Gee, I am still not hearing much enthusiasm from mainstream houses in New York about my idea that book publishers should stop putting out expensive and wasteful hardcover editions at the start of a book’s life and begin with original trade paperbacks instead.

(Here’s how most of the response went: You idiot. Original trade paperbacks are an old and outdated idea. Everybody’s tried it and everybody fails because trade paperbacks don’t get reviewed, don’t make enough profit for booksellers, aren’t taken seriously by TV/radio shows, and are too easily damaged in shipment. Even when they get to bookstores and even when they’re displayed face-up [too rarely!], the covers curl up on the table, so you lose about one out of ten.)

Remember, I’m not talking about established best-sellers that have found an audience willing to pay $30 per copy. I’m talking about books by new authors of midrange or serious literary books who don’t have a marketing budget behind them and can no longer depend on affluent readers who’ll take a chance on unknowns.

A Sales Rep Speaks

So: Do original trade paperbacks ever succeed? Thanks to Lise Solomon, a sales representative for the book distributor Consortium, here is a case in point:

“Last season I sold a first novel (‘Tinkers’  by Paul Harding), which I loved and wanted to make happen in my territory of Northern California. ” ‘Tinkers’  had the help of a Marilynne Robinson blurb on the cover and a great package from the relatively unknown independent publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, which announced the book as a trade paperback original. I had ARCs for key buyers and sold it passionately everywhere I could.

“The buyer at Book Passage in Marin County loved ‘Tinkers’ so much that she asked if there was any way Bellevue could print a hardcover edition for the store’s First Edition Club. The publisher did a short run of 500 copies, which sold out quickly, and ended up printing another 500. Then Powell’s in Portland, Oregon (the Northwest rep loves the book, too) asked about selling its own proprietary hardcover edition, too, and Bellevue printed 750 copies that presold out quickly.

“But most stores responded to the trade paperback. They were willing to bring in 4-12 copies of an unknown author from an unknown press.”

A Classic Case

So here is a classic case of launching a trade paperback from the ground up. The elements are: Passionate sales reps, savvy independent booksellers, a first book that stood up to expectations; and big initial orders (4-12 copies) that, compared to the usual buy for first novels (0-2) involved a risk on everybody’s part.

And if we are to take this story as an omen, it appears  the hardcover audience has boiled down to a collectors’ market that bookstores like Powell’s and Book Passage know how to cultivate.

The chain bookstore reaction, I learned later, was typically haphazard, with Borders coming in for a strong order of 1500 copies and Barnes & Noble making almost no buy at all.

Word Began to Spread

Back to Lise’s story: “The publisher got a grant to bring the author (based in Boston) out for four bookstore signings because of  the initial enthusiasm and because Book Passage needed its hardcover copies signed.

“Word began to spread. The San Francisco Chronicle reviewed it several weeks ago, as did the Los Angeles Times. The Boston Globe reviewed it last weekend, and rumor has it that it will get a New York Times Book Review soon as well.

“The trade paperback has been selling well because of the reviews and because of some passionate booksellers who wrote shelf talkers well enough that Bellevue sold through the first edition of 5000 paperbacks and 500 hardcovers. Bellevue went back to press for BOTH. Those just landed, and we’ve been out of stock for a few weeks, every rep’s nightmare, but I Bellevue is planning for a third printing since over half of the second printing is already sold.”

Is “Tinkers” a fluke or are original trade paperbacks finding a newly receptive place in the world? Lise Solomon says, are you kidding? “This should be the model!”

Looking at The Numbers

I asked Bellevue Press’s editorial director, Erika Goldman (below right), how many copies of the trade paperback edition have been sold since its January publication. She said, “8,000, and we’re about to go back to press a third time for a total in print of 12,500.”

To put that number in perspective, I remember back in the Big Bubble ’80s when the marketing director of Knopf told my colleague Bill Chleboun and me how dispiriting it was to send out a first printing of 3000-3500 hardcovers for first novels and see most of the copies returned in three months.

Even Knopf with its elegant reputation for discovering gifted authors could not generate enough hardcover sales to keep those books from sinking through the slats.  So for Bellevue Press to reach 12,500 in three printings only two months after publication is pretty sensational.

Weaning Off Hardcovers

Could trade paperbacks like “Tinkers” become the norm? Could a publisher just stop publishing hardcovers first, and begin most books’ lives with trade paperback editions?

“I admit it’s taken a while to get the ‘hardcovers first’ notion beaten out of me,” said Erika on the phone from her tiny office at Bellevue Literary Press in New York.

A veteran editor from the mainstream (Simon & Schuster, Charles Scribner’s Sons), Erika added,  “I was raised with the idea that if you don’t publish a hardcover first, you’re not going to get review attention. But distributing with Consortium has taught me a lot. I asked them point blank if there were any books that should be published hardcover first, and they said, ‘Other than art books, not really.’

“So we had the strange experience at Bellevue Literary Press of doing our first fiction books in hardcover because I was trying to wean myself off an old need. From then on we’ve been focusing on publishing fiction in trade paperback exclusively.”

Erika didn’t have to convince an acqusitions committee or pub board to go along with her. With her assistant editor, she is one of two full-time staff members, having co-founded Bellevue Literary Press with Dr. Jerome Lowenstein (below left), a faculty member at New York University School of Medicine, about three years ago.

How Bellevue Started

If you’re wondering whether the “Bellevue” of the title refers to the nation’s first public hospital (the one where all the crazies and the killers allegedly used to go), you’re right: Bellevue Hospital, now 271 years old, is both a general hospital whose ER is filled with patients handcuffed to stretchers and a modern medical center affiliated with the NYU School of Medicine.

For many years, third-year medical students at NYU School of Medicine have been required to write essays about their experiences with patients – not clinical experience, mind you (“3 mg Percodan administered 0500 hours”) but personal experience, the kind that inspired philosophic and poetic meditations.

Over the years these writings have been so eloquent that in 2001, The Bellevue Literary Review was created, consisting of student writings and outside submissions. The BLR, which continues to publish poetry, fiction and nonfiction twice a year, in turn generated discussions about whether NYUSM could publish books, and voila, the Bellevue Literary Press was born in 2007.

Most of Bellevue’s 20+ titles are decidedly not about health advice or medical advancements. (“We don’t publish popular reference titles at all,” says Erika, “only narrative nonfiction and fiction.”) Like the BLR pieces, the titles are loosely related to medicine and other sciences. Manuscripts qualify for submission if they “tell us something about the human condition.”

“Tinkers,” for example, is ostensibly about epilepsy and the way it was treated in the 1920s. But the writing is so dense with ideas that epilepsy is only a lens by which Harding examines much larger issues –  humanity’s bent for harnessing chaos, for example,  and what we learn when order tends to, you know, blow up in our faces.  (See complete and better written review next time.)

Drawing the Reader In

With its look-closer illustration of a distant, lone man walking toward a forest in a vast blanket of snow on the front cover (see above) and praise not only from Marilynne Robinson but Barry Unsworth, Elizabeth McCracken and a starred review from Publishers Weekly on the back, “the package draws people in,” Erika Goldman says, “and when they start reading, they can’t leave.”

Using a hardcover to reach those readers, adds Erika, would have been a mistake. “We think it’s more important to get as many readers as possible, and with the price point for the paperback,  we can still make the book beautiful.

“Bellevue Press titles don’t have to be hardcovers to be appealing objects as books, and we believe very much in the book as a beautiful object. That doesn’t mean we’re not responding to the whole electronic-download world, because we are. But we also want our physical books to be cherished, and you can do that with a beautiful trade paperback.

“So I don’t feel that we’re sacrificing any of our aesthetics by publishing in trade paperback first – I think we’re freeing ourselves up to respond to the market in a way that we can’t as easily when we do hardcover.”

A Loaded Question

I asked Erika this obviously loaded question: “After your many years with mainstream and corporate publishers, do you feel that working out of your tiny office for a tiny independent house has changed the way you think about the book industry?”

“I felt the difference immediately,” she said. “My first BookExpo after the founding of Bellevue Literary Press was like coming home to all the passion and all the quirkiness and all the originality that leads to a lot of unusual titles. For me it’s that counterintuitive energy that book publishing is all about. At BEA it was just so exciting to be in the [small press] aisle rather than running up and down the stodgy, stuffy, uptight, besuited corporate aisles.”

[How I love that word "besuited."]

Still, I said,  Consortium sells a huge number of titles coming from dozens of other presses to quite a number of bookstores. Don’t you worry about Bellevue’s books getting lost in the shuffle?

Erika: “You know what I used to worry about? A lot of jaded people in mainstream publishing who would say, every time you express enthusiasm about your titles, ‘Yeah, well, show me another one. It’s a very different attitude at Consortium, and much more rewarding from my perspective.  I’ve never worked with a sales group that’s more service oriented and responsive and impassioned.

“I’ve always been a mid-list editor so I tend to treat every one of my titles as an individual labor of love. Of course I’ve published books for commercial reasons, but for the most part I’ve worked on lists that I’ve crafted and that have been expressive of my sensibilities and vision. Trying to get attention for that part of the list is never easy, but at Consortium, that’s what they’re about. I don’t have to make excuses for it.”

Erika Goldman adds that she’s not a one-person show. “Our wonderful assistant editor, Leslie Hodgkins, manages much of the list, and we have a fabulous consultant, Janna Rademacher, doing publicity and marketing. I’ve felt it was essential to pursue all phases of the publishing process, especially when so much momentum can get word of this trade paperback out to an audience that will take a chance on it.”

Next column: A review of “Tinkers,” a book that will haunt me as long as I live.

I may end up posing quite a number of Things I’d Love to See in the publishing industry, but a recent email from an editor in New York points out what a tangled knot mainstream publishing has become — too tangled, it seems, to make any substantive changes. 

The editor’s message responds to a recent column about publishers ending the tradition of publishing a book in hardcover first, then waiting a year for the trade paperback (if any). I proposed that publishers start with the cheaper but still beautiful trade paperback edition first. Especially for books by unknown or midlist authors, the already wasteful practice of publishing hardcovers seems senseless.

And now that money is short, readers are far more likely to take a chance on trade paperbacks; book reviewers who used to require hardcovers (honestly! I haven’t heard that one in 20 years) have been overtaken by bloggers who LOVE paperbacks; and since even publishers dismiss hardcovers as “promotional copies for the trade paperback,” my thought is: Just reverse the process.

Here’s what the editor from mainstream house has to say about that: “If you want to push the idea of trade paper originals, perhaps you could examine how authors expectations’ for an advance would have to adjust, and perhaps how publishers might also try more dynamic royalty approaches rather than the industry standard royalty, which is 7.5% for tradepaper.”

Well, okay! I thought. A few adjustments on either side (author/publisher), and off we go. 

But no. It’s not that agents and authors I talked to don’t love the idea – they do. Rather the old suspicions that have been built into an adversarial relationship for centuries come crawling to the fore.

“I’d be fine with it [the idea of publishing trade paperback editions first],” said one agent. “If the publisher offers a bigger advance because after all, the author is taking the risk so the publisher can save money; and if the publisher supports a real marketing campaign that explains to reviewers and booksellers and interviewers why choosing a trade paperback format does not mean the book is substandard (because everybody thinks hardcovers are top of the line), and if the publisher sends the author out on both real and virtual book tours to make it clear the trade paperback form is better when it’s the first off the press, then we’d consider it.” 

Yikes. Well, let’s go back to the publishing side. When I asked the editor to give me an example of “more dynamic royalty approaches” the response was, “I don’t really  have any answers.” And then came the usual criticism:

“The argument for the trade-paperback-only is an old one, and it always starts from the consumers’ point a view. Which isn’t a bad place to start! It doesn’t overcome the structural problems: reviewers favor hardcovers, and some review organs have ruled out paperbacks altogether. Bookstores also tend to favor hardcover display space over paperbacks (note which format comes first as you walk into the store). And the financial model that authors and agents and publishers are used to argues against it: the royalties generate more slowly; the costs are amortized more slowly.”

Well, the booksellers I talked to agree only this far: Everybody makes more money from hardcovers, when they sell. If the books just sit there because nobody knows about them or about the author, no matter how hard the bookstore’s staff gets behind them, sales are hardly going to be brisk. 

“Of course we display hardcovers at the front of the store!” a bookseller said impatiently. “They’re the newest books from the publisher. Then you go to the reprints.”

So here is my problem. Until publishers make an orchestrated and committed (and hyped) effort to change, and appeal to colleagues (not adversaries) in the book trade to change, too, nothing is going to happen. 

(I know the old argument: Joining together to create industry-wide change could be called collusion and we’d all be sued! Okay, so don’t join together. Somebody make a decision. It would take only one of the big houses to start the ball rolling before the other houses would follow. We know this because the model is so familiar:  Whenever some new thing, like say, books with “YOU” in the title, or dogs in the text or vampires on the cover, hits a nerve, then they all do it. That’s the way things work in publishing.)

I’m hardly the first to say that resistance to change is going to be the doom of mainstream publishing. But I admit it’s just beginning to sink in that Internet publishing has taken off so fast that New York publishers may have only five or six years before the empire really starts to crumble. 

Of course they’re all making concessions to new ways of publishing on the Internet, but in terms of setting out those “dynamic new approaches” that are needed right  now – come on, it’s the Obama era, for crying out loud – I worry that a new kind of paralysis is setting in.

Last week’s column about publishing trade paperbacks first and letting them earn their way into hardcover publication (rather than the other way around) brought a delightful and informative email exchange with California writer Lois Levine.

If you read yesterday’s New York Times piece about authors establishing themselves on the Internet by selling enough self-published books to lure New York publishers into offering a contract, here’s how this was done in BC [before computer] times.

The only difference is that Lois and co-author Marian Burros didn’t have a clue to what they were doing, as evidenced by Photo #1.  (Burros went on to write for the old Washington Star and now the New York Times, but that would come much later.)

1) Self-published edition in mimeo

Here’s how the email exchange went after Lois read the column asking publishers to start the publishing process not with hardcovers but with trade paperbacks:

Lois: You are probably not old enough to remember that my first cookbook, “Elegant but Easy,”  was published in paperback by Collier Books (1968). When it became their best-selling book, it  was then brought out in hardcover by Macmillan. It still sells, though Marian Burros and I revised it in 1998 for Simon & Schuster. It has sold more than 500,000 copies.

Pat: Do you remember why Collier started with the paperback? Did S&S start with the hardcover in 1998?

Lois: Collier Books at that time had an idea that they could make a big splash if they brought out lots of paperbacks, so they bought our book as one of 100, I think, that they were going to use in this experiment. When it became their best-selling book, they had their Macmillan division bring it out in hardcover. Yes, Simon & Schuster started the book in hardcover, but now it’s in paperback.

Pat (After I asked her to send photos of the covers): I must say Photo #1 doesn’t look like it came from a New York publisher.

Lois: Right, that is the original, the self-published edition that we mimeographed in my Connecticut basement, collated in my house with the help of my mother and all her friends and sold ourselves with a reorder form in the back. We had sold almost 3000 copies before Collier came to us, having seen some of the publicity we also did on our own. The ’60s were the “do it yourself” days when two naive housewives could actually have a best seller. I often thought our story would be a fine movie with Doris Day playing me.

2) First Collier edition, 1962

Pat: Had you tried to submit the book to mainstream publishers first?

Lois: I could have papered my walls with rejection letters. Even looked into Vantage Press but we were astounded that they wanted US to pay them. They kept sending us special delivery letters reducing the price, but we said no thank you.

It was about two years of rejections before we mimeographed the first 250 copies and thought we would have them for shower gifts, hostess gifts for the rest of our lives. The first batch sold out in 10 days and we then rented an electric mimeograph machine and did 500 copies. After they sold we had them professionally printed  — 1000 at first and then another 1000 before Collier came to us.

Pat: How did you distribute? Did you get the book into any bookstores?

Lois: No, the mimeographed books were sold by word of mouth only as we had a reorder form in the back of the book.

Pat: Did you do any publicity – author appearances, interviews, after Collier picked it up?

Lois: Oh my gawd…did I do interviews: TV on the Joan Rivers show, radio call-in shows in New York (once with Margaret Truman hosting) and DC (where Marian’s husband and mine called in pretending to be disgruntled cooks), years and years of talks to women’s groups all over the country, et

Pat: What did your husbands say when they phoned?

3) Collier’s 6th printing, 1965

Lois: I don’t remember exactly, but they pretended that they had followed a recipe that didn’t work. We recognized their voices, though. It was hard not to laugh as we answered their nonsense questions.

Pat: Do you still make public appearances?

Lois: My favorite story happened a few years ago when I was in New Jersey visiting an old friend. Trader Joe’s had just come to her area, so she asked if I would go with her to point out some of my favorite items.

As we were going down the aisles with my comments, we noticed a woman following us. She got up her nerve to push a jar in front of me to ask if I liked it. My friend Barbara said, “She knows because she is from California and that is where Trader Joe’s began. Anyway she writes cookbooks.”

When the woman asked which one, and Barbara said, “Elegant but Easy,” the woman pointed me out to her friends as “the famous author” and they followed me up and down the aisles as if we were doing a commercial for TJ’s.

Pat: Tell us about the jacket designs over the years.

Lois: The inside was always the same, but publishers kept changing the photo on the cover. They even had one with a picture of a crown roast, although there was never a recipe for it in the book.

A Fine Old Tradition

I have heard stories like this from all over the West for nearly 40 years. They reveal an aspect to book publishing that’s too often forgotten – the love of expressing oneself in writing, the love of publishing from the ground up, the love of family and friends exuberantly creating an actual  publishing bee to get that book out there to like-minded readers.

The self-published version of “Elegant but Easy” doesn’t look very polished, but one feels that love just by looking at the cover. Imagine the power of word-of-mouth that could sell 3000 copies simply through an order form in the back.

Until recently I haven’t heard as many stories like this from Eastern states because the closer one got to what used to be called Publishers Row in New York, the less the impulse to self-publish seemed to occur. Standing in midtown Manhattan with a half-dozen corporate monoliths towering above, it was not easy for an author to think, hey, I can do this on my own.

Perhaps that’s why yesterday’s New York Times made self-publishing sound brand new and dazzling and thriving, which it is of course in its present incarnation of POD (Print On Demand) technology and Internet downloading.

But we shouldn’t forget that self-publishing has been a fine old tradition in many areas of the country, and that the impulse to self-publish is valued because it comes from the heart, from the ideal of many different voices expressing many different ideas, and because sometimes it produces a gem like “Elegant but Easy.”

#1: ONLINE ROYALTY ACCOUNTS FOR AUTHORS

(Note: This seems like an obvious next step for the book industry, although publishers hit the roof when I’ve shown it to them, as you’ll see. – Pat)

If you were an author, wouldn’t it be great if your publisher gave you a password to your own royalty account?

This would be an online, frequently updated, always accessible, entirely confidential page on your publisher’s website that would replace the current system.

As frequently as you wish, you could check sales of your book, the rate of returns, the percentage taken out for reserves and varying royalty rates for bulk sales, special sales, premium sales, electronic sales, and so forth.

As it is now, most authors have to wait six months for a printed, snail-mailed royalty statement that’s filled with outdated information that’s mired in financial gobbledygook their own agents can’t decipher.

But if your royalty statement were online and you didn’t understand the accounting – and this has been the most frequent complaint I’ve heard no matter who publishes the book – a pull-down Help box would provide a virtual tour of royalty statements in general so you can learn as you go. Specific questions could be emailed directly to the royalty department and answered within days.

How Hard Could It Be?

It’s not as though publishers don’t have the information online already. I come from the Pleistocene age (publishing in the 1970s) when we all read printed spreadsheets of weekly sales reports from booksellers, wholesalers and distributors.

Nobody took these numbers as Gospel. They provided a working estimate of front-list shelf life and a way to anticipate printings before the warehouse ran out of books. This wasn’t easy in those BPC (before personal computers), BB (before Bookscan), BI (before Internet) and BMHM (before menopause hit me) times.

Yet even then I was curious, as I am today, why authors as a rule are kept in the dark about the first crucial months of their own book sales. The reasons, when given at all, always sound a bit jaded to me: The last thing a publisher wants is for an author to be given too much information, editors and accounting officers would say. Why, early data might generate phone calls from difficult authors, causing harried editors and busy sales reps to be pinned down with questions from the hinterlands.

But today surely publishers don’t want authors to struggle with unintelligible information that’s six months old, not to mention often marred by mistakes. If royalty statements stay the way they are, bogged down in nineteenth-century thinking, the industry appears to send out a negative statement: Authors, who used to be respected and honored as the driving force in publishing (i.e., the people behind all our paychecks), have been tossed to the bottom of the heap. They are expendable and replaceable, and they’ll be sorry if they make a fuss about their royalty statement.

About Those Rankings on Amazon.com

Then, too, why should publishers abdicate their power to Amazon.com of all places? Today every author in America turns to Amazon the moment his/her book is published because the only numbers available are those wildly misleading rankings one finds near the bottom half of each Amazon title page.

It is in this fantasyland that the most damaging kind of false hopes crop up. Authors are encouraged to think: Gee, my book is 172,278 – that’s pretty high considering two million titles available. And wow! Another single-copy sale just pushed my ranking up to 152,722, more than 2,000 points! That could be a sign, yes? Another couple of sales and it might be time to reprint…

Granted, authors are 21^st-century products just like the rest of us – they have to monitor something. And if their publisher could provide reliable figures on a regular and timely basis, why, authors could better understand how the book business works and develop more realistic expectations.

Publishers Respond

I confess that mainstream publishers to whom I’ve broached this idea haven’t responded all that positively. ”Are you crazy?” one said. “Why, we would never do that. It would cost millions, and authors would get even more confused?” What a terrible assumption, I said. This is a service you should have provided authors years ago, and you know it. (That didn’t sit well either.)

I do know this: One day every publisher will provide royalty information online, and once that happens, it will only be a matter of time before electronic updates flow as routinely as data comes in – in other words, all day and night. At some point, we’ll all marvel at how long the old-fashioned royalty statements kept authors enslaved.

But maybe I’m the one in the Dark Ages. Perhaps publishers are out there already providing this service. Maybe authors know how it feels to check their royalty account online every day. If so, I’d love to hear from you. To paraphrase “The Tempest”: “O brave new world, that has such royalty statements in it!” Please do tell me about it.

(#2 and #3 of the Three Things will follow.)