Elizabeth Harris writing for The New York Times about the end of mass market paperback publication:
Stephen King, a famous paperback writer himself, said he grew up buying 35 cent mass markets at the drugstore and was sad to see them go the way of the VHS tape. As a young man, he bought every paperback novel by the thriller writer John D. MacDonald he could get his hands on — and sometimes books with “beautiful babes” on the cover.
Paperbacks were what King could afford, and it was “paperback money,” he said, that allowed him to quit his teaching job and write full time. When the New American Library bought the paperback rights to his 1974 debut novel, “Carrie,” it paid $400,000.
“We lived off that money,” King said. “I could write books. I was free.”
Profound and prolific.