Charlie: Thanks so much for this. Confirms my suspicion that it’s a crap shoot. And how could it not be?

Shana: And why I will never really understand this industry at which I make my living . . .

Oh, and as to your sidenote: Yeah, yeah, I know, it bugs me, too. I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet. If anyone can explain in simple language I’d be most grateful.

to add to that: um… it’s also a big guessing game. a hope and a prayer and how much clout your editor has to pull, and how good her marketing & sales teams are, based on the good guesses she’s made before — which are instinct and common sense mingled in a unpredictable fashion.

which is why publishing, although at its core, it is a business that sells widgets, is far less simple than selling widgets.

[side note: Justine, will you put up a link to go to the next & previous blog entries? v. handy.]

I had one novel this year that came out in paperback after disappointing hardcover sales … and the print run sold out inside the first week, forcing an immediate decision to reprint. And I had a different novel (different publisher — okay, it was Accelerando) where they printed a bunch more than its’ predecessor — and which out-sold the predecessor’s entire first 12 months by a 50% margin in just 8 weeks, again triggering a reprint.

An interesting point is that reprinting novels is fairly cheap and fairly fast; turnaround is a couple of weeks and a batch of as few as a thousand hardcovers can be profitable because the existing postscript files are available (and an increasing number of printers use postscript-to-press these days — no need to prepare plates, you just treat it like a godzilla-sized laser printer). However, the dust jackets have a longer lead time and are more costly to set up, so in at least once case one of my publishers printed a thousand spare DJs just in case they needed to run off some extra hardcovers.

The real fun, as far as I can tell, is trying to figure out whether you *really* need to reprint, or whether the empty warehouse is going to re-fill itself from returns as the boxes of unsold books come back from the bookstores. IIRC scholastic got bitten by this with the latest Harry Potter — they reprinted a couple of million(!) and then began getting returns, in mind-numbing (hundreds of thousands) quantities such that although it outsold the previous title, they were left with a couple of thousand tons of unsold stock.

Oh, to be in that woman’s shoes!

Sometimes by the time the book is going into printing, we’ve realized we’ve underestimated the first print number – maybe the author has gotten some phenomenal press, booked a spot on the Today Show, or the subject is suddenly “hot”, and a mention on a website like The Drudge Report increases back orders. When that happens, we try to increase the first print run, but it doesn’t always happen. Ordering a couple thousand more of book X means a couple thousand of book Y may be bumped, and suddenly everyone’s schedule is off. Or the printing press may just not be able to accomodate us so quickly, and so the request for more books turns into a second print run. It’s all a massive juggling act, and sometimes we can get the book out quickly, and sometimes not. Our main goal is to keep the spice flowing, so to speak, and not have any large lags between the time the customer orders the book and the time they receive it, otherwise they’ll grow impatient and cancel.

Granted, all of this is just how my publisher does it, and each company has their own way of dealing with print runs. When I worked at Tor, it was a bit different. And once the book becomes part of the backlist, the process for ordering reprints is based on other factors, which I won’t go into. I think this comment is long enough!