RH Unveils POD Collection

Random House is to begin marketing its print-on-demand titles as a distinct list, Random Collection, in January. Random is launching a dedicated website, which will be interactive and searchable and there will be a launch list of 750 titles with further books added throughout the year.

Deputy group sales director Faye Brewster, who is co-ordinating Random Collection, said: “We have a massive archive of well-known and less well-known books and it is our policy to make as many available as possible. We’ve had a p.o.d. list for the past year-and-a-half and now that there is a critical mass of titles we can be proactive in marketing them.”

The website will be regularly updated with picks and recommendations by Random House staff and authors. It will also contain a feature enabling booksellers to make suggestions for titles they would like to see made available in the future. Brewster added: “When retailers are asked for a Random House book that is out of print, they can suggest it to us and we will check out the rights.”

She said that being able to search the website by author surname would make the list notably accessible: “It’s usually quite hard to search publishers’ information for print-on-demand books.”

Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Patrick White and Josephine Tey are among the authors to feature on the Random Collection list, with some less well-known Nevil Shute titles also set to join the line-up in 2009. Brewster said: “The list is incredibly diverse and includes not just fiction, but the Ebury backlist, for example—all the books where there is a latent demand.”

Random Collection follows the launch of Faber’s out-of-print classics p.o.d. list, Faber Finds, in June.