A novel typically appears first in an expensive hardback and only reaches an affordable paperback a year later. The delay is deliberate and has little to do with printing capacity.
Readers differ in what they will pay
Some readers want a particular book the week it appears and will pay a premium for it. Others want the same book but only at a lower price, and are content to wait.
Selling everything at one price forces a choice between losing the first group's extra spending or losing the second group entirely.
Releasing two editions at two prices captures both. The hardback collects from readers who value immediacy, and the paperback collects from readers who value cost, without either sale cannibalising the other.
The delay is what makes it work
If both editions appeared together, almost nobody would buy the expensive one. The waiting period is the mechanism that separates the two groups.
A year is long enough that impatience is real and short enough that the book has not been forgotten. Publishers adjust the interval by title and by how the hardback performed.
A hardback that sells strongly may have its paperback pushed back, while a disappointing one is often moved forward to recover something from the investment.
The hardback does more than earn revenue
Hardbacks are what libraries buy, what reviewers are sent, and what prize submissions are usually made in. The edition carries institutional weight beyond its sales.
They are also more durable and more visible in a shop, which supports the sense that a book is significant. That perception feeds the paperback's later performance.
Not every book follows the pattern
Some fiction is published straight to paperback, or to a larger-format paperback, because its readers have shown no willingness to pay hardback prices.
Genre fiction with a price-sensitive readership frequently skips the hardback stage entirely, and mass market paperbacks were built around that assumption.
Digital editions complicate the model further, since an ebook has no manufacturing cost to justify a price difference and its pricing is set purely by strategy.
What the reader is actually choosing
The hardback buyer is paying for time rather than for paper, and the price difference is closer to a queue-jumping fee than to a materials cost.
Recognising that makes the decision simpler: pay the premium when reading it now matters, and wait when it does not.