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oselleAfter reading The Hunger Games I had a great desire to go back and read some of my favorite books from my own young-adult years. I was a young adult back in the days when such fiction wasn't the bestselling, guaranteed movie-adaptation juggernaut that it is these days, so none of these authors are household names. That's unfortunate because these were some great writers who, in my opinion, paved the way for folks like J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins and even the execrable Stephenie Meyer.
Two of the books I ordered were The House With a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs and Under the Root by the prolific Zilpha Keatley Snyder. The Bellairs book was a standard paperback but I immediately recognized something unusual about the Snyder book. It looked and felt like a self-published book. In fact it resembled almost exactly the version of Lazarus Came Forth that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
liptonrm published for me a couple of years ago -- even the font was the same.
I checked the copyright and it was indeed published via iUniverse (a self-publishing company) by a group called Authors Guild Backinprint.com. According to the message in the back of the book, Authors Guild is dedicated to using today's "print-on-demand technology" (in other words, self-publishing) to publish books that have fallen out of print. A quick look at Amazon.com seems to reveal that all or most of Snyder's books are only available this way.
While I'm immensely grateful that such a company exists to restore these works to publication, I find it incredibly sad -- and almost incomprehensible -- that a Stephenie Meyer can become a multimillionaire off her cheesy, shallow dreck while a writer like Snyder wouldn't even be in print anymore without "print-on-demand technology." Is it really possible that no mainstream publishing house wanted to reissue her work? This woman was a three-time Newberry Award winner! When I was a kid, the library had an entire shelf full of her books!
Seriously, I don't know what's wrong with the world.
Two of the books I ordered were The House With a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs and Under the Root by the prolific Zilpha Keatley Snyder. The Bellairs book was a standard paperback but I immediately recognized something unusual about the Snyder book. It looked and felt like a self-published book. In fact it resembled almost exactly the version of Lazarus Came Forth that
liptonrm published for me a couple of years ago -- even the font was the same.I checked the copyright and it was indeed published via iUniverse (a self-publishing company) by a group called Authors Guild Backinprint.com. According to the message in the back of the book, Authors Guild is dedicated to using today's "print-on-demand technology" (in other words, self-publishing) to publish books that have fallen out of print. A quick look at Amazon.com seems to reveal that all or most of Snyder's books are only available this way.
While I'm immensely grateful that such a company exists to restore these works to publication, I find it incredibly sad -- and almost incomprehensible -- that a Stephenie Meyer can become a multimillionaire off her cheesy, shallow dreck while a writer like Snyder wouldn't even be in print anymore without "print-on-demand technology." Is it really possible that no mainstream publishing house wanted to reissue her work? This woman was a three-time Newberry Award winner! When I was a kid, the library had an entire shelf full of her books!
Seriously, I don't know what's wrong with the world.
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Date: 2011-04-07 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-07 01:51 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2011-04-08 01:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-10 08:19 am (UTC)robert heinlein was a good read too for me as a kid, you must have heard of him
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Date: 2011-04-07 03:55 pm (UTC)I also loved HwtCiiW. That series eventually had another writer after Bellairs died. That was also always a steady seller at Eeyore's.
You've definitely convinced me to read THG. Very annoyed the library doesn't have it as an ebook!
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Date: 2011-04-08 01:17 am (UTC)The Bellairs book has the original Edward Gorey drawings inside but the new front and back covers are totally Harry Potterish. However, the copyright on the covers is 1993, which predates Mary Grandpre's illustrations for the American HP editions. Which again reinforces my belief that these books had a big influence on Rowling.
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Date: 2011-04-08 06:12 am (UTC)Is this the one where he keeps hearing the ticking clock and then there was an evil wizard or something? If so, I read that. I don't really like ticking clocks and they make me kind of want to claw my ears off (like the one J just put in the bathroom) and it always makes me think of this book (though I couldn't have told you the name until just now) and that ticking getting faster and faster.
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Date: 2011-04-13 12:35 am (UTC)I also hate ticking clocks, especially if I'm trying to sleep. Which reminds me, that if J. is looking for the one downstairs, I stuck it in the dresser drawer the last time I stayed over because that TICKTICKTICKTICKTICKTICK was keeping me awake. But I'm sure she's found it by now.
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Date: 2011-04-19 09:46 pm (UTC)