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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

According to the article, the book has sold almost a million copies since last year. So Knopf has definitely made their money back.

The size of the initial print run only tells you that they were still working out the marketing campaign. Doing smaller runs first lets you experiment with parameters like cover and format and media campaign timing.

It only makes sense to do a massive initial print run if the demand is both guaranteed and transient, e.g. a book that’s part of the national discourse right now but will be forgotten in six months.

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Does that explain why every surplus store winds up with so many copies of politician's autobiographies right after they leave office for good? I'll never forget as a kid seeing aisles & aisles of nothing but Bill Clinton's "My life" for $2 per copy or something like that.

Political books are a different animal than other books. You'll find political donors buying a huge number of copies to propel the book to the top of the charts to make a political statement. (my ideas can't be crazy if 50K people bought my book on the first day!)

Politicians use the books for fundraising and can end up with a lot of surplus books. I suspect that the donors that purchased Clinton's book needed to free up some garage / warehouse space and dumped them when they were no long a useful political tool.

Thanks. Now it makes sense to me to make a small run first before printing more. Doesn't explain why they immediately paid the author so much money. Are best sellers made by publishers by investing money in marketing it (like what this article is doing)?

This is how the industry works. People make bets based on their estimation of how a book is going to fly...and nobody really knows for sure.

Andew Wiley (a well known literary agent) also makes the observation that the bigger the advance the more assiduously the publisher will work to justify it.

In Hollywood this is called "buying your gross". Marketing costs are a major portion of revenue for a blockbuster.

This is how the publishing industry works. Authors get a guaranteed up-front advance and then also a backend residual dependent on performance. In fact this is how many industries work; as an engineer I get an up-front guaranteed salary, but then I also get bonuses and stock refreshers in arrears as reward for good performance.

As for why the industry works like this, this is the income that professional writers live off of. Most of them aren't coming out with even one book a year, and they need some form of guaranteed income to live off of. The publishing company is fulfilling a role here not too dissimilar from VCs, potentially losing money on most bets that don't win big but then hitting the jackpot on something like this novel. It's risk aggregation; what works for a profile of many bets is not good when you're the author with one bet.

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