It kind of feels like Trek fans get gouged.

[JJMiller]

There's an interesting wrinkle on the comics side of things. It was eventually deemed not worth the effort to strip covers from comics and other magazines and ship them, leading to the introduction of "affidavit returns" -- in which the distributors simply told publishers how many they and their accounts didn't sell on notarized forms. The problem was that magazine distribution was heavily mobbed up for decades. (Back in the 1950s, a large part of the infamous Senate hearings on comics and juvenile delinquency involved a crimebuster senator/presidential candidate trying to connect distributors to organized crime.) They'd not ship many of the books they'd gotten, lie about returns and and claim the credit for them. Then they'd sell them off to jobbers to resell.

So quite frequently you would find comics that had been reported destroyed being repackaged and sold intact (to go along with the coverless copies a lot of stores sold anyway after they'd stripped them). One day in the 1980s, the guy who owns Mile High Comics found an abandoned warehouse with 11 million Marvels from the 1960s in perfect condition. Marvel said since they didn't officially "exist," he was welcome to them!

I would suspect since those distributors also sold paperbacks, there may be similar treasure troves out there with regard to novels. (I tend to focus more on comics history myself -- I run a site called Comichron in my spare time.)

 

[JJMiller]

Was there a publisher who tried making MMPBs returnable (in recent years)? Nowadays you have MMPBs being shipped from online sellers to customer homes, and they make it reasonably intact. It seems to me like bookstores should be able to arrange for return shipping to publishers with a similar or better success rate.

You mean whole copy returns -- sending back the physical books? I haven't heard of anything. I would think there would be little point, as with magazines. The price point is too low.

[EDIT: That said, I could imagine a boutique publisher being willing to do it, particularly if they sell direct to retailers. I'm just not aware of a large one trying it.]

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Was there a publisher who tried making MMPBs returnable (in recent years)?

White Wolf's MMPB fiction in the late 90s wasn't strippable. That's the last publisher I can think of.

 

[KennyB]

Gouged? No. If you want it pay for it if not don't. I consider myself a HUGE Trek fan but I never bought box sets. It's supply and demand. $139 for a season was just out of my price range. I did not bitch about it, even when other shows full seasons were priced at $39. It isn't like it is food or gasoline and for the hard work the writers do I think it is a fair price in todays market. I also have no problem with the price of CBSAA. I still won't pay for a boxset though............

 

[Jbarney]

While I don't like any price increases either, I rarely think I am getting gouged when purchasing Trek books.
You just have to look at history and what pocket has offered with the size of the books. If you go back 20 years the size of the average book was around 276 pages or so. Within that range. Always seemed like that was the cut off.....that was the editorial target.

The size of the books today (and over the last 10-15 years) has been much larger in general. So while over time the prices have gone up, the depth and scope of the stories has been a lot larger.

Truth is, I am going to buy most of the books anyway. Regardless of the price.

 

[Christopher]

The first adult-level book I ever read was a stripped copy of Star Trek Log Three by Alan Dean Foster, which I found in a used-book store. I didn't understand why it was missing its cover, and it wasn't until many years later that I learned about stripped books. Anyway, I eventually got an intact copy to replace it, and I don't remember what happened to the stripped copy.

 

[KennyB]

The first adult-level book I ever read was a stripped copy of Star Trek Log Three by Alan Dean Foster, which I found in a used-book store. I didn't understand why it was missing its cover, and it wasn't until many years later that I learned about stripped books. Anyway, I eventually got an intact copy to replace it, and I don't remember what happened to the stripped copy.

I just returned from googling "stripped book"........interesting!

 

[Greg Cox]

I remember trying to explain the concept to my father, who worked in a shoe store. He thought the whole system sounded totally insane.

"Let me get this straight. If some tennis shoes didn't sell, I could just trash them, send the shoelaces back to the manufacturer, and get reimbursed in full? That's crazy!"

Only in publishing!

 

[JJMiller]

Note that in magazines, only the logo with the title, issue number, and corporate name needed to be returned, which is why you find so many comics with just the top portion of the cover razored off. That's why you saw differences to logos (as well as to UPC boxes) with the advent of nonreturnable magazines like Whitman's polybagged comics and later, direct sales editions. They had to keep those comics from entering the returns stream.

 

[JJMiller]

But to get back to the relevance of all this to the original post: trade paperbacks are generally a healthier market for publisher and retailer, usually better for consumers in both the package and in that discounts at retail are more likely, and a step up, exposure-wise, for any line that uses them. As David said, the Times killed the MMPB list, a major motivator of sales. So the move on these editions is generally a good thing, though individual preferences may differ. (And bookshelf uniformity may suffer!)

What goes is availability in some places that only carry mass markets. I've seen Trek books occasionally in the grocery store. It's unclear how much of the distribution goes there, though, and a lot of those places are carrying trades now anyway.

I will anecdotally add that the question I've gotten at table most frequently since the Prey trilogy came out was whether there was a trade paperback compendium, so there must be a constituency for them. I just wish there were boxes for aftermarket box sets easily available!

 

[David cgc]

I will anecdotally add that the question I've gotten at table most frequently since the Prey trilogy came out was whether there was a trade paperback compendium, so there must be a constituency for them. I just wish there were boxes for aftermarket box sets easily available!

I'd suspect that's more about the "compendium" than the "trade." I've been seeing more MMPB compendiums recently, Game-of-Thrones- or Tom-Clancy-thick MMPBs with three or four old tie-ins collected in them. Smaller franchises, like Alien and Independence Day. I suspect that's probably more intended for a quick cash-grab using old material that'll have a brief window of renewed popularity thanks to a new movie release than because the material itself turned out to have legs, which would be the case for most of the TPB or HB compendiums I've seen. Those super-thick pocket-books can't be that durable. I swear the spines turned wrinkled and white in the moment I was looking at them on the shelf.

 

[JJMiller]

Oh, I'm pretty sure they mean a TPB like Destiny, as that's the name usually invoked. And yeah, at 1,200 pages, a MMPB would need spine replacement surgery pretty quickly. To sickbay!

 

[JD]

When the NYTs stop including MMPBs on the bestsellers list? I think Destiny and some other Trek novels made the list, so I'm assuming it must have been fairly recently.

 

[JJMiller]

When the NYTs stop including MMPBs on the bestsellers list? I think Destiny and some other Trek novels made the list, so I'm assuming it must have been fairly recently.

January. My report from when it happened is here. They also killed the graphic novel list and also shortened hardcovers from 20 to 15. The latter recalled a personal ache because when they cut that list from 25 to 20 (three years ago this week!) I had a hardcover out that made 21st on the Bookscan list. Easy come, easy go...

It's all about staff cuts, affecting the whole operation. Last week there was some notoriety surrounding a book that topped the young adult chart which appears to have only made the list due to massive purchases from the reporting stores by individuals associated with the publisher, or something like that. It was subsequently removed from the chart.

 

[JD]

That's a shame.

 

[Christopher]

Last week there was some notoriety surrounding a book that topped the young adult chart which appears to have only made the list due to massive purchases from the reporting stores by individuals associated with the publisher, or something like that. It was subsequently removed from the chart.

As I understand it, they were preorders rather than actual purchases, and the author never actually paid for the books.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I remember trying to explain the concept to my father, who worked in a shoe store.

Our Australian TV show about "Border Security" recently featured a story about a guy importing hundreds of left shoes, claiming they were "samples". The Customs officers made him drill holes in every shoe, right there in Customs, because the usual strategy is that some other "shoe mule" was probably going to be trying to import hundreds of matching right shoes in a few days time.

 

[JJMiller]

As I understand it, they were preorders rather than actual purchases, and the author never actually paid for the books.

I didn't know how it had shaken out. Unpaid preorders should never count for anything -- although before 2003 in comics, that's all the sales charts were. Hence some high-ranking books that never came out!

 

[Greg Cox]

True story. Back in the eighties, an author (who was serving time for bank robbery) got a friend of his on the outside to call independent bookstores all over the country: "Hi, I'm out of the country right now, but I heard about this great new book. Could you order me a copy and I'll pick it when I get back to the USA? Thanks!"

This worked in the short term. There was a sudden spike in orders, and we almost went to a second printing. Then the booksellers started comparing notes, realized they'd been scammed, and the story hit p. 4 of The Wall Street Journal, which is NOT how you want to start out your day. We quickly cancelled the second printing.

Fortunately, nobody accused the publisher of being in on the scam, and we were able to argue convincingly that, "Look, the author is a crook. It says so right in his author bio!"

(The book was a blackly-comic novel about life in prison. And a very good one, actually. It almost got made into a Bruce Willis movie, but then there was a writer's strike . . . . )

 

[Greg Cox]

Digressing a bit, I will say that dealing with an author who was in prison was an interesting challenge. There are institutions that are impressed by NY publishing, but the U.S. Dept of Corrections is not one of them. Made things tricky when you urgently need to discuss the copyedit on the manuscript, but your author is in solitary and the warden has confiscated his typewriter . . . .

Plus, he had to call us collect.