To speak from my experience: There was a time when I had a voracious appetite for literary fiction. I couldn’t get enough of it. Authors in this genre tend not to churn out multiple books within short spans of time so I found myself often in search of more than the best-seller list could provide. Also as time went by, I realised that oftentimes little known authors can churn out some real gems in this genre, if you know where to look.

The challenge for me then became where to look.

Over time, I began to distinguish between the different imprints and to have a strong sense of what ‘promise was inherent’ in them. I had a particularly strong affinity for Flamingo Books which (I think) was an imprint of Harper Collins. It came to be that it didn’t matter who the author was, if it was a Flamingo Book, I picked it up because I knew what to expect. I don’t recall ever being disappointed, although that might very well be me nostalgically romanticising a past that is now beyond my reach. But, on the whole, I was a very satisfied customer.

And then, without warning (to me at least), Flamingo disappeared into thin air! I cannot begin to tell you how disoriented I was. Once upon a time, the editors at Flamingo provided a bridge for me between the known and the unknown. Then all of a sudden, they pulled that bridge right from under me. I do not exaggerate when I say that I went through a personal book-buying crisis.

I continued to buy the established authors, of course, or books by those authors whose style I’d developed a taste for over the years, but unfortunately, I sampled fewer new authors and sheepishly migrated back to the (grossly inadequate, in my book at least) bestseller list.

In the interim I have wandered into new genres as well as attempted to develop cautious new relationships with the other literary imprints that were long ago in the shadows of Flamingo, at least in my eyes.

But still, as I see it, if you’re an avid reader, you’re going to want to read more than what’s on the bestseller list in the genre of your choice. Sooner or later, you’ll go searching for the hidden gems. When that time comes, imprints, (if they are successfully executed and not just pulled out of a hat, you understand), are the guiding posts to the treasure coves where those gems are to be found.

And, if the longtail is the future of the book business, then imprints are going to matter more, not less. So I think the conversation should not be about whether they should exist or not, but about what would be/is the right way to execute them. Because sometimes i have a sense that publishers come up with an imprint because, well, that’s what we do right? Although I think in the long run the market has a way of telling these publishers what to do with their imprints.

Or is this fetish for imprint, a peculiarity of scholarly publishing because the authors invariably are also the consumers? I speak from my experience in India.

So perhaps it’s not that all imprints are meaningless, but that poorly defined imprints with no strong brand identity in the minds of consumers — that is, to say, most of them — are without value.

And the imprints that do have a well-cultivated brand identity — e.g., a Penguin for literature, a DK for lavishly illustrated children’s books, a Rough Guide for down-to-earth travel books, an Oxford for language references, or an O’Reilly for high-quality technical books (all examples from my own bookshelves) — really do help consumers make buying decisions. I know they help me — especially when I’m buying a book sight unseen from Amazon or the like.

You don’t need the publisher for the “name” per se. However, you do need a publisher for (a) access to accounts and (b) fulfillment to those accounts. There are many other things the publisher adds as well.

Thanks,

Mike

Some bookstores in my area shelve fiction higgledy-piggledy, CBA and ABA mixed together in a big happy group. If I, as a customer, with my 3-seconds-per- potential-purchase to spend on choosing a book, don’t recognize the author, I look next at imprint. Imprint does in fact convey info to me as a buyer. Not being 100% aware of what every single conglomerate offers, if I don’t recognize the imprint or publisher as being me-friendly, I’ll just leave the book on the store shelf.

I imagine my comment will not find favor because it’s not politically correct–not being totally supportive of whatever the large pubs want to do. But in discussing this, I have put n my constant book-buyer hat, and hung up my writer-chapeau…at least for the moment *G*

I suppose it would help authors who are trying to sell to the general public and not just sell to a Christian market because in some settings the books will blend together, and unless you know the author, you won’t know what you’re getting until you take it home and read it, or unless God or faith is mentioned on the back cover. But that’s just my take as an avid reader and book addict. I’m sure most people could care less.

But if the covers didn’t have that uniform design pattern, as a reader, I didn’t pay much attention to imprints before I became a writer. I pay much more attention now, but that’s mostly for information on the market, not because I’m interested in any particular imprint over another.

The decision to get rid of the various Thomas Nelson imprints seems like a good one. Simplicity, right? I don’t quite understand why anyone would fuss about it, especially if it wasn’t their own publishing house.

Camy