Marketing and sales are the keys to success in publishing. Manuscripts can be accessed, editorial revisions for language, style and subject matter can be done with a little help from outside, and high production quality can be ensured with computerization of printing techniques. But the best product can come to nothing if the book is not properly marketed and sold and the money recovered for further expansion.

What are the factors that inhibit sales? The stock-in-trade answers are: high prices, few retail outlets and little incentives for retailers to stock titles, inadequate publicity and the general tardiness of publishers to organize book promotion tours and exhibitions. High prices restrict the individual buyer, lack of outlets and low discounts and stringent credit terms offer little incentives to the bookseller to take risks and poor publicity ensures that the potential buyer never comes to know the book exists. Quite apart from these obvious factors, few publishers realize that the key to success for modern retail sales is to compete either on prices or really high quality, and not to remain in between. Publishers try to take on too many individual titles, cut corners in production costs to keep prices low and keep publicity and other overhead expenditures as low as possible. The result is that they fail to deliver on price, range, editorial or production quality.

Much of the confusion arises because many publishers believe that books sell if they are priced low and the retailer is provided with large discounts and endless credit. This is not always so, especially with the discerning buyer who is prepared to pay extra if the book has relevance to his needs and interests and holds the promise of enduring value. These are subjective and there is no single yardstick to measure their worth. But at the end of day, the book ought to have sold to qualify being called “good”.

Take the professional courses in science, technology and medicine; accountancy, management, law, architecture or even the string of competitive examinations that every student appears for. Prices become irrelevant as the candidate is prepared to fork out any amount if the book offers him a reasonable chance of success in today’s fiercely competitve world. Money doesn’t matter; only quality.

As against this, take the plethora of guidebooks and down-market fiction of glitz, sex and romance and celeb books that have no specific market in mind; they are aimed at the mindless mediocrity in the hope that some will be seduced by the packaging. Contrary to popular belief, such books don’t sell; they end up invariably in the remainder market. Low-priced books sell in reasonably large numbers, but they give publishers hardly any margins and sooner or later find themselves in the back burner.

In the not-too-distant future, only quality will matter — quality of content and the quality of production. In the search for quality, price will not matter too much. For readers only expect a return on their investment.