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Post by severance on Mar 23, 2015 9:47:21 GMT
Still making my way through the two new issues of 'Paperback Fanatic,' but the letter from our very own Mr. Boot (and Justin's reply) has caused me to do a bit of research re the recent cancellations of huge chunks of men's Adventure Fiction. Hope Andy doesn't mind but I'll put up a bit from his letter here:
Well it looks like HarperCollins are being stupid, as they've cancelled the whole Gold Eagle line, with the last titles shipping in December. Considering that Don Pendleton published the first 'Executioner' novel way back in 1969, that's one hell of a back catalogue they're cancelling.
Executioner - 1969 to December 2015 with last issue #445
SuperBolan - 1984 to December 2015 with last issue #178
StonyMan - 1983 to December 2015 with last issue #140
Deathlands - 1986 to November 2015 with last issue #125
Outlanders - 1997 to November 2015 with last issue #75
In addition to the above cancellations, the four long-running Adult Westerns have also just recently bitten the dust, and those numbers are even more impressive.
Longarm - 1978 to March 2015 with last issue #436
Slocum - 1975 to December 2014 with last issue # 430
Trailsman - 1980 to December 2014 with last issue #398
Gunsmith - 1982 to March 2015 with last issue #399
The latter has gained a reprieve, as Robert Randisi owns the property and writes every issue!! and has found a new home for it - issue #400 will be published by Piccadilly Press.
But that is one huge swathe of Men's fiction that is no more.
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Post by pulphack on Mar 23, 2015 12:11:51 GMT
Well, since I wrote that letter and then learned about the end of Gold Eagle, I have to say that in some ways I'm not surprised. The editor at GE was a bit shocked that they were cancelled as The Executioner has been optioned for a movie and has some names attached. She was hoping this would carry some weight, but to be frank I know what accountants are like in publishing, and it would only have carried weight IF the film had been made and IF it had been relatively successful. Otherwise, it's too many ifs and buts for their liking. The way in which GE carried the majority of its sales, and kept in profit, was by direct marketing and selling (meaning that they actually made more per unit than if the books sold in stores) and by careful sales repping (for instance, the audio versions of GE books could be ordered for weigh stations on truck routes across the US as the majority of the trade for audio was from truckers who listened as they drove the interstates). HC doesn't work that way - they are a traditional big publisher in that sense, and go for the big sellers and little in the way of mid-list. Big prizes not small steady profits.
So much for letting Harlequin do its own thing, eh? As romance is a very particular market in terms of marketing, I wonder how they'll tackle it? They may be able to find some common ground as their own Avon imprint is a big player in romance fiction.
The Executioner may well live on as the rights revert to Linda Pendleton, Don's widow, apparently. Deathlands and Outlanders bite the dust and become a dusty item on a balance sheet of properties owned but no longer active.
Thank God for the likes of Robert Randisi and Picadilly Press, eh? Go, Mr R!
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Post by andydecker on Mar 24, 2015 18:39:12 GMT
The Executioner may well live on as the rights revert to Linda Pendleton, Don's widow, apparently
So maybe there will be other short novels with atrocious covers like those self-published westerns? I don't know. Even if The Executioner is a brand name, it got overshadowed by so many novels, movies or even tv - stuff like Strike Back is like a Stony Man novel, only better written - that I can't imagine a successful new version.
This is the end for this part of the market. A hard blow for a lot of writers who concentrated on this novels. I read somewhere that Harper was interested in the property because of foreign licences and the established network. Those romances are pretty successful. Problem is, that GE unlike the romances had no market outside the US. The only foreign edition still published - or was published - is the french edition of The Executioner. Seems like pulp-translations in France and licenced titles like Blade also got trashed last year.
I am kind of baffled that they couldn't even sell Rogue Angel abroad. Even if the Lara Croft/Dan Brown craze is long over, maybe it could have worked.
The termination of the westerns surprised me more. Some of the newer writers were quite good. I will miss the occasional Longarm. The Western seemed to sell a bit better, as I gathered, but maybe not enough. Or someone really wanted to rid themselves of this kind of Adult stuff. You never know. It wouldn't surprise me if those series were seen as an embarassment. And of course the death of bookstores in the US and the decline of the mass-market paperback can't helped either.
I will truly miss this part of publishing.Even if I read not as much of it as in the past, it was kind of comfort food, not the least because it was formula writing. A sad day.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Mar 24, 2015 19:01:22 GMT
the Lara Croft/Dan Brown craze is long over It most assuredly is not. The novels of Andy McDermott (I read eight of them last month!), James Rollins, and many others seem to be doing very well. |
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Post by andydecker on Mar 24, 2015 19:49:05 GMT
the Lara Croft/Dan Brown craze is long over It most assuredly is not. The novels of Andy McDermott (I read eight of them last month!), James Rollins, and many others seem to be doing very well. But these are well established writers. Are there really new writers still jumping on this train? But you may be right that Brown is not the best comparison. The concept of Rogue Angel is this mix of the comic Witchblade, Lara Croft and the Discovery Channel  . Even if archeology was the background of the stories, it focused more on the action aspect and the weird supernatural abilities of the heroine.
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Post by pulphack on Mar 25, 2015 6:23:35 GMT
Andy - several points to raise here. Firstly, GE could have had a slice of the market for thrillers in Europe, particularly around 25 years ago, when they could have established themselves in the marketplace, but the problem was not the product but the marketing and sales. European arms, being focused on romance, simply could not get shelf space for GE stuff as they couldn't offer reductions on similar genre big sellers, dump bins, etc. So they were squeezed off the shelves by reps that could.
Secondly, perception is a huge issue for series fiction. Back in a PF interview Warren Murphy posits that the lack of respect afforded The Destroyer was in part down to the fact that it was numbered. That makes it look like a magazine, a product, a conveyor belt item - hell, all fiction is this once it gets successful, with authors and publishers under pressure to milk the cash cow. Numbering it just ruins the artifice that this is art. Executives want success and continuity, but they also have C19 romantic ideas about art. A personal example: right now I have a project in development, and the producer is encountering a problem with his execs: he wants a pilot and ten episodes for a season, all written by one writer. There is a schedule. There is evidence that the writer has been consistent in production. This excites them. But, they then ask, wouldn't it just be pulp crap if it was all one writer? If he doesn't take three months a script like some of the people we've hired, won't he have sweated for his art? Hell yeah, he will - you think they guys taking three months are sweating? No, they're cranking it out a week before deadline and goofing off the other two months three weeks. But it doesn't look like that - perception. That's why numbered men's series are a thing of the past.
But men's fiction as such is still going strong - there are new writers coming in all the time, have been for years now. What the hell are all those Andy MacNabb clones if not The Executioner in uniform and without numbering? What's Leee Child if not The Destroyer without a daft superhero type name on his books? DCI Banks and his ilk - the tough coppers - are Remo Williams before he was messed with. It's still there, just subtly changed and marketed a bit different. Y'see what I'm getting at? I used to hate the concept of marketing, but the older and more cynical I get the more I realise that it's everything. You can have the best book in the world, but if the marketing is screwed, so are you...
Third. Personally, I think The Executioner may survive as there is still a fan base. Whether it'll be anything depends on if the film gets made. Then I can see a tie-in, and maybe one or two books a year of a revamped Bolan if the movie does well. If not, off to e-book world and those terrible covers. The other franchises are gone, at least until they become retro enough for someone to take a punt on them.
Finally, 'stuff like Strike Back is a Stony Man novel, only better written' - c'mon, there are a number of Stony Man writers, as there were on all GE series, and some of them are really good, and some not so good. But all of them had the same issues that stopped them going 100%, like the insistence on inserting gun porn detailing. That can really stop a good story in its tracks, but it was insisted on editorially as it was what the customer wanted. Don't blame the writer for that. Some of those guys should be writing for a bigger arena.*
(*for the record, I'm not including myself either way as I moved away from GE a couple of years back)
Rogue Angel always struck me as Relic Hunter with magic, though I guess Sydney Fox was Lara Croft basically. Loved Relic Hunter more than Tomb Raider, personally. Liked her nerdy sidekick. I think they couldn't sell Rogue Angel outside the US partly for the shelving reasons, partly because the market then was a little overloaded (Relic Hunter, Tomb Raider, even Alias all overlapped in some way, let alone adding a new title to the mix), and partly because Harlequin's parent company, Toronto Star, was very difficult to deal with over licenses - I worked with a guy at the now-gone Chorion who had been trying to negotiate a license for a kid's property the Star group owned, and it was bang-your-head-on-a-wall time from the off. Needless to say, Chorion never got the license...
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Post by andydecker on Mar 25, 2015 17:36:07 GMT
particularly around 25 years ago, when they could have established themselves in the marketplace, but the problem was not the product but the marketing and sales.At least in Germany it was also a problem of acceptance. Only a few of the men-fiction series were bought and translated in the 70s, at best three or four, and they didn't fare well. At the time there was a huge problem with the violent content. The publishers ran into censorship problems. Today this market with numbered books doesn't even exist anymore. Cora, the german publisher of the Harlequin romance stuff, which distribute it mainly at the newsstand or in supermarkets and not in book-shops tried to expand the french crime series novels of the Gerard de Villiers imprint sometime in the 90s, I think. Back then the French did half a dozen of these series. If I remember correctly, they did 5 novels before stopping this. Even the flagship Malko was cancelled in 2000. But, they then ask, wouldn't it just be pulp crap if it was all one writer?As evidenced in Pizzolatto or Frank Spotnitz?  I never was a fan of the latter, but I have to confess that both his Hunted and his Strike Back delivered what they promised. But all of them had the same issues that stopped them going 100%, like the insistence on inserting gun porn detailing. That can really stop a good story in its tracks, but it was insisted on editorially as it was what the customer wanted. Don't blame the writer for that
No, I don't blame the writers in this. The problem with these kind of products is that they have to follow very rigid guidelines to work. It can't evolve much. A lot of things have to stay the same, especially the characterisation. In the case of the GE product not only the gun porn was often a hinderance, there also was the mandated length, the limited characterisation, the rigid b/w. It takes a special skill to balance these things and write a good story. Maybe the comparison with a tv-mini was a bit unfair. It is a different beast. The writers can do all the things which you couldn't do in series like Stony Man. To keep things interesting after 100+ is very difficult, maybe even impossible. Then I can see a tie-in, and maybe one or two books a year of a revamped Bolan if the movie does well.
Normally I would agree with you on this, but not in this particular case. I think it would be very hard to find a big enough audience for this. If you update the character, you kill everything which made it unique in the first place. When I read that they do a tv-series of Max Allan Collins' Quarry I thought it very smart that they do it as a period piece. Maybe this is also planed for a Bolan movie, I don't know, but if you don't, you have not much to distinguish this from other properties. And if both Punisher movies were not very successful, I doubt even Bradley Cooper could make this work. Especially in a PG13 movie, as was rumored. We will see 
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Mar 25, 2015 17:44:19 GMT
particularly around 25 years ago, when they could have established themselves in the marketplace, but the problem was not the product but the marketing and sales.At least in Germany it was also a problem of acceptance. Only a few of the men-fiction series were bought and translated in the 70s, at best three or four, and they didn't fare well. At the time there was a huge problem with the violent content. The publishers ran into censorship problems. Today this market with numbered books doesn't even exist anymore. Cora, the german publisher of the Harlequin romance stuff, which distribute it mainly at the newsstand or in supermarkets and not in book-shops tried to expand the french crime series novels of the Gerard de Villiers imprint sometime in the 90s, I think. Back then the French did half a dozen of these series. If I remember correctly, they did 5 novels before stopping this. Even the flagship Malko was cancelled in 2000. But, they then ask, wouldn't it just be pulp crap if it was all one writer?As evidenced in Pizzolatto or Frank Spotnitz? I never was a fan of the latter, but I have to confess that both his Hunted and his Strike Back delivered what they promised. But all of them had the same issues that stopped them going 100%, like the insistence on inserting gun porn detailing. That can really stop a good story in its tracks, but it was insisted on editorially as it was what the customer wanted. Don't blame the writer for that
No, I don't blame the writers in this. The problem with these kind of products is that they have to follow very rigid guidelines to work. It can't evolve much. A lot of things have to stay the same, especially the characterisation. In the case of the GE product not only the gun porn was often a hinderance, there also was the mandated length, the limited characterisation, the rigid b/w. It takes a special skill to balance these things and write a good story. Maybe the comparison with a tv-mini was a bit unfair. It is a different beast. The writers can do all the things which you couldn't do in series like Stony Man. To keep things interesting after 100+ is very difficult, maybe even impossible. Then I can see a tie-in, and maybe one or two books a year of a revamped Bolan if the movie does well.
Normally I would agree with you on this, but not in this particular case. I think it would be very hard to find a big enough audience for this. If you update the character, you kill everything which made it unique in the first place. When I read that they do a tv-series of Max Allan Collins' Quarry I thought it very smart that they do it as a period piece. Maybe this is also planed for a Bolan movie, I don't know, but if you don't, you have not much to distinguish this from other properties. And if both Punisher movies were not very successful, I doubt even Bradley Cooper could make this work. Especially in a PG13 movie, as was rumored. We will see As always I find my views coincide Andy. There was general trend to wards feminine editing back then to. In the case of E.C Tubb's Dumarest series concerning a macho fellow who fights a lot there was a deliberate policy to remove him from the editorial lists precisely becasue he was too macho. So there was an input from above although to be fair the editors probably recognised the future rather than trying to shape it too much. |
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Post by pulphack on Mar 26, 2015 7:59:32 GMT
Interesting you say that, Craig - when GE came under a female editor, it was noticeable that the violence and gun porn remained, but they were concerned about the amount of cursing involved...
Andy - I agree that the problem with a multi-writer series is that it has to remain static because continuity is hard to maintain otherwise, but it can be done if you keep the pool of writers small and the editor is very hands on with continuity and editing storylines before the books are actually written. Which, frankly, doesn't really happen as much as it should. Actually, that sentence should be in past tense, as are there any such series now left? Unless you count the James Patterson factory - and he does seem to have the right approach to the matter. I don't care for his stuff, but admire the way he works with other writers.
I can't help it, I have to argue with you about the Executioner! It could work as a book franchise now, IF (and it's the biggest if for me) the movie was successful. To refer back to the Punisher is irrelevant to me, as the way in which movie franchises from books or comics work has changed since then. Marvel in particular have proved that you can back engineer and reboot from the movie. They didn't know how with the Punisher, but they've learned since then and those lessons can be carried forward. A revamped Bolan, taking its cue from a successful film, could have a new lease of life.
I honestly don't get what you say about updating the character killing everything that made him unique in the first place... Bolan hasn't been like the original for decades, now. The Bolan of GE bears scant resemblance to the Bolan I first read 42 years ago. That's why he's survived while others have fallen by the wayside. Vigilante to supersoldier is a long haul that places him on different sides of the law and also changes many of the motivations. Let's be honest, he's not really a character, more a set of characteristics (much like Nick Carter, Sexton Blake, etc) that can be adapted to the times. Or not, as editorial dictates demand.*
(* A few years back Linda Pendleton offered GE the rights to the original batch of books, but they turned them down as they couldn't figure out how to market the old Bolan alongside their version, as they were markedly different placed alongside each other)
What he has is a history and a vague pop culture awareness to hang a marketing campaign on, which gives him a slight advantage in grabbing attention. Any moviemaker worth their salt would take this and rebuild him to fit the times. A resulting film may alienate a few die-hards, but that would be far outweighed by any new audience curious enough to slap down their ticket money. And the new Bolan would progress from there.
Mind you, look at how many reboots bite the dust (Bewitched, Get Smart, The Munsters/1313 Mockingbord Lane spring to mind). It's a way back, but not a very certain one.
Incidentally, I have a chum who likes to refer to him as Mack Bolan, Glam Rock Executioner - which kinds of dates both of us, and is possibly a slur on the boppin' elf...
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Post by andydecker on Mar 26, 2015 18:41:46 GMT
You are right in all you wrote. I am sorry, I wanted to keep it short and was much too vague. What I meant: I think the 70s origin is a important part of the character. The blue-collar heritage, Vietnam, the whole philosophy, it gave the charakter a certain appeal. Of course the character had lost most – or all - of these things. I always marveled that GE still maintained the origin, even if it didn't made any sense any longer and the reader needed a lot of goodwill to believe it. Any of the characters stopped aging a long time ago. In comparison Iron Man Tony Stark got every few years an update in which war he build his armor. (Which is a sad commentary on our times, but that is another topic.) If you strip Bolan of these elements for a movie, he is just another vigilante. Which in itself isn't very interesting. This I meant with my remark about the Quarry tv-series. Collin's killer for hire also has that 70s Vietnam origin, which the writer took a lot of effort to keep. (The first novel was published in the 70s). The new novels are almost all period pieces. Of course there is a huge difference between both characters, but it is interesting that the producers didn't update the character. (Of course period pieces are successful at the Moment, so maybe it was this.) As you wrote, so many reboots failed. I tend to avoid them, because I mostly cannot see the point. But I am the first to confess that I am no longer the right audience for that. |
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Post by andydecker on Mar 26, 2015 18:44:29 GMT
Some day I will learn how to work with the "Quote" button. Sigh.
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Post by pulphack on Mar 27, 2015 6:59:32 GMT
Ah, I see what you mean, now. Sorry, was a bit slow on the uptake there! Yes, I agree that the Pendleton Bolan's origin was unique and made him stand out - off-hand, I can't think of anyone who had that kind of motivation in commercial men's targeted fiction before him: the hard-boiled PI's (who were also usually blue-collar) were generally motivated by money or women, and the spies and adventurers tended to be middle-class or had some kind of private income. A regular guy who hadn't chosen this path as a career and was responding to such a motivation was a new arrival. Thing for me is that he lost that so long ago that I never think of him in that way now. I wonder how many of the readers under 35 think of him that way?* And that's why I figure that any attempt at a reboot will just take the folk memory of him being around so long and mold it to whatever the current spin would be.
A period piece would be good, though - that retro feel can be good box office, and if it re-established what made him strong, then a new franchise could drop the last thirty years of change and take him back to his roots. As it stands, I think the way to make it work with the new Bolan would be to forget the origin and present him as a kind of Captain America in a blacksuit instead of a costume.
I must admit, I usually grumble about reboots as well, but the occasional one that works makes me grudgingly give them the benefit of the doubt. But like you, I'm probably too old and the wrong audience for such things. I know they can work though, as I remember going to see The Avengers Thurman/Fiennes movie with someone when it came out. I love the old shows, but she was oblivious to them - she'd heard of it, but had never watched it - and she loved the film on its own merits, whereas all I could do was sit and grumble to myself about the bits they got 'wrong'. Which proves something, I guess...
(* assuming that there are any under 35, mind - I have no idea what the demographic was for regular buyers)
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. Even if archeology was the background of the stories, it focused more on the action aspect and the weird supernatural abilities of the heroine.
I never was a fan of the latter, but I have to confess that both his Hunted and his Strike Back delivered what they promised.
