Cengage is getting sloppy
My book $30 Film School was originally published by Muska & Lipman. Different pressings of it have also come out under the banner of Thomson Learning and Course Technology, all owned by the parent company, Thomson Learning. Thomson is a huge company and print a lot of the textbooks purchased by US schools. Thomson treated me OK and the book sold well, but in 2006, they were bought out by Cengage Learning, a UK company. Cengage is owned by multinational investment group, Apax.
The first printing of the second pressing of $30 Film School shipped without the DVD. I’m STILL fielding e-mails from irate buyers who write me about it. Those books are still in a warehouse somewhere and getting out to store shelves somehow, even though it came out two years ago and the books were supposed to be recalled and fixed, according to what I was told.
Cengage is recently getting even more sloppy with book production. A few months ago they asked me to do tech updates for third pressing of second edition of $30 Film School. I spent about 40 unpaid hours doing the updates, sent them in. When they sent me the third pressing of the second edition, they’d made none of my changes. This was, according them, a mistake on their part. (And they did send me the third pressing, you can tell the pressing by the last number on the descending numeric series on the the copyright page of any book.)
Worse than that, the book they sent was poorly bound and started falling apart after I’d read it for five minutes. And it was not a test copy. It was what they’d printed to ship.
I’ve talked to some people higher up the food chain than me in the publishing biz, and they say that these are not isolated problems, and that the new owners, Cengage, seem to care more about profits than making decent products.
MWD