What do you want first, the good news or the bad news? OK, let’s do the bad news and get it over with. Another one of my titles, There’s Only One Danny Ogle, has been POOPed (put out of print). Publishers do this when a book isn’t selling well enough (i.e under 1000 a year). A couple of months ago it was Vicious Circle and Jade’s Story and last week poor Danny was relegated. I guess I shouldn’t grumble. It has been in print for ten years and had seven print runs and I do appreciate that OUP are better than many publishers at keeping books in print for as long as they can. Still, it’s gutting when the letter informing you that you’ve been POOPed arrives. It’s like being told one of your kids isn’t pulling their weight at school. Or is basically pretty thick.
My problem is that I depend on the Danny Ogle title so much. Anyone who’s ever seen me perform will know how it forms a central plank to my ‘act.’ I love getting children to participate in extracts from the book and some of the best laughs we’ve shared are down to the garden scene. And children do buy it - obviously not enough children but they do buy it - because it’s funny, easy to read and under a fiver. It is also, crucially, the only one of my books with a boy as a main character.
So what’s the good news? The good news is that the book is still available in an anthology. Football Mad, contains Danny Ogle, two books by Alan ‘Dirtie Bertie’ MacDonald and one book, Nice One, Sam, by John Goodwin. This means I can continue to use ‘There’s Only One Danny Ogle’ on school visits but it being part of an anthology isn’t the same somehow. Football Mad has no individual Danny cover, no contents page to find the story itself (p. 187 BTW) and, at £6.99, it’s more expensive - once you step over the £5 line parents start umming and arring a bit. But I’ll fret not. The tinky-winky scene will live on!
It makes me wonder about the whole idea of ‘bind -ups’ (where several books are bound in one cover) vs. stand alone titles. As I noted from my Public Libraries Returns (see my blog from 8th Jan), borrowing of the individual titles in my After School Club series far outstripped the bind-up ‘Clubbing Together’ title. On the other hand, in the shops, Clubbing Together had phenomenal sales when it was first published. I suppose it’s different strokes for different folks - while some children relish a big, thick book, others find them daunting. While some like a series of stories in one compendium, others like to read individual titles as individual books.
What do you readers/librarians/booksellers think?
go straight to p 187!