The paperback of An Abundance of Katherines will be published on August 14. It will look something like this:

(In real life, the cover will be higher resolution and not clearly stolen from B&N.)

As you can see up there in the top-left corner, the paperback of Katherines will be--at least for a while--a mere $3.99. Almost all trade paperbacks now retail for 10 dollars or more, and a lot of people have been asking why the book will be so inexpensive. Some reasons:

1. Books are ridiculously overpriced. Paper Towns will retail for $17.99. That's a lot cheaper than most contemporary fiction (Junot Diaz's brilliant novel is $24.99, for instance), but it's still expensive. I'm always interested in trying to keep costs low, but it's very difficult for a number of reasons, which I can get into if anyone ever wants a long and boring post about publishing economics written by a rank amateur in the field. At any rate, we were talking about how to launch the paperback of Katherines, and someone was like, "What if we made it so cheap that no one would make any money?" And I was like, "Now that is an idea!"

2. Of course, that idea was born of a nakedly capitalistic calculus: We hoped it would 'grow the brand' (someone actually said those words in that order; the brand in question being, I guess, me). We also wanted people to get excited about the October release of Paper Towns, which by the way you should preorder right this very moment! (Sorry, I am practicing my shitty salesmanship skills.)

3. Like all writers I know, I would much rather have readers than money. Books have always been luxury items. (Putting aside the fact that even voracious readers in the end prefer food to fiction, there is almost always a cheaper way to read than purchasing a book.) It is because books are a luxury that they are so expensive (ditto re., for instance, cable television, which is also outrageously expensive when you consider that you are paying for the right to watch advertisements). The unfortunate result of this is that purchasing and owning books becomes impossible for a lot of people. And there is real value in owning a book, in being able to return to the text repeatedly, in being able to highlight it and write in the margins and make it well and truly yours. So whenever there's an opportunity to lower the hurdle between a reader and book ownership, I'm for it.