The way publishers print their books isn’t as straightforward as it might seem to the average reader. For many years, print production has struggled under consolidation. There are just a few US printers able to handle the needs of US publishers, and thus, a number of books produced by US publishers aren’t printed in America. Many go to Canada and/or Canada is the source where printers are able to access enough paper to meet their needs. Other books, especially those that rely on color—cookbooks, picture books, and so forth—tend to be published overseas. One of the biggest countries printing those books is China.
Tariffs will impact book lovers. Though there is a temporary suspension on said tariffs for goods coming to the US from Canada or Mexico, the 10% tariff on Chinese imports has gone into effect. This means that it is really likely the price of books will begin to slide upward. This would be in addition to the slight increase in the cost of books over the course of the last several years as publishers have dealt with paper supply challenges, inflation, and the general market.
In January, Kathleen Schmidt, founder and CEO of KMS Public Relations, joined me on the Book Riot podcast to talk about the ways tariffs may impact the average reader. Schmidt has over a quarter century of experience working in the book world, and her work, which you can read on Publishing Confidential, has been an incredibly level-headed look at the realities of today’s publishing world. I’ve pulled the transcript of our podcast conversation and have edited so as to make it a more readable format. You can listen to the podcast segment in full here.
Enjoying what you’re reading? Support the work we do as an independent media resource by becoming an All Access member, and unlock our entire library of articles and a growing catalog of community features. Sign up now for only $6/month!
Kelly Jensen (KJ): Kathleen, I would love it if you would start by introducing yourself and sharing anything about you and your work, your background that you think listeners should know.
Kathleen Schmidt (KS): I’ve been in the publishing industry for about 30 years, which I can hardly believe. I’ve held positions mostly in publicity and marketing, but I’ve also been a literary agent, an associate publisher, an acquiring editor, and I ghostwrote a book called The Little Book of Goat Yoga, which is not a well-known fact, but there you go.
Having all those positions has put me kind of in a unique spot in the publishing ecosystem because there really isn’t anything I haven’t done or haven’t seen. So that’s why I started my Substack. I can talk about the industry writ large because I’ve seen so much of it and experienced the nuts and bolts of it in a way that a lot of other people have not.
KJ: Let’s start with where and how publishers produce printed books. My understanding from the research and interviews I did in 2018 about this is that there is an industry-wide challenge in accessing paper. Thanks to the consolidation of a lot of printers nationally and more globally.
KS: A majority of books are printed domestically, meaning in the United States. Publishers have certain printers that they favor.
But you might have a situation like the Obama book. It’s a thick book. You need a lot of paper to print it. You need a lot of time to print it. What Penguin Random House was able to do, probably, is to go to their preferred printer and say, this is what we’re printing. And then that printer kind of moves every other job off the slate to prioritize this one.
So if you’re another publisher that uses that printer, you may find yourself in a position where your printing is being delayed. Because A, they’re using all the paper for the Obama book, and B, that is a huge money-making job for that printer. When things are going as they should in a normal season where there’s not an Obama book, like right now, there isn’t so much a paper issue.
I think that things have leveled out from the pandemic and I don’t think we’re experiencing the delays that we did when the supply chain was getting back on track. But the other part of it is that some of the paper is imported from Canada. So when we talk about tariffs, usually people go right to printing in China and how much it’s going to cost to ship those books over to the States. But you also have to think about where you’re getting the paper from. Paper is not just created in the United States. It’s also imported from Canada.
So if we’re talking about a 25% tariff for Canada, you’re talking about a substantial raise in the price of paper, which could be very problematic for publishing. That 25% would have to be passed along to the consumer at some point.
As you were saying, the price difference for books between 2018 and now is not that big. And that’s been a problem that publishers have struggled with for a while. If I look back 20 years ago, the prices haven’t gone up that much. That’s problematic for the industry, but at the same time, the industry knows that it’s competing for consumer dollars that consumers are reluctant to necessarily spend on books.
KJ: What have you seen in terms of the prices of books? What has increased in cost? Maybe you can speak to whether that is a certain style of book or genre that has increased. Do you think that a growth in accessing ebooks by the average consumer, which are often at a lower price point than hardcover editions, has changed the sort of print runs made of books and taken some of that pressure off paper costs?
KS: When the publishing industry knows that they can raise the price of a certain author’s books, they will. I’m going to bring up the romantasy category because that’s front and center right now. Rebecca Yarros’s publisher is looking at how big her books are. Big meaning they’re long. They’re like bricks. Publishers can get away with charging more for those books because she’s got the audience that will definitely pay.
In economics there’s this thing called willing to pay. So if you’re trying to price anything, you’re testing it out first. You’re seeing if a specific book can hold a $35 price point now. When you consider that, you have to think about if it’s a bestselling book, like the Rebecca Yarros, it’s going to be discounted by 20% probably at B&N, and it’s going to be discounted on Amazon. You have to consider that the discount is going to happen. So you have to price the book high enough that you’re still recouping whatever costs were set out to make the book. That’s one situation.
When you’re talking about a debut author who has a modest platform, maybe there is a little buzz surrounding the acquisition of the book. You really can’t go that high with that price because you are testing it out in the market. Publishing doesn’t do market research like the movies, screening and audience testing. The test is putting it out on the bookshelf and seeing if people will buy it. My argument has always been for some of those debut novels to come out as paperbacks at a lower price point so that consumers will be more likely to take a chance on it.
The thing about ebooks is that while they’re priced lower, they’re not priced that much lower. They’re not priced low enough where consumers aren’t complaining about how expensive they are. So what you often get in the ebook world is people who have Amazon Prime and Kindle Unlimited. Those are the people that benefit from, you know, some of what goes on with ebooks in the first place. Now there are, say, romance authors that have their entire collection on Kindle Unlimited. I am paying to have that access. I’m not paying for the individual books. I don’t think there’s dynamic pricing for your regular everyday ebook. Sometimes I look at that hardcover price versus the ebook price and decide to get the hardcover because, it’s only $5 more expensive.
KJ: You brought up some authors whose books have gotten the special edition treatment in the last couple of years. These gorgeous hardcovers, gorgeous sprayed edges. Do you think that that has had an impact at all on book prices?
KS: I do. I was just talking about this with someone yesterday. There’s a book that just got published, Death of the Author. I heard that that book is very nicely designed. It has the frayed edges. It has embossing. It’s really pretty. To me, that signals it’s more literary. The publisher wants to make a splash with it. People will pay more attention to it. The special editions and deluxe editions that are produced are like a collector’s item for some of the audience that reads those authors.
KJ: Let’s talk now about the tariff piece of this all. What is your understanding of how tariffs, if implemented by the new administration, would directly impact publishers? Where do you think that will hit them? In response, where and how do you think this would show up for the average consumer? I’m not talking about library markets, because I know that’s a whole different conversation, but for the average person who wants to buy a book.
KS: First, let’s talk about what kind of books are most likely to get hit with tariffs. We’re talking about four color cookbooks, any illustrative books, board books for little kids, children’s books that are illustrated, things like that. Those are generally printed in China because it’s less expensive to do so. The ink is less expensive. The paper is less expensive. The printing costs are less expensive. When we talk about tariffs, we talk about taxing those items to a certain percent.
You, the publisher, are paying 15% more to import those books that you’re having printed in China. You were having them printed there in the first place because it was less expensive. Now it’s more expensive. Not only that, but during and after the pandemic, when the supply chain was getting back on track, the containers that books were shipped in were more expensive. Publishers absorbed the cost for that. They absorbed the cost for shipping, and shipping depends on how much fuel is costing. So if the fuel is being taxed higher, you’re paying more for that. Everything down to getting the books off the ship onto a train to get to the East Coast costs money.
So if you’re talking about a 15% tariff on goods coming over from China, the publishing industry is going to have no choice but to raise prices on those books.
What started happening after the pandemic, at least where I was at the time, Skyhorse Publishing, they had a whole cookbook division. They were becoming a lot more picky about which cookbooks they’d publish or which four color books they’d take on because of the expense.
KJ: That was one of the questions that I was curious about. Will publishers respond by being pickier about books that they’re publishing and maybe having smaller lists? Will they be making decisions about whether or not it makes sense to print something in four color or full color versus sticking to the black and white, which maybe they can then print domestically at a better rate?
KS: During the pandemic, there were some books that we printed domestically that were four color because we didn’t have another choice and they were expensive.
The other thing you have to keep in mind is that for any of those books that get printed, you want to print enough where you’re not going to have to go back to press. That’s a terrible guessing game for publishers to have to take on. It would take months for you to get a reprint during the pandemic. So what publishers are going to run into now with the tariffs is the same kind of problem because they don’t want to pay the expense twice. So, if they have a cookbook they’re going to have to estimate the best that they can what the first printing should be because they know that a second printing is going to be very costly.
KJ: Do you think that there’ll be an increase in maybe going ebook first or considering digital first to gauge what sort of interest there might be in a title to help on determining print runs or to cut down on unnecessary costs?
KS: That’s an experiment that has sort of been done before and it didn’t go so well. For a time, years ago, what they were trying to do—and this has been talked about on and off for years, especially with cookbooks—is making them more interactive, like an interactive ebook. You get the ebook and maybe there’s a link to a cooking video in it or something like that. It never caught on. People don’t seem to like cookbooks as ebooks, so I don’t think that that’s really going to work. As for kids’ books, I think what has happened with Barnes & Noble cutting way back on that category is not going to change. They’re still going to be very particular about what books they take on. This isn’t only a retail problem. It’s a literacy problem, which is a whole other episode, but they only take on a certain amount of risk with middle grade books and kids’ books, and that’s not going to change. Publishers are really going to have to meet the moment and figure out what kind of pricing will work for them.
We’re really at a space that can be either an opportunity or a space where we just see less. When I say opportunity, I mean to get creative and to think kind of outside the box. But in an industry where the margins are so tiny, that itself, you know, presents a risk.
What you’ll see is a lot of what we have already seen, which is celebrity cookbooks or cookbooks from people with these huge platforms. These are the ones that publishers are willing to acquire because they know they’ll make money from them and you know, if you’re a newbie coming in and you have a very modest platform, I think you’re going to run into problems getting published. Just because you’re not a guarantee. Publishers are well aware of the fact that they’re going to have to put out a lot of money to make that book work.
You also have to consider something in the publishing ecosystem like Costco, which used to take a huge number of cookbooks and could make a publisher’s fiscal quarter by doing so. They’re not doing it anymore.
KJ: It’s like an octopus. There are so many like tentacles, so it’s not as simple as tariffs are the problem. That’s one of many problems that are all coming together at the same time to create this big question mark. We have no crystal ball, we can take some guesses, but it’s hard to kind of see where publishing will be two years from now.
KS: It’ll also affect those authors’ advances because it’s gonna be a question of how quickly is the publisher going to recoup those costs? You don’t know.
KJ: What is one thing that you would like the average book lover to consider when it comes to purchasing, sharing, borrowing, or reading books in 2025?
KS: I would just say that if you notice that the price of books is increasing, it’s not to punish the consumer. It’s to keep the publishing ecosystem flowing and to also, you know, hopefully, better pay the people who work on those books. I am a big advocate for better pay for publishing, especially for people at a junior level. That can’t really happen if tariffs are coming and unless prices are increased on books. I would just ask the consumer to think about all the people that it takes to get a book out into the marketplace.
KJ: That makes so much sense. Like the average person doesn’t tune into all this stuff in the same way that like those of us who are steeped in the book world are. There’s so much to the $30 price point. But it’s so much like that 30 price point. That is not just the cost of the physical book itself. It’s the author’s pay. It’s the editor’s pay. It’s the publisher’s pay. It’s the marketing and publicity pay. It is, you know, all of these pieces. When you do the cost breakdown, nobody’s making much money off a $30 hardcover book. It’s hard to wrap your mind around.
KS: In all honesty, it doesn’t cost a ton to create a book, right? But it does. The rest of what you’re charging is to pay the author, pay the staff, and all that goes along with it. You just have to keep that in mind when you’re buying a book. Also keep in mind that prices have not increased that much in a very, very long time.
KJ: And really a dollar increase in cost from 2018 to 2023 is not that much money. That’s not a huge increase, especially when you think about the cost increases in so many other sectors of the things we interact with and purchase every day.
Source link
