Wonderful Bookclub Books! Cheap, Badly Bound, Wonderful Bookclub Books!

In your recent posts you have alluded to the costs per book and how small the profit margin can be in children's book publishing. In light of this, i am curious about how book publishers work out deals with the scholastic book club. Does scholastic simply license the titles and make their own printings?

Scholastic's Book Club division is a whole separate arm of the company. Sometimes it will buy bookclub rights from a publisher (even another arm of Scholastic) and print its own bookclub edition of the book. Sometimes it will take existing stock from the publisher.

Book club prices are substantially less than what one might pay in a bookstore, how are such prices possible? When i order picture books via these bookclubs I never know whether I will receive a "normal" paperback picture book or one of the "stapled in the middle not glued" picture books which fall apart quite quickly in my classroom library. I assume this type of binding is done to keep prices down, does it really make so much of a cost difference?

Oh yes. Especially when you also use cheaper paper.

The idea of the Scholastic Book Clubs is to make children's books available at prices that children could conceivably afford. In poorer areas, this is a blessing, and studies have shown the important psychological difference that owning a book makes to children. (Which is not to say that learning to borrow books and use libraries aren't damned important skills.)

Do the authors/illustrators make the same money per book sold via these bookclubs as they do through the regular market place?

No, not usually. But it's good exposure for the book, and the SBC editions only sell in the bookclubs. For those of you unfamiliar with this, bookstores cannot order bookclub editions. The Series of Unfortunate Events books, for instance, were available in paperback through the bookclubs a long, long time before they became available in paperback editions to bookstores.

Last question: Is there any listing or way of knowing which publishing companies have "deals" with scholastic to sell their titles through the bookclubs?

Pretty much all of them.

I often hold off on purchasing new titles if I know they will be available more cheaply (or free with points). This works fine for books published by scholastic itself (ex. I held off purchasing Hunger Games, until it appeared in a bookclub flier), but how do I know what titles from other publishers will be available?

You don't! Ha-ha!
No, really, Scholastic decides which books it takes, and you find out when you get their catalog. Sorry.