ABSTRACT
Over the years, the sale of mass-market paperback rights often attracted attention both in the trade and the general media, since it was in this area of publishing that licensing revenue rose spectacularly. The trend started in the United States in the 1970s and led to advances such as the $3,208,875 paid by Bantam in 1979 for Judith Krantz’s Princess Daisy, still the all-time record for fiction. By the 1990s, advances tended to be more modest (although Pocket Books reportedly paid $2,600,000 for Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale). There has been a substantial shift in the overall strategy for hardback/paperback editions in the last twenty-five years.
