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Despite Derleth’s fears, however, horror fiction became popular in the seventies with the success of novels like William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) and Stephen King’s Carrie (1974). Derleth’s estate fell into the hands of his children, April and Walden Derleth. Though the details of the dispute have never been made public, Derleth’s estate appointed a fan named James Turner (who had no editorial experience), as editor-in-chief of Arkham House following Derleth’s death. Donald Wandrei, who had been involved in Arkham House since his return from World War II as its managing editor, left the company after Turner’s appointment.
Five days after Lovecraft’s death, August Derleth’s colleague, Donald Wandrei, wrote to his fellow writer to inform him of the author’s passing. Derleth wrote back, insisting to Wandrei that they work together to publish Lovecraft’s work. After Charles Scribner’s Sons refused to publish the collection of stories Wandrei and Derleth put together, the two borrowed a name of one of the fictional New England locales in Lovecraft’s stories and formed Arkham House to publish the manuscript themselves.
Across from Lueders Road in St. Aloysius Cemetery, Sauk City, Wisconsin, is the grave of August Derleth, founding editor-publisher of Arkham House. On the other side of that road is Arkham House itself, the place where Derleth devoted the last thirty-two years of his life ushering macabre writers out of the obscurity of the pulps and into the hardcovers of an entirely new niche in genre fiction.
In his 2008 book, Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age, Jeff Gomez augers that the future of electronic publishing depends on whether publishers are prepared to meet the demands of a new generation of readers he calls “Generation Download.” This generation, he argues, “is the first generation to come of age not knowing anything but an existence with the web.”
The WebScription strategy relies heavily on its salivating science-fiction fan base. Throughout the years, Baen’s editors, authors, and publishers promoted Baen novels through the house’s very Web 1.0-style messageboard, Baen’s Bar. Is Baen’s success with e-books due to its status as a niche science-fiction publisher? And if so, would megalithic publishers benefit as readily from Baen’s e-book distribution model?
