From: "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Capclave 2005 nattering, with footnotes
Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2004 19:15:21 -0400
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Walsh" <MJW at press.jhu.edu>
To: <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2004 6:01 PM
Subject: [WSFA] Capclave 2005 nattering, with footnotes

> Just an fyi . . .
>
> Last week I received a letter from our GoH Howard Haldrop, who is not
> connected to electronic world . . .really.
>
> One of the projects to get folks to either join Capclave or atleast to
> send us their money is to produce a limited edition chapbook of a
> Waldrop story that will be part of the registration fee.  Howard had two
> suggestions: reprinting The Ugly Chickens (1), since 2005 will be it's
> 25th anniversary, with new author background material about the writing
> and research for the story or, a whole *new* story.
>
> In the letter Howard was responding to, I suggested why not do both and
> do it like an Ace Double.  He rather liked the idea, thou he noted he
> wouldn't be able to get an Emsh (2) cover, and of course traditionally
> the authors of an Ace Double usually had totally different roylaty
> reports, even when it was the same author. (3)
>
> Hotel wise, the plan is to locate a hotel with a little more available
> function space, and to be there for atleast 2 years. On more or less the
> same dates, also.
>
> mjw
>
> 1.  If you haven't read it, boy, are you in for a treat, as I have
> mentioned previously.  Here's the story:
> http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/waldrop/
>
> 2. Emsh, was Ed Emshwiller (1925 - 1990), a noted artist in the field
> and filmmaker.  He did the covers to many Ace books, also many covers to
> F&SF.  Do an Image search at Google for "Ed Emshwiller" for samples of
> his art.  His wife, Carol Emshwiller, is a writer of some regard in the
> field.
>
> 3. "Occasionally both sides were by the same author. One such pair was
> by Phil, and the royalty statement in question gave totally different
> sales figures for the two halves of the same book"
> <http://www.philipkdickfans.com/articles/pkdandme.htm>

This comes from anecdotal reportage by Ed Meskys -- essentially a fanzine
piece.   I think he has grafted a well-known story onto Phil Dick.  I'm not
sure Phil ever had both sides of an Ace Double.

The real story concerns another SF writer, and I've forgotten who it was,
but it might have been Poul Anderson.  Like Phil Dick, Poul was a Scott
Meredith Literary Agency client.  I worked at SMLA in 1963, and the story
was still fresh there then.  It wasn't an *author* who caught the
discrepancy; it was one of the "pro desk" guys at SMLA.

The thing was that one side of the Double was a story-collection, while the
other was a novel.   While Ace paid $1,200 as an advance on the novel, they
paid only $1,000 for the short story collection.   Ace Books *never* paid
additional royalties; they simply "earned out" their advances -- their
sales, as reported annually in royalty statements to the authors/agents,
simply stopped when the advance was earned out.    Unhappily, this was
several thousand copies sooner for the short-story side of the book.

You can be sure that SMLA milked their discovery for all it was worth --
and extracted Additional Royalties for the copies sold of the short-story
side of the book.

After A. A. Wynne (the owner of Ace Books) died, his bookkeeper confessed
that he'd always kept two sets of books for Ace -- not because he'd been
asked to but because he knew that was what Mr. Wynne would have wanted.

This story was widely told at the time (early '60s) and I think Ed (still a
kid then) heard it and confabulated it with Phil Dick's own contrary
history with editors.

--Ted White