A new imprint from HarperCollins plans to publish 25 “short” books a year at competitive prices with “nonreturnable shipments to stores and lowered money to authors up front in exchange for increased profit sharing.”
Robert S. Miller will lead this initiative which has yet to be named. He said, “Our goal will be to effectively publish books that might not otherwise emerge in an increasingly ‘big book’ environment, an environment in which established authors are under enormous pressure to top their previous successes, while new authors are finding it harder and harder to be published at all.”
Miller hopes to convince booksellers they need to take on more risk for the books they order instead of leaving the risk entirely to publishers. The rate of return is “around 40 percent.” Sounds like Miller has an uphill battle to fight. (via Books, Inq)
More on this from writer Roger Simon.
Offhand, this sounds good to me. The bookselling industry has employed a nonsensical returns system for decades.
On the other hand, like other fixes, it might just make things worse.
Well, good luck to ’em. Like Lars said, the whole system is logically whacked and makes no sense.
Unfortunately, it’s going to be very hard for a single imprint to have anything like impact. In fact, it’ll be amazing if they survive because the big-box stores will most likely NOT sign on to this, especially not for non-name authors.
Without solidarity amongst suppliers to make distributors and marketing outlets change their insane business practices, I predict the effort is doomed to failure.