We wear calm on the outside,
but inside-a silent war never ends.
Reality Instruction London Review of Books
Publishers go paperback-first as readers shun bulky books π
The final chapter may be being written on hardback books as publishers experiment with a paperback-first strategy, because readers are turned off by bulky tomes, a survey showed.
A number of much-anticipated new titles are being released in paperback format, despite the financial advantages that the hardback-first strategy has for publishers.
The traditional publishing strategy is for the hardback to be released first, which garners more profit per book than with paperbacks and which can help to create a “buzz”, making it easier to persuade bookshops to later stock vast quantities of the cheaper format.
A survey by a London bookshop owner indicated readers’ antipathy towards hardbacks, with 46 per cent saying that they hardly ever or never bought hardbacks compared with 9 per cent who said that they always or mostly bought them.
Data from Nielsen IQ, which monitors the majority of book sales in Britain, shows that 72 per cent of books sold in 2025 were in paperback format despite these, in general, being released 12 months later.
Tom Rowley, who runs the Backstory bookshop in south London and conducted the survey, recorded a difference between fiction and non-fiction, with 81 per cent of novels sold at the shop last year being paperback compared with about 66 per cent of non-fiction titles.
In a piece written for the social media site Substack, Rowley quotes a publisher outlining the reasons that the book industry likes the hardback-first strategy despite the low sales volumes. Very few hardback titles sell in the thousands.
Mark Richards, the co-founder of Swift Press, said that it was hard persuading bookshops to take “an unknown book, ie, most literary fiction”, meaning that publishing in hardback provided a window to garner good reviews.
Richards said that this then gave publishers a “chance of persuading bookshops to take it in significant quantities when the paperback comes round”.
Jim Gill, a literary agent at Felicity Bryan Associates, told Rowley that only two or three hardback books a month “really sell”, adding that the strategy worked as a marketing tool with the “real volume [being in] paperback or audio”.
Hardbacks do also provide more profit per book for the publisher and author than the paperback despite their higher printing costs.
In a sign that publishers may be changing their strategy in the face of reader opposition, however, a number of new titles are being released simultaneously in both formats, or paperback first.
Indicating that profits may not be dented by a paperback-first strategy, Rowley’s survey indicated that readers were more concerned about weight and portability than cost, meaning that pricier paperbacks were an option.
The survey of more than 600 readers found that 61 per cent preferred paperbacks primarily due to weight, format or portability compared with 35 per cent who indicated price was the prime factor.
A handful of the smaller publishing houses have begun to deploy a paperback-first strategy, following the lead of Fitzcarraldo Editions, which since its founding in 2014 has published only one hardback.
Its founder, Jacques Testard, is quoted on Substack as saying: “No one’s ever said: ‘It’s such a shame you don’t do hardbacks’.”
Last year, Canongate published Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore in paperback. Rowley said this had paid off, given that the title was still in his shop’s list of top ten bestsellers.
Faber is set to publish Jem Calder’s I Want You to Be Happy next month in paperback initially, albeit at the slightly higher price of £14.99.
The publishing house also simultaneously released paperback and hardback editions of Eliza Clark’s She’s Always Hungry priced at £9.99 and £15, respectively.
And according to Rowley, his shop sold many more copies of the paperback but also sold out its pile of “gorgeous, signed and collectible hardback” editions.
“That seems a clever approach to pleasing the reader while making a book pay,” the bookseller said.
