The Case Against Hardcovers

Why Most Authors Should Publish Only in Paperback (Plus Digital and Audio)

I’m wading into a conversation about hardcovers today because increasingly authors I’m signing on She Writes Press are asking to have them. Like lots of topics in book publishing, to hardcover or not to hardcover is genre-dependent. There are many books that should be hardcovers—cookbooks, coffee table books, children’s books, lifestyle books. But She Writes Press publishes memoir, fiction, and self-help, and mostly debut authors who are not household names. For these genres and these kinds of authors, the case against publishing a hardcover edition is strong.

First, let me name my bias. I’m a trade paperback gal to my core. My nine years at Seal Press instilled in me the belief that paperbacks are to the book industry what populism is to politics. Paperbacks are more accessible, more affordable, and easier to read. Readers prefer them. That said, hardcovers are a cultural status symbol of sorts. They hold more gravitas. Collectors and hardcore fans want hardcovers from their favorite authors for reasons ranging from status to aesthetic to not wanting to wait for the paperback.

Obviously, hardcovers do sell, and when they do, they make publishers a lot more money than paperbacks. When they sell well, it reinforces the prominence of the format. The problem here is that most books do so poorly in hardcover that the format can be a liability, especially for debut authors.

Let’s start with traditional publishers:

Publishers’ decision about which books to issue in hardcover is driven by financial considerations, but also by hope and guesswork. If publishers were savvier at business, they’d publish only their big-name authors and books they truly thought were going to break out in hardcover, but publishers are in the business of gambling. Thus, they’re as likely to publish in hardcover books they hope and want to do well as they are for those books attached to authors with proven track records and big followings. The challenge there is that when the books fail, it’s the authors who suffer. The publishers can afford to absorb the fallout of their bad bets; authors often never recover. If and when a hardcover run doesn’t sell well, or doesn’t sell through, one of two things can happen: 1) the publisher can put the book out of print, meaning that the paperback edition never sees the light of day; 2) the publisher can strip and rebind the hardcovers and sell them as paperback, which is increasingly less common than it used to be, in part because it’s easier and cheaper just to pulp books by the thousands.

For authors, having your book come out in hardcover may perhaps seem like you’ve made it and your future is glorious. It might speak to your publisher’s faith in your book, but it might also just speak to your publisher’s need to make its quota. When Perseus acquired Seal Press in 2007, the corporate office mandated that we acquire “big books” and that said “big books” needed to be hardcovers. So we fiddled with our P&L statements and put whatever numbers into the blank cells that needed to be there in order to make them balance (which is how publishing works, by the way). Seal Press was a paperback program since its founding in 1976, and not really a “big book” kind of publishing house, so it was unsurprising that the few hardcovers I acquired before I left in 2009 did not work, by which I mean they did not earn out their advances. And the authors who were so ecstatic about their books being chosen for hardcover were not at all happy many months later about their dismal sales.

Enter non-traditional publishing:

I’m a hybrid operative, publishing books outside the pressures of my former CEO’s mandate to find and publish “big books.” Thank God. In my corner of the publishing ecosystem, I get to publish books I care about, great and beautifully written books that are attached to authors who are not famous and who are not household names. More often than not the authors we publish do not have big followings, and most do not have a proven sales track.

If you have a great book, an important book, a book you believe in, but you do not have a built-in audience, an author platform, or a demonstrable way in which you plan to sell directly to your fanbase, you really should not publish a hardcover edition first.

My press, She Writes Press, is capable of publishing hardcovers—and we’ve done it from time to time. That said, because our authors are not known names, it doesn’t make sense for us to do what the big houses do, which is to release the hardcover one year in advance of the paperback. Big houses do this to make money, and to build demand. They know readers are clamoring for these books, so they try to squeeze $30 out of us rather than $17. It’s economics.

For authors who don’t have the kind of readership that’s clamoring for your book, you want to maximize sales. To publish the hardcover first us to limit your readership by making your only available format too expensive and too inaccessible to the average reader. Because of this, if and when we publish hardcovers (usually at our authors’ insistence), we publish them simultaneous to the paperback edition.

A fallout of this strategy is that the hardcover edition cannibalizes its paperback sales. What do I mean by this? If you have two editions that release simultaneously, the industry will typically choose to buy the hardcover. Largely this is habit. A book buyer will see that your book released on April 8, 2025, and if they see two formats, they’re likely to buy the hardcover because traditionally that’s what comes out first. That might seem like a good thing, but it’s not—because if and when those books don’t sell (and remember, they’re less accessible and too expensive for the average reader to take a chance on if they don’t know you from the author of the book sitting right next to yours), the bookstores just send them back. I believe based on the outcomes I’ve seen that the paperback edition will always do better on its own merits, without its overweening sibling format competing for attention. In other words, if you are choosing between simultaneous release or paperback-only, choose paperback-only.

A word on multiple formats:

You might ask, why is simultaneously publishing the sibling format of hardcover problematic but not the eBook or the audiobook formats? This is because buyers of print are buyers of print. Paperback and hardcover appeal to the same reader, who reads physical books. If I go to my local bookstore looking for something to read, I’m going to buy the paperback, unless it’s not available, in which case sometimes (rarely) I’ll buy the hardcover. My choice to download an eBook or listen to an audiobook exists as a buying preference separate from print. Audio and eBook sales are not competitive with other formats; rather, they’re complementary. So while I actively discourage hardcovers for all but the already-famous among you, I highly recommend publishing paperback, digital, and audio to release on the same publishing date if you’re able to.

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One quality I love about authors is their hopefulness. A debut author with little platform to speak of, small to no audience, and no previous track record of sales will often say to me that they believe they can easily sell 10,000 copies. We, the hopeful, look at other breakout authors we know and love and think: Why can’t that be me? And indeed—why can’t it? The deal is that it takes a lot of legwork to build that kind of fanbase and track record. Most of the authors who have hardcover sales worth talking about* are multi-published authors with demonstrable previous successes or existing (usually large) followings. In some cases, they’re authors with a life story the publisher anticipates thousands will want to read, as is the case with Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of Careless People (the Meta exposé).

There are a handful of you reading this who might be an author or know an author who published hardcover editions of their fiction, memoirs, or self-help books with success. We have a book on the She Writes Press list this spring, for instance, No Woman Left Behind. The author, Kate Grant, runs a successful foundation. The hardcover will be gifted to prominent donors, and the author made a successful case that due to the nature of her work tackling the global health crisis that is fistula, there will be demand for this format. I agreed with her, and we made an exception.

The point of this post, as with so many I write, is to support authors to publish smart. Know where you sit in the marketplace. Be hopeful, but also be realistic. Writing a book and deciding to publish it does weird things to our psyches. It puts most people on a knife’s edge, existing in the emotionally wrought space between feeling extraordinary and special in one moment, and anxious and consumed with self-doubt the next. It’s a Jekyll and Hyde existence, and it’s hard. And so, the more we understand about how things work and how to situate our own books and author experience within the context of the bigger whole, the more we can integrate our better angels and inner demons and get grounded in what will bring us the best outcomes.

*Bookscan numbers across different genres to show a snapshot of what’s selling particularly well in hardcover right now:

Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros
(I don’t read romantasy but one of my friends has almost convinced me to start reading Yarros)
Pub date: May 2023
Total sold to date: 2,188,000
Total sold last week: 13,350

James, by Percival Everett
(I couldn’t wait for the paperback and bought this one in hardcover)
Pub date: March 2024
Total sold to date: 696,800
Total sold last week: 8,796

All Fours, by Miranda July
(bought and listened to this one in audio, and All Fours is the subject of the Write-minded podcast tomorrow!)
Pub date: May 2024
Total sold to date: 179,200
Total sold last week: 1,486

Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams
(I want to read this but not enough to buy in hardcover; waiting for the paperback)
Pub date: March 2025
Total sold to date: 64,450
Total sold last week: 17,879