A new life for This One Wild and Precious Life in Australian and NZ

I've taken back the rights to my book (and so ends a long, hurtful story)

Right, so, news.

The short version:

Woot! I have retrieved the rights to This One Wild and Precious Life, the book of which I’m most proud, and I am re-releasing it as un updated revised edition somewhat independently. And I’d love, love, love you to fork out your hard-earned cash to buy a copy…if it suited. Only if you want. Perhaps for a friend, if you’re drawing a blank on a better gift idea…

• This new edition has been updated with the latest science and factlets.

• It won't have the hardback cover, but it will be cheaper. It will also have a reversed-out cover - orange instead of blue, per the British version.

• I will be distributing it via the Australian-owned and much-loved company Booktopia. I’ve also set up an arrangement where it can be printed more efficiently and agilely (producing less waste).

• This new edition will be available to all bookstores - indies, Amazon and the rest - in Australia and New Zealand via Booktopia Publisher Services (BPS). (If you’re a retailer wanting to know how to go about accessing BPS, Booktopia has said you can email them directly. )

• Booktopia are offering all of you here 20% off on pre-orders until May 23. Instead of $34.99, you’ll pay $21.56 (price updated at checkout!). It will be shipped to you on May 23.

The longer version (and the story of the cover):

Wild and Precious was a big book to write. As world events would have it, it came out smack-bang in the middle of Covid. There were many implications to this, including it suffering from marketing and PR neglect from its publishers. As we are now witnessing everywhere, large, too-powerful entities can struggle with disruption. Especially disruptions to status quos.

Anyway, the book refused to fail. In spite of sustained, truly baffling and incredibly distressing obstructive efforts by said large, too-powerful entity.

Cut to March this year and I find out that the book’s publishers were Just. Not. Printing the book any more.

Not that they told me.

I found out when I got phone calls from three bookshops saying their reorders were being refused. All very odd, given that reorders from bookshops generally suggest the book is still in demand (indeed sales figures remain strong). Whether contractually all this is kosher remains hazy. What the publishers’s motives are, and were from the beginning, remain a mystery to everyone who got tied up in this bizarre saga and to many industry insiders who came to learn about it. I should say I was not the only author to have experienced this unprofessional treatment. I can only conclude it had something to do with the domino’ing that starts - and can’t stop - when something large and too-powerful gets disrupted. Otherwise decent and hard-working employees get caught up in the system, a system that answers always to the top.

Whatever. The upshot is that I retrieved the rights to the book and can now give it the life it deserves.

There is much more to say here. But I am in a horrible position of having been bullied into relative silence. I’m sure many of you, especially the creatives out there, have been in a similar position at some point.

I will, however, share the story of how my cover was birthed. In part because the ridiculousness of it makes for a good tale. And because so many authors and other creatives have gone through something similar and have also felt bullied into silence. And, relatedly, because I feel we should expose unfair power plays when we finally can. As I get older and just don’t have the fear of power as I used to, I feel a responsibility to.

So, thirteen years ago I saw one of Brene Brown’s early presentations in a theatre in Sydney. I had just interviewed her for one of my columns and stuck around for the show. I remember she told a story about the time her publisher dicked her around with the cover of her book (even Brene Brown was not immune!). She showed a slide of the truly ridiculous design they were trying to make her go with (I think there was a cartoon elephant on a tightrope to denote vulnerability).

The anecdote came back to me as I was digging around book contracts the past month or two and found the original Wild and Precious cover that my publisher almost forced me to go with. I’d previously designed all my book covers. But they told me their new designer “must” do this one (for what I presumed were political reasons), but I could have “input”. I chased the progress of the cover design for six months. I’m an author who designs my covers, fonts - the bloody marketing materials! - in their head before they’ve even written the first chapter. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to have my allotted input. I’m also an author who tends to want to have a say on a lot of things (read: really cares). I was told month after month, “It’s coming”.

The cover was finally delivered four days before it was due at the printers. I was told there was no time for my input.

The resulting cover featured a large image of a woman in a bikini who I and everyone who saw it thought was me (tall, bun on head, slightly masculine, defiant stance), staring out to sea with a big orb on the horizon (the orb motif was part of my initial concept). When I protested that the woman looked like me, and that I did not want to be depicted on a cover of a book in a bikini (I cited “use of image, name and reputation” laws), they shrunk the image and whacked on a smoky haze to disguise “me”. Bear in mind this was just as the Australian bushfires hit a peak and ScoMo had just come back from Hawaii to tell us he doesn’t “hold a hose, mate”. I insisted the smoke go. Bubbles were added. At which point I begged them to give me the weekend to come up with an alternative.

Version 1 and Version 2

I found Karen a collage artist from Adelaide and we went about clipping images from old Life magazines (we had to go with images that were more than 50 years old to get around permissions, which we would have no time for). We worked with images of mountain ranges I’d climbed. I wanted the vibe to be hopeful, a bit surreal, but not too “flee to Mars”-ish. I didn’t sleep for three nights and the whole ordeal left me distressed and despairing for more than a year. The hurt and abandonment obviously went deeper than a cover design. But fortunately, my lovely US publishers chimed in and agreed my version was better (it was a joint publishing project).

As I say, I share all this, because I feel a bit compelled or obligated to. And perhaps also to give context to why I’m really quite excited to have the rights back and to be giving my work another shot. I feel it’s all come a full circle.

A bit of book publishing background

As this was all going down, it was interesting to note a heated conversation on Substack about the state of book publishing. Elle Griffin wrote a comprehensive, belated dissection of the antitrust case brought against Penguin Random House in 2022 (No One Buys Books), which revealed a bunch of figures about US book publishing that I think most people will find astonishing:

• The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors.

• There are only 50 authors across the US publishing industry who sold more than 500,000 units in a single year.

• 90 per cent of authors sell fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 per cent sell less than a dozen copies!

• 2 per cent of all titles earn an advance over $250,000, which accounts for 70% of all advance spend in America.

• According to one publisher, “75 per cent [of our] acquisitions come from approaching celebrities, politicians, athletes, the “celebrity adjacent,” etc. That way, we can control the content….”

I imagine the trends are similar in the UK and Australia, where a “best seller” amounts to 5,000 sales.

Elle’s argument was that forums like Substack attract way more eyeballs for creatives now. The post was linked to in Ross Douthat’s NYT newsletter, but also attracted pushback from other ‘stackers, one of whom happens to also be a book publisher. I should flag, I don’t necessarily agree with Elle’s argument and I still have a great love of publishing, and respect the care and passion of many many publishers (I have dozens around the world); the fact that it’s a swirling story is what I found relevant. And those figures! Oh, and where it all fits into this idea of large, too-powerful entities wreaking havoc in the world (the anti-trust case was to stop one of the world’s largest publishing house buying up another publisher and becoming even larger and too-powerful).

Please do grab a copy of the new Wild and Precious with the better karmic energy attached if you’ve not read it already (or even if you have). And if you are connected to a bookseller, let them know it’s back in print with a fresh new orange look and price point.

Thanks for listening and supporting me,

Sarah xx