Tag Archives: book publishing

Resurrection publishing

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I.e., republishing out-of-print books. Article in The Guardian, via Booksquare:

For some companies, resurrection is a sideline alongside new titles; for others, it’s their whole raison d’etre. It’s a labour of love, not money, for most. Few of these books get reviewed, and partly for that reason they won’t catch your eye, or even be there at all, when you’re in Waterstone’s. Mostly there’s little hope of achieving the level of sales – perhaps 2,000 copies – where you start to tot up your profits. Often you’re doing well if you’ve sold 300.

A little madness in the name of love. What’s not to like?

One little nit — c’mon, Guardian, hotlink the publishers you mention! Okay, actually it’s more of a medium-sized nit. Here, I’ll do my part:

Pomona.

Great Northern Publishing.

Parthian.

Sutton Publishing. [UPDATE, seems to be disappeared.]

Nonsuch Classics. [UPDATE, also disappeared.]

Traviata Books. [UPDATE, also disappeared.]

Related: See also my post Wagging the Backlist.

Wagging the backlist

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Jeff Jarvis, a couple of days ago, offered some ideas to publishers about how to make money from their long tail — i.e., their backlists. The basic idea is to offset the cost of storing all those books by charging a premium for them–while simultaneously offering a discount on electronic/PDF versions.

Must be in the air, because Booksquare has forayed into the same territory, while raising an option (in the comments) that Jarvis omitted: POD — specifically, the capability to produce one-off print copies of backlist titles.

Booksquare thinks that’s what’s coming — it’s just not quite there today.

POD technology isn’y geared toward mass production yet. It’s getting there. Until then, it’s not cost effective to print very small runs of books to meet demand . . . there might a reluctance to use this technology due to pricing as well — a POD book will likely be at a higher price point than the original version. As I think about it, pricing POD books in general might be something that publishers are just now starting to think about seriously.

Amazon’s acquisition of BookSurge will certainly change the dynamics of POD (and I think that Amazon is the dark horse in the book digitization race for this very reason), and as they develop their market there, you’ll likely be seeing more publishers embracing POD as a way to regain control of their backlist. Of course, as I noted in my article, you’re also going to see authors who realize they can simply go it alone. BookSurge’s product is produced much faster than other POD suppliers and is excellent quality (I have a sample on my desk).

Okay, if I were running a publishing company from my armchair, I’d be obsessed with POD. I’d be chewing on it 24/7.

I’d be looking for partners who might be able to do it more cheaply than I could.

I’d be thinking about offering my backlist at a loss if it meant I could establish relationships with prospective customers. Why not offer an author’s backlist titles as incentives to get people to purchase his/her latest book, for example? It wouldn’t even have to be by author — you could use your backlist to get people reading other authors, too, or to get them to explore other, related lines of books.

There’s no reason publishers couldn’t add public domain books to their POD offerings as well. Anything to get people collecting books and to expose them to other portions of a list.

I’d also be asking how price-sensitive people are when it comes to backlist books. Anyone who has shopped for an out-of-print book online knows their prices can soar pretty high. So, identify out-of-print books as just that. “Xxx by yyy is out of print. However, we can create a printed, bound copy from our electronic files if you’d like. Here’s the price . . .”

I’m just sayin . . .

RELATED: I’ve also posted about the long tail here and here, and also about “Resurrection Publishing.”

Why you shouldn’t pay $500 for a copy

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People are putting copies of “Opal” on ebay, hoping to cash in on the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal. Today on Amazon, copies are still being offered for $80-120. But on ebay, bidding has cooled off. Prices were up in the $50 range yesterday. Not today.

This may be why: according to The Book Standard, about 12,000 copies were sold before Little, Brown pulled the book.

That’s a lot of copies. I’m no expert, but I can’t see the value going much higher than $50. Not for the foreseeable future. So if you own a copy and want to double your money, go for it. But if you’re thinking you’ll buy a copy at that price and flip it . . . maybe not such a good idea.

(For background see posts I’ve written here and here. And here and here and here.)

Inside Alloy

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The New York Observer has a piece up about Alloy Entertainment, the book packager that was called in to help Kaavya Viswanathan “write” How Opal. . . :

The convoluted authorial structure of Alloy books is anything but transparent.

“To me, all that stuff is such a black box,” said one author who has worked with the company. “They have writers who don’t exist, and they have writers who don’t really write the stuff, and they have one series supposedly by one author that are by many. There’s no one-to-one alignment between anything that gets produced and the producer. There’s no literary accountability.” 

Literary accountability, maybe not. We’ll see about legal accountability. As Booksquare writes in their post about Little, Brown’s decision not to revise Opal:

While we’re not cynical, we fully expect a lawsuit or two to be coming down the pike. ‘Cause this is America and suing is our national right.

(See other posts I’ve written here and here. And here and here.)

“I burst into tears”

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That was Kaavya Viswanathan’s reaction when she first saw her book in print, according to this article in The Guardian. Here’s the full quote.

In an interview with The Associated Press before the controversy, Viswanathan talked about the pressures of her new fame and described the first time she saw her novel in print. One Saturday in March in the Harvard bookstore, she happened upon a prominent display of her books, each slapped with a head shot that took up most of the back cover.

“I started to hyperventilate, and I burst into tears,” Viswanathan said at the time.

In retrospect, looks like that was a tell.

(Other posts about all this here and here. And here.)

The scandal that keeps on scandaling

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I guess if you’re going to plagiarize, you might as well plagiarize from more than one book.

The Harvard Crimson is now reporting it’s found passages from Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life” that were lifted from Meg Cabot’s “The Princess Diaries” and Salman Rushdi’s “Haroun and the Sea of Stories“(!!!).

And The New York Times (registration required) has published a piece reporting similarities between passages in Viswanathan’s book and passages in “Can You Keep a Secret?” by Sophie Kinsella.

This wasn’t a novel. It was a fricking medley.

(I previously blogged about this here.)

Look what I found down the rabbit hole

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Hi! I’m popping up to grab a bit of fresh air and blink in the light.

I’ve been following links from links on this Kaavya Viswanathan story.

I started with The Analytical Knife blog, and followed a link there to Lizzie Skurnick, fisking a Harvard Independent article based on an interview they did with her.

Skurnick also put up a link to this Slate ariticle by John Barlow, about his short stint as a book packager writer-for-hire.

I made a couple of side-trips on the way, but you’ll have to find them for yourself.

I think I need a rest now. Good stuff tho, all of it.

Package ‘er up

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Booksquare has a post up about the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal that raises the question behind the question:

It also makes one wonder why in the world a business like Little, Brown would spend a reported $500,000 on an unwritten book by a first-time author who was starting her academic career at a famously tough university.

For a possible answer, Booksquare links to this piece at Publisher’s Weekly that suggests How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life was purchased not as a novel, but as a product: an attractive author with an interesting backstory, matched up with a “test-marketed, packaged” story.

Makes sense to me.

Update: the story gets worse…