More book biz

If you're a writer of books you owe it to yourself to follow a small number of sites and blogs to inform yourself about the business. The post of the day is Galleycat's take on the economics of large sales for The Historian and similar books following it.

Everyone's looking for the next DaVinci Code, the book that sells not only to inveterate readers and to thriller fans, but to everybody and their mother and their mother's book group. (That book's been going strong for, what, something like three years, and more than 25 million copies are in print.)

When I was working for Borders 18 months ago, people used to come in and complain they couldn't find the paperback of The DVC.

That's because there isn't any yet, I said.

Why not? they said. They seemed annoyed, and even suspicious, that they had to pay full price, as if the store were perhaps hiding paperback copies so they could charge for the hardback. (And the hardback was selling for 40% off, so it was something like $16 -- little more than a trade paperback.)

I really had to think about my answer. The notion that publishers sell as many hardbacks as possible, and only then start selling the paperback version of the same book, was evident to me by the time I was a teenager. But I talked to several Borders customers during the nine months I worked there who didn't get this basic precept and, when it was gently explained to them, instead of saying "Oh I see" would get even more pissed off, as if this was somehow a whole conspiracy against them, the readers.

But the point is that these conversations with uninformed customers were a sign that word of mouth for the book was so strong that it was reaching people who weren't even familiar with bookstores.

Anyway, I started this post saying there are a few online sites and blogs writers should read all the time, so here goes:

• Galleycat and FishbowlNY (the latter oriented toward the larger media industry, but where else would you see a posting about the worst copy-editing miss ever?) on the Mediabistro site
• Miss Snark, a literary agent blogging anonymously about the biz
• Publishers Marketplace, which lists book deals
• Book Standard -- fairly dry publishing industry business journal, but the commentary section has some good readable stuff.

Read those every day and you're going to be pretty informed for somebody who doesn't work in the industry.