When Bad Books Happen To People

[owlectomy]

File under coincidences: this weekend I rewatched the first season of Slings and Arrows, which is all about the hijinx at a Canadian Shakespeare festival as the hero tries to rescue a production of Hamlet that is about to go terribly wrong.

Hamlet, gone terribly wrong.

I've been hearing about this from everyone on my DW circle so that's not news to anybody.

But in the spirit of knowing a tiny bit about the publishing industry, some vague and totally unsourced speculation regarding how such a thing could have come about.



First, this is entirely in Subterranean's baileywick: an expensive collector's edition, a limited edition of 1000 copies with high production values. I'm not saying this to rag on Subterranean. If they did an expensive limited edition of one of my favorite authors ever, I would absolutely go for it. (I have an e-reader; beautiful production values are one of the few reasons left for me to buy print books.) I am saying, if they can sell 1000 copies of a book, they have made all the profit they stand to make on the venture.

Keep in mind, for almost any book you care to name, 1000 copies would be an embarrassing failure. For this particular $35 100-page hardcover, 1000 copies represents the highest possible success. So when it comes to money, the only question is, can Subterranean round up 1000 Orson Scott Card fans who genuinely want to read the new rewritten Hamlet, now with extra deluxe homophobia? I don't know the answer, but I wouldn't bet against it. Ah, but wait. The book came out in April and it still has copies available...

So here's a hypothetical scenario. Orson Scott Card has already published six books with Subterranean. You can find them in the Out of Print section of their catalog. Let's say for one of those he signed a contract (not atypical in publishing, especially when you're publishing a big name like Card) that said Subterranean would buy this particular novella, plus (sight unseen) the next one or two novellas that he submitted to them. Publishers sign these kind of contracts when they feel like "author shops the next book to different publisher" is a bigger risk than "author submits terrible book to us."

Author submits terrible book. What's next? Well... they've already paid the author part of the advance. Which they aren't going to get back. And they've already contracted to publish the book. If they publish it, at least they stand to make some money from absolute completists and however many OSC fans really do want extra homophobia in their Hamlet. If they don't publish it, whatever money they've already invested into it is a total loss, and they ruin their relationship with one of their biggest-name living authors. And they could even get sued for breach of contract. Best alternative may be to suck it up and publish the terrible book.

Again, I have zero connections at Subterranean. I wouldn't condemn Subterranean for publishing the book either way -- I don't think I'd have much ground to stand on, considering my own publisher has its own conservative imprint. Just wanted to speculate a little on the answer to the collective "WHY???" that went up through the blogosphere.

Comments

[deborah]

the description of one of the out-of-print books to which you link made me laugh and laugh and laugh:

Since the days of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, poetry has been steadily dying as a public art form, because poets, taught to value obscurity and difficulty, have labored to make their verse less and less accessible to untrained readers.
I see little point in creating verse that has no readers except a tiny club who have learned a private code.
...
The Subterranean Press edition of An Open Book will be the only edition.

[starlady]

bwahahaha, good to see OSC's been beyond irony for a while now.

[starlady]

Mmm, this makes sense. Thank you for sharing!

[trouble]

That makes sense.