The Price Of A New Book

One of the great irritations of any bibliophile is the fact that at some point, one's authors stop writing books.

There are any number of reasons of course, death being the primary one.  Or they no longer are "in" the modern market, or they simply (for whatever reason) stopped writing.  But at some point there will no longer come another "new book" from author X.

This is more problematic of course if one's favorite authors have died years ago.  In this case, one is left to scrounging for additional writings that may be outside your original area of interest or simply settling for the fact of re-reading their works (as they are usually the ones that you enjoy the most).

However, there is another option.  Someone else writes another book "in the style of".

This has been in the back of my mind for years - but did not really impact any of the authors I read until, while on The Borg website of All Things Books (and everything else), that someone had written sequels to H. Beam Piper's Space Viking.

Initially I was very excited - Space Viking remains one of my favorite books (and Piper one of my favorite authors).  I clicked over to see the review and pricing.  The reviews were fine - the pricing, not so much:  $3.99 for the electronic version.  Paperback price:  $39.00.

To quote a Southern phrase which pleases me to no end, "Well, bless your heart".

I let the thing settle - after all, that is ridiculous - until earlier this year I saw that the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate - he the author John Carter and Carson of Venus and David Innes of Pellucidar, again another favorite - had begun authorizing additional follow on books of their most famous characters.  In this case, no electronic books, only hard copies.  The paperback is $21.95.  The hardback is $36.95.  Or one can get  a collector's edition for $56.95.

Well, bless your heart as well.

There are a great many things I do not know about, but I know a very little about book publication, having many years ago published something once or twice for fun (definitely not for the money, as subsequent events revealed).  The way it works, at least on The Borg of All Things Books is this:  you upload a test with a size of book and number of pages (this is all templated, of course) and any sorts of illustrations, color covers, etc. and the platform spits out a price to publish the book in terms of materials and labor.  This is covering their cost; any money that the author wants to make is always added on top of that.  This becomes a careful balance between making the book attractive through pricing and making the author money through sales.

I certainly understand that professional authors want to make a living.  And I suppose I concede that estates that control them have some level of interest in making money as well. But $20 to 30 dollars for a paperback seems a bit like highway robbery.  Especially if you are trying to build a market for an author who has not published since the early 1950's.  Nostalgia will only take one so far.

It is a little interesting to me as during the mid-80's and 90's the Robert E. Howard estate let any number of authors borrow the character of Conan.  Some of the books were good, some were rather stale and predictable.  Yet in all cases, the pricing was the same as any other book on the market (Ah, $2.95 Ballantine books.  How I miss you).

Apparently in the modern age, the consumer is not a market to be served but a fleece to be sheared.

I could buy it used, of course - except every used price is the same as the new price; individuals who bought the book and having read it, are trying to find a way to recoup their money.  Which seems to provide no benefit whatsoever (by contrast, I purchased by book by the Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer this week from 1970.  $8.00 with the book, shipping, and taxes).

In point of fact, this probably is for the best.  At $20 + a book, the likelihood that I will be disappointed seems to be fairly high (for that price, I expect the equivalent of The Peloponnesian War.  Which, again, would not cost me that much currently).  And given the current state of affairs, any book written in the current environment is more than likely to incorporate the thoughts of the age rather than the thoughts of the author (all authors reflect the age in which they write, which is one reason I suspect it is hard to "re-write" old characters; they must always reflect the currency of the age).

And so, it seems, the Space Viking Empire of Price Trask of Traskon will always remain poised on the brink of moving forward in Empire building and John Carter will have come back from Sassom (Jupiter) and disappeared into the Martian Wastes with Dejah Thoris at his side; David Innes will expand the Empire of Pellucidar into trackless timeless wastes not recorded and Carson of Venus will continue to fly in his anotar (airplane) above the raging oceans with his beloved Duare.  Perhaps it is better this way; they can continue to live in my imagination unabated and free instead of confined into times and spaces the original authors could have never imagined - and perhaps, never desired.