Some publishers, eh?

Scholastic are a big publishing company. Huge. In fact, Scholastic Inc. is the world's largest publisher of children's books.
So you'd have thought that they would know better than to;
Exhibit A.


Put a big sticker on their books that says 'Ideal Christmas Present' that is so sticky that you can't get it off without 30 minutes of scrubbing with turpentine and gentle coaxing.
Waterstone's used to have a similar problem with those lovely orange stickers that they like to use. It took a number of top scientists several months to find a gum that was sticky enough to stick onto book covers, but not too sticky that you couldn't get it off. I know, because i've personally stickered and de-stickered tens of thousands of books in the name of marketing. So my advice to Scholastic is to get in touch with the Waterstone's scientists to find out what gum they use.
Exhibit B

Ah, 'Adult editions'. What this means is that the pulishers think that the book or series in question that was originally written for kids, has enough appeal to adults that they will now try and sell it as an adult book. And heaven forbid an adult would be seen reading a kids book, so they change the cover to look more grown up. Famous examples are Harry Potter, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and The Boy in the Striped Jimjams.
Publishers don't mention that the price of a kids book is less than that of an adult book. So if you look really closely at the example above, you will see that the price of these new 'adult editions' will be £7.99. But if you check out the price of the edition that's available at the moment (the kids edition), you'll find it's £6.99. So what's likely to happen is that the price of the kids edition will go up too. Boo. Boo. Boo.

In their defence, Scholastic publish this.

Barry Hutchison will be the topic of my next post, which will be much more positive. Unless he isn't the topic. And then it'll be something else.