From Publishers Weekly:
The Mueller Report is the hottest manuscript in political publishing today, and Melville House is preparing to join the race to acquire and release it.
The independent publisher, like Skyhorse Publishing and Scribner before it, has announced plans to crash the special counsel’s recently-filed investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, should it be made public. But while Skyhorse’s trade paperback edition will include an introduction by attorney Alan Dershowitz, and Scribner’s edition, also a trade paperback, will be produced in conjunction with the Washington Post and include an introduction by Post investigative journalists Rosalind S. Helderman (a Pulitzer Prize winner) and Matt Zapotosky and some of the Post‘s original reporting on the investigation, Melville House is going a different route: it will be the publisher’s first mass market paperback in its nearly two decades of history.
Melville House will publish the book, which will be priced at $9.99, with a first printing of 50,000 copies. Pending the release of the report, the press will be prepared to publish it as early as possible, with a stated placeholder pub date of April 16.
Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly
“Our formatters are faster than your formatters! Our printing press is faster than yours!”
And people claim there’s a lack of creativity in traditional publishing.
UPDATE: PG omitted, “We’re faster than the Government Printing Office!”
Anyone else notice how fast this is supposed to come to market?
Whatever happened to their couple years lag time? 😉
Everyone who thinks there is a market for 50K MMPB copies of the Mueller report — when there will be other competing versions AND since it is a government document which will most likely mean an e-version will be available for free — raise your hands.
None of that matters. Melville House’s business strategy is to appeal to an extreme left-wing audience by hating on the current administration in between hating on Amazon. Or maybe the other way around, it is hard to tell sometimes. Which is odd in the sense that the current administration and Jeff Bezos are certainly no allies.
But virtue signalling as a business strategy seems to work for Melville House, so what the hey, though I do wonder if they’re going to be keen to distribute a document (probably) exonerating a whole lot of folks most on the Left assumed were guilty.
Waving my hands. Knuckle draggers like me are the market. I also buy books from Amazon that are available on Gutenberg. We have an aversion to transaction costs.