Quote:
Originally Posted by Thasaidon
My understanding is that it happens fairly frequently and mostly with fiction. . . .
The publisher has a "hot" new author who writes similar books . . .
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Similar novels? You mean that the publisher just has one murder mystery writer at a time? Or just one that has murder mysteries set in the UK? Sounds strange. So I'd like to see several examples.
As I wrote, I know it happens with textbooks, where there are frequent new editions created mostly by the publisher's in-house staff.
If they have a backlist biography of, oh, say, Anthony Eden, selling for years at a low price, and are pushing a new high price Eden biography, it concevably would make minor business sense to drop the older title. And I could understand it being eyebrow-raising if the old one was critical, and the new one is hagiographic. But fiction? This makes no sense to me, because publishers have multiple titles per genre.
Also, popular authors should have the freedom to sell rights outright. One of my nineteenth century favorites, Anthony Trollope did it a lot. By doing it, the publisher took all the risk, and Trollope took none. To me, outlawing such arrangements means a legal requirement that the author share the risk with the publisher. That would be, to me, a bad law.