More on the extra printings this week to fulfill demand for What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception by former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan (Shelf Awareness, June 3, 2008):
PublicAffairs used Lightning Source to print at least 4,000 copies of the book at the beginning of this week as a way to fulfill orders immediately while more copies were being printed via traditional offset methods. The publisher sent Lightning Source a digital file on Monday, and Ingram Book began shipping books on Tuesday. Lightning Source called it "an unprecedented use of print of demand."
The book's first printing was 65,000. After the story broke 10 days ago and the book went on sale earlier than planned, PublicAffairs opted to print another 125,000 copies.
In a statement, PublicAffairs publisher Susan Weinberg said, "Lightning Source's print-on-demand capability helped us reduce our turnaround time and ship more books to booksellers as quickly as possible."
For his part, John Ingram, chairman of the Ingram Content Companies, said, "This is a wonderful example of how print on demand can be used to supplement offset printings where a sudden and unpredictable leap in demand exhausts the original print run. Order loss was minimized, sales were maximized. Our teams at Lightning and Ingram Book continue to work closely with Perseus on a daily basis as the demand pattern of this particular title evolves."
Ingram suggested publishers set up "all their frontlist at Lightning as both a risk mitigation and sales maximization tool."