Word: paperback
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...audience is uncertain, publishers are downright frantic. Only yesterday they could count on six-and seven-figure sales to paperback houses and thereby raise needed operating capital, fund new ventures and enrich writers' wallets. But Fat City is rapidly becoming as legendary as the Land of Oz. According to New York Publishing Consultant Leonard Shatzkin, author of the forthcoming analysis of U.S. publishing, In Cold Type, the times get leaner by the month: 1977 paperback-reprint rights, for example, "contributed approximately 60% of total subsidiary-rights income to publishers. That went down...
What went wrong? Inflation, principally-and poor planning for it. Printing and paper costs rose; prices were passed on to the consumer. But in a high-volume business, where the shelf life of a book is measured in days, the average $2.25 per paperback could no longer be considered an impulse-buying item. The result: of the 900 million paperbacks shipped last year, nearly one-third were unsold. The paperback recession was echoed in the diminishing rewards to writers. Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift brought $313,000 back in 1975, but The Dean's December earned...
...cutbacks are just beginning. Says Louis Wolfe, president of Bantam, the largest U.S. paperback house: "We're paying more attention to what we pay up front and with good reason. We can't afford a lot of money for what might be a big book and then find out it isn't. We have to have a bottom-line profit, and we can no longer afford to keep some of the hard-cover publishing houses going." Shatzkin is less sanguine: "There will definitely be failures among the original trade publishers...
...book business. Some major corporations that backed publishing in the '60s and '70s, hoping for a big score, are pulling out. RCA sold Random House; CBS jettisoned Fawcett Books; textbook giant Scott, Foresman abandoned William Morrow. And the film studios, whose pictures often earned outsize profits for paperback tie-in editions, are equally cautious. A seven-figure property like Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife has yet to make it to the screen. Currently, the odds are against its ever getting to a sound stage. Says Willie Hunt, vice president of production at United Artists...
America's oldest city is the site of one of its strangest attractions, a garish attempt to capitalize on the successful cartoon series and paperback books by the same name. Thing is, it works. There is something awe-inspiring about seeing the heaviest living man sitting outside on a chair the size of a Mazda. How about a wax representation of a man with three eyes? Don't knock it til you've seen it, or the shrunken heads, either. While you're in the area, check out Fort Castillo a quizzical structure with eight-foot thick walls made...