Over the past few years, I’ve seen more than a few complaints about the cost of books, particularly the cost of mass market paperbacks. So I did a little analysis. My first book, The Fires of Paratime, was published in 1982 as a mass market paperback, for a price of $2.95 (which would theoretically cost $9.81 in today’s dollars). In 1993, Tor published The Towers of The Sunset (the second Recluce book) in mass market paperback format for $6.99 (costing $12.50 in today’s dollars).

But those comparisons fail to take into account the length of books. The Fires of Paratime was only 239 pages long (for a price of 1.2 cents per page), while The Towers of the Sunset was 536 pages long (for a price of 1.3 cents per page).

Over the next ten years, the price of my books increased fairly consistently at the rate of inflation while the price per page rose to around 1.5 cents. That per-page-price remained around that level until 2023, when it jumped 33% to 2.0 cents per page. Even so, that increase didn’t cover inflation. When my last mass market paperback was published (Contrarian in 2024), it listed at $14.99, but for Tor to cover the increased inflationary costs would have required a price of $16.25, which most readers are unwilling or unable to pay without sacrificing something else.

Historically speaking, the price of paperback books has pretty much tracked inflation over the past sixty years – until 2023. While a mass market paperback still remains the same in inflation adjusted dollars as it has for the last twenty years, the income of the average middle-class or poorer American hasn’t kept up with inflation.

And that’s not a problem that the publishing industry can solve, because the industry is low margin, where the majority of editors make less than legal secretaries.