The Continuing Slow Death of Long Midnight Publishing

Added on 20 February 2013

I wrote a while ago about the fact that I was getting ready to wrap things up at Long Midnight Publishing, ditch all the stock and concentrate solely on eBooks. Yes, there followed an enormous outpouring of grief, with millions of distraught members of the general public weeping blood on the steps of LMP corporate HQ, and it's true that the stock market completely tanked at the news, causing chaos in the world's financial markets that lasted nearly three months.

Nevertheless, I never made the dramatic announcement with the intention that it would cause a stampede of desperate buyers hoovering up the final few hundred copies of each of the Barney series; and just as well really, as that didn't happen. For example, THE LONG MIDNIGHT OF BARNEY THOMSON currently sits at 294,374 in the Amazon chart, which at least looks good compared to THE HAUNTING OF BARNEY THOMSON's 412,489. Yes, exciting times here at LMP.

Anyway, the main reason for the plan was to cut the cost of storing books, and my original intention was to get rid of everything, resulting in zero stock and zero sales.

However, the fellow in charge of storage and distribution of LMP books has come up with a dastardly plan of sound common and financial sense, which means that I won't be binning the entire stock after all. We've pulped around 6,000 books - cost of pulping £27 - while leaving the complete stock of Book 1s intact, plus a couple of hundred of each of the others. This way LMP's storage charges have dropped to virtually nil, while at the same time allowing the books to remain on sale for a little while longer.

And, as you would notice from those apocalyptically awful rankings, given that at the moment one person buys a print Barney Thomson book every decade or so, "a little while longer" is likely to be rather a long time.

LMP. Muddling slowly into the future, so you don't have to.