Never judge a book by the cover (of its reprint)
I often get asked whether Caroline Lockhart’s novels are still in print. As of this year, boy are they ever! Did The Cowboy Girl play a role? Maybe, but technology played a bigger one.
If you need any proof of the way the “Long Tail” economy is growing exponentially, look no further than the explosion of recent republications of Lockhart’s books, originally published in the 1910s. Most are from print-on-demand outfits. I imagine they’re aided by the fact that Project Gutenberg has provided the text for these books. All the publisher has to do is grab the text from Web, insert into its printing software, add a cover, and wait for somebody to make an order through an outfit like bn.com.
But it turns out there’s one step in that newfangled-publication process that turns out to be more difficult than it looks: adding a cover. Here are three Lockhart books from an outfit called Tutis publishing.
Is The Dude Wrangler about ancient Greece? Does The Fighting Shepherdess involve Indian maidens and Egyptian pottery? Is the Lady Doc a contemporary medical thriller? Suffice it to say: no. In fact I’d have to say that these are some of the absolute worst covers I can imagine given the content of these novels. I picture some hapless Tutis executive, armed with a CD-full of stock images, required to assign them to titles at a rate of 20 or 30 an hour.
On the other hand, hey, anything to promote reading and books. And especially, anything to promote unjustly-forgotten novelists like Lockhart. But here’s hoping this process of reprinting old novels improves a bit as it matures.
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Labels: Cowboy Girl, publishing realities, technology
