Like many, I am a habitual reader. My biggest nightmare is
getting stranded for longer than five minutes with nothing to read. So a while
ago I read something that made ask, “Why didn’t I think of
that before.”
Someone commented that they almost always read paperbacks because of the convenience
of carrying them with you.
As one of those people who prided himself on reading the hardcover, I realized that this makes a lot of sense. Ever since then, whenever I buy a book, I almost always go for the paperback.
Now this choice will be even simpler as the publishing industry embraces the growing trend of releasing novels in paperback.
This question was addressed by author Christina Baker Kline last Sunday in her piece in the San Francisco Chronicle. Kline is a midlist author with modest sales (at least they were modest). She tells how the editor at William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins, proposed the straight to paperback alternative (an option Kline thought was the publishing industry equivalent of “straight to video” in the film industry) for Orphan Train, her fifth novel.
There is the prestige of seeing your novel in hardcover, and also the advantage of two releases, the second coming when it is re-released in paperback. Kline was savvy enough, however, to realize that her place with a big six publisher would likely hinge on how this next novel went. She opted for the paperback.
Things went well. The paperback included French flaps (covers that fold back inside the book like the dust jacket in a hard cover), good binding and a multiple-finish cover. Target picked it up as their book club pick for April, a few other national book clubs grabbed onto it, and Orphan Train went back for a fifth reprint.
Kline also mentioned that book clubs don’t even consider reading books in hard cover, which I had never heard before. The answer to that question will be another blog post here. Look for it.
Kline still worries about respectability, but with 100,000 copies of Orphan Train in print, and those slick little French flaps, I don’t think she has much to worry about.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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