From The Hollywood Reporter:
Margaret Atwood’s latest work The Testaments — the highly anticipated sequel to her 1985 best-selling novel The Handmaid’s Tale — is set to be released globally next Tuesday. However, a “retailer error” by Amazon broke the embargo, resulting in a “small number of copies” already ending up in the hands of readers.
Todd Doughty, Doubleday’s executive director of publicity, told The Hollywood Reporter in a statement, “A very small number of copies of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments were distributed early due to a retailer error which has now been rectified. We appreciate that readers and booksellers have been waiting patiently for the much-anticipated sequel to the best-selling The Handmaid’s Tale. In order to ensure our readers around the world receive their copies on the same day, our global publication date remains Tuesday, Sept. 10.”
. . . .
The embargo breach has also created an outcry from independent booksellers on social media, including Astoria Bookshop owner Lexi Beach, who shared her frustration on Twitter. “There will be ZERO consequences for $amzn violating not just the fine print but the entire basis of this embargo agreement some exec surely signed digitally through Adobe Sign just like the rest of us did,” she wrote Tuesday.
Added Beach: “And the kicker is that $amzn will make hardly any money selling this book. Books (especially big splashy publications like this) have always been a loss leader for them. Whereas I and many other independent retailers are counting on this release to pay our bills.”
Link to the rest at The Hollywood Reporter
PG notes that embargos occupy a hallowed spot in the uninspired world of Big Publisher marketing.
Embargos are also breached with some regularity by people other than Amazon. PG is not the only one who suspects that publicity about the breaking of more than one embargo has been part of a publisher’s staged marketing campaign for quite a while. Throw in the dreaded Zon and people become even more excited.
From The Washington Post, September 27, 2012:
The embargo on the J.K. Rowling novel “The Casual Vacancy,” reportedly one of the most draconian non-disclosure agreements in the history of publishing . . . did not quite work. ¶ Thursday is the release date for the first book for adults written by the empress of Hogwarts. Reviews were embargoed until 1 a.m. and book sales until 3 a.m. Since Rowling’s Harry Potter books have sold more than 450 million copies worldwide, the release of her new book — even though it is set in an unmagical British town called Pagford — is one of 2012’s largest publishing events. ¶ Thus, it is a test case for the common, if unloved, practice of forbidding booksellers from selling the book in advance of the embargo date, and forbidding media outlets from reviewing said tome before the date the publishing company decrees. ¶ The practice generally has several intents: to make sure books are in stores when readers hear about them; to retain the news revelations in nonfiction books; and to try to bottle up interest in big fiction titles, propelling them onto bestseller lists with an unusually high number of immediate sales.
“For franchise authors, you want to drive it to Number 1 by having everyone buy it the first week of release,” said Elyse Cheney, a literary agent in New York.
Rowling, who is nothing but a franchise author (she is the first in the world to earn more than $1 billion in book sales), added spice to this release with an unusually strict legal document that its publisher, Little, Brown, reportedly imposed on prospective reviewers.
The Independent in London reported a clause that not only required signees to hold off on sales and reviews but also forbade them to even mention a contract.
But — and this almost always happens — somebody got the book anyway.
The Associated Press and the New York Daily News (and perhaps others) said they managed to get early copies of the book, and they published reviews Wednesday. AP reported it did not sign the contract but “purchased” the book; the Daily News said the novel was “obtained.” Because they alone had reviews, those two organizations set the tone for readers’ perception of the book.
The Post and other news organizations observed the embargo, running reviews Thursday.
Just about nobody was happy.
“I couldn’t even get an embargoed copy to review,” said Dan Kois, editor of the book section for the online magazine Slate, which is part of The Washington Post Co. “They wouldn’t send it to us. They had very clear levels to this campaign.”
. . . .
The Post and the New York Times refrained from publishing their staff-written reviews online Wednesday, though The Post put AP’s review on its Web site. The Post’s executive editor, Marcus Brauchli, said he thinks the publishing industry is ultimately “fighting a losing battle.”
A spokeswoman for Little, Brown said she would have a company representative call for comment on this article, but no one had done so by press time.
This sort of struggle between publishers and media outlets has been small-arms combat for years. With some books, in which authors and publishers have signed exclusive excerpt rights with magazines or newspapers, there is a clear business mandate to preserve those rights and to keep others from writing about the material.
. . . .
Connie Ogle, books editor for the Miami Herald, and LaFramboise, the Politics & Prose book buyer, both noted a similarity between some embargoed titles and B movies that are not made available to critics for pre-screening.
“There is a core audience that is going to go see the movie or read the book anyway,” Ogle said, “and those films or books often tend not to have a long shelf life.”
Link to the rest at The Washington Post
The ABA is already trying to increase the size of this molehill…
https://www.bookweb.org/news/statement-american-booksellers-association-amazons-early-release-testaments-573915
Well they would, nothing else they’ve whined about Amazon has stuck … 😉
One must wonder what evidence — not hope, not ideological predisposition, not received wisdom not founded in fact — demonstrates that the costs imposed throughout the system by an embargo (and its enforcement) are both:
* positive forces for either (preferably both) total sales and first-week-of-official-issue sales, including pre-availability orders whether fulfilled early or not; and
* that such increase in sales results in greater revenue than enforcement and segregation costs (leaving who benefits aside for the moment)
I am not in a position to disclose details, but some past access to publisher materials indicates that Commercial Publisher #1 and Commercial Publisher #2 (both major trade houses based in NYC) would have to say “An embargo has no validated commercial advantage.”
<sarcasm> Or you could just audit the net for a large independent bookstore that hosted an HP4, HP5, HP6, or HP7 midnight-release party, maybe even including the overtime pay that almost none of them actually paid. </sarcasm>
The biggest hint that the publishing and bookstore industries should consider is the increasing tendency of highly profitable segments of the entertainment industry like “recorded music” and “H’wood” to purposely punch holes in what would otherwise be called an “embargo” with extensive previewing, etc.
Oh, embargoes. I remember those from my media days. We would embargo a news story, and sometimes the reporters would get super-vigilant about making sure we didn’t publish it before a certain time, because their Big Time source “would never trust me again.”
I can see the “trust-factor” with a reporter-source relationship. But Amazon selling a book “early” — how does that negatively affect the author? And how do you threaten Amazon? “We’ll never send our books to you again!” That sounds like a modern-day Pyrrhic victory for the author or publisher.
A smaller retailer might compete by having the customers pre-order the Sure To Be New Hotness, so the customers can have it on their doorstep at their convenience. Or maybe have an in-bookstore launch party, like Rowling used to do for Harry Potter. Don’t pout, don’t frown, just do a more creative job of getting customers into your store.
This is hardly unique to Amazon. There are several posts up from people at the Stephen King subreddit with images of copies of his latest novel. That they claim they simply walked into a store and bought. Or got it in the mail from one of Amazon’s competitors.
Sucks to be you then. I checked out the pre-order page and Amazon is $11+ cheaper than list price.
See, price comparison is a fundamental part of how people shop. You go to the grocery store and compare the price of peanut butter to other stores you have been in. You go to Old Navy and compare the price of trousers to other stores. You look at cars and evaluate them by price and condition. The vast majority of people expect retailers to compete on price and have no pity on them when they do not.
They still think high costs entitle them to high prices.
I wonder how much of that $11 differential goes to Ingram.
As long as publishers cling to volume discounts and distributors to lowsr *their* costs, the standalones’ costs will remain higher than Amazon’s. No whining will change that.
Whereas I and many other independent retailers are counting on this release to pay our bills.”
I care more about Amazon than I care about independent retailers who whine in public.