My book Sparks and Shadows came out a couple of months ago, and I've been hearing from excited noders who got their copies in the mail. Everyone who ordered a copy has my delighted thanks.
The book is a signed, limited-edition trade paperback, mostly aimed at regular SF/F/H readers, but also aimed at book collectors who're willing to gamble $19 that I'll become a big-name writer someday and they'll be able to auction their copy off for three or four times what they paid for it. That sort of thing can happen; if you bought a copy of the $50 limited edition of Brian Keene's The Rising when it first came out, you could sell it for $345 on Ebay today.
But, most readers aren't book collectors/speculators. The $19 cover price is very fair for 356-page book with a small print run; the publisher priced the book pretty close to what it's costing them to produce them. Paper is expensive, and so is good cover art and shipping boxes of signature sheets between two countries. Most big publishers price their books 60-70% more than the production cost, and accordingly Amazon.com demands a 55% commission on every book sold. HW Press didn't go for a big markup because they wanted people to be able to afford the books.
Even so, $19 is a lot of money if you're on a limited budget. Heck, the $7-$8 you pay for a standard paperback is a whole lot more than it used to be, and sure enough, as book prices have gone up, sales have gone down. It's a problem for every publisher.
Another problem, particularly for small presses, is the loss of books in shipping. HW Press received most of the books in fine condition, but a couple of boxes looked as if the UPS guys had hurled them off a shipping dock. The 3-ply sturdy cardboard boxes were split at the seams, and the books inside were damaged.
Fortunately, the books were insured by the printer. The printer told HW Press to strip the damaged books -- that is, rip the front cover off -- and mail the covers back and she'd be reimbursed.
Despite what you might see in used paperback swap 'n shop stores, stripped books are not legal to sell. The book vendor or print client stripping the books is supposed to dump the books in the trash or the recycling bin ... or give them away.
The woman running HW Press felt bad about ripping covers off the damaged books, books she'd worked so hard to get into print in the first place, and she felt worse about just dumping them in the recycling bin. A book is meant to be read, even if it's banged up and missing its front cover.
So, she telephoned me: "Do you want me to send you these stripped books? You can't sell them. If you sell them we all get in trouble with the printer."
Me: "Heck yes, I want them! I will not sell them. I will send these books to reviewers who don't mind getting a stripped copy. I will release them with BookCrossing labels."
And I will send them to noders.
HW Press sent me the copies shortly before Hot Damn 5 and I took a couple of copies to the nodermeet. The books have sound spines and the pages are all firmly in place; in other words, they're perfectly readable, even if they're a bit unlovely and a few have some stray ripples from where the boxes sat on my porch getting rained on while I was at work.
So, message me if you'd like one of these copies. Unfortunately, shipping is not cheap. It will cost me about $3.50 to get a padded envelope and send a copy via media mail to someone in the U.S. It's $7 to send a book to Canada and $11 to send a copy to the UK, Europe, Australia, etc.
10/5/07 Update: I'm out of copies.