On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Godfrey DiGiorgi <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Mar 19, 2009, at 12:28 PM, Adam Maas wrote: > >> ... Pricing is not set by the bookstores but rather by publishers ... > > That's not correct, at least not today. Maybe it was in the past. > > Nowadays, the bookstore chains collaborate with the volume distributors on > pricing, they set the terms for pricing, delivery and return of merchandise. > Between the them, they hold publishers and authors at ransom. Small > bookstores often cannot even carry merchandise from a variety of publishers > due to contractual obligations between the publishers and distributors, > driven by the relationship with large bookstore chains. > > At the workshop I attended in November, we talked about this to great > length. The book business, and particularly for photography books, is a > really sucky and difficult game to succeed at as an author or small > bookstore. The whole game is weighted to the success of the large bookstore > chain and volume distributor. > > Godfrey > >
Note that in most cases the Volume Distributors _ARE_ publishers who also distribute for the smaller houses. The big publishers are the major power here, the big US chains have a lot of influence due to volume but the driving force is the publishers (who are not as beholden to the chains as the chains are to the publishers, courtesy of Amazon). The major influence the chains have is in their choices of what to stock rather than in pricing. As a long-time regular over at Baen's Bar (the webforum for Baen Books, a major SF&F publisher) I've gotten a lot of information over the years on how the publishing industry works for a mid-level house (Baen is the largest privately-owned publisher of fiction in the US) -- M. Adam Maas http://www.mawz.ca Explorations of the City Around Us. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
