In my post about “Hamlet’s Father”, I said I didn’t expect Marvin Kaye or Tor Books to disavow or apologize for publishing it in The Ghost Quartet. I was half wrong! Kaye posted this comment:
For the record, when I put together “The Ghost Quartet” for Tor Books, Scott Card was not my choice to be one of the four contributors. Not because I do not respect his work; in the past I have bought an original dragon novella from him, and reprinted his horror classic, “Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory.” However, Tor insisted that Scott be one of the contributors to “The Ghost Quartet.” When approached, he tried to beg off because he was under such deadline pressure that he warned it would take him a very long time to write something new for the book.
However, Tor Books insisted that he MUST be one of the quartet. Tor made it clear they would not publish “The Ghost Quartet” unless Scott was part of the mix. As a result, he was over a year late delivering his manuscript, by which time one of the other authors was very angry at me.
So that is something like a disavowal, sort of. Meanwhile, Tor sent me this statement:
Orson Scott Card is a very successful author for Tor. We do not attempt to censor the political or religious beliefs of any of our authors, and make our acquisition decisions based on commercial potential.
Finally, Card himself has posted on his website calling the PW review “dishonest” and responding to other “false statements”:
[T]here is no link whatsoever between homosexuality and pedophilia in this book. Hamlet’s father, in the book, is a pedophile, period. I don’t show him being even slightly attracted to adults of either sex. It is the reviewer, not me, who has asserted this link, which I would not and did not make. [...]
[S]ince I have become a target of vilification by the hate groups of the Left, I am increasingly reluctant to have any gay characters in my fiction, because I know that no matter how I depict them, I will be accused of homophobia. The result is that my work is distorted by not having gay characters where I would normally have had them — for which I will also, no doubt, be accused of homophobia. [...]
I’m as proud of the story as ever, and I hope readers will experience the story as it was intended to be read.
I conclude with a link to the response from Subterranean Press again, just to have all the official statements in one place.
James Nicoll quotes “a source” with access to Bookscan numbers as saying that The Ghost Quartet sold around 100 copies. I guess that commercial potential wasn’t as thoroughly fulfilled as anyone involved with the project might have liked.
There’s something inherently amusing about a member of a hate group (and Focus on the Family is overtly one) accusing his critics of being “hate group” members.
Not having read the story, I’m a little curious about his defense, as both reviews I read seemed to make it clear that Card was overtly pushing the “gay people get that way because they were molested” BS as well as the idea that Hamlet’s dad is portrayed as both gay and a pedophile. Card only seems to be responding to the latter (which I suspect is a tacit admission of the former), but I’m not sure if his response even there is valid within the text.
It’s sold 235 copies through Bookscan. Yes, I really looked. That’s a horrible number, but does not include online sales or ebook sales obviously.
That would be horrible for one of the big publishers like Tor or Baen, but for a novella published through Subterranean, I’m not as sure. I’d be curious how it compared to other novellas Subterranean has done.
I don’t have Bookscan access, but the Subterranean edition was limited to 1000 copies, was published five months ago, and appears not to have sold out.
[S]ince I have become a target of vilification by the hate groups of the Left, I am increasingly reluctant to have any gay characters in my fiction….
… I think we all know how the hate groups of the Left would vote!
The 105-sales history is actually for the trade paperback, which is what would have been carried by chain stores. (Or not, considering those sales. My guess is that most of it was Amazon sales, which suggests that the chains passed up on shelving this book). The first-edition hardcover would have been not carried, because of its high price-point ($25.95, which is a lot for a hardcover in 2008, for only 304pp), in any great numbers. (235 copies).
For the purposes of this discussion, especially with commercial considerations, it’s better to focus on the trade paperback sales . . . which as you point out is quite horrible. (Online or ebook sales, while not accounted-for, are usually a reflection of chain store sales, so if one did bad, well . . . only in outliers is it different.) When you compare those sales versus something comparable, say, Marvin Kaye’s THE ULTIMATE HALLOWEEN a few years earlier, it sold 2925 copies, in trade paperback, on bookscan. So 100 copies vs 2925 copies? That’s beyond horrible. And explains why no one really noticed the novella in the first place.
The trade paperback sold 105 copies on US Bookscan. The hardcover sold 235 copies on Bookscan. Both numbers are quite low, but of course only represent the minimum number of copies possibly sold in the US. Depending on the book, and which retailers ordered (and then sold) copies, a Bookscan number can represent anywhere from around 80% to around 10% of sales. While the numbers are extremely low, the only real conclusion one can draw is that B&N and Borders and warehouse stores like Costco did not sell a lot of copies of this book, likely because they did not make a large buy in the first place. I suspect that the book didn’t do very well at all, despite Card’s presence. (It’s not like Card’s work is of interest, generally, to ghost story fans.)* But suspicions ain’t facts. It’s sort of a running joke for authors who also have access to Bookscan to compare their royalty statements to Bookscan numbers and observe the sometimes massive gaps between the reporting of the two.
The Ghost Quartet also shows up in 229 library systems, according to Worldcat. A “system” may include many branches, and branches may buy more than one copy of a book. Perhaps 500 or even 1000 hardcovers, and some paperbacks, are in libraries now. The book still could have turned a profit.
*Full disclosure. I am not a Tor employee. I did, however, co-edit an anthology of ghost stories for Tor called HAUNTED LEGENDS with Ellen Datlow, which was released one year ago. Tor could have exercised some influence over the table of contents, but did not in any way.
That sounds about right. I checked worldcat, by isbn, and I got about 199 library systems carrying the hardcover. The paperback? Only 16 library systems. But in comparison: WIZARDS, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann? It’s sold 57 times what THE GHOST QUARTET sold, in trade paperback, into bookscan. So I’d still stick to my original contention, that no one really saw the OSC novella, at least not enough to make waves about it, then . . . :p
FWIW, I couldn’t find Ghost Quartet in the New Hampshire library system at all. I was half-considering borrowing it through ILL. If I go out of state it’ll cost postage at the very least though, and I’m so not doing that.
Oh and, in fact, Bookscan does include a fair number of online sales, including amazon.com and bn.com. Not every online retailer reports to Bookscan, but those two certainly do.
Card writes, “I have little interest in a dithering hero; nor am I much inspired by revenge plots. Yet I keep hearing that this is the greatest of them all. So I analyzed the story to see what it would take to make me care about it.”
In other words, he could only write about Hamlet by falsifying everything about him. Smooth move; but at this point, the former Squire Orson (remember when he used to be FUN to be around at cons?) can get away with anything he wants to.
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