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Originally Posted by barryem
One more recent author that I especially like was Lee Gruenfeld. He was pretty popular 10 or 15 years ago and wrote some excellent novels. Today they're unavailable. I emailed him to let him know there's at least a little interest and I got a reply that it's not up to him. His publisher owns the rights and has no interest in making them available.
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Assuming he has anything like a standard contract on those books then there should be a reversion clause where he can get his rights back once the books are out of print for a given time, which they appear to be. He may be, like many authors, assuming that it's up to the publisher without actually looking into it.
I've been surprised by the number of authors I've talked to that have no interest in getting their rights reverted. (because what would they do with them?
) They have no interest on doing any kind of work with their titles other than writing (& editing) them. Once a title is done they don't want to have to do anything with it and feel that's what publishers and agents are for. They would never want to do the work involved with seeing their backlist titles self-published which is why houses like Open Road exist. Unfortunately their are tons of lesser titles that will never get picked up by someone like OpenRoad. One author, whos name I can't remember now, posted a few years back that his older books weren't ebooks because no publisher wanted to give him a large advance like he'd gotten on the titles back when they were originally written years ago. There was interest in putting them out, but not for the up front money he wanted.