Topic for discussion…

Updated on July 21, 2011 By Ken Begg 12 Comments

There was a time not too long ago when book publishers thought it was counterproductive for authors to release too many books. This is why many authors had pen names; if the publishers didn’t want too many Evan Hunter crime novels per year, he’d also write under the names Ed McBain and Richard Marsten.

Now, however, I’m noticing that at least among genre fiction, they seem to be putting out books a lot quicker. You don’t wait a year between novels right now in many cases, but maybe six months. In an extreme case, a fun fantasy trilogy I recently read, Hexed, Hounded and Hammered, by author Kevin Hearne, were released at a one a month clip, meaning you got all three books basically in two months.

Assuming this is true, you can clearly chalk it up to the fact that audiences expect instant gratification now, and don’t really want to wait that long between books if they don’t have to. (Movie sequels also seem to be speeding up, not to mention reboots. Or look at Marvel, basically releasing half a dozen connected films over a three or four year span.)

So here’s the question: Are we heading back to the days of the pulp writers, when you’d get a new Doc Savage novel every two week? Will sheer output be rewarded and prized again? What do you think?

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  • Reed

    Hmm, that’s an interesting speculation, but I’m not sure that I see things as moving definitively in that direction. This is primarily because I don’t think most authors have enough stories to tell that they can keep cranking them out that fast. I love Doc Savage, but a lot of them are totally forgettable. I don’t think that sort of thing can survive these days. We may be a culture of instant gratification, but we are also a culture of instant feedback. There is just so much product available that if something gets a bad review it too easy to simply move on to something else. I remember a recent review where a movie studio executive was saying that on a bad movie they used to at least be able to make money back the opening week “before the reviews got out”. Now people are tweeting about how bad a movie is in real time, and a movie can die instantly. Books may or may not be that subject to instant response pressure, but there has to be some similar effect. If you can’t keep putting out a good product, people will stop buying.

    Or, to put it another way, only the Beatles could put out an album every year. There are precious few Beatles out there.

  • Rock Baker

    Will our current economy support mass output? Even if people want something fast, they still need to have the spare cash to spend on it. I know I’d like to see a surge like that in the comic book industry, if only so there would be more paying jobs.

  • Rock — I think not too much longer, people will be downloading more stuff. I could see writers whipping out a short novel a month for a buck a pop. If you could get 5,000 people to subscribe to / buy your books, you could do pretty well. 10,000, quite well. 25,000, very well indeed.

    Mid-level suspense writer Barry Eisler recently decided to forgo a half million dollar traditionally publishing contract for his next two books, figuring he could make more selling them himself electronically or through PoD. This after his friend and fellow writer Joe Konrath (the biggest proselytizer for this sort of thing) convinced Eisler to write a short story (his first) and dip his toe in by offering via Kindle for a buck a pop. Eisler made $30,000 off that one short story. I think you’ll see a lot more of that sort of thing.

    Could this work for comics, too? Don’t see why not. I realize our generation loves things on paper, but you can’t argue the fact that offering them electronically radically reduces the break even point, meaning you can sell to a smaller audience and still be viable. Hopefully this will usher in an era of much greater genre diversity in comics, too. And if the stuff breaks through to a wider audience, you could always collect it on paper then.

  • Rock Baker

    I know AC has been selling their backlog electronically, but last I heard it wasn’t to fantastic numbers. Time will tell I suppose. The main thing I wouldn’t be wild about would be the lack of a hard copy. The computer can’t be on all the time, but a book an be picked up at ANY time. (Still, its not like I’d refuse to exploit the new technology if it means a much more steady income!)

  • PB210

    The Mack Bolan books come out at least once a month. They have reached about #393 last time I checked. Bolan has never had a film or TV show (indeed, R-rated adventure films have largely disappeared from theaters, in these days of Harry Potter).

    A few Westerns (Slocum, the Gunsmith, the Trailsman, Longarm, etc.) also arrived once a month. Curiously, as with Mack Bolan, most of these novel series have no television or film adaptations (indeed, Westerns have largely disappeared from theaters).

    The Nick Carter series also arrived roughly monthly from 1964 to 1990. (An earlier series with the Shadow written by Dennis Lynds did not last comparably long.)

    Germany has the Perry Rhodan series.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Let’s not forget, though, that for every terrific story coming from the pulp era, there were literally thousands of others that were really terrible, not even good in a fun way.

    I don’t know if it’s so much “instant gratification” on the part of readers (though I’m sure that’s a factor) as sheer over-marketing by publishers. Hey, vampire books are hot! Let’s release hundreds a month and hope some of them stick!

    What they want, what they’ve always wanted, is books that sell, not necessarily good books. Series books are easy because there’s already an audience.

  • Reed

    I do not like to buy electronically for the simple reason that it is too easy to lose your purchase due to some electronic catastrophe. I do like some electronic distribution models, and the ones I like I use frequently. A big one for me is Steam. Once you have an account and you buy a game that game is yours and can be loaded and re-loaded, loaded on different machines, etc. You just can’t run more than one copy at a time. Do any of the electronic print distributors currently work this way? I’ve seen horror stories about, for example, Amazon’s rights management for the Kindle, but I don’t remember the substance of them.

    I know that I was very excited when Marvel talked about offering an electronic archive for it’s older titles for a monthly fee, but then it was only a few titles. If they digitized everything in their back catalog I would gladly pay a monthly fee so that I could re-read comics from the 60’s and 70’s, but not just a small selection of their “greatest hits”. I have not looked at the service for a couple of years, perhpas they have improved it.

    I am currently totally in love with Marvel Essentials and, to a much lesser extent, the DC Showcase titles that provide 500 or so pages of older comics on news print for a very low price. For me Marvel Silver Age holds up waaaay better than DC Silver Age. I’m working my way through the first Justice League Showcase and good Lord does it blow chunks! Every issue is the same story: the Justice League are mysteriously frozen in place by some individual, and they then go out in groups of two or three to accomplish some task. Martian Manhunter is always confronted with a big fire, and Green Lantern is always sent to fight something yellow. You would think, the evidence of your eyes to the contrary, that yellow was the most common color in the universe.

  • John Campbell

    If I remeber correctly, the Mack Bolan (and it’s off-shoots if they still exist, Able Team and Phoenix Force) weren’t written by the original author after a point. They had different authors publishing under the original author’s name. Deathlands did this. James Axler only wrote so many.

    If I’m wrong let me know but it was my understanding that this is how they pulled that off.

  • Rock Baker

    I believe you’re right. There was a joke to this effect on an episode of Corner Gas where a book club read a Mack Bolan book.

  • PB210

    Don Pendleton only wrote roughly 38 of the first 39 Mack Bolan novels and the War Book. (Wayne Crawford as Jim Peterson wrote one intervening book.) The series has continued under ghost writers since. These authors usually received a thank you in the indicia.

    Pendleton actually managed to wrest intellectual property rights to Mack Bolan away from his publisher. Not many comic book writers, or pulp writers such as Walter Gibson (who wrote most of the Shadow) have ever done the same.

  • Peoht

    Well, part of it is that publishers are wanting at least a trilogy from new authors. Or at least three books involving the same world and characters (as opposed to a single story across three books). I think what’s happening, is that authors are taking three books to the publisher who just bangs them out right-quick which is why you’re seeing the lightning fast release schedules. The question is if those authors will do anything else, or fade to obscurity.

    Then again, it’s far less frustrating than George RR Martin’s 6 year gap between the last two books. And since Feast of Crows wasn’t even supposed to exist, it’s more like an eleven(!) year gap.

  • Flakey

    @Reed

    Not sure if SciFi your thing or not, but check out Baen Books. To my mind the Steam of the e book world. No encryption, several formats including a basic html, and no down load limits. If you lose your copy, never mind, just log into your account and re download it from Baen again. They even have a free library that you can download books from their authors earlier works, and some of the classic “golden age” authors.

    To the original point I think it is more that people have grown up with tv since they were born now. People are used to seeing year after year of the same show, as long as it remains popular. This seems to be transferring to books. People will devour as much as an author can produce now, as long as they remain at least fairly good in their writing.