Writers Tricks of the Trade Volume 6 Issue 2 | Page 36

On Amazon Stores (Cont’d)

at every place in the value chain in between should be to standardize and, as much as
possible, to treat many different books the same. That’s not a creative imperative; it
is a commercial imperative.
My father first experienced the tension that this insight can create at Doubleday
on Amazon
in the Available
1950s when
he persuaded the company to standardize the trim sizes of their
books for maximum printing efficiency. That didn’t require radical changes. It simply
meant that books would be an eighth- or quarter-inch longer or shorter, wider or
narrower. These were differences that were really not perceptible to most people, yet
it was a real internal corporate battle to wrest control from designers who believed
“every book is different” and that this mystery (or cookbook) had to be published as a
6 by 9 inch book while that one had to be 6-1/2 inches by 9.
In fact, the trivial differences in trim size were not important at all to the books’
chances of success. There were other decisions — the specific paper or type face
among them — that also had no discernible commercial impact on each individual
book but were, nonetheless, intentionally made book-by-book as though they did. In
many houses, and (admittedly I’m saying this without any supporting data) probably
more in smaller houses than larger ones, they still are. And that’s true even though
whether the paper is 55 pound or 60 pound or the type face is Times Roman or
Baskerville can’t be shown to have