FAQ 3: Random Questions
This is the former "SFBC FAQ," but I've added FAQ 1: About the SFBC Blog and FAQ 2: About the Science Fiction Book Club, so this collection of questions is now #3. It's intended to be perpetually a work in progress, so please do leave any other questions in the comments.
1. How do I let the SFBC know that I want to see a specific book in the club?A: You can write to us at sfbceditors@sfbc.com, about that or about anything else you'd like to tell the editors. I keep a very long list of books requested by members, mostly from e-mails, and we regularly use that list to plan our "Collector's Corner" features.
We're more likely to check out a book the more people ask us about it, and requests are generally more effective on classics than on current books (since we're already looking at those). But there are several series that we started to take seriously because members kept bugging us about them, and we do read and keep track of all requests.1a. When will you offer Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince?
A: I'm afraid the SFBC's parent company hasn't yet been able to make any deal with Scholastic, that book's publisher. Until such a deal is made -- and there's no guarantee that it ever will -- we can't offer that book to our members. This is all taking place on a rarefied plane far above me, but I believe we're still trying.
Update, 3/1: Still no news on Half-Blood Prince, and I'm afraid all of the above applies to Deathly Hallows as well. I don't know exactly what negotations are going on, but my hopes are not high.1b. When will you offer Chainfire by Terry Goodkind? (And how about Phantom, too?)
A: We made what we thought was a good and reasonable offer to Terry Goodkind's publisher, but we weren't able to come to an agreement on those books. There is one final book planned in that series, and we hope to make a new offer for the last three books then -- but it's quite possible that offer will also be rejected.2. Are you going to offer e-books?
A: We don't have any plans to do so at the moment. It seems like a very SFnal idea, so it would be a nice thing to do. Unfortunately, e-books are still a small, fragmented market, and we don't have the rights to do bookclub books in electronic form without paying more money to their original publishers. So offering e-books would mean starting up a whole new line of business, which we're not ready to do just now.3. I just wrote a novel. Will you look at it for the SFBC?
A: We are happy to consider any book professionally published in the US or Canada, but we do not consider self-published or vanity published books. We do very little original publishing, and all of it is commissioned; we do not read unpublished works.If you are a publisher who would like to submit books for consideration, please query me at sfbceditors@sfbc.com, and I'll give you our guidelines.
4. Are SFBC books exactly the same as the ones I'd buy in a bookstore?A. Yes and no.
The text is identical; we don't abridge or alter the original text in any way. But the physical book itself is often printed and bound in a smaller size; bookclub editions are more likely to be about 5" x 8", while publisher's editions are more usually 6" x 9". We also regularly eliminate foil, embossing, and other cover gewgaws that are designed to grab a reader's eye in a bookstore, since we don't sell through bookstores.And we also regularly do omnibus editions, or hardcover editions of original publisher's paperbacks, which are quite physically different from the original books.
We sometimes reset the publisher's text, but we generally try not to in most cases, since that's costly and often introduces new errors into the text. We do mostly get electronic materials from publishers, and can sometimes reformat those to fit our specifications. We also photographically reduce page size much of the time.5. I vaguely remember an old SF story. Can I tell you about it and have you figure out what it is?
A. Sometimes we might be able to work out the story you're trying to remember, but there are only a couple of us here. A much better bet is to post such requests to the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written, where there are many more people and such requests are regularly seen and answered. (If you've never accessed Usenet directly, you might find it easier to use the Google Groups interface at http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written?hl=en.)6. I am outraged that Author X has done this! You must stop this immediately and tell that author to go back to the stuff I like better!
A: I'm afraid that we don't have any control over what authors write, and fairly little direct contact with authors. We see books after they are written, and decide then whether or not to offer them to our members.If you want to complain about the direction of a series, or a change in your favorite author's writing style, you'd be much better off writing to the original publisher of that book, or to the author directly.
7. I am outraged that the club is offering Book Y! It is written by an author I despise, or is in a sub-genre I can't stand. I demand that the club never offer any more books like this, and concentrate only on the things I like!A: The SFBC covers the whole spectrum of speculative fiction, from elfy-welfy epic fantasy to blood-soaked military SF. There's no one here who loves all of the things we offer, so we certainly don't expect the members to enjoy everything equally. But all of the books we offer do have their devoted fans, and we try to have books that all of you will enjoy.
If you're not seeing the books that you'd like to see, it's much more constructive to write to us (at sfbceditors@sfbc.com) to ask about the books you want than to write and complain about the books you don't want. (Though I do appreciate that the latter can be more psychologically satisfying.)Reposted 4/2/07 at 1:28 PM.
Comments
Add to 4 -- do you reset the text from the publishers, use electronic text from the publishers, or both?
Posted by: Marilee | June 8, 2006 03:31 PM
The answer to that is a big "yes, some of the time." We try not to reset, since that's expensive (and often adds new errors), but sometimes it can't be avoided.
I'll edit the original entry to cover this; thanks!
Posted by: Andrew Wheeler | June 9, 2006 07:17 AM
Not so much a commment for the FAQ as a question: Since book club editions are not (usually) bound in cloth, why do the pictures of the books in the mailer look like they are so bound? On the edges of the book, under the dust jacket, it looks like these books have colored cloth spines, but in my experience, they all come with the black paper boards.
I am not so much complaining, since I appreciate the low prices (and prefer that to the SFBC starting any kind of "bonus points" plan a la QPBC), but I do think the pictures could be more accurate. Maybe you should say on the FAQ page that the books are not bound with cloth spines in order to keep costs down.
I know it's a nitpick, but I work in rare books, and people are often surprised when they find out their book club editions have little to no resale value to collectors. The FAQ section on differences between trade and book club editions could educate customers on this point.
Thanks for the blog -- I am really enjoying it!
Posted by: Mike | June 9, 2006 08:25 AM
Mike -- hardly anything is actually bound in cloth these days (I just checked about a dozen books from different trade publishers that happened to be in my office, and they're all paper-over-board in various colors). Only high-end publishing does cloth bindings at all. Trade houses do have a contrasting color on the spine more often than we do, but that's not really a cloth binding.
And our bookshots are photographs of actual bookclub editions (not usually of that particular book, since it's not published yet, but of one about the same size), so that is what they look like, more or less.
Posted by: Andrew Wheeler | June 9, 2006 08:46 AM
Is it possible to list the size of the books on the ads and (better yet) the web site? When buying books in a series it is really frustrating for me to get books of all different sizes...this may be a small issue for most but I prefer to have sets that appear like a set. Many times I avoid the book club and buy retail so I know what I am getting.
Posted by: Kevin | September 17, 2006 01:22 PM
Kevin: We do always list sizes when books are oversized (or notably undersized), but most of our books are 5 1/2" x 8 1/4", so listing that a hundred times in our catalog would take up a lot of space -- and that space would have to come at the expense of words actually about the plots of the books.
Some of our books are 6" x 9", but the smaller trim size is our default. It's possible that we could list the size when it isn't 5 1/2" x 8 1/4" -- I'll see if that might work.
Posted by: Andrew Wheeler | September 17, 2006 07:49 PM
Hey! Why the change in the home page for featured selections??? what was so wrong with the status and previous information stuff right on the first page??
Posted by: Elaine | September 27, 2006 10:31 AM
Elaine: My website manager told me yesterday that she was asked to remove the Selection box from the home page, and that it had been done for all of our company's clubs. (I don't know why, but I suspect it was to save valuable page real estate.) You can still click on "Featured Selections" in the top navigation bar and get to the same page.
If there's anyone out there who is particularly unhappy with this change, please write to Customer Service at service@sfbc.com to (politely, I hope) say so.
Posted by: Andrew Wheeler | September 27, 2006 10:40 AM
Well this will be my first post on the blog and it'll be a ho hum one since I've probably asked it via email before. Are there any viable contacts I could write to on either side to get the ball rolling about 2 cm on the Harry Potter 6 issue?
Posted by: Lee Bartholomew | October 24, 2006 03:51 AM
Lee: As far as I understand it, the Harry Potter issue is all up to Scholastic (the publisher). We can only offer a book in a club if the publisher agrees to sell, and it doesn't sound like they want the clubs to have that book.
A polite letter to them might get a response -- though I suppose they might say that it's all our fault for some reason. (As I said, I wasn't involved at all in the HP negotiations; they're much bigger than the SFBC.)
Posted by: Andrew Wheeler | October 24, 2006 08:27 AM
well, i ,personally am loking forward to reading the new harry poter.I do think authors sometimes have a bad spell, but its still fun to read.The Goosebumps series is utter trash and is disgusting for youngsters to read!
Posted by: Shaakira | April 4, 2007 02:20 PM