Dorchester Switch

Hello, everyone! Happy Monday! I am SO glad Monday is here! That means no work and lots of time to catch up on the things I actually want to be doing. Now onto the post.

I'm sure many of you have already heard the news about the Dorchester switch, but in case you haven't, I'm here to give you the low-down. For those of you who already know, don't stop reading! There is more for you down at the bottom of this post.

So Dorchester, a smallish publishing company compared to the major houses which focuses mainly on mass market romance, is switching from it's traditional paperback publishing to what's called a POD publisher--aka print on demand. What this means is they are essentially eliminating all their huge inventory piles of books and are only printing what the bookstores are demanding. Therefore, being more efficient on cost.

Those of you who still don't have e-readers (Kindle, Nook, etc) can still receive these same books in paperback. However, the majority of their sales will likely switch to e-book.

As far as reading books from Dorchester goes, it really doesn't have a tremendous effect. Those who read paperbacks can still do so. The question I really want to know is: what does this mean for writers and the publishing world in general?

While Dorschester may not be a huge player, and from what I've been told by insiders, had only small advances for mass market rights, many big time agents didn't deal with them. So for those of us who are un-agented or agented but not published, it doesn't effect us.

But how will it effect Dorchester's writers? They have options to get out of their contracts. While this is better than the company going completely belly up, many writers will now be orphaned should they choose to remain mass market.

So the question I pose to all of you is this: do you have an e-reader? If you do, do you still buy books by your favorite authors in paperback? Do you read many small press authors or do you stick to books you would be reading anyway? Let's get a discussion going again.

For those interested here is a link explaining more: http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2010/08/09/dorchester-update/

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