Ryne Douglas Pearson's Blog, page 8

Site Redesign

I'm pretty happy with the new look and functionality. Easy drop down SAMPLE and eReader-specific buy links at the top.

But...no mention of bacon! I know. But rest assured, I am still a devoted cured swine flesh aficionado.

Reversion Of Rights & Backlist Bliss

To many of you the above title will mean this: blah blah blah blahbitty blah blah. In other words, 'Say what?'

Let me explain. Some terms first.

Backlist--generally accepted to mean the books that a writer has written, often some years before. In essence, their aging bullpen. Decent players whose time has past because there are shiny new players--books, in this case.

Reversion Of Rights--most publishing contracts have in them a clause which states, basically, that once a publisher feels they have milked every possible cent from a book you've written, the rights they purchased originally revert back to you. You could, literally, go out and sell the book to another publisher--but that rarely happens (see 'shiny new' concept above).

Writers have rarely worried about reversion of rights. After all, what were they going to do? Print, warehouse, and ship their titles? And deal with returns? Which was all a pointless consideration anyway, since they had zero chance of getting these old titles distributed to the major chains and retailers.

But guess what happened? The Kindle. Then the Nook. And the iPad. Widespread acceptance of eBooks, and all the flavors of eReaders out there, have given authors with a backlist, like me, the ability to actually exercise this reverion og rights clause and get their titles out there again.

Others have written on the wonders of backlist publishing, but I want to touch on the mechanics of how the reversion of rights works...at least in my case.

Spring 2009. I receive a letter from a former publisher, Penguin/Putnam/Berkley. Out of the blue.

 

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I read this and think...so what? What am I going to do with Top Ten? I literally forget about this letter for over a year.

Then, early summer 2010, with the rise of eBooks in full swing, I was deciding to release a new novel as an eBook (Confessions), plus two unpublished novels I had gathering dust on my hard drive (All For One and The Donzerly Light), when I remembered that letter. I dug it out and thought, 'What about the four novels published before Top Ten?' So, I shot off a letter to HarperCollins (who acquired William Morrow, the publisher of these four novels). Many months went by. No response. I began to wonder, were they going to try to release them as eBooks? The contract did not give them that right to exploit. Another letter. Nothing. Finally, I sent a letter than was a bit more...forceful, thinking the next stop was turning it over to my lawyer.

Boom. April. What do I get?

 

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Four letters from HarperCollins. One for each book. So now I have my entire backlist. They're mine! All mine!

Well, almost. Several subsidiary rights which were sold at the time of my original contract remain in force, such as non-exclusive audio book rights to the titles. Meaning, I could also release my own audio books, but that's down the road.

And that is it. That's how reversion of rights worked in my case. I've heard horror stories about other authors having to fight for these rights, and publishers dragging their feet for years. I was comparatively lucky.

And now those books are, or soon will be, available again, and are earning money for me while saving readers quite a bit. I earn roughly the same royalty on a $2.99 eBook that I did on a hardcover from my former publishers.

That's a win all around.

The Futility Of Signage

I very much like this photo...

 

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I Am Not The Walrus, Nor Do I Write About Him

'Where do you get your ideas? Do you dream them? Are they generated in your subconscious?'

I have been asked all these questions over the past 20 years as a writer. To the first, I have no answer to match that of Stephen King, who famously quipped that he acquired them from a certain street address. As to the second, more on that in a minute. For question number three, if they came to me in my subconscious how would I know? I'd have to send Leo in Inception-style to confirm.

But back to the second question. Do I dream my ideas before writing them? In a word--no. To be more expository, let me offer up an example of what I'd be writing if I were to use my somnambular excursions as the basis for fiction...

A few nights ago, I had a dream. It went something like this: I was living in a house that had just gone through some minor remodeling. Nothing major. But I seemed pleased with the results. Then, I went into the back yard.

There was a walrus there. Smallish. Later, I was to be told in this dream that it was a 200 pound walrus. Apparently, and this is just a waking observation here, garden walruses are diminutive. Go figure. Now, despite the size, I found myself quite startled in this dream. I mean, there was a whiskered, tusked walrus staring me down from between a gaggle of bushes beyond my lawn. What did I do?

Of course I consulted my neighbor. A walrus expert. Fortunate coinkidinks like these are common in the dream state, thankfully. My neighbor, who had a nose somewhat off center, as in his nose was planted squarely on his left cheek, informed me quite calmly that I should expect to see walruses in my yard. To which I inquired 'why', ignoring his misplaced nasal appendage.

Because they look for alligators.

Of course! How stupid of me! The well known scientific tenet that pint-size versions of aquatic arctic mammals drag their flippered bulk into suburban neighborhoods to track down armored reptilian quadrupeds! How stupid my schnozz-shifted neighbor must think me!

After learning this, I returned to my back yard to watch the walrus do his thing and flush out the unseen gator that must have drawn him to my humble home. But...the walrus was gone! Like the wind! And I was left to wonder, did he find the gator and do whatever it is that walruses do to them? Or was my back yard just a point in transit as he was on his way to get the gator?

Sadly, whatever came next is lost to me, as the dream faded away.

So, yeah, I think I'll write that.

Another Blast From The Past

The trailer for Mercury Rising, which my novel Simple Simon was made into oh these many years ago.

When Is Not Real Too Real?

If you see a supremely believable sequence of the earth being destroyed in a movie, you can be pretty certain it's not real because a) you paid ten bucks plus the price of popcorn, and b) you're still here.

But what about images that are shown in other venues, as parts of documentaries or other TV shows meant to insinuate or mimic reality? That scene where the lion tackled the wildebeest right in front of the camera--how the heck did the lion just not eat the camera person? It's an easier meal, and would require far less chasing and clawing and gnawing. Could it be that that very sequence was manufactured?

Computer Generated Imagery, or CGI, is a mystical blend of art and science that has advanced to the stage that convincingly real vignettes can be created, sometimes to avoid the eating of staff by wildlife, or simply to save time and money. But when are these faux real things that exist before our eyes too real? Does an audience have the right to know that what they are seeing, if presented as reality, is, in fact, not?

David Attenborough has some thoughts on this in a brief article in the Daily Mail, but what do you think? Is there a point where not real needs to be explicitly labeled as such?

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Having fun checking the formatting on the OCR scan of 'Cloudburst'. It was my first novel written, and the first one published by William Morrow (now an imprint of Harper Collins), and my writing has changed a lot in the twenty years since I wrote it. But I have to say, that sucker has a pretty sharp plot. I had forgotten a lot of the intricacies I'd woven in.
 


Really excited to get the eBook version out in a few weeks, and then onto work getting 'October's Ghost' and 'Capitol Punishment' ready for reissue.

 

B&N Bringing A New eReader To Market

According to the LA TIMES, Barnes & Noble will announce a new eReader soon. This is significant in several respects.

One, they already have the very popular NOOK Color eReader, which has helped grown their eBook business along with its plain jane cousin NOOK.

Two, this demonstrates an investment by B&N that leaves no doubt about the road they see ahead as being paved not with paper, but with electrons.

Third, it puts pressure on the industry's 800 pound gorilla, Amazon, to push its Kindle eReader toward new capabilities, and, I expect, even lower prices.

This new eReader from B&N will likely seem more iPad than Kindle, with capabilities beyond the NOOK Color. And all this is wonderful. Competition in this arena is fantastic, and can only help the end consumer--readers--who will be presented with more choice.

I think it may also signal something down the road, especially from the likes of Amazon: a two-tier eReader offering. The Kindle (which I can only imagine will someday be free with the purchase of a dozen eBooks or so) and a more full featured tablet that can be reader and so much more.

None of this should surprise anyone. The rapid growth of eBooks, beyond what most 'experts' would have dreamed even last year, is just a part now of an appetite for devices that serve as readers, and, in many cases, laptop replacements.

This new offering from B&N may be their signal that they want to get to this new future before Amazon, and broaden their business beyond eBooks. In response, will Amazon soon fire back with their own new offering? I can't wait to see.

New Covers For My Backlist Books

The new cover art for my first three novels, Cloudburst, October's Ghost, and Capitol Punishment have come in. These books, which were published in the 90's, and whose rights have now reverted to me, are off being scanned now for new digital text files, and I hope to have these available in the June/July time frame. Simple Simon, the fourth of these books, which was made into the Bruce Willis film Mercury Rising, is populating across retailers now, and is already available for Kindle and Nook, and should be available for iBooks and other readers soon.

So have a look. I really like what my cover guy has done.

 

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Blast From The Past

While cleaning my office yesterday, what did I stumble upon?

 

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The very first draft of Knowing. Ahhh...memories. Kids, this was way back when we actually printed scripts on paper and didn't just send them as PDF files. Crazy, huh?