The 80,000-member trade group Authors Guild is kicking up a fuss over major publisher Simon & Schuster’s announcement that their new contracts will no longer include a minimum amount of sales for them to declare a book out of print.
While I can certainly empathize with the Authors Guild, can they honestly say they didn’t see this train wreck coming years ago? Anybody keeping half an eye on the industry should have known it was inevitable.
As the capabilities and availability of true print-on-demand (POD) services grew, the end result stood out in the distance like a beacon on a lighthouse. Safe harbor ahead…but watch out for the rocks!
The advent and mercurial growth of Lightning Source Inc. put the final nail in the coffin of the customary definition for out-of-print status. For a minimal upfront setup charge, every book ever published can remain in print forever, whether it sells one copy per year, one per day, or 100 per day.
If a book’s sales drop into the basement, a publisher can upload its digital files to LSI and forget about it. If a customer walks into their local bookstore and asks about it — the clerk can find it in Ingram‘s book catalog (Ingram being the parent company of LSI) and special order it. And that book will show up in Amazon.com‘s catalog with 24-hour shipping availability forever.
Many small and self-publishers have joined the POD revolution, including my own company Slipdown Mountain Publications LLC, which uses LSI for all our POD titles. We have no need to print large quantities, maintain and manage large inventories of books, or worry about which titles will sell a lot and which won’t. If a title takes off, we just add an appropriate offset print run (while leaving the title’s files with LSI to capitalize on their Ingram connection) to handle the demand at lower per-unit cost. For LSI titles, if we arrange an order with an individual bookstore, we can place the order online with LSI and have them drop ship it directly to the bookstore (and it will look like it came directly from us!).
The moral of this story for traditionally published authors — read your contract very carefully and try to negotiate out any “never out of print” clauses. Then, when your publisher decides your book is no longer profitable, you can upload it to LSI yourself and let it sell however many copies it will.
NOTE: Please do not confuse my use of the term POD or print-on-demand with all those subsidy presses that like to call themselves POD publishers or even self-publishing companies (a real oxymoron). POD is just a printing technology and not a publishing method.
