Damn it all, I lost someone’s ask
I saved it to draft (so I could deal with it at more length) and it vanished.
The person was saying they wanted to tank up on Young Wizards printed books but were having trouble, due to unavailability of all but “the first one”, and prices for both hardcovers and trade paperbacks being all over the place at independent suppliers.
Briefly: this has been a problem for nearly the last decade, and more so since the books’ US publisher (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) was ingested by another larger publisher.
Distribution on these books has always been dodgy, and frankly it’s become more so over time, as their publisher keeps changing hands, staff leave or are fired, and sales staffs turn over. Additionally, all the books have appeared in multiple formats over the years, and not all of the books necessarily in all of those.
Confused yet? I know I am, and they’re my damn books!
Dealing strictly with the Harcourt editions here: the first three appear only in mass-market paperbacks, with covers by two different artists. The fourth one then appears in mass market and an unusual small-format hardcover. Then (when the series took off with that publisher) all the MMPBs were repackaged, and (starting with the fifth one) were preceded by Harcourt hardcovers. Additionally, as the books were doing quite well in the early 2000s, the sales staff thought it would be a good idea if there were “digest format” editions aimed at younger readers. (These books were only physically larger than MMPBs, with bigger print: no text was ever Reader’s-Digest-style condensed.) And there were only six of these, as the later books were thought to be “more adult” and hence not a good fit for this format.
After that, the remaining three books all went to hardcover-and-paperback, usually a year apart. The digest editions were allowed to gradually go out of print; so were the hardcovers, as demand for them fell off. And that’s where we are at the moment, with (as far as I can tell) the MMPBs only being reprinted in small amounts when stocks fall low enough to warrant it.
This situation doesn’t really support the books being easy to find. Additionally, older editions of the hardcovers from previous publishers (and older trade paperbacks, ditto) are still out there, and can be had… but at what will look like weirdly high prices. The early Dell hardcovers of So You Want To Be A Wizard, Deep Wizardry and High Wizardry, due to their small print runs, are rare, hard to find, and usually go for hundreds of dollars. For a long time there was no US hardcover of A Wizard Abroad until SF Book Club published one set from the text of the UK Transworld/Corgi edition. (sigh) And so on. (There’s a page over at the Young Wizards site dealing with this wild assortment of covers and formats.)
Now, all that said: Over at Signed Books Direct is our storefront for copies of both the newer and older books. Except for the rarest ones, we sell them at cover price (and are happy to do so, because FFS nobody needs this many of their own books). :) I acquired a lot of these from Harcourt when word came down that warehouse space was tight, stock was being winnowed, and I could have these for cheap—or, it was heavily implied, they would be pulped. And as someone who due to a weird confluence of circumstances had half the print run of her (strongly-selling!) first novel pulped in the warehouse, the word, even after forty years, makes my blood run a bit cold. So I laid out the necessary cash and gave those books a home. And when people find ones they want, I sell them on to new homes with great pleasure.
So the thing for you to do (O person whose ask was in an evil hour eaten by Tumblr) is use the SBD contact email on this page to query me about what you’re looking for. I’m presently in the middle of reorganizing the store’s inventory so it reflects what we’ve actually got. The website’s about to be reorganized to reflect what’s on the shelves in the boot room, but that’s not gonna happen this week.. so don’t take what you see on the site seriously. Query me about what you’re after, and as soon as I’ve had a rummage in the shelves, I’ll get back to you.
HTH!
(And for those of you wondering, “But what are you doing about the distribution problem?” …right now the answer is: “What my agent and I can.” More news as it becomes available.)