Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, today mulling over a problem I’ve been trying to ignore for some time—what to do with old author copies that have outlived their purpose.
Updated version of three novels. In storage are 152 paperbacks of the original versions
My first book was published in 1984 and sixty-three others from an assortment of traditional publishers followed up until a few years ago when I stopped writing new novels to focus on reissuing backlist titles and self-publishing a few books that were already written but had not been sold. With each new book, I eagerly accepted as many author copies as my publisher would agree to and usually bought more at an author discount to use for promotion and to sell at events where there was no bookstore to handle sales. I don’t have many copies left of any of my early titles, but along the way, as I began to be published by larger houses, my contracts specified larger and larger numbers of author copies. At the same time, I ended up doing fewer events where I handled sales myself. Books started to accumulate.
Obviously, I wasn’t going to toss extra copies. These were my babies! Besides, it’s painful to throw any book away, even the falling-apart, non-acid-free mass market paperback keepers from my high school days. It was with great sadness that Gone with the Wind was consigned to the trash, even though I doubt I’d ever have reread it.
But I digress.
Nefret, Bala, and Calpurnia checking out the storage bins
Our solution to the overflow of author copies back in the 1990s was to add storage bins to the waste space in a stairwell. Extra copies of the romance novels I wrote back then, plus all of the Face Down series and other titles, soon filled these up, especially after the Bantam Loveswept line was discontinued and the departing editors sent their authors extra cartons of their most recent titles. I don’t know where those would ordinarily have gone, but I ended up with over a hundred copies of That Special Smile and not a clue what to do with most of them. I still have forty-eight of them in storage. I really should take them to the dump, especially since I’ve already revised all my old romance novels and reissued them in omnibus editions.
Just to give you an idea, since I have a list of the location and contents of each box in storage, there are fifty-six in the upper bin, nineteen in the lower, eleven under our bed, eighteen in the closet in the spare room, and forty-two just piled in stacks around the perimeter of that room. The boxes are all sizes, from small ones that hold only three or four books to some too heavy for me to lift. There are also 229 loose copies of current POD titles in my office. I am rapidly running out of space, and I will shortly have a few copies of each of the four-book Diana Spaulding 1888 Mysteries to add to the mix,
Feral helping get the boxes ready to go to reunion
Don’t think I haven’t tried to find homes for my books. I’ve sent boxes of my mysteries to Malice Domestic to use as giveaways, donated every time a charity or a library asks, done giveaways at this blog, tried consignments at a local Maine chain of bookstores (not successful), and even taken freebees to my fiftieth high school reunion. The drawback, of course, is that except for the reunion, when I filled the trunk of my car with books and drove there, the books had to be shipped. Books are heavy, and therefore expensive to send by UPS or USPS. Still, I’d spring for the expense if someplace like The Book Thing of Baltimore, which gives away all the books donated to them, would accept shipments. Unfortunately, they only take books brought to their location in person.
no room for luggage, just boxes of books headed for reunion
So, what am I to do with old author copies, especially the ones that have been rewritten or considerably revised and reissued in new editions? Those aren’t versions I even want anyone to read. I’m steeling myself to dig them out and take them all to the paper recycling bin at the dump, but if anyone reading this can think of an alternate solution, I’d love to hear it. If I do nothing, it will be my heirs (years from now, I hope) who will be stuck with a mountain of books to dispose of.
Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.
