Books Reborn in Paperback

Last month, The Wall Street Journal had an article (on the front page, no less) about books that did OK in hardback but  exploded in paperback.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, for instance. Viking initially printed 30,000 copies of the hardback, but the paperback version has sold 1.4 million. The Kite Runner went from 110,000 copies in hardback to 5 million in paper, and The Secret Life of Bees from 126,000 to 4.67 million.

The article said that Eat, Pray, Love’s breakout success was no accident, that it was the result of a “series of calculated moves” on the Publisher’s part. But I believe the truth (also admitted, but only after the jump to P. 11) is simpler than that: women loved the book, so they told their friends about it.

As, one by one, newspapers drop first their book section and then book coverage altogether, there has been a lot of “Woe is Me!” hand-wringing (mostly by the critics, whose jobs depend on that coverage).

But book publishers traditionally have done little market research. They rarely study what a customer wants, nor how effective their advertising and publicity efforts are. Consequently, I think the industry has put far too much weight on newspaper coverage and not nearly enough on word-of-mouth. I did an informal study in May of the books I’ve read or plan to read, and I found none of the books (none!) via newspaper review. A few I learned about on NPR, but most were either recommendations (personal, bookstore or blog) or just caught my eye in the store. And with ordinary people blogging about books (that is, recommending them to their online friends), the word-of-mouth factor is more important (and more powerful) than ever.

What Penguin (Eat, Pray, Love’s publisher) DID do was keep the book in print longer than 90 days. Because bookstores don’t have to pay for books for 90 days and because they can return them at no cost, many books that are not sold in the first three months are returned. The publisher often (usually) “remainders” them–sells them at a steep discount or turns them into paper mush. Books that are remaindered in 90 days don’t get the chance to develop that critical word-of-mouth. Another thing Penguin did was watch the numbers: when Eat, Pray Love continued to sell, one copy at a time, and booksellers continued to restock it, one copy at a time, they kept it available. Then when they released it in paperback, the developed a careful plan to stoke the word-of-mouth fires.

It’s encouraging to see a major publisher doing this kind of research and allotting their publicity dollars based on which books have “legs” (which are already getting informal buzz). It’s encouraging to see any book news on Page 1 of the Wall Street Journal!

But what I most enjoyed about the article? All but one of the books mentioned (full list below) I’ve either read or they are already on my To Be Read shelf, and most of them, I read in hardback. To me, that means if the publishers learn to read the market data for books that have legs, the books *I* like to read should be more and more available. And that’s definitely good news to this reader!

Books with legs (according to The Wall Street Journal):

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

The Memory Keepers Daughter by Kim Edwards

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

I would add to this list

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger