Talking about the book, the UP I’m publishing with this time differs from the one I published with before in that it’s become part of a huge publishing house.
The positive results of this are that the book will be prettier and they will promote it more actively.
On the negative side, I have to bother with copyright and I’ll only get 3 (like in THREE) author copies. Plus, the book will cost some insane amount. Probably with the goal of ensuring that nobody ever reads it.
Big companies, what can you do. There is no logic to what they do. If they priced the book at $10, I’d sell a ton of copies for them. But selling doesn’t seem to be what they want.
Clarissa's Blog 
Big companies, as opposed to university publishers, are out to make a profit. If your publisher thought that your book would be a best-seller, they’d peddle it at a dime-a-dozen. Perhaps your title is too high-brow to appeal to the masses — have you considered a more sensationalistic title, or at least a juicy lede on the cover?
Or would that be trolling downward, like Tana French? 🙂
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The problem with big companies is that nobody cares. Huge means nobody’s. Everybody has their own tiny patch and they don’t care what happens beyond that. This is why the bigger a company is, the more waste there is and the more it needs to rely on government handouts, bailouts, tax relief, etc.
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Maybe few individuals will buy it, but the good news is that lots of university libraries will buy a copy, right? And this will make it accessible to other scholars in your field. Three author copies, though, seems really low…
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Yes, it’s all about selling it to the libraries. They aren’t trying anything beyond that.
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So what’s the highbrow title, if you don’t mind sharing?
Maybe one of your readers can suggest a more “gotcha” title, for when your work is published a second time for the straight-to-satellite television crowd? That’s where all the residual loot is.
Think pay-per-view melodrama on a bargain-basement channel like Showtime, or even a highly hyped HBO production (they love promoting pseudo-high-brow programs on that network).
You can always use a pseudonym for the television version, if you don’t want to embarrass Klara after she learns to read. 🙂
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I’m always very boringly straightforward. The book is on literature of the crisis, and the title is Literature of the Crisis. 😆😆😆
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Literature of the Crisis??? Okay, I guess for the dusty shelves of a university library.
For the television release, how about Death Flight of the Doomed Spanish Literati, with the cover showing a medieval Spanish castle on a moonlit hill in the background, and nubile young Spanish students fleeing for their lives through a thick, dark, and menacing forest?
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Weak title. May I suggest:
in very large type: SEXY SPANISH VAMPIRES!!!
subittle in very small type: are not part of the literature of the crisis
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You definitely got the right idea! It’s a race to the bottom to determine what will attract the most newsstand readers, without making the dismiss the publication as a children’s comic book!
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Correction: “without making the reader dismiss the publication as a children’s comic book! (Which would definitely hurt sales.)
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