Quote:
Originally Posted by anamardoll
Who are you? I wouldn't pay $50 for a signed anything unless it was from Douglas Adams and it was a posthumous signature.
Limited editions don't benefit the author, they benefit eBay. And everyone else loses, and your audience gets to feel like you don't care about them unless they're the 1% of people who can drop $50 on a single book on a whim. Bah.
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I don't know anything about Mr. Keene other than that he's won -- twice -- an award for which I was merely nominated. That and his publishing history suggest he's gone from mass-marketed books to the slow marginalization that has afflicted most mainstream sf and horror writers in the twilight of what Virginia Woolf called (with admiration and respect) the common reader.
Faced with not being published at all in hardcover, many once-sought genre writers have agreed to exclusive limited editions before striking humbler deals for paperbacks and, lately, ebooks.
These editions are sometimes lavish and costly to produce. They are not self-published and usually offer incentives to the actual publisher, such as jacked prices and a fan-base willing to splurge. In other words, the pretentious pricing isn't usually the author's idea. It is the drawback of getting to do a beautiful-looking book with a niche publisher who only does that one thing. And the author's percentage isn't generally as high as the book's price would suggest.
Often, the writer isn't trying to make a vast disproportionate profit by doing this. They just want the satisfaction of seeing their book as a handsome physical object. They like being able to point to and sign it during book tours. They toil in dinky rooms for lifetimes in semi-isolation amid exploding marriages and want some sense of tangible validation -- however delayed -- for the effort.
Let's say you're a relic who grew up being published the old way. You might find yourself longing for the pleasures you remember. Here's one of the things you might miss most: the feeling of owning fancy editions of your own words to put on your own shelf and pick up whenever you needed to be reminded your work was real in the truest and most tactile sense.
Limited editions often benefit the author, but not always monetarily.