New books in large print from WF Howes

Over recent months we have become increasingly impressed with the publishing programme of WF Howes and they have a good balance of award winners, fiction and non-fiction and classics.

We have just received the May titles and you can find out more details about these nineteen here:

Click on the author’s name hyperlink to see all the titles that we list by that author; click on the title to go straight to that particular book.

Fiction
Crime and Thrillers

George Pelecanos, What it Was

Greg Hurwitz, The Survivor

Stuart Macbride, Birthdays for the Dead

General Fiction

Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing, a TV Book Club Best Reads of 2012

Kate Grenville, Sarah Thornhill

Tim Lott, Under the Same Stars

Kathy Lette, The Boy Who Fell To Earth

Christie Watson, Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, Winner of the Costa First Novel Award 2011

Lauren Groff, Arcadia

Matthew Green, Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend

Ismail Kadare, The Accident

Historical Fiction / Thriller

Lloyd Shepherd, The English Monster

Romantic Fiction

Zoë Miller, Rival Passions

Paranormal Romance

Melissa Marr, Graveminder

Classics

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

Non Fiction
Biography

Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens – a Life

Julia Fox, Sister Queens – Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile

History

Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts

Houston – we have a problem, and it’s getting worse

 

The specialist large print publishers (eg Ulverscroft, WF Howes, AudioGo) buy rights from the mainstream publisher or the author’s literary agent to publish a large print edition for five years.

All the specialist large print publishers produce some really appealing titles and some real dross (which it would be invidious to mention by name).

The trouble is that the dross doesn’t sell well and hangs around for the full five years. But our problem is that the good titles, especially the really good titles, are going out of print not just in the first year of the five year license but in the first month.

One publisher which has a much more enlightened attitude is WF Howes. I was speaking to their Chief Executive Officer, Shaun Sibley, at the London Book Fair last month and he told me that their policy is to ensure that all titles in large print are kept available for the full five-year term. They do this by using very short print runs or single-copy print on demand technology after their initial print run is exhausted.

This is the perfect use of print on demand technology. The idea for www.largeprintbookshop.co.uk arose as a result of a visit organised by the IPG (Independent Publishing Guild) to Lightning Source, the major print-on-demand printer, owned by the largest book wholesaler in the world, Ingram, in June 2004.

I should go back to see Lightning Source’s bigger and better facility in the UK, but what I saw in 2004 made a massive impression on me. Vast laser printers printing three titles of differing format and extent onto a seven mile roll of paper; turning the roll and passing it through a second printer so that the reverse pages could be printed; separating the three books into separate piles and creating book blocks ready to be bound with the full-colour cover which had been printed simultaneously on a separate machine. All happening at phenomenal speed, but the thing that amazed me the most was that 80% of all they were printing were single-copy orders. As I say, absolutely brilliant for large print books.

But consider the problem we are having with titles going out of print almost as soon as they are published (in some cases we do not even get one copy because all stock has been sold prior to publication date).

In December, a title I expected to become one of our big Christmas sellers, Victoria Hislop’s The Thread went out of print in the month of publication. (In this instance we will get a second chance as the paperback edition is coming in June).

Mark Logue’s The King’s Speech went out of print in both hardback and paperback in their respective months of publication.

Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse went out of print shortly before the Steven Spielberg film was launched.

There are many other titles that we could keep selling throughout the licensing period, such as Gervase Phinn’s Roads to the Dales; and the award winning Edward de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes, only published in large print last September but now out of print in hardback and paperback.

Such behaviour is bizarre in the current tough business climate. Actually, it would be bizarre at any time, but large print publishers are a breed apart.

Large Print Publishing as a Sausage Machine

All the specialist large print publishers in the UK are only interested in selling to the public library market, and they all have some incentive scheme to make ordering easy.

For example if you commit to buy one copy of each WF Howes title for a year (19 titles a month) you will make a saving of 20%; Ulverscroft offer a similar scheme whereby you can save 10% or 15%. AudioGo offer something similar.

The consequence of such schemes might be good for the publisher, and might make the librarian’s job easier, but they also have a number of adverse consequences.

Libraries have different demographics just as bookshops do, and family sagas might sell better in one part of the country than another.

The element of choice is taken out of the librarian’s hands. They just take what is offered.

With budget restrictions, a commitment to such an incentive plan might mean that the whole budget is placed with, say, Ulverscroft, rather than spread amongst the publishers. For example under one of the Ulverscroft schemes you can purchase £9,807 worth of large print books for £8,336 (624 books).  I am certain you could make a more interesting and appealing selection by picking and choosing amongst other publishers.

With a guaranteed sale, there is no incentive for the publisher to publish at the most appropriate time. For example when Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol was eagerly awaited in 2009 it was published on both sides of the Atlantic on the same day in September 2009, in time for Christmas. In America, the large print edition was published on the same day, and in the UK the unabridged audiobook version was published on that day. However, the UK large print edition was published the following February, long after the reviews had appeared and interest had subsided.

It would be good to see librarians fight back and opt to use their expertise and training to select the most appropriate titles for their library.

About one third of the 25,000 titles on our website are POD (print on demand) titles which means that they are published by someone other than the main large print publishers. This number is growing and comprises books published in large print by literary agents doing the best for the literary estates that they represent; backlist titles for which there is enduring interest – eg ReadHowYouWant issued two PD James backlist titles late last year as a test with a view to bringing the rest of her output into print (A Certain Justice and The Murder Room); the enduring out of copyright classics, such as Dickens, Hardy and Austen and, just out of copyright, The Great Gatsby, a book which regularly features in lists of favourites, and for which a major film is about to be released.

Less than 1.5% of new titles are published in large print. One day mainstream publishers will realise that they can do their own large print editions (using POD technology) for some of the 98.5% of books that are not currently published in large print and that these titles could sell just as well as any for which they sell rights.

For example, for the past few years we check books shortlisted for prestigious prizes, be they the Man Booker, the Orange, the Daggers, etc and the vast majority of titles shortlisted are never published in large print.

There could be worthwhile pickings for the mainstream publishers and great benefits for the 5% of the reading public who cannot read conventional print.