Trade PBO Love

About this time last year I wrote a long screed expressing my undying love for trade paperback originals, and hoped that there would be more of them. I won’t repeat myself again, since my views haven’t really changed much (for further proof, consider my end-of-year column for the Sun last year, which focused almost exclusively on PBOs.)

Fast forward twelve months and bookseller Robert Gray’s talking about the same thing at much more depth on his blog Fresh Eyes. He speaks to Soft Skull Press’s Richard Nash about why that publisher focuses more on TPOs and why they make economic sense. It can essentially be summed up as follows:

There are some books that people might not be willing to fork over hardcover money for, but would take a chance on at paperback prices. Never mind that, as Canadian author Ania Szado explains, they just look more attractive than many hardcovers do.

But here’s another thing to consider as well, and that’s the issue of print runs. A hardcover print run, at the low end, is 3000-5000 copies. A decent print run is 20-50K, and the publisher’s really going all out if you get a 100K print run or more. But mass market print runs are much, much higher, because more people are willing to either wait a year, or simply fork over less money to read the book. So if more people are willing to take a chance on the middle, on a product that often looks more attractive, with a print run that’s in between hardcovers and mass market, why wouldn’t more publishers take a chance on the format?

Take Sam Lipsyte’s HOME LAND. It’s still too early to ascertain how successful the book is, but the hardluck story aside, the fact that the book is available in trade PBO —  and thus more readily accessible to those with less cash than hardcover buyers, who are also more likely to warm to the novel’s eclectic voice — has to be a factor. Gray also brings up Jhumpa Lahiri’s THE INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, a book I keep forgetting was originally released as a trade PBO.

So what types of books would work best with this format? Short story collections of any stripe, for one, and anthologies in particular. How many times has any of us heard — or believed — that no one will fork over the money for an anthology? But TPO makes that a likelier shot. Would Akashic have launched their “Noir” series of anthologies had BROOKLYN NOIR not been so successful? Obviously not, but I’ll argue that success was in part due to the affordability of the TPO pricing. Although I hadn’t realized it when I read the galley, the Otto Penzler-edited DANGEROUS WOMEN is also a TPO, and I think again, the format works in this case.

There has also been a further shift towards TPOs in the crime fiction world, not just on the small press side. There’s HarperCollins’ Perennial Dark Alley, who gives young, somewhat unclassifiable first novelists a shot with that format, and has certainly exposed me to writers I might not have tried otherwise (Rob Roberge, Jon Evans, Chris Haslam) or republishes lesser-known work by the tried and true (think Peter Robinson’s THE FIRST CUT) I mention other favorite imprints in my earlier post as well, and most of the books I was looking forward to then turned out to be among my favorite reads of 2004.

So even though I did this last year, I suspect I may have a bigger audience this time around, and thus I’ll pose the question to all of you: what do you like or dislike about trade PBOs? Are you more likely to buy them, own them, keep them on your shelves? What books are you willing to buy in that format that you might shy away from with hardcovers? The backblogs, once again, are all yours.