Footnotes Past

I told one of my possibly three reader's I'd put up some of my older columns from the PNBA Newsletter. Here is one of my favorites:

Dear Publishers-

Hi. I work in a bookstore. Have you ever worked in a bookstore? Sometimes, I really doubt that you have. Here are a few things you need to know.

There is no ‘Next DaVinci Code.’ There never will be. Please stop putting this in your catalogs and on your books. Ditto Harry Potter.

Booksellers hate shrink wrap -- Especially booksellers who chew their nails. Any book you feel the need to shrink wrap usually retails in the neighborhood of $40-$100. NOBODY buys a book that expensive without getting to see the good bits inside. And if the good bits happen to be naughty bits, the only way that book won’t be returned as severely shelf worn is if you reinforce the binding with bolts, and go with sheet metal instead of cloth.

Speaking of packaging, stop already with the ‘creative bindings.’ Just because there is no writing on the spine (or on the dreaded plastic coil thingy we all thought was cool when were in, say, 2nd grade…) doesn’t mean we’re going to face out your book. Really, we won’t, on general principal.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, sacred, named mike, or otherwise, NO MORE MOVIE COVERS. With the possible exception of To Kill a Mockingbird, the book is ALWAYS better than the film. You have the premium product! Keep it that way. More often than not, those coming into our stores, even while the movie is still in the theaters, prefer the original cover. It’s true. Just ask anyone…

Let’s talk dumps. You may call them ‘cardboard displays’ or ‘point-of-sale displays,’ or something fancy, but they’re dumps. When did it become standard practice to put trade paperbacks in a dump created for hard covers? The slots for the books are so much bigger than the books, it is ridiculous. It’s like putting an XL parka on a five year old. If you don’t have a dump that fits the book, scrap the idea entirely. Flashing lights, screaming audio, and generic risers that look like they were created on my old Commodore 64 – bad. Elegant use of lights (see the Narnia dump from HC), string (Lemony Snicket), and pop-up (Robert Sabuda’s Winter Tale) – good.

None of us are fooled by the phrase ‘paperback original.’ We all read that as ‘See, we paid this author a pretty good amount of money in the form of an advance, and the book wasn’t very good, so we knew we’d never recoup that cash by throwing more of it into a hard cover edition. We’re hoping that enough people pick this book up on their way to the departure gate to at least get ourselves out of the red.’

I see I’m at the end of my allotted word count. In a few months, perhaps I’ll continue this letter. In the meantime, please go to a bookstore, shadow a few customers or employees (not too closely… that’s called Stalking), read a bit, and then buy a book. Hell, buy two.