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Logo: Confessions of a TPO
What effect does the binding have on the reader, the author, the publicist, the reviewer, the editor, the publisher and the price point of the book? Are the differences preceived or do they have real world implications? Interspersing interviews with some of Canada's leading publishing, reviewing, and writing figures with personal essay, novelist (The Nettle Spinner) and newly annointed Ninja Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer looks at the prestige, economics, and artistic considerations behind the publishing decision to go with hardcover or TPO. |
| Hardcover Logo: Confessions of a Trade Paper Original For those who like that
sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like What is the matrix governing my book purchases? Surely the calculus is simple: what I want to read = what I buy. Or is it? Let me hearken back to the Eden of pre-authorial bliss, the early years before I was published, during which I diligently read the work of others, trying to decode the mystery of their brilliance. The very first book I ever yearned for was a pocket Penguin paperback copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. It seemed to call to me from my mother's bookshelf. It had a black spine and the font seemed very tiny. I was eight and had been able to read for three years. When I asked my mother if I could read it, she said, 'Well, it may be too difficult,' and I knew from her tone there was something between the covers that was sacred, and certainly not for children. This was my first experience with the book as object, as talisman, and also with the word as taboo or power. I would pull The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie out whenever I knew no adults were around and I would try to find the 'difficult' bits. I was Eve plucking the apple. The book itself resonated in my hands because I knew it was a vehicle for some forbidden information that I wanted. How to reconcile this sweet nostalgia with what I know now as a published writer? How to bridge the gap separating that frisson I experienced with that lovely book against my skin and the facts as they are now literally laid out before me. You see, I recently sent out a series of surveys to agents, publicists, review editors, publishers, writers, new booksellers, used booksellers and customers in a mad attempt to glean what is really behind what I had come to call The Myth of Hardcover. The responses I received were so varied and complex that myth has burgeoned to epic. It is a tragic tale in which we encounter life, passion, sexual longing (well, for those with book fetishes), occasional success and, if not death, then certainly remaindering (a fate far worse!). I propose that a brand new hardcover purchase has a seriousness to it. That its high price and strong architecture signal an earnestness, a solid worth, an implicit value that the consumer absolutely cannot do without, right now, and also that the book's author is necessarily substantial.
Naturally, then, cracking the hardcover ceiling is seen as an achievement among young writers. It is a status symbol.
When my first book was about to be published, myriads asked "Will it be coming out in hardcover?" This seemed like a question from the uninitiated and I found myself explaining again and again how 'things' worked. I had not expected my first collection of stories to be hardbound but after the relentless queries I did begin to feel a little diminished. I thought back to the time I lived in Belgium years ago where, in my spare time, I browsed the English section of the local fnac. Here were books I'd never seen before. Nick Cave's creepy little anti-Bible And The Ass Saw The Angel, Peter Handke's Across and two of the sexiest books I've ever purchased – Conversation in Sicily by Elio Vittorini and The Royal Hunt by Dumitru Radu Popescu. These last were published by Quartet Books under the imprint Encounters and, I believe, were meant to be reclamations of lost or never-translated triumphs. I see now the paper stock is cheap as it has become brittle and brown – but the covers, oh, the covers! Slender of build and printed on substantial cardstock, they are matte with a waxy feel and open along a crease line so that the pages are deeply, safely set into the backing. When new, their elegant spines called out to me. The first lines didn't hurt either (Vittorini –"That winter I was haunted by abstract furies." And Popescu – "What glory remains on earth unchanged, what creature with breath, what high majesty? And what worldly joy does not fall into sorrow?"). There is never a more spirited moment than the point of consummation at an fnac checkout, book and cash in hand. And possibly there are never more memorable books than those read far from home, in a country in which one's mother tongue is not spoken. In the weeks before my collection of stories was published, bombarded with queries about its binding, I kept my ego in check by running my finger along the spines of the Vittorini, Popescu, the several gorgeous Black Sparrow Press editions of John Fante and Charles Bukowski, and the sumptuous oddly-shaped or oversized City Lights and New Directions paperbacks by Allen Ginsberg and Louis-Ferdinand Céline that I have in my library. I reminded myself that there was no hardcover fiction in the fnac. Not in the French section, not in the Dutch section, not in the English or German language section. There were hardcover art and architecture books and hardcover reference and hardcover children's books and that was it. Many international fiction publications never come out in hardcover. I took solace in this. If a hardcover purchase signifies a critical seriousness, is a paperback purchase then capricious? And is there a subtle message the consumer internalizes about a possible connection between the quality of the content and its binding? Media claims not to make a distinction.
But publishers beg to differ:
Generally, the boundary between hardcover and TPO parallels the size of the press. Large presses tend to bring their authors out in hardcover with accompanying large publicity drives which include advanced reading copies (ARCs), while smaller presses with tighter fiscal constraints are unable to pre-publish in advance of publication date. This means that there is no taste for the media before the book arrives and so correspondingly it is difficult for the media to schedule a book from a smaller press.
Note that, of the smaller presses who answered my query, none has ever sent out ARCs. My publisher, Goose Lane Editions has decided to send out a limited number of ARCs for my debut novel, The Nettle Spinner. I may never be able to discern whether their strategy is effective because of the various elements at work. For one thing, a novel tends to get more attention than a first short story collection, since, by its nature, it has a central theme and therefore, a 'hook.' My instinct is that Goose Lane Editions is proceeding correctly, and that ARCs for trade paperback originals are, in some way, the missing link in leveling the playing field for hardcover and TPO. But even assuming an ARC gets media attention for any book, does this mean the book will sell over its hardcover competition?
What about awards? The Giller Prize has been won only once by a TPO author (M.G. Vassanji in the inaugural year). The Governor General Literary Award for Fiction has been won three times in the last ten years by a TPO author (Douglas Glover, Gloria Sawai, Greg Hollingshead). I do not know the reasons for this discrepancy and likely there are many factors at work but still the fact remains that the cards are stacked between 70% and 100% (according to these meager awards statistics) in favour of hardcover authors. Should we assume the winning books are necessarily more important than the shortlisted ones or even, for that matter, than the books that didn't make it to the list at all? No, of course not. One can only assume for any given award, that juries are unstable entities, prey to whim and opinion just like everyone else. But the reality of a prize win means much more in terms of sales than it means in prize money. Media and bookstores aside, a big prize can be a huge boost for the career of the winner and, presumably, for the income and profile of a publishing house. If hardcover generally wins, this would theoretically encourage the printing of hardcover. Another way of detailing the worth of hardcover is to look at the trickle down effect. In my youth, I was a used-bookstore addict. I did not know publishers and authors lost income thus. I did not understand capitalism and besides, in those heady university days, smoking Drum rollies and dressing where punk met Pippi, I wanted nothing to do with the establishment. As well, I couldn't afford to feed my book habit at new stores so I was on the 'righteous' budget. At the antiquarian and used stores, I could get my whole course curriculum for under fifty bucks and still have a little left over for that leather softbound Kipling because it included "Beyond the Pale" which I knew was the absolute key to understanding Eliot's "Prufrock" – or was that "The Wasteland"? Oh, and the Italian/English quarter bound bit of early erotica/smut by Cornazano entitled Proverbs in Jest (published, 1888). You see, I was buying in fits of passion, with the incredulity of epiphany – that joy received through finding uncanny connections in the universe. What little I knew was coming together in unforeseen ways and I found this exciting. I found a Marie Stopes on early birth control. Hey, I had read about her in Germaine Greer! Hey, she was a pioneer of eugenics! The book was like a hot coal in my hand as I considered how many women had been sterilized on account of her theories. Creepy. I must own it. I found a first edition Everybody's Autobiography by Gertrude Stein. I found Venus On the Half Shell by Kilgore Trout. I found everything I could by Richard Brautigan. Did it matter what was hardcover and what was paperback? Absolutely not. The used-book stores that I browsed and in which I eventually worked, aided and abetted my book consumption. Far from undermining sales, these stores are an important link in the literary food chain. They circulate out-of-print books and service those who may in the future be able to afford 'new' books. How do the used booksellers feel about the hard/soft dichotomy?
Consider this. Of the two used bookstores in my neighbourhood, one won't take hardcover because they can't compete with the paperback about to come out, or already out, and they certainly won't be able to compete with the remaindered copies of the same book. The second store carries almost exclusively remainders and overstock. I think 'worth' can be evaluated in this way. Hardcover has no intrinsic resale value. Consumers will buy hardcover if they are attracted to the product, if the television media has buzzed it, or if the dailies reviewed it positively. There is a sense from the surveys answered that the consumer, given the choice, would prefer paperback. I do not think that the average book buyer is impulsive but rather that given the fact that frontlist large press books are well-hyped and, therefore, easily recollected at point of purchase, the desire for ownership, and entry into the particular mystery of that particular book, over-rides patience. At this point, the fact that hardcover fiction exists begins to feel coercive.
What economic advantage does a hardcover have over a TPO from the point of view of a publisher?
I like to think that profits from hardcover help unburden the cost of general publishing and so help younger authors get published and promoted. It helps me stomach the other less palatable notion of the hardcover as a kind of secret handshake into a certain class of readership. And that if there wasn't such a feeling that it did mean something, then it wouldn't. The history of the paperback is, of course, only seventy years old. Penguin first came out with paperbacks in 1936 for sale at kiosks in the rail stations. They cost sixpence.
Quality is often mistaken for price, isn't it? And possibly you do get what you pay for but where books are concerned, I always let my instinct lead. If I'm holding it, and I must have it, then I must have it, cost be damned. However, like other writers, I am not above subterfuge. A well-received request to review a coveted item might just yield the prize. Also, occasional roguish behaviour has its thrifty benefits. If you look hard at my shelves, study them carefully, and refuse to miss a thing, you will find the slim volume. Pull it out of the shelf, open the front flap and you will see in a neat girlish scrawl my mother's name on my copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Is not theft the most telling manifestation of desire?
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is the author of the newly released novel The Nettle Spinner and the widely hailed shory story collection Way Up. She is also now an editor here at Bookninja.com.
(discuss) |
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Your
new book is coming out. You're excited and pleased with the work
you've put in. Do you want it to appear in hardcover or trade paper
original? Do you care? Likely most of you do, but perhaps haven't
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