We’ve just announced eight more events, with authors including Helen Lewis, Rachel Parris and Jem Calder and the FT’s excellent Sarah O’Connor and Soumaya Keynes. In the next fortnight we have graphic novelist Lizzy Stewart, as well as Adrian Wooldridge on the future of liberalism.
IT’S A JOURNEY I MAKE so often I count it in my PT’s regime. A customer tentatively approaches the counter enquiring if I have a new book in stock. They break into a broad smile when I confirm we have plenty. I cross the shopfloor to pick one up or, if it has been out a little longer, rush downstairs to the stock room, rummage around for five minutes, and then triumphantly return to the counter.
The customer does not return my look of triumph. In fact, they are now looking distinctly unimpressed, perhaps even wondering if I am trying to pull a fast one. “Oh,” they say. “Do you not have it in paperback?”
I briefly summarise publishers’ near-universal attachment to a hardback-first-then-paperback-after-12-months model. I explain we don’t like it any more than they do. Customer looks either resigned, baffled or sceptical (“I’m sure I’ve seen it in paperback.”) Customer leaves. No sale is made.
Variations of this routine happen several times a day. After a while, the other two FAQs — “do you have a toilet?” and “would you stock my book?” — count as a blessed relief. At least it’s not a reader who has performed the minor miracle of selecting one book out of the millions of titles they could decide to read only to be told they’d better choose something else because it’s not available in the format most readers actually want. Come back in a year?
You might, by now, have formed the impression that I’m a little baffled by this particular tradition. And you’d be right. But, four years in, I thought it’d be worth trying to find out why this model actually exists, rather than just grouching from the sidelines. (Though a good grouch can be cathartic. Especially on a slow Monday afternoon.)
So I spoke to readers, authors, editors, bosses of publishers small and big, publicists, newspapers’ literary editors, the head of Britain’s most prestigious literary prize, agents, printers and industry data analysts.
I asked them all the same question. What is the point of hardbacks?
Four answers emerged, along with some tentative glimmers of hope for those of us who prefer a paperback.
But before we get to the explanations, let’s have a look at the data. Is Backstory an anomaly? Are hardbacks secretly beloved everywhere but Balham?
I started by asking newsletter readers. Of the 623 readers who responded to my question, 46% said they hardly ever or never buy hardbacks, compared with the 9% who said they always or mostly buy them.
This undersells the strength of feeling in the paperback-only crowd. “I loathe hardbacks,” one respondent wrote. “I never take them on holiday, and I never read them out and about.”
This strong preference plays out at the till, too. 72% of the books we sold at Backstory last year were paperbacks. Uncannily, this mirrors the national trend exactly: according to the data wizards at Nielsen, of all the books sold last year in the UK, 72% were paperbacks. (This data is © NielsenIQ BookData 2026.)
There are, though, a couple of caveats.
The first is a biggie: non-fiction. I’d be willing to bet all our “dragon porn” profits that the 9% of my survey’s respondents who prefer hardbacks are non-fiction readers.
While the bulk of our hardback fiction sales are just a handful of buzzy books people can’t wait to read, we sell one or two copies each of a wide range of non-fiction, with customers often unfussed about the format. Only 19% of the novels we sold last year were hardbacks, whereas at least a third of history or politics books were.
Not coincidentally, fiction skews female and non-fiction readers are more likely to be men. There is a certain sort of bloke who wants a weighty book for weighty ideas — a five-volume account of the Hundred Years War, for instance. In one of my old newspaper jobs, a (male) officemate contemptuously said that my side of the bookcase was full of “unread paperbacks”. (There are, of course, loads of women who read history, politics and current affairs, and plenty of men who prefer reading about aliens. When we ran a non-fiction book group, women were in the majority.)
The other caveat is books bought as gifts, such as cookbooks: 89% of the food & drink titles we sold last year were hardbacks.
All of which is to say: steady on! I certainly wouldn’t be in favour of ditching hardback history or beautiful gift books, which account for a good share of our Christmas sales. I don’t want to know why those books are published in hardback. That much is obvious: publishers like them like that and so do readers.
The question is: why is fiction still usually published in hardback, despite readers’ stated and revealed preferences?
The four major publishers alone publish several hundred novels each month. Dozens of these are by debut authors, with no established fanbase queueing up to buy their book. One obvious way to make a debut stand out is to persuade a critic to give it a good review.
Newspaper readership is in serial decline, but book publicists still crave such coverage. Even if a potential punter never buys the paper in question, they might well see “the best debut novel this decade — The Times” plastered on the front cover in a bookshop.
And there’s a perception that newspapers will only (or at least prefer to) review hardbacks. The boss of one of the world’s biggest publishers raised this as an argument in favour of hardbacks when we spoke for this piece, as did both of the literary agents I interviewed and some of the publicists.
But this is not what the journalists themselves say.
“They do make that argument: that we won’t review them,” says Robbie Millen, literary editor of The Times and The Sunday Times. If anything, he says, “I’ve got a prejudice against hardbacks…they’re hard to read. I much prefer paperbacks with flaps.
“We’re covering many more paperback originals than we used to, so I reckon publishers are stuck in old think.”
Frederick Studemann, Millen’s counterpart at the Financial Times, agrees. “I’m not fussed about the format,” he says. “Other countries publish first in paperback form… and no one gets sniffy about those.”
What newspapers want is novelty. They favour hardbacks, then, not because they like the format but because it is the first format. This is why Millen says he reviews more “paperback originals” than he used to: journalists don’t want to review a book that was published in a different format last year, but would happily consider a book published straight into paperback.
The other problem with publishing in hardback in order to get review coverage is that it means a positive review — in effect, a free full-page advertisement for a book — appears at a time when the reader can only purchase in a format most of them don’t actually want. By the time a paperback is available, they may well have forgotten the reviewer’s words, however complimentary.
And now to another red herring. Several publishers argued that printing a hardback first was important for prestige. Literary awards, they reckoned, favour weighty hardbacks.
Not according to Gaby Wood, chief executive of the foundation that runs the most prestigious of Britain’s literary gongs, the Booker.
“It makes absolutely no difference at all,” she says. “Judges don’t judge based on the format. Publishers always assume judges care who published the book. They don’t. They barely even look at who wrote the book: they judge the words.”
Besides, she points out that judges are often reading books in proof form before they are officially published. As proofs are almost always printed in paperback, she is “unaware of the extent to which I’m reading a hardback in paperback”.
The Booker exists to reward great writing, not to sell books. Even so, Wood points out that the books that benefit most in sales terms from being on the Booker shortlist are the ones that are already in paperback.
This is definitely the case at Backstory: of the six novels on last year’s Booker shortlist, the four that were still in hardback only shifted between four and seven copies in the month before the prize was awarded, despite the hoopla. The two paperbacks sold 37 and 42 copies respectively.
When I spoke to the bigwig publisher, they opened by observing that the hardback-first-then-paperback “model looks pretty resilient from where I’m sitting”, especially for literary fiction. “You have no choice for debut fiction,” they argued. “Putting a literary novel straight into paperback would be the kiss of death.”
They readily conceded that the hardback edition may only sell 1,000 copies. (In reality, it is often even fewer.) Nonetheless, they thought of the hardback as an important “marketing vehicle”.
This refrain was echoed by others I spoke to. It’s not about selling the hardback, the argument runs: the hardback sells the paperback.
“I can see why we need to do them,” says Jim Gill, a literary agent at Felicity Bryan Associates. “It comes off for two or three books a month (or so) — books that really sell in hardback and then get another chance in paperback and become bestsellers all over again.
“With most books, though, it’s sort of a PR/limited-theatrical release of some thousands (let’s be honest, some hundreds) of hardback copies. The real volume is in paperback or audio.”
If a book generates buzz, hopefully that will rub off on consumers. But the real intended audience is major retailers, whom publishers are hoping to persuade to stock the paperback in volume.
“For an unknown book — i.e. most literary fiction — you’re unlikely to get significant support” from bookshops, explains Mark Richards, co-founder of indie Swift Press. “So if you go straight into paperback then you’ve often lost your chance of getting it into the shops in good quantities at all. Whereas if you publish a book in hardback then get good reviews etc., you have more of a chance of persuading bookshops to take it in significant quantities when the paperback comes round.”
For most literary fiction, therefore, “the hardback has become more or less a glorified marketing tool”.
Publishers pitch for paperback “book of the month” slots at major retailers that can add thousands of sales. But in order to secure these, they need to show that the hardback stood out from the crowd. In VC-speak, the hardback is therefore “proof of concept”.
This “offers the market a chance to do its research and development that in many industries happens prior to taking things to the market,” says another publishing boss. “In books the relatively low cost of getting something into the market (compared to film or chocolate bars or cars) means that the consumer and media markets are given a chance to make choices that winnow the mass market choices.”
This makes sense, particularly from a publisher perspective. At Backstory, it is certainly true that we are more likely to take relatively big bets on paperbacks if they have already performed well in hardback. Our first order for a paperback we want to put on a table would usually be five copies; for Evenings and Weekends, we ordered 200, for The Correspondent, which comes out in paperback in June, 100.
The current vibey hardback is Yesteryear. We sold six copies last week and 10 this week: a small portion of our overall book sales, but enough above the (very low) hardback benchmark for us to know already that we’ll probably take a lot of paperbacks when the time rolls around.
There are, though, two flaws in this argument. The first is from Backstory’s perspective. We are a small bookshop: we can only stock 3,000 or so titles at a time. A handful of fiction hardbacks might sell decently, but the rest won’t. Do we want to devote a significant portion of our limited space to providing publishers with a sampling exercise for consumer demand? (That sounds like something we should charge for!)
Indie bookshops (and Waterstones) are more likely to take a punt on a literary debut; supermarkets and airport bookshops will shift volume, but only once others have taken that risk.
Second, publishers can (or at least should be able to) deliver re-orders within days. Books are printed in the UK and a paperback reprint can be turned around in 48 hours. So there is arguably no need for a different edition and a 12-month delay to test the market.
To take an extreme example, if all debut fiction were published in paperback, indies would still be more likely to take punts. As soon as something began to take off, others could (and would) leap on it. National sales charts are published weekly: if a book is gaining momentum, it is no secret.
Perhaps it won’t surprise you that the argument in favour of hardbacks that seems to be most compelling is: Money.
“On the most basic level it’s about the P&L,” says the retail director of a major publisher. “A meaty hardback will help the numbers work.”
Printing a hardback costs roughly twice as much as printing a paperback. But printing costs are only one among many costs borne by publishers for every book: there’s the author’s advance, then the editor’s, sales reps’ and publicist’s wages, then distribution costs and any marketing budget. Those costs are similar regardless of how the book is printed. The publisher will typically set the RRP of a debut hardback novel 70-80% higher than a paperback, so each hardback sale generates much more profit per unit.
This “maximises value” from any one acquisition, argues the bigwig, meaning that though readers might prefer paperbacks, the hardback model enables publishers to take more bets and thus give readers more books to choose from: “There’s what consumers think they want and what they actually want.”
Contracts are structured so that the same economics apply to authors. “Publishers love the idea because the margin is so much better in hardback,” explains Jim Gill. “Agents and authors because the royalty rates on that bigger RRP are so much better.”
It is not only that authors earn more from their slice of the pie in hardback, it’s that publishers give them a bigger slice of the pie. Royalties for a standard hardback typically start at 10% of RRP, whereas for a paperback it is usually 7.5% (in both cases, the share goes up a bit if a book hits certain sales targets).
“Early adopter pricing is not unique to the book industry,” says Kay Peddle, a literary agent at Colwill & Peddle. “Any product that involves a lot of investment tends to use this strategy. And I think it’s important for authors and publishers to capitalise on the buzz and excitement of a new publication — it’s a very low margins business and it’s important to get return on investment wherever possible.”
And how do the figures look for a bookshop? Unlike authors, we don’t get a bigger slice of the pie for hardbacks. But we do, of course, make more pounds in profit by selling a hardback rather than a paperback.
Here, though, the distinction between non-fiction and fiction is crucial. Last year, sales of hardback non-fiction contributed 35% more revenue for Backstory than non-fiction paperbacks. But the opposite held for fiction, quite dramatically: there, paperbacks generated 148% more revenue than hardbacks.
None of my conversations gave me any more reason to believe that readers want hardback novels. When I asked about their personal reading preferences, even my interviewees weren’t so keen on hardbacks. “I haven’t read a hardback in years,” said Jim Gill. Kay Peddle called paperbacks “the ultimate format”: cheap, portable and with “no pressure to keep it pristine. Sand, grime and dog ears all add to the charm”.
The four bestselling authors I spoke to loved the beautiful hardback editions of their own novels, but mostly preferred to read in paperback. “Hardbacks are a pain to carry around in your bag all day,” said Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam. Still, she admitted she would have been disappointed if her own novel had gone straight to paperback, “which is silly given my own feeling on hardbacks — but there really is something special about them… It feels culturally good and healthy for there to be some books that are beautiful, collectible objects and some books that are cheap and accessible.”
But I did come away persuaded that there are sound economic reasons for the status quo. Publishers, authors, bookshops and readers benefit from the hardback-first model for non-fiction. In fiction, the benefits are much less apparent for readers or retailers, but still clear for publishers and authors — at least for books that sell. (A lot of books lose publishers money, regardless of format. And authors only earn royalties after the publisher has covered their costs: 10% of £0 is worth the same as 7%.)
Is there a compromise here? Readers prefer paperbacks; publishers need to recoup their investment. If publishers are sticking to hardbacks for their higher prices, rather than out of intrinsic preference for the format, might it be possible to increase paperback prices instead?
Interestingly, of the readers in my survey who preferred paperbacks, 61% said that was primarily due to weight, format or portability, compared to 35% whose preference was driven by price. Could a slightly more expensive paperback, timed with the publicity traditionally given to a hardback, sell more copies than both formats combined? It’s surely worth a try.
There are other options, too. A pricier but beautifully produced “fancy paperback”, with flaps, could satisfy the “I-want-it-now-but-don’t-want-to-lug-around-a-hardback” crowd, followed later by a standard paperback for a more price-sensitive reader.
And if a paperback really takes off, a publisher could always produce a beautiful, limited edition hardback as a second format: superfans could line their bookcases with these, and publishers could present them to authors, the publishing equivalent of the golden vinyl that was traditionally given to musicians who sell a certain number of records.
Indies are leading the way. Fitzcarraldo Editions has only ever published (beautifully produced) paperbacks, save for a 10th-anniversary limited hardback run of its greatest hits last year. Economics initially forced their hand (their start-up capital would go further with the lower cost of printing paperbacks), but they have no plans to move away from their model. “No one’s ever said ‘it’s such a shame you don’t do hardbacks’,” says Jacques Testard, its founder.
The bigger indies are beginning to experiment, too. Canongate published Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy straight into paperback last November to capitalise on buzz generated by its US publication. That seems to have paid off: six months on, it is still in our top-10 bestsellers.
Next month Faber will publish a contender for book of the summer, I Want You To Be Happy by Jem Calder, as a nicely-produced paperback, at £14.99. That seems a good bet for the beach: both a fair bit cheaper than a hardback, and much more hand-baggage friendly.
Faber also provided us with the best experiment I’ve yet seen by simultaneously publishing paperback and hardback editions of Eliza Clark’s third book, She’s Always Hungry. We put them side by side. To be sure, we sold many more copies of the paperback, at £9.99. But we also sold out of our pile of the gorgeous, signed and collectible hardback edition, at £15. That seems a clever approach to pleasing the reader while making a book pay.
I don’t have a perfect answer. And, of course, much as I might try to understand the industry at large, my spot at the till only affords me a good view of one small part of it. But I would like to see bigger publishers being bolder and experimenting, too.
If you’ve got this far — sorry! — how do you think we could please readers, authors and publishers? Drop a comment below.
Happy reading… however you read!
Tom