[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by brecklundin

I once emails one of the Effinger fan sites and basically was told the same bummer story of other favorite writers of mine, for example Edward Abbey, that the estate/rights holder is either refusing to make the work available or nobody really knows who owns the rights or the rights holder wants an insane amount of cash for the rights.

In the case of Effinger, I'm pretty sure his ex-widow (they divorced amicably before he died) Barbara Hambly (also an excellent writer whom I highly recommend) probably owns his rights. I think she might have mentioned something of the sort on either her official website or the associated blog.

But the problem there is that a) Effinger's personal stuff apparently got caught in the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina disaster, and b) Hambly's having her own problems getting her rights-reverted backlist in e-ready format (apparently her agèd mother has been manually typing things up from the paper copies, Hambly having lost her electronic ones some years ago in a computer/hard drive crash).

So neither of them will be getting their older work out soon, though Hambly has been writing new novella-length stories in some of her popular settings and selling them at $5 a pop off her website. Unfortunately, while her webmaintainer is e-reader savvy enough to offer ePub and Mobi versions alongside the PDF, they're not quite savvy enough to offer all the formats in a single bundle instead of charging for each separately. But I'm buying anyway.

Originally Posted by brecklundin

I wish an agile company like Baen could make it their goal to try and get some of these neglected authors works...

I myself would dearly love some John Morressy, among many, many others. At least finish up the planned Kedrigern collections, which were left in limbo when a) Morressy suddenly died, b) his wife who owned the rights also died, c) Meisha Merlin collapsed in upon itself like a black hole, creating a singularity from which their upcoming catalogue could not escape.

It seems the last few novels and stories in that series were translated and sold exclusively to the Poland sf/fantasy market before that. I have no particular objections to learning Polish, but I don't even want to think about hunting down out-of-print Polish fantasy books and magazines…

Originally Posted by brecklundin

BTW, I was never even aware of the Barbarian Swordsperson works...THANKS, another set of stories I won't read before I croak.

I'll be merciful and not detail to you how amazingly hilarious and like, totally awesome they are, especially the ones which satirize classic sf like Burroughs' Mars and Asimov's Nightfall and modern clichés like MMPORGs.

Thanks for the Callahan recs. I've already read most of them, I think, but I should go back and see if Robinson's written any more since then. (He lives in my general geographic region, it turns out.)

Originally Posted by brecklundin

Anyway, sorry to Simon for the mini-jack of his thread!!! d'oh!!

Um... If he's living in Thailand and likes sf/fantasy, he might want to read some S.P. Somtow, who's written some amazing stuff, often incorporating Thai cultural stuff? And Somtow's not only an award-winning writer, but also an Eton/Oxford-educated near-member of the royal family (just barely missed the cutoff point for being counted as royal descent, but has an aunt who's an actual princess, IIRC) who also scores operas and directs films?

On a more advice-ish note, perhaps band together with a number of writers similar in style/taste and offer a periodic newsletter which gives updates, excerpts, and occasional discounts to subscribers?

Say, feature one writer each time as the "featured writer", do a little interview/snippet bit and offer a % off discount coupon for one work of theirs, maybe even a freebie for starters and % off other selected works if you liked the freebie, good until X date?

It helps you share out the "advertising" cost among a pool of like-minded colleagues, targets your promos at people who've actually signed up for and want them, and lets you reward your loyal readers who follow you without asking them to pony up more than they might want to give for a little something back in return, while also attracting newer potential readers who might take a chance with a coupon.

And if you gain a fairly large-ish pool of fellow writers and you've got lots of works between you, you could keep rotating between them for a long time before you run out of works to feature.