Mark Askwith, creator of the Canadian television show Prisoners of Gravity wrote to let us know of this Youtube video which chronicles the happy day that Neil Gaiman received his very first Barbie Whistle Torch. Neil gave one to me. I shall treasure it always. You may see it here.

The video also features Harlan Ellison, which is more entertainment than any mere mortal can endure in one day.

I feel giddy. I must get my smelling salts.

Click TOP to return to the webcomic.

Harlan Ellison’s documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth will air on the Sundance Channel Monday:

For more than 50 years, Harlan Ellison has been a singular voice in American literature. Too often marginalized as an author of genre fiction (Ellison prefers the term “speculative fiction”) or influential, award-winning scripts for “The Outer Limits” and “Star Trek,” Ellison sits for a revealing cinematic portrait in Erik Nelson’s entertaining documentary. The notoriously combative, motor-mouthed Ellison appears in clips spanning a quarter century. Also featuring Robin Williams, who describes his friend as “a skin graft on a leper.”

Hat tip to the deeply nifty SF Signal.

Have a preview:

Buy the dvd. I did. Can’t wait to see it.

1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell:

He was working at a feverish pace. Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. Then, in November, tended by the faithful Avril, he collapsed with “inflammation of the lungs” and told Koestler that he was “very ill in bed”. Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news he had always dreaded. Finally he had been diagnosed with TB.

Sherlock Holmes: man of logic and reason. His creator Arthur Conan Doyle fell for every spiritualist crackpot scam in the book:

He claimed to converse with the spirits of the dead. Virtually abandoning Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle churned out books on spiritualism and addressed vast audiences around the world on the subject. He proudly adopted the sobriquet “the St Paul of the New Dispensation”, ruffling some feathers along the way. In North America he clashed with Harry Houdini, an illusionist, who argued that all spiritualists’ “tricks” could be replicated by a competent magician.

In praise of the distractions of the internet. Print this one out. Read. Reread. Save it. Reread it again.

This doomsaying strikes me as silly for two reasons. First, conservative social critics have been blowing the apocalyptic bugle at every large-scale tech-driven social change since Socrates’ famous complaint about the memory-destroying properties of that newfangled technology called “writing.” (A complaint we remember, not incidentally, because it was written down.) And, more practically, the virtual horse has already left the digital barn. It’s too late to just retreat to a quieter time. Our jobs depend on connectivity. Our pleasure-cycles—no trivial matter—are increasingly tied to it. Information rains down faster and thicker every day, and there are plenty of non-moronic reasons for it to do so. The question, now, is how successfully we can adapt.

Isabel Paterson, the forgotten writer who gave Ayn Rand many of her ideas:

Her idea was simply to leave people alone to make their own investments, to earn profits and keep them, and to liquidate unprofitable enterprises. History backed her up. She remembered the nation’s relatively quick recovery from the economic crisis of her girlhood, the depression of the 1890s: “This country experienced bankruptcy in the nineties. Part of the loss was borne by foreign bondholders. That part of the situation is now reversed. It is a much worse bankruptcy. But that is all it is.” She knew that once the incompetent were permitted to go bankrupt, the competent could “pick up the pieces.”

An exploration of the history of fairy tales:

“It has been said so often that the folk invented and disseminated fairy tales that this assumption has become an unquestioned proposition,” Bottigheimer writes in the introduction to her most recent book, Fairy Tales: A New History (State University of New York Press, 2009). “It may therefore surprise readers that folk invention and transmission of fairy tales has no basis in verifiable fact. Literary analysis undermines it, literary history rejects it, social history repudiates it, and publishing history … contradicts it.”

For previous posts in this series, hit the VERY BAD PUBLISHERS link.

Comments from the original message board posts are included below. Apparently, it was not hard to figure out who The Woman was, for though her professional life was short, her life in fandom went on…

Also, additional commentary about remaindered books and the accounting for same.

OK, back to our story.

We didn’t quite hit rock bottom on that misery mine yet.

Now, in an ideal world, IF my book with The Woman had been getting an 8% of cover price royalty, it would still have to have sold over four times the 3,000 copies it actually DID sell to earn out the advance. My original understanding was that my advance would have been ammortized equally over the books in the contract (instead of being lumped against the first one) and, of course, I had no idea that the accounts would be cross-collatoralized over all books in the series and all books on contract I had with the company.

Unfortunately, after deductions for net costs, my meagre advance, and slashing half the royalty for sales at discounts of 50% or greater, and cutting another half for holds against returns, there was no way that a 12,000 advance sale on A Distant Soil would bring in any royalties either.

But things get even worse when you realize that, because The Woman was entitled to a half royalty share on the GN I had illustrated for her, I wouldn’t be getting 4% of cover, I would be getting more like 2% of cover, or about 14 cents per copy sold.

Now, to be fair, The Woman took no advance on the book herself which was generous of her, but then, she sure as hell didn’t need an advance, either. She not only got royalties on several books she edited at the company (even when the creators did not), she also got a salary that made her New York editor counterparts envious. She was permitted to work half days at home writing. She often didn’t come into the office until 1PM. The publisher was subsidizing her writing ambitions by paying salary for her to stay home and write at least a half dozen projects only one of which, to my knowledge, ever saw the light of day – the book I illustrated. (EDIT: To clarify, mine was the only FICTION project she had published there, that I know of. I think she had one or two non-fiction projects.)

So, simply to earn out the entire advance which was paid out over the course of a year and a few months (one year’s advance plus a short extension), the book would have had to sell almost 35,000 copies JUST TO PAY OUT THE ADVANCE of $300 a month and that DID NOT COUNT all the net deductions, 50% held against returns, etc. That was just to earn back what I had been paid even though what I had been paid amounted to the worst page rate I ever received in my entire career.

35,000 copies is good sales by any standard and I didn’t see that happening on this book.

To ALSO earn out enough to pay the colorist and letterer – and to pay the writer their 50% share – for me to even begin to see any more money on the project, it would have to sell between 60,000-70,000 copies.

Moreoever, for the entire time the book was earning out at a loss, ANY AND ALL losses would be deducted from profits on A Distant Soil. In the end, A Distant Soil would be forced to subsidize the book I was illustrating for The Woman.

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For previous installments, click VERY BAD PUBLISHERS. These tales are lessons I learned from The SECOND worst publisher I ever worked with.

Anyway, this company is no longer in existence in the form I knew. It has completely shut down its trade divisions and only does “specialty market” books. It no longer publishes fiction of any kind and the people I once knew are no longer there. It does not use its old trade division name in any of its literature anymore.

There is no mention whatsoever in its marketing information or company history that it had ever published trade book lines or graphic novels. I guess they have decided to leave that bit of the past in the past.

And since they are no longer in any position in our market, and the people that once caused these problems are no longer there, I publish this tale as a warning to creators who might encounter these interesting contract difficulties elsewhere.

These posts were originally published about ten years ago, and cover my publishing history with this company up to 1989. The lawsuits mentioned further down began sometime in late 1990.

OK, this epic missive is a bit rambling and redundant, but what the heck. Here’s where all of the disparate elements come together.

When a publisher announces signing a contract for reprint editions of your book, sometimes it’s good news. Another publisher buys hardcover or foreign rights, you reach a new audience, and there’s a little bit more money in your pocket. Most authors don’t make much on foreign rights, but they still cash the checks, you know?

But expanding the audience with reprint editions wasn’t what was happening here.

I told you of how one day my old publisher had me in the office and bit my head off, told me I had no talent, and then told me to get out of the business.

Mere days later, I was his bestest little artist, like a daughter. He loved me and my work, denying everything he had said before. Either he had schizophrenia or something was up.

Something was up.

The publisher was in financial trouble and had been for years, sinking into debt before I even got there. They had been bought out by their printer quite some time ago because they couldn’t pay their printing bills and even though the long departed Woman claimed their graphic novel division had more gross revenue than any other division of the company, gross is nothing. Net is everything. The net was in the red and had been for years. (At one point, they had also sunk huge sums of money into a travel quide book scheme that had bombed badly. So, their GN division wasn’t the only trade book line that was sinking the company).

My publisher was pissed off because the printer/owner was pulling the plug on the trade division and he was about to be out of a job. He was not in a good mood, especially where flaky little artists like me were concerned. He had bet that we would bring in huge bucks with our graphic novels and save his company, and he had lost his gamble.

Only a few of the GN’s made any money. Yet some authors had received far larger advances than mine, including one comics artist who was paid $10,000 to produce about a dozen black and white illustrations and a color cover for a novel that only sold about 1,000 copies. While I was getting chump change, bigger name creators were getting big advances, but their books were selling less than mine was. The publisher was unable to figure out how the comics market worked and how to get popular comics creators from the direct market to sell in the retail trade (in all fairness, the rest of the comics market didn’t really figure that out for another decade either).

The printer/owner had a plan to continue to bring in revenue on those books that were still profitable like mine. Our printer/owner was working up a secret deal to sign our contracts over to another publisher, but had no intention of telling any of the authors about this. Only 12 authors were being bought out including me, because we were the only ones bringing in any real dough. We weren’t making any money on our books, but the publisher sure was. Most of the books were New Age books. I think mine was the only GN that was bought.

However, they had no right to transfer our contract agreements without our permission. Instead of contacting us for permission or to negotiate a contract sale deal, the publisher told all of the authors involved that only reprint rights to our books had been sold.

My publisher was glad to see the back of the lousy comic creators he believed had helped ruin his company when we failed to make him really, really rich (he lived the good life anyway, but he wanted a really, really good life), so he blew up at me in the office that day and got it all off his chest. However, when my publisher realized that my book was one of the ones picked up by the reprint licensor, he had to keep me happy so I would continue producing new volumes. A core feature of the secret contract sale was that the creators were going to keep producing new works.

So, the next time my publisher saw me, he was all smiles again. He brightly asked when I would have a new volume ready only days after he had told me to give up art for good. He had not remembered that he had signed all my licensing rights and black and white publishing rights back over to me. “I don’t recall that!” was one of his favorite phrases (right next to “Artists sell themselves so cheap.”)

The printer/owner had sold my entire contract to the licensor without letting the licensor know that there were virtually no rights left to buy, because my publisher had simply neglected to let the printer/owner know he had signed those rights back to me months earlier. So, one day it was “Get out of publishing!” and the next it was “I love your work and when are we going to get a new book?”

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Harlan Ellison, writer of many glorious things, is also a very talented voice actor.

He has been nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Spoken Word for Children category for this performance of Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. The website has a sample, as well as easy online purchase options.

At AudioFile: “Ellison’s jaunty reading provides just the right mix of whimsy and awe for the story’s rhymes and clever characters. The pleasure is infectious.”

I have many of Ellison’s CD’s. It is a great pleasure to draw comics while listening to a terrific story performed by an actor with a compelling voice. Harlan Ellison is outstanding.

In ancient days, I bought Ellison on albums. Good lord.