Hi, Marsha! It's been a decade since we published THE COLORADO KID and the
publisher we worked with to do so (Dorchester) has been out of business for
five of those years, so getting accurate data isn't too easy. But my best
recollection is that Dorchester printed and shipped just under a million
copies -- maybe 950,000 or 960,000, something like that. The vast majority
of those were in the original printing. I think they did go back to press
one or two times after that over the course of the 3-year term of the
contract, but those additional printings were tiny by comparison -- maybe
another 10,000 or 20,000 copies each time.
The only factor used to determine how many copies would be printed and
shipped, as far as I know, was how many copies stores ordered (plus maybe an
extra 5% or 10% just to make sure there were some extra copies in the
warehouse). Stores were allowed to order however many they wanted, and
however many they ordered, that's how many we printed.
Now, this does not mean there are a million copies of the book floating
around -- keep in mind that the book was done as a mass-market paperback
(the small pocket-sized book you see in racks at supermarkets and drugstores
and such), and when those books don't sell they don't get shipped back to
the publisher to be resold somewhere else -- their front cover gets torn off
and just that gets shipped back to the publisher, and the book itself gets
destroyed. I believe more than half the copies that got shipped to stores
wound up being destroyed in this way -- that's sort of horrifying, but it's
the nature of the paperback business. You ship a lot of copies to fill
store racks, and then any that haven't sold a couple of weeks later get
destroyed.
But that still means there are probably something like 350,000-400,000
copies out there -- it shouldn't be a scarce book or hard to find.
Of course, if the 350,000-400,000 people who own a copy mostly want to keep
theirs and only a few are interested in selling, that could result in the
price being high in the secondary market.
We definitely didn't keep numbers of copies low to artificially create a
collector's item. If anything, we did the exact opposite, shipping as many
copies as humanly possible, to ensure that anyone wanted to read the book
had a chance to do so.