In The Book in Society: An Introduction to Print Culture, Solveig C. Robinson notes that the paperback’s key selling point — its low price — meant that it had a wide appeal beyond the bookstore: Unlike traditional hardcover books, which continued to be sold mainly through bookstores, the new paperback imprints were offered in a wider range of venues, from rail stations to drug stores and grocery stores. Relatively inexpensive, the ship, and often issued and series, paperbacks quickly took their place on the store shelves besides magazines.”
In the post-WWII era of mass-consumption, this widespread availability helped build the publishing industry we know today: publishers and imprints dedicated to specific genres such as crime, science fiction, romance, and westerns, sprang up to bring stories to readers across the United States, fueling fandoms and providing authors with enough income to etch out a career as a full time writer.
This world took a hit in the 1970s when a key magazine distributor collapsed, taking with it access to those key store shelves from which so many people could find a cheap book. Robinson notes that in the aftermath, “some publishers decided to make a virtue of the fact that trade paperbacks featured the same size text but at a lower price than hardcover books, and they began to market these books as ‘quality’ paperbacks.”
In Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, John B. Thompson dug into this point quoting an executive from the time: “The hardcover side was snobby, literary, pretentious, tweedy— all things that you would expect from the [1960s]. And the paperback business was sort of second class – we got the books a year later, we got no credit for the words, we were all about marketing, packaging, distributing, and selling books… While the paperback business was dependent on the hardcover business for product, the hardcover houses depended heavily on royalty income from paperback sales to run their businesses.”
Fast forward to the 2000s, and mass market paperback sales continued to drop. The elimination of those key sales channels, the rise of new formats like eBooks and audiobooks, and the continued focus on hardcovers and trade paperbacks took their toll. It’s spelled real problems for authors: where they might before be able to depend on an initial hardcover release and subsequent mass market paperback release a year later— the hardcover sales fueled by libraries and dedicated readers and the greater paperback sales from more casual readers — the shrinking of the category has meant that those back-list sales were no longer as reliable. eBooks have taken up some of the slack, but it isn’t a perfect replacement. And as hardcover and trade paperback book costs have risen — now often in the $30-$45 range — the economic pressure for an author’s book to succeed is higher than ever.