I Want My DTV

You hear the lament all the time: it’s too daunting to start a paperback line from scratch, but publish a successful hardcover whose paperback rights you don’t own and you’ll miss out on a huge chunk of the revenues.

More than four decades ago, a group of independent houses in Germany, facing similar concerns, decided to take a chance. They joined to form DTV, the Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (German Paperback Publisher), with the hope of providing enough scale to navigate the unusually tricky German paperback market.

These days, the experiment appears to have worked, as it cited about $45 million in annual sales and is Germany’s third-largest paperback house. Though the number of cooperating publishers has shrunk to eight—a company rule states that a house must leave the partnership if it starts its own paperback line or is acquired by a company that already has one—the number of titles has stayed strong. Nearly the entire backlist of 5,000 remains in print, with DTV doing about 500 new books every year. (As many as half are now originals, to compensate for the diminishing hardcover pipelines.)

The system has, to say the least, a few quirks. The company doesn’t just get first refusal for a hardcover bought by the eight houses—it can match the offer of any outside house, and the hardcover publisher in the collective must give the paper rights to DTV. The collective will also sometimes buy a paper original and then turn around and sell a hardcover license as a “pre-run” to one of its members, hoping that the publishing of a secondary hardcover license can boost sales for the paperback that will come later. (Yes, they are aware of how unusual this sounds.)

DTV is run by its own publisher and has its own editorial staff. Each of the houses, which include Hanser and Beck, has board representation proportional to its stake in DTV. “It can sometimes be a little awkward,” said DTV foreign rights manager Constanze Chory, of a situation where competitors become partners. But the arrangement, despite being “singular,” she said, “still works. We all make decisions together.”