The Styling Of Books

Why are the Canadian books not available in hardcover? .. "As of "The Saxon Shore" the styling of the book has increased, along with the intricate design of the pages. I was wondering if the first couple of books will be reprinted in this newly discovered style of book...?"

To answer this multiple-part question adequately, I have to start with the last part, which obviously came from a Canadian, because what is being described here is the original Trade Paperback Edition with the deckle-edged pages and the French flaps on the cover. There was no change in the book format with The Saxon Shore... What happened was that this reader, coming late to the series, read the first three books in the Penguin pocket book size and then was ready for the release of The Saxon Shore in its original, full-size Trade-Paperback edition.

Now we have a situation out there where, for the past six months or so, people have been searching for the original, Trade Paperback editions of The Singing Sword, in order to complete their collections of the Canadian Trade Paperback Edition. Unfortunately, that particular edition is now sold out and officially out of print. I have no idea how many were printed originally, but that was back in 1993, and at that time no one could have anticipated that the original format would still be in demand five years later. It is only by coincidence, apparently, that a few copies of the original Skystone TP are still available. Several people have written to me directly, asking me to help them out in finding copies of The Singing Sword, but it’s just not feasible. I have the staff of several used bookstores (in three cities) alerted to watch out for them on my behalf, but they simply don't seem to turn up in used bookstores. People are collecting/have collected them.

As a minor piece of trivia, the cover design on the original Singing Sword is the only design into which I had no personal input. Penguin Viking, having seen signs of success with The Skystone, wanted to try to attract a younger reading audience to the series and so came up with the comic-book style cover (that’s how I’ve always thought of it) for Singing Sword, complete with sexy red-haired siren (Enid, Uther’s mother, I guess) and fantasy blade for Ullic Pendragon, which thousands of people took (naturally enough) to be The Singing Sword... Now that’s changing. This year, the Penguin mass-market paperback of The Singing Sword will be reprinted, with a new cover that is very close to the original design I submitted to Penguin’s Art Department, away back in late 1992. That pleases me, because the entire series will then be recognizably a series, and I’ll have influenced all of their cover art. That’s unusual, in the book business. Authors are usually just the schmendricks who write the damn books... other people are employed to design, produce and market them. I have had little input, for example, into the early American books, and none at all into the Dutch, Spanish or German editions.

To answer the matter of the Canadian books not being available in hardcover, I have a story... Back in ‘91, while The Skystone was in the preparation stages, Brad Martin who was then VP Sales & Marketing for Penguin Canada convinced me that I had a better chance of more sales through going the Trade paperback route than I did via the Hardcover route. His argument was that no one knew me, and the mere addition of a hard cover and dust jacket to a book increases the cost of the book by $10 - $12 a copy. By going with the Trade Paperback, (TP) he argued, I would increase my chance of sales, since the price of the book could then be kept below $20.00 and statistics indicate that people will buy on impulse up to as much as $20.00 an item. Over $20.00, they hesitate and think about it. The fact that this was a first book by an unknown author could and would militate against many hardcover sales. We went with the TP, and I’ve been glad we did so ever since, because Penguin had a format they wanted to introduce (they called it Le Classique) featuring deckle-edged pages and French cover flaps... a beautiful design and a reader-friendly book that sits open on the palm and doesn’t spring shut while you’re trying to read. By the time the third book was due for publication, I was "established" and Penguin wanted to go with a hardcover edition of Eagles’ Brood, but the Penguin field reps all came back crying "boo-hiss" and put the kibosh on that move. People, it appeared, were already collecting the series and the booksellers didn’t think Jack Whyte’s readers would want to change to hardcover in mid-series... That turned out to be true, and we never have published hardcovers of the original series in Canada.