Brand-Name Authors Serve as Loss Leaders

Link to October 26 Publishers Weekly post, "Who's Footing the Bill for Price Wars?"

Here are the numbers for Under the Dome, Stephen King's latest door stopper. (At 1,088 pages, it'll do the trick.)

$35 list price
$8.98 Walmart price
$8.52 loss based on highest publishers' discount.

Lots of bleating going on in consumerland. (So where are they being led to?)