Nov 09 2007
RP: Who do they think they’re kidding?
One of your favorite authors has a book coming out, in a sub-series that hasn’t gone hardcover, so you preorder it months in advance and have it in your hot little hands ASAP.
You can’t help but notice as you compare it to another book in the shipment that it’s a little, ah… thin. Both books retail at the $6.99 price point, but one is two-thirds the size of the other.
You give the publisher the benefit of the doubt because they send you all these nice preview emails and you want to have happy thoughts about them, so maybe they figured out they could save paper and make a greater profit if they use a smaller font, and you’re totally supportive of saving a tree and the principles of capitalism, so you open the book to a random page, prepared to squint.
The font is HUGE and bordering on double spaced.
That bad feeling you were trying to stifle comes roaring to the fore. You flip to the end to check the page count: only 282 pages. Fuming ensues. What is this, frickin’ Harlequin Presents? And if that is the case, shouldn’t you be getting four books for this price?
Then you happen to notice the header toward the end is not the title of the book. You skim the page. It’s a story. Which you have already read. Online. For free.
You find the beginning of that story and check the number on the previous page: 248. So this “book” is almost 40 pages even shorter than the brevity that was already pissing you off.
It’s not a book. It’s a frickin’ novella.
You have no problem with novellas per se, but for $6.99, there better be three of them bound together!
Or do one of those $2.99 things that were all the rage a couple years ago, which were basically just like this, only didn’t leave you researching how to make a voodoo doll for a publishing house because at $2.99, you didn’t feel so… what’s the word I’m looking for… oh yeah… assraped!
So you read the book that was 150 pages longer for the same price. And you read three other books from your TBR pile, all of which exceed 350 pages for their $6.99 cover price. You still haven’t read the book in question, and you’ve begun giving the evil eye to the publisher logo on the spine of every book, whereas you have never in the past paid any attention to that information and were baffled by readers who did because it’s all about the story, right?
It’s all about the story until the corporate machine exploits a loyal reader base because they’ll buy anything with that author’s name on it. It’s disrespectful to the reader and damaging to the author. (You know better, of course, but how many less savvy readers bought this pamphlet-disguised-as-a-book and think it was the author’s decision to rip them off because it’s the author’s name plastered all over the cover?) And even though you will remain a loyal reader of this author because you care more about some of the characters she’s created than certain members of your own family, some of your enthusiasm has dimmed because of the publisher’s actions.
And you are twice as determined that you will NEVER buy a hardcover romance novel because the publisher is no doubt unscrupulous enough to charge you upwards of $40 for a short story with a dust cover.
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Is the 2nd person POV freaking you out yet? It’s all part of my subliminal mind control. This is how you feel, yes? Yes, yes, it is. See, it says right there, it’s all about you.
Actually, I was so peeved when I wrote this, I believe I subconsciously removed myself from it to stave off the foaming-at-the-mouth ranting I was leaning toward at the time. (I share a house with an adolescent prone to hormonally fueled rages. I do NOT need to be adding any of my own drama, trust me.)
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11/25
November 9th, 2007 at 5:12 am
Aw, yes. I have heard of this book. I believe it is running at about 2 stars at Amazon right now, and many a reader is feeling cheated.
Bad, bad decision-making on the part of the publisher. They’ll get their money now, but lose a lot of reader trust over this — and it’ll reflect badly on the author, more than anything. Unfortunately for her.
November 9th, 2007 at 6:16 am
I seem to remember a similar hullaballoo over a LKH book, but I guess there wasn’t enough of a hullaballoo to make an impression. Well, it serves me right. I had been complaining that my cynicism and lack of faith in humanity were flagging a little bit lately… :roll:
November 9th, 2007 at 10:05 am
I felt this way about the new, er, Grave book. Wide margins, big font,teeny weeny skinny assed hard cover book for $23. 23! What the heck?? Know what I did? I skimmed the entire thing at the book store and then read the last chapter. I mean, it’s that freaking small! HA! Then I bought that AWESOME Sarah McCarty book instead. Yea. You know it. Wait. Does that make me look bad? :shock:
November 9th, 2007 at 10:33 am
I used to be in the “it’s a book store, not a library, dammit, and that’s stealing just as much as shoplifting is” camp (like treating the produce section at the grocery store like a snack bar), but I really can’t blame you at this point. My local brick-and-mortar stores ran me off with their lousy service and poor stock, but online you can’t see when you’re paying premium price for a flimsy excuse for a book… Bah. You’re screwed either way. Go ahead and get some back when you can.
Books are my crack, though. It’s not like I’m going to quit because I had a bad trip. :???:
November 9th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Hey, I’m on board with the lofty ideals. But I refuse to be assraped. That’s dirty fight’n and I’m not going to bend over. :evil: I will, however, go get the book at the library.
November 11th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
I do wonder, though, couldn’t the author have delivered a longer story? I have NO idea what book you’re talking about so I don’t know if anyone knows personally the author, but do we know for sure this was a 100% publisher “at fault” situation? Maybe they expected a longer book and the author couldn’t deliver it, that’s all she had as far as that story went and so the publisher decided to move forward because the readers were expecting the release?
Really, I’m not defending the publisher (I’m not, I swear) but I do think it’s a fallacy in thinking to automatically assign blame to one party or another (whether author or publisher) without knowing the why of how it happened. I would be more likely to say they’re both at fault because the author could have delivered a longer book and the publisher could have reduced the price when the book was delivered at a shorter length.
But the important thing is that I do agree it totally sucks and was bad business, no matter how it happened.
November 11th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
I think there’s a vast enough difference between 100,000 words and 50,000 words that if the pub wasn’t expecting a shorter work, they would have said to the author, “Come back when you have the word count you contracted for.” The author has a 900-page monster coming out next summer, so inability to make word count is definitely not the issue!