I had thought, and still do, that the phenomenon of publishing a book in paperback only was a good thing, especially for fiction. As a bookseller, I observed the paperback achieve sales three and four times what they would have been if the book was hardback. It should be good for the author too, I thought. The lower royalty payment per book would have been more than compensated for by the higher sales and the larger audience. When I suggested this to a writer recently, he was quite adamant that paperback only editions meant that writers got a much smaller return because they missed out on PLR.