Print on Decrepitude

I've had a generally good relationship with Penguin over my 28 year career, but right now I am not feeling very charitable toward the folks on 375 Hudson Street.

Sometime in 2012 or 2013, it's hard to know exactly when because they don't really announce these things, they started a Print on Demand program.

Which is not, in and of itself, a bad thing.  POD has come a long way since its early days, and you can do very attractive POD books, especially trade paperbacks, that are hard to tell from the standard offset edition.

But that's not what Penguin is doing.  They are doing mass market POD editions, and they are awful and crappy and markedly inferior to the regular offset editions in pretty much every way imaginable.

Today's example, a copy of Simon R. Green's Hell to Pay, the 7th Nightside novel, spotted at a Barnes & Noble in CT.

I knew it was POD the second I opened the book.  That's kind of bad sign #1.  You shouldn't be able to tell a POD book from a regular book that easily.  But these Penguin POD books have Wimpy Spine Syndrome.  Which is...  well, if you pick up a regular paperback and open it a wee bit at the center point and kind of push on one side and pull on the other, you aren't going to get a lot of give. The spine is going to kind of hold itself firm.  Not the POD editions.  You open it up, and there's a spine, but it's very malleable and elastic.  This was that kind of book.

Then there's the paper stock.  It's a very bright white.  I gave my younger brother this book and another similarly sized Nightside book and asked if he could tell anything about them, and that was the thing he noticed.  It didn't look like a book.  It looked like it had been printed on copy paper, was how he described it.  That nice 87 brightness sort of copy paper.  The problem with that is that it offers a lot more contrast between the black ink and the white paper which can be a little annoying, and may also offer a little more glare.

Then there's the guttering.  Depending on a lot of factors, a regular paperback you can usually read without having to push the pages back too far.  There's enough space between the inside text and the spine that you can hold it open with one hand, and get enough room to read the book.  Not with these POD editions.  Even though they are the same size and use the same page plates in theory, the text is much more likely to run far enough into the spine that you've really got to hold the book open with two hands to read it.  This means there is a much bigger risk that you might break the spine of your book.  Happily, I guess, these POD editions have such wimpy bendable spines that they won't break in quite the same way?

In this particular book, the copyright page was very blurry.  The text was generally crisp enough, but you could really tell on the copyright page that this wasn't well printed.  It was the book version of watching a movie somebody recorded from their seat in the theatre.

The binding of the cover to the innards is just a little off.  In a properly printed mass market, the gluing of the cover to the spine runs to the edge of the spine.  In these POD editions, the gluing will be off kilter.  On this copy of Hell to Pay, the front cover was glued a fraction of an inch more to the first page than it is supposed to be.

According to our website, the last regular printing we spotted was 5th printing.  This one says it is the "1st".  On the copyright page, that's the "10 9 8 7 6" countdown.  The lowest number is supposed to be the printing.  I am pretty certain that the list of other books by Simon R. Green was updated along the way from the first printing to the 5th printing.  This POD edition has the list of other books by the author that was current when Hell to Pay was first published seven years ago.  The Nightside series was twelve books, but this "other books" panel only goes up to this 7th book.  Good luck figuring out from here the right sequence for reading all the books that came after.  There is no mention of the Secret Histories series, a NY Times bestselling series by the author. There is no mention of his Ghost Finders series.

The POD books are much more susceptible to generic printing errors than regularly printed books.  Another client of mine, Del Howison, has purchased a few batches of these POD copies of his first Dark Delicacies anthology to sell in his Dark Delicacies store.  Can't have purchased more than 20 or 30 of these.  One had a seriously wrinkled spine.  Another had the cover for his book wrapped around the innards of another book.  In another, they put the final pages of the book from page 340 on at the beginning of the book instead of at the end of the book.  All of these are the sorts of things that sometimes happen with books printed by regular means.  But they don't happen in 10% of the copies.

Penguin also tries very hard to say that these aren't POD books, because there are contractual implications to saying that.  They are "managing the inventory."  Maybe we have 5 copies, maybe we have 48 copies.  But the bottom line is that they are printing them in very very small quantities, and only when they absolutely need to print them.  Del Howison generally has to wait a bit getting his books from Baker & Taylor, because B&T doesn't maintain much more than a one or two copy inventory and has to wait for Penguin to supply if Del wants to get five or six.

Penguin now charges $9.99 for a shoddily printed copy of Dark Delicacies.  The better-printed copies cost $7.99.

How can you tell if your paperback with Berkley or Ace or Jove or Roc or NAL or whatever imprint of Penguin is being printed in this way?  Well, on the one hand, it's very easy, because if you've read this blog post, you might accurately get a "you'll know it when you see it" feel.  But  it's also very hard, because the publisher doesn't want to utter the words POD or let you know that their book is in their Special Inventory Program.  It's hard just looking at Amazon or B&N.com or anyplace to tell a book that has just a few copies around because it's in this program from one that is in its end of days with the regularly printed copies.  By definition they're doing these POD runs for books that don't sell a lot of copies and are probably not carried regularly at most bookstores (in fact, I'm surprised a Nightside book by Simon R. Green is being printed this way) so you may not know until you decide you need another five copies for your shelf or some reader complains to you via the contact link on your website.  However, on the very last page of the book opposite the inside back cover, I have noticed that the POD editions have some kind of string of characters, a printing code of sorts, that you don't see on the regular editions.  Of course, Penguin will now do its best to get rid of that, or to add a random string of characters to the back ad on the last page of all of its books just to confuse us.

Do you want your book printed this way?

I've had communication with people at Penguin about this dating back many months, and I don't get the sense that they really care.  We are supposed to be happy that our book is being kept in print.  And the decision to do this isn't the editor's department and isn't anything the editor can influence, and who wants to spend a lot of time worrying about things you can't do anything about.  So even though I don't usually like to do business blog posts like this one, I think at this point that it's time to let the sun shine in.

This is the kind of bad, foolish, short-sighted behavior that will end up putting big publishers like Random Penguin out of business.  Because any of us can go to CreateSpace or Lulu and print a book that looks better than these Penguin group POD editions.  And if I can't even count on the publisher of my clients' books to print them half decently...

The Great Experiment...

Borders has announced the first major change to result from the opening of its first new concept store in Ann Arbor a few weeks ago. One part of their revamped approach was to stock fewer titles, allowing a higher percentage of those fewer titles to be displayed. And now today's Wall Street Journal reports that this experiment was so immediately successful in increasing the # of books they actually sold that they're in this for the long haul. All of their stores will start to have fewer titles, with more of them faced out, with title count reductions in the 5-10% range, with the genre fiction section perhaps seeing a smaller reduction than some of the non-fiction categories.

What does this mean?

Is it possible to separate your reaction to this from your reaction to the new concept store approach in general? Where you go to a bookstore to find fewer books, but can research your ancestry and make photo albums and download a book to your Sony Reader, but find fewer books. You can either see this as the complete dumbing down of the bookstore, or as salvation as somebody attempts to think out of the box and do something new in a bookstore for the first time in decades. I want to reserve judgment until I see the thing for myself, which may not be until one opens in Southbury CT in May. But my own instinctive feel is to say that somebody has to do something. When I started in the business 22 years ago, you couldn't buy a book at Amazon. You couldn't play Warcraft with 28,285 of your closest friends on the internet, which you couldn't surf. Maybe it's not such a bad idea if you try and integrate some of that new stuff into a bookstore, and give more reasons to enter a store. Do you like that your bookstore sells chocolate, greeting cards, board games?

One major point that needs to be made: the superstore hasn't been a boon for the typical author's backlist. Even though there are more superstores with bigger selections and fewer mall stores with smaller, the bar for backlist success hasn't gotten bigger. I hate to say it's gotten tougher to sell backlist; you can fall into the trap of remembering how in the 1980s you had these three authors who did way huge backlist business while forgetting all of the authors who didn't sell in the "good old days" either, kind of like how we forget that the last half hour of Saturday Night Live has always been filled with bad sketches. But if it's gotten any easier, that has a lot more to do with the internet than it does with the physical bookstore. If having all of those books doesn't really do much to increase the sales of the ones at the very bottom end of the range, how big a hurt will it be for the retailer to stop selling them? The CEO of Borders says in the article how there are a lot of books selling but one copy a year in the stores that are carrying them.

In order to stay in print, a book needs to sell at least 25-30 copies a week on Bookscan, maybe 1500-2000 copies a year total, which may support a ship rate of 150-200 copies a month. Even though the technology may exist, most big publishers don't want to print 500 mass market paperbacks at a time. They want to print 2000 and not have them cluttering up the warehouse for three years. Do the math; 1500 copies a year total in a country that has around 1300 Borders/B&N superstores. How many copies is the average store going to sell?

For a $7.99 paperback, with a royalty of 6% or 8%, that's $1300 in royalty income tops to the author. $3K maybe in gross revenue to a big chain that sells 750 copies. Less than that for the publisher.

So if Borders stops selling some of those books...

Will I & my clients lose out as these $1300s zero out? Or become $1000s, or $500s? Will my less-successful clients lose out while my even marginally more successful ones benefit a bit and the top ones maybe even more? If you're the only author in the sf section, guess what sf author people will buy!

Will people download them at the Sony Reader station? Will POD terminals make their way into Borders? Will people go to Amazon and buy a print or Kindle copy? Will they go to the local B&N instead? Will the Borders buyers be more attentive to which backlist they need to carry when?

Will the publishers end up seeing more books go OP as some of these titles drop from a marginal 150 copies a week to a hugely iffy 100 copies? Will they decide to become more interested in doing short runs of 1000 or 1500 copies to keep books in print, taking better advantage of advances in printing and POD printing technology? Orbit in the UK is doing runs like this; the smaller British market might be forcing them to be a harbinger of this development.

Will Borders see a short-term benefit but a long-term loss if people start to buy these less successful books on-line or at B&N and decide they like that experience as much or more? Or will Borders be able to get a younger crowd into stores that will like these digital offerings?

Lots of questions. I do know that the cover is one of the most important things to selling a book, so the idea that you could sell more by showing more covers isn't a crazy one. I do know that anything can be done well or done poorly. Real-world example: Simon Green's DEATHSTALKER LEGACY/RETURN/CODA sold much better at B&N In hardcover than at Borders, and I think a big reason was that the earlier five books in the series had remained core titles with consistent availability at B&N while some of them had drifted off-shelf at Borders in the several years gap during which sales had slowed as they inevitably will when no new book is on offing. The new approach at Borders increases the chances of things like that happening, but good buying can minimize those risks, to say "I know we weren't carrying those old Deathstalker books 3 months ago, but now with the new book on the way..." This week, Borders may be selling more GOBLIN WAR by Jim Hines, because those books have at least been on the shelf at some Borders, while the older ones aren't to be found at B&N, but what if this new approach means the Hines books had a harder time staying on at Borders, too. You can see that the questions here are real, and many. Like the new idea at Borders, don't like it, just be happy we have two major book retailers so the mistakes can even out.

I'm going to be very curious over the next several weeks to see just which JABberwocky books if any will be getting the heave-ho at the Borders in NYC...