A couple of
months ago, rummaging through one of those recommendation lists Amazon sends
out, I spotted a book called Crossover
by Judith Eubank. I had never heard of either the book or the author, but I
read the description of it and checked out the first page. It was well written,
and the price was right, so I bought the e-book version.
On Labor
Day, looking for a short book to read, I came across it on my iPad and went
with it. At only 172 pages, it was just right for the day, and I flew through
it. It was a highly enjoyable read, better written than most of the bestsellers
I see today, and I thought I’d discovered a promising new author who had
self-published on Amazon, like me. In the Kindle store, the publication date
showed as April 2014.
Then, at
the end of the book, I came to the copyright page, which showed that it had
originally been published in 1991 by the now defunct publishing house Carroll &
Graf. What I had been reading was not a new book, but rather an electronic
reissue of an older one.
Not Dead, Just Resting
I’m
guessing, since it appears Ms. Eubank has written only one other work of
fiction, that her book didn’t do terribly well from a commercial standpoint,
and that she eventually moved on to other things. That happens. There are good
books that sell poorly and bad ones that sell quite well. But like many other
authors, Ms. Eubank has gotten a second chance from Amazon and the e-book.
Not all the
authors who have done so are living. I’m noticing a lot of reissues of
mysteries from the 1920s and 30s on Amazon. In fact, one of those, The Cornish Coast Murder by John Bude,
is on my schedule for this month. The first e-book I ever read, Murder at Bridge, was a 1920s American
mystery novel that someone put up on Kindle for 99 cents, apparently after
discovering the copyright had expired.
And my own
first mystery, The McHenry Inheritance,
got a second chance on Kindle. Passed over by agents and publishers in the
1990s, it has sold modestly but steadily since I put it up on Kindle in July
2012. In fact, this August, more than two years after publication, it had its
best month ever in paid sales on Amazon, and this Monday it had its best-ever
free promotion, with nearly 600 downloads worldwide.
The Library Vanishes With a Click
There are
quite a few good authors whose work has long been out of print. In the mystery
genre along, I can think of Father Knox, John Dickson Carr, Richard and Frances
Lockridge, and so on. Sometimes a long out-of-print author gets a revival, as
Earl Derr Biggers did when the University of Chicago reissued his Charlie Chan
novels. But that’s the exception. E-books offer a way for good writers whose
audiences would be limited today to stay in circulation, if not exactly in
print.
Still, I
can’t help remembering the Library at Alexandria, which burned in ancient
times, leaving us without many of the great works of antiquity. With everything
on a computer somewhere, fire won’t be an issue, but some day a rogue computer
virus could wipe out much of the literary canon, and a lot of secondary good
stuff, too. I try not to think about it.
