section. (There are a lot more literary novels that are in that format, and it seems like almost all non-fiction comes out that way, etc -- but at a Worldcon, it's a bit more specific).