So if Scholastic is not doing as well as they had expected with this line, this is only by comparison with its own spectacular sales history. In spite of softer paperback sales, I see little sign that publishers are pulling back from this area. Just about every hardcover publisher now has its own paperback line. This should not be seen as entirely a bad thing. Many of these lines publish reprints of previously published books, and to do a reprint you must first publish a hardcover, so some of these paperback sales support hardcovers, and also make more books available in a format that more families can afford. . .
Paperbacks can do other things to support a hardcover line.
This sale will help the original publisher's bottom line considerably, and more sales like it can be expected. With several major publishers jockeying for position in the paperback market, high-status titles will be much in demand not only to enhance a publisher's prestige but to help get its line into the stores. Plenty went on in publishing in general, and in children's books in particular, at just about every major publisher and many of the small ones. This still continues. Other companies with more of a reliance on backlist and sales to libraries, such as Houghton Mifflin, BDD, and HarperCollins, saw no sales growth, but at least did not see a decline.