Reading & Writing Forum: Take a Bow!

[OSJ]

One commonality that runs through this forum (other than a propensity for spending too much money on the  funny books), is a pretty universal interest in the science fiction/fantasy/horror genres. So what does it mean when a writer is discussed on an internet forum? Well, if it's something like GoodReads,  which is a pretty generalist forum, the author might sell a few copies of his latest offering. So what about a writer getting talked about on a message board based on professional wrestling? Well, if your name is Richard Gavin, your whole life might have been changed for the better!

Some months ago, someone, (I believe it was Roman) mentioned Richard's collection Sylvan Dread: Tales of Pastoral Darkness. The name was familiar to me, turns out that Gavin was an author that I usually enjoyed when I ran across his work, but I hadn't made a real concentrated effort to seek him out. Fast forward a few months to a year and I'm given another dream project at Centipede Press: Create a new series dedicated to providing collections by a number of authors who self-identify with "the New Weird". How are these different from the Masters of the Weird Tale series such as the Arthur J. Burks and  Fred Chappell collections discussed elsewhere in this form? Quite simply, and I won't make any bones about  it. MOTWT is high-end shelf candy. Book as art object. This new series is focused on contemporary writers, the people who we'll be talking about as shaping the horror genre in the 21st century.  What I'm charged with doing is to produce 4 books a year, two in spring and two in fall. Each book will collect around a quarter of a million words by a given author and feature a guest intro by a colleague and an afterword by myself and retail for a mere $45.00! Yes, just a few bucks more than a cheaply-made trade hardcover and you get a well-crafted volume signed by 3 authors and the illustrator and filled with great material. By budgeting $3.50 a week (skip one double latte a week and you're there!) .

So anyway, my first four selections for 2019 were Lisa Tuttle US ex-pat living in England, John Llewellyn Probert - UK, Kaaron Warren - Australia and Simon Kurt Unsworth also hailing from the UK. For 2020, I thought long and hard about how we could  maintain both our diversity and quality. The first name that came to mind was that of John Langan, a US author with two brilliant collections already published, the second name is one of the true movers and shakers of the genre,  a Latina living in Canada, Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an outstanding writer, editor, & publisher, whose three collections and a handful of brilliant novels made her selection an easy one. Then we come to Richard Gavin, a Canadian author who was discussed at length in this very forum and here's what happened...

Richard has had several collections published most of which were print-on-demand likely only paying royalties and at an extreme disadvantage in the marketplace. So what do I have against print-on-demand books? Well, the biggest problem is that  the customer has to know about the book in advance, because they sure as hell aren't going to see it on display. Anyway, your discussion of the author's work resulted in an invite from a certain editor to participate in a new series that will feature a hardcover, signed limited edition packed with nearly a quarter of a million words of fiction including several new pieces. I tried to discourage him from providing new material, not that I don't want it, (after all, I'm not an idiot), but because I felt badly in that we're not budgeting for the inclusion of new material and I never want to be seen as taking advantage of someone.  Richard was having none of it, he feels adding the new material is investing in himself and making sure that even his most diehard fans get something new for their money, because that's the kind of guy he  is.  Anyway, this guy has been writing twenty years, not making a great deal of money doing so, and in two years he's going to have a book published large enough to split into two mass-market paperbacks and almost certain to be reviewed in the Washington Post, Publishers Weekly and the Library Journal. Not to put too fine a point to it, but without compromising his style or anything else, this man's life is going to change and improve because you talked about his work on this message board. Take a bow, y'all done good!