(or, what happens if your book gets reprinted a lot)

A few weeks ago, we reprinted Box Brown’s Andre the Giant, which is exciting, because reprints are always exciting!  You’ve sold all the first printing of a book!  And you get a chance to fix any mistakes and add praise and accolades your book has received!  Those are all very exciting things.

It was also exciting because we got to point out to people the extremely non-obvious way you can tell if a book is in the first printing: on the indicia page (that’s the page with the copyright information), there’s a line of numbers at the bottom.

If those numbers go all the way down to 1, congratulations: you’re in possession of a first printing!

If the numbers go all the way down to 2, you’re in possession of a second printing!  And so on.

Here’s the current indicia page for Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s This One Summer.  This is the paperback edition, but it has the hardcover edition information on it as well — and you can see that this book is also in its second printing, as the numbers go down to 2.  You can also see that the hardcover edition is still in its first printing.

photo 2

Here’s another indicia page — this one is for American Born Chinese.

One of the questions we got asked when we’d initially posted pictures on our facebook page was, what happens when you get to the 11th printing?

As you can see below, what happens is that the numbers go up by ten and start counting down at 20.  So this paperback edition of American Born Chinese is in its 16th printing.

photo 1

Misc. secret book facts you never knew!