A good book about a true original, a maverick, if you will. It does make me wish for a bygone era of office nonsense, the type that occurred in the Mad offices. Not like “Sexual harassment ain’t so bad!” kind of stuff, stuff like keeping a list of everyone who pissed you off or was annoying over the year and then inviting them to your annual party where you just bring the worst, ladder-climbing, jerkoff self-promoted people together to enjoy each other’s company and see what it’s like. And you feed them. Sure, the finger sandwiches have cigarette ash in them, and the “wine” is mostly grape soda that was opened a week ago so it’s good and flat, but food is food.
The Fyre Festival guy should’ve claimed that’s what he was doing, that he was mocking rich kids who would pay all that money to go to a concert. He could’ve swung into being a cultural hero if he’d gone that route. “It was a big joke that only I was in on, and it DID get a bit out of control…”
The sad thing is that this book is VERY out of print. It’s pretty hard to get a copy, they go for $50-$70 bucks on ebay, and there’s no current digital edition, it looks like someone put one out a big back, but that was not a legit thing?
Which I can understand!
I’ve emailed two different publishers to try and inquire about the rights to this title. I’m not really an indie press, but I COULD be, I have the DESIRE to put out a few books, mostly because I’m personally interested and (foolishly) believe that others will be interested, too.
The first publisher sent me to a second publisher. The second publisher sent me to a third publisher. Now I’ll try that third publisher and see what happens. The problem is that The Mad World of William Gaines was published, that publisher was bought out, then THAT publisher was bought out, but it’s not like these publishers were saying, “I must have the Mad World of William Gaines in my roster of books!” Instead, it was a mass buyout where Publisher A sold their entire catalog to Publisher B, so Publisher B had a lot of stuff they wanted to reprint and distribute, I’m sure, and a lot of “other” that they just kind of…have.
I tried to get the rights to another book, Campfires of the Dead by Peter Christopher, in early 2021. At that time, most publishing folks weren’t in the office, and apparently couldn’t access their records (which I guess means these were either only in print or were stored digitally on a non-networked server?), so it wasn’t until December of the same year, nearly 12 months later, that I got an email that the rights had reverted back to the deceased author’s wife.
HOWEVER, I don’t think I got this news in time because on September 22 of 2022 (9 months after I heard about the rights) 11:11 Press put out a collection of Peter Christopher’s work that included Campfires as well as some unpublished stories. My suspicion is that this would take longer than a year to put together, edit, get an intro from Chuck Palahiniuk, and publish, but maybe I’m wrong on that one…
I’m not angry about that or anything, I mostly thought Campfires should be more widely available for a reasonable price (it’s another one that was super expensive due to being out of print and not having a gigantic original print run, also in the $50 to $75 dollar range). It seems possible, if it came out in late 2022, that I was already too late in inquiring in early 2021.
I’ve since learned a little something about the rights to stuff like this: The problem with acquiring the rights to reprint something like this is that it’s such small potatoes for the publisher. While they’re not making anything from it currently, they don’t stand to make much by selling the rights, either. The time and energy it takes them to do this would probably result in something approaching a break even.
It’s not that publishers are hoarding rights and stuff, it seems more that publishers don’t have simple mechanisms for small sales.
Which is, in my opinion, one of the problems of big publishing. It’s like the film industry, there’s not really a middle class of publishers. There are indies who strive to not lose TOO MUCH money on their passion projects, and there are the huge boys who try and make their nut on 4-5 titles, huge tentpole books that keep things afloat.
“Nut.” “Tentpole.” So sexual.
I would like to make a suggestion to big publishers out there, who almost certainly read my Goodreads reviews as they are an excellent window into a certain audience of readers, sometimes referred to as idiots.
Guys, make it simple: Pull together your out of print shit, and sell the rights on eBay. You don’t NEED to make $10,000 on this. Have your attorney draft up fill-in-the-blank paperwork, make this super easy, make it super clear which rights are eligible for this type of sale, have one of your interns, who you don’t pay because you don’t need to because the ONLY way you could be an intern working for a publisher in Manhattan is to be super rich going in, run this.
Hell, make the criteria super simple: Has it been out of print for 10+ years? Did it fail to crest a certain dollar amount or number of copies in sales? Is there no digital edition available?
You might as well sell the shit.
I don’t know that you’ll make billions, but maybe that’s the thing about publishing in 2024: You need to stop looking for the big payday and start looking for the steady paycheck, know what I’m saying? You’re not sitting on a gold mine, but you are sitting on a modest amount of cash that’s very illiquid and not doing you any good.
I’ll keep trying to get the rights to the Mad World and update you all. Let’s see what happens!