Isn't publishing great

[andrewducker]

Air has recently won both the BSFA and Clarke awards, which ought to send people scurrying to buy a copy.

Only, according to Amazon.co.uk it's out of print.

What, exactly, are his publishers thinking of???

Comments

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Looks like it should dispatch in 24 hours, to me. (Of course, the US edition is probably out of print ...)

[andrewducker]

Aaah - I saw that the edition I had read was out of print and that its replacement paperback wasn't due out until September. I failed to notice the hardback. Must have been half asleep.

And the St Martin's edition is still in print in the US - I assume they've just stopped importing it now there's a UK edition.

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

Giving the rich and famous of the second hand book market a good early christmas present? :P.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Publishers try to judge the print run of a hardcover very carefully -- they don't want to end up with several hundred (or thousand) surplus hardcovers clogging up their warehouse.

It takes about a month to roll the presses and get a supplementary print run into the warehouse and then the shops: modern presses are postscript-to-press, so there's no messing around with plates, but there's still the logistical business of fitting a new job into a busy machine's schedule (printing presses start at the 0.25M price range and go up from there so they tend to be heavily utilized resources). In general, you don't roll the presses for less than 500 copies -- the more you print, the cheaper it works out in both paper and ink costs and in terms of amortized setup time, so short print runs are prohibitively expensive.

A secondary issue is the dust jacket. Colour DJs with hot foil and embossing can cost as much as the actual hardcover book block, and take longer to get printed (it's a multi-stage process). Smart publishers print some extra DJs -- they can use 'em as publicity freebies for bookstores or slap 'em onto the outside of a hardcover reprint run to save time.

But the point is, when the publisher notices that the HC is out of stock they have to decide whether to reprint (remember, several hundred copies are still sitting on bookstore shelves around the country, and some percentage of these will be returned for credit in due course, unsold) and even when that decision is made, it'll take a month or more, so the decision is made on the basis of anticipated sales in a month's time.

This bit me hard on ACCELERANDO. The UK hardcover is sold out. But it sold out less than ten weeks before the mass market paperback is due. There's probably no way it'll sell 500 hardbacks in six weeks, and the paperback will probably kill hardcover sales dead. So it's unfortunately unavailable right now, and is going to stay that way until July.