Monday, March 9, 2009

One problem with small publishers

Last month I saw a debut showcase of The Crown Conspiracy by Michael J. Sullivan on Fantasy Debut. It looked like a fun book, so when I made my last Amazon order I tossed that one in the cart too, along with Matters of the Blood by Maria Lima.

The Crown Conspiracy is published by Aspirations Media, which I've never even heard of. According to a post by the author on his Amazon blog (Amazon has blogs?), a sudden demand for the book has caught the publisher and its distributor off guard. In short, people are ordering the book all over the place but no one's getting copies and probably won't for at least several more weeks.

But Matters of the Blood isn't available either. It was published by Juno Books, which is one of the big small publishers (although technically now they're just a newly acquired imprint of a big publisher, as Pocket Books recently ate them). No Amazon blog for that author, so I hopped on over to the Juno site. I don't see any mention of why the book isn't available.

I don't really care either way--and of the two, I want to read The Crown Conspiracy more (I'm a sucker for a well-done thief tale, while UF with kick-butt heroines has already started to bore me). It just seems more than a coincidence that out of the five books in my order, the two published by small presses are the two that I have to wait on. It reminds me a little of something Terry Pratchett said at a booksigning I attended in 2006. His first book was published by a small press and was a huge bestseller--and it almost bankrupted the publisher, which wasn't set up to handle large orders. Good luck to Aspirations Media!

3 comments:

Jamie Eyberg said...

Oh, to have bestselling problems. :)

Cate Gardner said...

Oh to have a book that people had to wait for because demand was so high. I'm not going to get any writing done for hours now.

K.C. Shaw said...

Yeah, I think that's one problem I wouldn't complain too much about if I was the author.

Sorry I threw off your groove, Cate. :)