We have really fun discussions on the DorothyL listerv. Imagine several hundred crime-fiction and true-crime fans and authors of all kinds standing around, discussing, laughing, arguing, shouting . . . it’s more entertaining than a circus. We just got into a big to-do over the question of whether authors ought to be paid royalties when copies of their books re-sell on the used and rare book markets, particularly those authors whose reputations have soared in recent years, with the values of their early books following along. The italicized quotes are from Gary Warren Niebuhr, a bookdealer and expert on private-eye literature. The marked quote in plain text down in the middle comes from somebody else who was trying to argue the case for paying royalties on after-market sales.
But also (god, I don’t want to defend those high prices, someone please stop me) that all of the authors mentioned above were published from a mid-list press with small print runs. As their popularity grows, and as the demand for firsts increases with the number of people collecting mystery fiction as icons, the price will go up. That is why I always tell people if they just want to read the books (not own the book) there is always the second editions, the book club editions, the paperbacks or
. . . whatever you can find. (Something happened to this post and I lost the end of the line.) You’re right, Gary . . . BUT (and this is a big but—[no, I’m not talking about anyone’s big butt in particular]) that’s presuming there was a second or a BCE or a mass market . . . or maybe the MM was the first-and-only short run . . . . And there’s just some of us who want that advance or first trade, come hell or high water, and to that kind of mindset, a BCE is just giving a rubber bone to a starving dog. The reader/collector’s problem comes when economics and the first trade collide. Case in point: Booked to Die, which was at $600 the last copy I saw, this past winter, and is now being offered at anything from that up to $1,000 for a signed copy. Without my rich uncle (of which I ain’t got one) dies and leaves me the income off several million prudently invested, OR without I find a dealer who knows just enough to be dangerous (the kind of dealer Janeway always hopes to find—the one who knows he’s got something but not exactly what, nor how much to ask for it), I’m never gonna own a first of that book. Sure, I can buy trade firsts of new stuff coming out and get ’em signed when I can and hope to God I picked well on at least one or two (did this years ago with a first of McMurtry’s Last Picture Show, and it’s now a nice little $400 item), but for me that just doesn’t make up for the big ones that I missed when I coulda had ’em.
> > one of the things that gets me about this “racket” is that Jerry [Ford], Walter
> > [Mosley], Gar [Anthony Haywood] and Richard [North Patterson] and others
> > aren’t getting paid anything when their books resell in the collecting market.
Have you ever bought a used car? Remember how you sent the money to Detroit and the factory to pay all those folks who worked so hard to build that used car? Remember when you bought that nice Tiffany lamp in the antique store for your Aunt Bertha? Remember how you sent a check to the Tiffany company for blowing that glass? Authors could sell their own books, but it seems easier to let dealers do it, doesn’t it?
And it ain’t all milk and honey for that hypothetical dealer, either. For every buy-at-$5-and-sell-at-$500 item he (or any of us) may handle, how many $20 volumes sit on the shelf and catch dust for years, despite our faith that this is really good stuff we’ve bought, and that we’ve expressed that faith by sinking our cash into inventory? It’s possible to have a lot of fun in the book trade, but IMO it’s just about as remunerative in the long term as writing is for authors—in a word, not very, for the great majority.
Dealers preserve what the authors and publishers allow to be destroyed. People in the book industry (of which the authors are a part) give a book a three month shelf life maximum, and then they are done, shredded, remainder, dumped in the dump.
Well, that’s stretching it a little bit (although not that much). My rule of thumb is that a book’s average in-print life is based on a three-year payback. The publisher figures out how many copies he thinks he can sell in three years, prints that many copies, and when those are gone, that’s it—and if it doesn’t sell out in three years, off to the remainder tables and pulping mills for you, buddy! And no back-talk from the author about another printing, either, unless you’re Stephen King.
Once a publisher declares a book OSI or OP, no amount of writing to them is very likely to turn up an overlooked warehouse copy. And writing to an author hoping to buy a copy of his book . . . that’s even more hopeless. As Edward Gorey astutely observed in The Unstrung Harp (another nice little $150 to $200 item, if you can find a clean one in a good dj), the author receives his six free copies from the publisher and is plunged at once into a quandary: at least twice that number of people expect to receive free copies from him, but if he buys enough copies from the publisher to give one to everyone who’s expecting it, the freebie request-list for his next book will be three times as long.
Now this isn’t to heap universal condemnation on remainder tables and pulping mills. With some books, they richly deserve such a fate—particularly “celebrity diets” or pop-philosophy-of-the-week nugacity or “as-told-to” pseudo-biographies of the semi-literate, by the semi-talented, and for the semi-intelligent. The best things such books (and I’m reluctant to dignify them with the designation) can do is to provide recycled paper and save us from the clear-cutting tree farms.
The Archangel Gabriel was the patron of Mars for the corrupted cash. Fnord.
