Trade publishing vs Mass Market books

Volume plays a good deal into the decision.

Mass markets are almost universally strip covers, which means that once they're in the stores, they never come back. Because of the cost of producing an MM relative to the cost associated with shipping it, bookstores "return" them by ripping their front covers off and sending just the cover back to the publisher. The books are then pulped.

While returns are also figured into the profit and loss calculation for a trade book, there is always the possibility of selling the returned stock later/using it to stock bookstore orders for a later promotion or when the stores want more stock on the author's backlist. With a mass market, 99.9 times out of 100, that book is gone forever once it's in the bookstore.

So you have to assume you'll sell through enough stock to make that worthwhile.

This week we got mass markets of Emma Donahue's ROOM for the first time since its publication...2?...years ago. She's coming out with a new novel, and her publisher thought now was the time to blow the money on that format.

Once in a blue moon, a mass market is not a strip cover, and once in another blue moon, a trade paperback is. HARRY POTTER and THE HUNGER GAMES are printed as strips--but again, expected sales volume.

Now, there are some genres, like sci-fi and romance, where the norm is to go straight to mass market, both because of customer price expectations and, I would assume, projected volume. If you can count on sell-through of a certain number of books just based on buying patterns of genre fiction readers, then (I think--I worked for a commercial NF imprint and we printed nothing in MM, ever) mass market saves on production cost.

It's all about that profit and loss statement.

This isn't a size issue. Mass market paperbacks are all strippable. Some books are published in both larger and smaller formats, but those smaller formats are not always mass market and therefore strippable: sometimes they're just smaller.

The decision-making on whether or not to publish a trade paperback or a true mass market one usually happens when a publisher decides to publish a book: some imprints deal with trade paperbacks, others produce mass market only. So it's dependent upon who the publisher is, to a great degree.

Debeucci said:

Obviously, all YA is trade

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Lots of YA and MG novels get printed as hardcover. As Old Hack said, it depends on the publisher, and on the book.

Usually, if a novel comes out in hardcover, the publisher brings out a second edition later in paperback. The second edition is usually mmp, but I've seen a few cases where the publisher decided to go to trade paperback.

All YA is not trade. For that matter, a book can start as trade, and then go to mass market, or even start as mass market and then go to trade. All sorts of things go into the decision, and the thought process is different with each publisher, and often with each book or writer.

Copycat. *g*

Trade v. mass market is a question of distribution channels. There's nothing that says the same title can't be distributed both ways.

The publisher will ask which way will provide the highest profits and follow that path.

When my books were published I was told they'd come out as trade first and a year later as MM. The reasoning was that they hoped to get reviews with the trade and be taken seriously, and then sell well a year later. This was done in all editions, including foreign editions. The last book came out in hardback the first year.