It’s very hard to sell
books, I’m told, and that’s one reason why publishers try to keep them cheap.
Modern printing technology has slashed production costs to such an extent that
the cost of the paper used is a major component. As a consequence, many books
are printed on paper which is not much better than newsprint. Costs can also be
trimmed by keeping type fonts small and line spacing narrow: you can easily
pack 80 000 words into 200 pages or less, though if you bust a word limit the
consequence is sixteen new physical pages since it’s still the case that a single
uncut printer’s page contains sixteen text pages and you can’t get rid of any
spares – they will be there at the end of the book.
Even though marketing
is key to a book’s success, publishers economise on a book’s appearance. When I
look at the dust jackets or covers on a Waterstones book table, I imagine they
have all been prepared by freelancers taking at most a couple of hours to do
the work and probably being paid a hundred pounds or less. That’s true even for best-selling
books. Whereas food supermarkets have stripped-down packaging for their Essentials or Basics ranges, publishers strip down all their ranges.
I’m surprised that
authors put up with all this. True, most of them (us) are desperate to be
published so accept almost any terms. But Top Ten or Top One Hundred writers
are surely in a position to argue. Perhaps they just don’t see it as their
business: you sit at home, email the completed Word doc.to your agent, let your
agent find the publisher and negotiate the terms, reckon that it is the
publisher’s business to deal with paper, font, binding, endpapers, jacket or
cover design.
This would perhaps be
in OK in a world where publishers had some sensitivity and taste. But look at a
Waterstones table and all the evidence is that they don’t. As examples of
bookmaking craft and graphic art, the books are dire - a word which means really,
really bad. I do judge a book by its cover and some of the covers do seem to be informing me that the contents are not worth bothering with.
I enjoy the design work involved beyond the stage of writing a text. Paper,
typeface, font size, line spacing, headers and footers. Then endpapers and
cover boards where it is a remarkable truth that a very wide range of colours
and textures are available in the standard Wibalin ranges and all at pretty
much the same cost. Despite that, most published books huddle in a safety zone, using a small
range of the available options. How often do you see end papers in bright
yellow or lilac or apple green?
As for jacket design,
software which comes as standard with any PC already enables anyone to mock-up a
jacket and even though I entrust to a graphic designer the final preparations,
which involve adjustments down to half a milimeter in placing text and images, I
am involved in all stages. The covers aren't elaborate confections, but they have been worked on.
The result, hopefully,
is a book which has been thought through as a physical object as well as a
literary or scholarly text. You won’t see many in your local bookshop.
The one big exception in the recent past was the special edition of Sarah Perry’s
The Essex Serpent.
