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Slightly Excessive
April 14, 2008
I just got in the review for
Invisible Fences, a debut horror novella by Norman Prentiss. My reviewer noted that Cemetery Dance is publishing it as a 170-page, $30 "deluxe hardcover" as part of their novella series. That's roughly 17.6 cents per page. By way of comparison, Stephen King's
Duma Key, a 592-page $28 hardcover, costs only 4.7 cents per page (and that's before the Amazon discount, which drops the per-page price to 3.1 cents). Stephen King is easily the best-known horror writer in the world, a bestseller many times over. Norman Prentiss is apparently a short story writer, and I only know that because I searched around a bit, as the galley and publicity letter contain absolutely no information about him.
David Niall Wilson, an author and reviewer who's usually pretty in touch with the horror writing community and has himself contributed to Cemetery Dance's novella series,
says, "I know that Norman has published stories prior to this - but I don’t know of any novella or longer-length works."
Prentiss's website contains nothing but a series of brief Flash movies that repeat when you click on them: no bio, no bibliography. Googling for "Norman Prentiss bibliography" turns up nothing, and "by Norman Prentiss" only finds two stories, "Glue Traps" in
Tales from the Gorezone and "In the Best Stories" in
Shivers IV, plus a few mentions of
Invisible Fences on various review sites and messages boards. The pickings, in other words, are slim.
Do readers really have so much disposable income that they're willing to pay 17.6 a page (which Cemetery Dance calls
"fairly inexpensive"!) for a novella by someone who doesn't seem to be terribly well known even within his own field? I've never heard anyone call bookselling a recession-proof industry; my sense is that as belts are tightening, book budgets are dropping. Maybe Cemetery Dance is only doing limited runs of 776 copies because that's all they think they can sell.
Posted by Rose Fox on April 14, 2008 | Comments (1)
