Stieg Larsson Is First Author To Sell 1M E-Books 122
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson, author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, has become the first author to sell more than one million e-books on Amazon. The Swedish noir thrillers feature Lisbeth Salander, an asocial and extremely intelligent hacker and researcher, specialized in investigations of persons, and investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist. Quercus has sold 3.3M copies of Larsson's books in the UK, and estimates that worldwide sales of the three novels are somewhere between 35-40M copies."
Heh (Score:3, Interesting)
The title of his books remind me of The Flower that Drank the Moon. "Dustoff Varnya is such a brilliant director. Did you see his last film, "The Flower that Drank the Moon"? It was simply glorious!"
Re:No "ideologies" to hold him back (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, that's pretty ignorant.
Most times the authors are against it because the publishing houses offer them a tiny flat fee and no percentage of the sales...As far as THEY are concerned, it's just one printing! And the author gets crap, which is wildly unfair given that the costs to the publishing house are non-existent.
In this case, since he's dead, there is no one to stop the publishing houses from raping his corpse.
Re:No "ideologies" to hold him back (Score:3, Interesting)
> In this case, since he's dead, there is no one to stop the publishing houses from raping his corpse.
Ironic, given that raping corpses figures prominently in his books. In soviet russia, the books...
The real story is the custody battle (Score:4, Interesting)
When Stieg Larsson died suddenly, and after writing just 3 of the planned 10 books about Blomquist and Salander, he left behind Eva Gabrielsson, his common-law wife of 30+ years.
Unfortunately, with no explicit will and no legal acceptance of common-law marriage in Sweden, she inherited absolutely nothing.
See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1240159/Stieg-Larssons-widow-seen-penny-20m-fortune-earned-together.html [dailymail.co.uk]
Terje
PS. I loved the books, read them all in Swedish instead of waiting for the Norwegian translation.
Re:No "ideologies" to hold him back (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know about that. There was a lot of dispute over Larsson's estate. His partner through many years, didn't get anything, because they never married or registered their relationship - and the reason they never did was that they were hiding from neo-nazis, which Larsson had royally pissed off.
Disputes over rights aren't exactly ideal from a publisher's perspective. I think the success is a lot about the rather extreme anti-banker/capitalist/influental people sentiment in his stories, which has hit a nerve in the current troubles. Maybe that is also a genre of fiction which US audiences has been somewhat short on, due to a generation of films sanitized from such topics by Hollywood blacklists.
Its a shame (Score:1, Interesting)
What is this world coming to when sadistic cliche-ridden trash become the top selling e-books?
I would have thought people with ebook readers would read better written novels.
There has been a massive marketing campaign by Amazon and big chain bookstores to sell Larsson's books so that might explain it.
I heard from someone who walked into Borders and got pitched Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by an employee before he even opened his mouth.
Then the cashier asked him if an employee has recommended the book. When he asked why the cashier said that employees had been told by management to do it.
Could it be sellers are getting kickbacks from the publisher?
Re:No "ideologies" to hold him back (Score:3, Interesting)
It all depends on who you are and what your deal is. Generally, if you've released anything since the e-book thing has blown up, then you dealt with it in your original contract, and you may see as much as 25% of the 70% that Amazon pays your publishing house coming back to you...Which isn't bad but isn't good either.
Some literary agents have started bypassing the publishing houses altogether [venturebeat.com] which is good for the authors' e-book percentages, but bad if they want to sell paper books as well. On-demand printing may offset some of this.
If you did your deal 5 or 10 years ago, it's unlikely that you're going to get anywhere near as good a deal. A number of people who I've talked to, who've sold books that have sold more than 100,000 copies, but less than 1,000,000 copies...They're getting crap deals. Publishing houses make the RIAA look like a bunch of saints.
Re:No "ideologies" to hold him back (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that, in the future, this is very likely to happen, and I think it's a very good thing.
Right now though...Distribution and marketing costs of printed books is prohibitively expensive, well out of reach of the average writer. So you've got to cut your devils deal with a publisher, and they take whatever they can get from you, up to and including all future publishing rights on all media.
Lot of people aren't in a position to renegotiate, and those people are the ones whose books are published to e-book the fastest. Those authors who are, they'll take longer because of all the negotiations.
Re:The real story is the custody battle (Score:4, Interesting)
You left out the tragic reason why he couldn't marry her. Before he wrote the books he did a lot of work investigating extremist groups, he made a lot of enemies. His marriage would have put details of him and his wife into public view and he was unwilling to take that risk. Sad story.
Re:No "ideologies" to hold him back (Score:4, Interesting)
None of the books were published until after his death, and he apparently died without a will [wikipedia.org].
Re:No "ideologies" to hold him back (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Its a shame (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The real story is the custody battle (Score:1, Interesting)
Its not a rumor.
In an interview with her she stated that she has his computer with a partially written novel on it and will not give it up unless they agree to let her finish it and share in the revenue.
She says that she was part of his writing process and has the know-how to finish it in line with his vision.
Personally I agree that she is the only who could do it and still keep his name on the book. You bring in another author and it would not be the same.
Hopefully they let her do it or give her a good chunk of change in return for the computer.