|
Post by franklinmarsh on Aug 13, 2009 16:03:37 GMT
With 'the kids' giving up on reading, those that did read seemed to want (ahem) more for their money, hence the rise of the housebrick. I heard a radio interview with some modern writers/literary types recently who seem to have contracts for 70,000 words minimum these days, and when searching for writing tips found one website that helpfully suggested that yer average reader wouldn't want to shell out their hard-earned on something less than half an inch thick (regardless of what was in it). Well, denizens of the Vault excepted. 'Twould seem the only modern equivalents are quick reads, chap books and e-books. The speeding up of life in general means that people want it and they want it now, so they'd rather download music and presumably read from a screen (or see the fillum) than actually have an album (what happened to singles) or a book in their hands. Can't you buy 100 great books for your nintendo now? It's the end of civilisation! (But mercifully I've recently acquired a copy of Errol Lecale's Zombie - hah! They ain't got me yet!)
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Aug 13, 2009 16:17:20 GMT
Well, there was a novelisation of TCM remake a couple of years back. Seemingly didn´t made waves. Most of movie novelisations are crap anyway, written on the quick. I know that those tie-in writers would protest vehemently, they even have their own awards nowadays, but the writing is very middle-of-the-road. Tv-stuff can be much better. Depends on the franchise. Those Charmed books were dire. But again this is a different market. Mostly when I peak into a novelisation I do it at the supermarket while shopping, because here they are sold a lot. Standing directly near the latest superseller. Of course tie-ins are a season business. You don´t keep it long in print, you don´t have to advertise, it is true work-for-hire, it doesn´t matter much who writes it. Only true high profile movies get sometimes high profile writers. And after a few months nobody is interested in it any longer. But bushwick is right. That there were no SAW books was kind of surprising. On the other hand, the poor writer. To bring sense in this convulted mostly senseless story - where the movie writers themselves seem to have lost the way -, wouldn´t be a fun assignement.
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Aug 13, 2009 16:53:15 GMT
Oh, and I forgot those Black Flame movie tie ins. New novels of Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Final Destination.
Of course they were 350 pages plus or more and seemed to vanish without a trace.
|
|
|
Post by bushwick on Aug 13, 2009 22:50:25 GMT
some good points here.
There are also shedloads of Warhammer books that must do OK. Have briefly scanned through 'em in charity shops, and they don't seem anywhere near as 'edgy' as older stuff but I could be wrong. Has anyone read any of them? I imagine they must be written under similar conditions to PC Westerns or other old series - multiple authors, pseudonyms etc?
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Aug 14, 2009 9:22:13 GMT
Warhammer owes a lot to Hammer movies, the pseudo gothic environment, monsters and a lot of violence. No sex, though. They have a stable of writers, who of course have to know the game, and some names are surely pseudonyms. A few very prolific have emerged, and there are a lot who only wrote one or a trilogy and left the field. WH is firmly entrenched in the fantasy field. Still, there were some good ones. A couple which really reminded me of old british nasties were C.L.Werner´s Brunner novels. I know them quite well, as I translated them. Short to begin with most comprised of a couple of novelettes describing the adventures of bounty hunter Brunner, the fantasy version of the man with no name. Lots of gore and monsters and a hero which Laurence James would have liked. Werner also wrote a terrific one-up called "Palace of the Plague Lord". It is a fat fantasy and a version of the Dirty Dozen without the good commander and the heroism, only sociopaths here, and that are the good guys. Even for a WH it is very gory and a lot of fun. Everybody dies horrible He also wrote the "Witchfinder" trilogy, which owes a lot to a Hammer movie. The rest of the line is more in the vein of classic fantasy, with elves and dwarfs and vampires. Warhammer is kind of like the kitchen sink approach in that regard. William King´s "Gotrek&Felix" series is a good read if you like this kind of novel; it is actually quite funny sometimes, when the heroes aren´t busy beheading Ratpeople or demons.
|
|
|
Post by bushwick on Aug 14, 2009 9:46:21 GMT
I knew somebody here would have the scoop. Cheers Andy. Looks like I'm going to start with these as well, I like the sound of the Brunner stuff. More strain on shelves to come.
|
|
|
Post by Dr Strange on Aug 14, 2009 11:09:18 GMT
I seem to remember seeing a question somewhere else on these boards, along the lines of "What is the present-day equivalent of the pulps of the 30s and 40s?" Well, maybe we've got the answer... film novelizations and tie-ins to TV shows and video games. Quickly turned out to cash in on a niche market, probably somewhat cheaper than most other books, and probably quite ephemeral (i.e. unlikely to be re-printed once the film/TV series/game has dropped below the cultural horizon). And (though it's not good to pass judgement on books I've never read) generally not that "well-written", whatever that means?
|
|
|
Post by Dr Strange on Aug 16, 2009 14:06:15 GMT
I don´t know who said it first (Warren Ellis?), but Vampires ARE the Star Trek of horror. As in Star Trek isn´t real science fiction at heart. I really don´t know how the success of vampires came to be. Anne Rice wasn´t an overnight success. Maybe all those advocates of Dark Fantasy were right in trying to jump on the mainstream train, a lot of sales sure proved them right. Of course it targeted woman as an audience, and I think that the average "nasty" back then was firmly in the boy´s domain. (Of course one of the ironies is that a lot of Paranormal Romances have more explicit sex scenes than Shaun Hutson and Guy Smith combined. The times sure changed) I would argue that most of the vampire books are not true horror. They are watered down monster books based on popularized established themes. In most of these successful series you can spot elements from role playing games, vampire tv-shows, and Anne Rice. It is much divorced from a straight and short horror novel of the 80s. Most of those vampire fans would never read a novel like Garton´s Live Girls or a Slade or the early Herbert. It's vampires for girls and zombies for boys, according to this month's "The Word"...
|
|
|
Post by pulphack on Aug 17, 2009 18:20:08 GMT
the reason our sort of thing - any genre - disappeared in the first place was purely economic, if misguided. the mid list - short shelf life pulp, basically - was sacrificed to the demands of editorial for larger budgets to promote and buy BIG titles. something had to be trimmed off the lists to make that cash available, and it was the low-advance, limited sale paperback. better to take a gamble on big advances and potential sales with big advertising, it seemed. also, reps wanted to focus more on big names and big promotions in order to maximise sales in dwindling shops and floor space. put the two together, and that's the real prosaic reason it vanished.
i got that explanation off people who worked in publishing in the mid to late eighties, and see no reason to doubt the logic. especially as the continued success of mills&boon showed short shelf life could still pay, and the limited returns and turnover of niche marketed genre like warhammer et al showed it could still pay (let us never forget that the bottom line is still whether or not it shows red or black).
those short-sighted (and probably long gone) editors and reps have a lot to answer for. the success of niche tv tie in and the continued success of warhammer etc prove this.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Aug 17, 2009 20:29:55 GMT
Here's one i've been meaning to ask which may or may not be relevant to this thread (apologies if it ain't): can someone explain to me what the instant remainder is all about?
|
|
|
Post by allthingshorror on Aug 17, 2009 20:40:51 GMT
Is it due to the fact that a publisher may bring out more copies of a said book than was viable for the mainstream market, and instead of pulping them, offers them to the bargain markets so as not to lose all of their money? Or could it be that they bring out a book, but due to problems with contracts, advertising legal problems- they just remainder them? Saying that - some remainders are weird, I found, not so long ago in The Works - fifteen copies of Joe Hills Heart Shaped Box which were all signed and were selling for £4! And there's this place, that seems to be a remainders book fair: www.ciana.co.uk/
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Aug 17, 2009 21:19:55 GMT
Ta, mr. horror. It's the straight-to-remainder titles (often mentioned by Stephen Jones in his introductions to 'Best New Horror') that baffle me, because, if i understand him right, there's an intent involved, it's not that the company have over-estimated the likely audience for a particular book. There's clearly a whole lot about the industry i still don't quite grasp!
Was a time - late 'eighties/ early nineties i guess - when the Charing X road had a number of Remainder Shops and i never did figure out why they had piles of William Kimbers - probably could've picked up half their output for next to nowt at the time. There was one company, Bounty, which seemed to specialise in recycling the bulkier Peter Haining titles, never saw a Bounty book outside of the remainder shops until they began to turn up on market stalls.
|
|
|
Post by pulphack on Aug 18, 2009 22:42:02 GMT
as i understand it, the economics of the remainder tends to work like this.
if a publisher wants to do a book that will sell 4,000 projected copies, say, then it will need to be priced at say £4.99. if the market price for a similar sized book and title is £3.99 then you can't sell it at the cost price and expect to turn it into the black.
however, if you print 10,000 of the title, then the per-unit price comes down to around £1.99, so you can sell it for £3.99, probably make your money back and a profit on the projected sale through the usual outlets and then - about a month or so later - release the rest to remainder shops for about 50p per boomk and make a little more on top. the author's share is accounted for by the fact that most contacts have a clause about remainders which preclude the publisher paying the percentage of cover price, and settling for a small recompense.
certainly, that's how it was explained to me in the old days. not sure if that's still a hundred percent true. i think the costs of laser printing coming down may change that - companies like harper and faber have struck deals that are seeing them able to produce POD at costs corresponding to usual unit costs, and this will no doubt continue, and hopefully filter down to small pressese eventually as printers of POD realise they have to be more reasonable to compete.
of course, some titles do get remaindered by accident - this happened to the first run of Deathlands titles M&B did in this country in the late eighties, and LJ got a tidy sum in compensation...
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Aug 19, 2009 0:02:41 GMT
Thanks pulphack, that makes some kind of sense and i guess the rise of the pod accounts for the demise of the remainder shops (which, now i think about it, were always well stocked with an abundance of Taschen's!).
|
|
|
Post by timothymayer on Oct 24, 2009 20:35:18 GMT
You note the lack of horror novels in the book shops on this side of the big pond as well. In the 80's there was a big boom in horror fiction, but it seemed most places just carried King's output and used other authors to fill in the gaps. Then King's books started to sell not so well and the shelf space dried up. Which is too bad because a lot of good authors (KW Jeter, one of my faves) managed to ride on the wave. Now you go into a bookstore and there usually isn't a horror section at all, except this time of year.
|
|