The great hardback book con

Boris Johnson’s memoir costs £30 while Sally Rooney’s costs £20. Are rising prices why some best-selling authors are seeing sales drop?

The nights are drawing in, the Government is dogged by scandal and Richard Osman and Sally Rooney are sitting pretty at the top of the bestseller lists. So far, so familiar. Yet look a bit closer and all is not as it seems.
The publishing world was sent into a tizzy this week when it emerged that, despite their chart dominance, Osman and Rooney had seen their sales slump compared with their previous offerings. Rooney shifted 10 per cent fewer copies of Intermezzo in its first week of publication than 2021’s Beautiful World Where Are You, according to The Bookseller trade magazine, while Osman’s We Solve Murders was down 30 per cent on last year’s Thursday Murder Club instalment.
It is not just Osman and Rooney, arguably the two biggest names in publishing this decade, that have seen sales slide: pricier, more profitable hardback books are struggling across the board. Overall hardback sales are down six per cent year-on-year in 2024 thus far, to 30 million, while paperback sales are down just one per cent to 103.9 million, according to Nielsen Bookscan data seen by The Telegraph. 
Some in publishing reckon there is an obvious reason: the ever-increasing price of hardbacks has finally gone too far and is now putting off potential readers. The average RRP of a hardback in 2019, the last year before the pandemic hit, was £18.22, but that is now well over £20 today. The best-selling hardbacks from 2019 s (which are often discounted by retailers) cost an average of £12.99 each, which had risen to £16.99 last year. We Solve Murders has an RRP of £22, while Intermezzo will set you back £20. The Golden Road, the latest book by popular historian William Dalrymple has an almost unheard-of £30 guide price. As does Boris Johnson’s new memoir Unleashed, and Melania Trump’s memoir Melania.
“We have certainly seen people wincing at the price of hardbacks,” Ross Bradshaw, owner of Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham, told The Bookseller. “Novels at £20 or £22 are hard to sell, but also popular non-fiction at £30.” Molly Murray, owner of North Ayrshire’s Seahorse Bookstore, added: “The cover price increase has reduced these sales drastically. We avoid ordering hardbacks of novels now because the cover price is prohibitive for many of our readers, especially when the same editions are generally half the price in the supermarkets.”
Have publishers become too greedy? They will say that production costs have soared in recent years, especially after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and the decision by many paper manufacturers to shift to making boxes for Amazon, but profits for the biggest publishing houses remain strong. Hardback margins are as good, or better. But independent booksellers increasingly struggle to shift the copies they do buy, especially as many of the biggest releases — like Osman and Rooney — are heavily discounted at outlets such as Waterstones, The Works or WH Smith. Even the most loyal independent bookshop customers have their limits. Would you spend £30 on a hardback book as a gift when there is a chance it will remain on a shelf, forever unread?
Hardbacks are a peculiarity of British publishing and, like many things in Britain, endure largely because of tradition instead of necessity. Here, hardbacks are published first, which allows authors and publishers to make the bulk of their profits, then a paperback release follows about six months later to give them a second bite of the cherry. In many other English-speaking countries, with the notable exception of the United States, hardbacks are seldom seen. Instead, so-called trade paperbacks (large, soft-covered books) are the norm when a book is first published.
There were rumours before the coronavirus pandemic that publishers were looking to phase out hardbacks because they were too expensive to make, but Covid-19 sparked a surge in reading and that never came to pass. “It is sort of a miracle that hardcovers have survived as long as they have,” says top literary agent Toby Mundy. “I don’t think it’s over for them, but they could be in a slow decline.”
There has been “some pressure” from booksellers on publishers to consider releasing books in paperback form first because of spiralling costs, according to Juliet Mabey, founder of Oneworld Publications. “Publishers are reluctant to do that because when you do a hardback first it’s not just about whether the margins are better, because obviously we don’t sell them all, it’s more about the fact that there’s not a lot of review space and publishers feel that the hardback has more chance of getting review coverage,” she says. 
Mabey, whose authors have won the Booker Prize three times, including Prophet Song by Paul Lynch last year, adds: “If reviewers are sitting there with a hardback and a paperback, they probably think the hardback has more weight behind it, or has a bigger destiny ahead of it.” Many authors also like the heft of having their work bound in hardback.
There are other factors behind the hardback decline. Mundy reckons that people are more willing to experiment with formats, such as audiobook or ebook, than ever and that the podcast boom is diverting readers from buying a book on a topic in the first place. 
“Would you read a book called the French Revolution, or will you listen to six episodes of The Rest is History, which is absolutely phenomenal? Podcasts have probably hit posh, hardcover nonfiction a bit.” There may be some truth to that: sales of hardback fiction are actually up by three per cent this year, to 5.9 million, but non-fiction sales are down by a steep 14 per cent to 12.2 million.
James Daunt, the chief executive of Waterstones (and America’s Barnes & Noble), reckons that the issues are overblown. “I would say it’s probably the third-best year we’ve had, but slightly worse than last year,” he tells me. “Then in typical publisher — and, indeed, bookseller — fashion, we all throw our hands up in the air and go, ‘Oh my God, the sky is falling in!’ But it just isn’t the case.” He expects to have a “very strong December”, as hardbacks fly off the shelves and land under Christmas trees.
There is no getting away from it though: hardbacks are more expensive than ever and the prices are unlikely to come down. “Unfortunately, everything has got a little bit more expensive,” says Daunt. “Inflation in books has been remarkably low over time and, in the UK in particular, prices are lower than anywhere else: they’re lower than in any European market and lower than in the United States. They are really good value.”
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