Flogging a dead writer until money bleeds from their wounds
October 4th 2006 12:54
Virginia Andrews
Okay, so this has been irritating me for quite some time now. There's this author, Virginia Andrews... she wrote this book in 1979 called 'Flowers in the Attic'... it was quite famous, a big bestseller, and was even turned into a film. She followed it up with four more books in the same series, one of which was released posthumously (and with a bit of editing). All in all, she wrote about 6 books while she was alive... she died in 1986, just seven years after having her first book published.
Now... there are quite a few Virginia Andrews fans. 'Her' books are still published to this day, under the name of V.C. Andrews... quite a lot of books actually, around twenty or so! How can someone die in 1986 and still be publishing books twenty years later?
Obviously, they're ghostwritten. The same thing has been happening with Robert Ludlum's books since he died in 2001. Someone has been finishing off all his unfinished stories so his publisher can continue making money off his name... obviously he signed a contract allowing this, and his family get a fair share of the profits. It's not too bad, considering the ideas and some of the writing is still his.
But V.C. Andrews... she's really popular. A lot of people just eat up her books one after the other, and are completely unaware that she's been dead for two decades now. Check out this disclaimer inside one of her most recent novels...
"After the death of Virginia Andrews, the Andrews family worked with a carefully selected writer to organise and complete Virginia Andrews' stories and to create additional novels, of which this is one, inspired by her storytelling genius".
So... they aren't even finishing off her unfinished stories anymore. Now they're just releasing any old shit under her name, following whatever discernible formula she managed to set up in a mere 6 or so books. Apparently the writer of these 'V.C. Andrews' books is one Andrew Neiderman. Yes, it's a man. And yet, they actually refer to the latest V. C. Andrews books as 'Her latest bestseller'... isn't this just blatantly false and misleading? Neiderman's name isn't actually contained anywhere in these novels.
Andrew Neiderman
And that brings me to another point... if she wrote only a few novels, how could they possibly manage to build new works based on her 'style' without repeating themselves over and over again? Obviously, they can't... a lot of fans have noticed a downward trend in the most recent novels. A formula can only be flogged to death so many times before it gets really, really, really old. And the fans who haven't noticed? Well... I've been told that if you can't say anything nice, then you shouldn't say anything at all.
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