In more 1632 news, 1634: The Ram Rebellion is shipping from Amazon, and as of April 12 is ranked 434 in books on Amazon, and 463 on B&N!!!
If you’re going to buy it anyway, you might consider using THIS LINK, which returns a tiny bit more to Eric’s coffers.
–Loyal Minions
As of April 14, 1634: The Ram Rebellion is ranked #200 on Amazon.
Congratulations :)
I have a question, why is Grantville Gazzette II released as a Hardcover now whereas GG1 was released as a Paperback? It kinda messes up my library arrangement somewhat.
“As of April 14, 1634: The Ram Rebellion is ranked #200 on Amazon.”
That came out very weird…
April 14, 2006 !!!! So very weird!!! :P :)
The reason GG2 came out in hardcover is about as simple and crude as it gets:
MONEY.
Honestly, that’s all there is to it. Today’s market in mass market paperbacks absolutely sucks, due to the collapse of the traditional rack trade distribution network — that refers to books distributed in supermarkets, drug stores, etc — and the continuing closure of mall bookstores like Walden’s. More and more book sales are imploding into the superchain bookstores. (The two big ones nationally being Barnes and Noble and Borders, and in some parts of the country, chains like Books-a-Million.)
That makes for very good hardcover sales, and lousy paperback sales. Add to that the fact — always true — that the profit margin for publishers is much better with hardcovers than it is with mass market paperbacks, and you have a recipe that pretty much insures that publishers will move to hardcover any time they think the market will bear it.
That doesn’t mean that _all_ books will come out in hardcover, of course, because they’re also more expensive to produce and a riskier proposition for publishers. That’s why Baen produced the first Gazette volume in paperback. Nobody had any idea how an anthology of that sort would sell. But the minute the sales figures started coming in — which were way better than most paperbacks produced today — Baen immediately decided to issue any later volumes in hardcover first.
That will be true for Volume 3 as well, coming out in January, 2007. After that… we’ll see. There are no current plans to produce paper editions of any volumes beyond #3, but I imagine Baen will want to keep going, unless sales show a sharp drop. (Of which there’s no sign yet, at least.)
Eric