I suppose both Rice and King (the two most prominent offenders in the Author in Desperate Need of an Editor category) have something in that their free hand with their (over)writing doesn't seem to reduce readability to the point of costing them their readers. Both sell an ungodly number of books with each new release, when many (most?) authors are one step above having to print their own work with a vanity press.

Mind you, both lost me as a consumer of their novels years ago. (Though I've happily rediscovered my love for King's short stories this year...)

In other news, I finally finished reading Ryng's The King in Yellow today on my break. It wasn't as bad as I feared from the opening pages, getting somewhat stronger and less modernly grating in the second act. But I still think it's vastly inferior to the shorter partial version Blish wrote in his story "More Light." And neither version strikes me as following up on the promise of something that's supposedly so brilliant and blasphemous that authorities would ban it (never mind the driving readers crazy part, which is a taller order than I think any writer could manage).

their free hand with their (over)writing doesn't seem to reduce readability to the point of costing them their readers.

I don't know, though. I bet the books are becoming less profitable. What with enormous marketing budgets, and the authors being able to demand huge advances and high percentages of each sale, and the high cost of long, long books. It's the kind of conundrum that a lot of businesses that demand high profits get into -- you need a huge marketing budget to help the book make its numbers, but the larger the marketing budget, the more expensive the book has to be to make a suitable profit per book sold. The more expensive a book is, the harder it is to sell, so the marketing budget keeps getting larger.

(Whereas, most books have a marketing budget of probably ZERO, so if they sell at all, they've made back the investment in paper and copyediting. It always alarms me a little when I realize how much of a book's marketing is the author marketing himself, by himself, with no huge publicity machine to back him up.)

There's also that practical point, which J. K. Rowling has reached, where it is almost impossible to bind the book because it is so many pages. Either someone will have to beat her with a stick to make her edit the next volume down, or else it will have to come out in an extremely large trim size, because Vol. 4 (to say nothing of Vol. 5) was a really problematic book as a physical object.

Harry Potter and the Quest for the Perfect Binding

Either someone will have to beat her with a stick to make her edit the next volume down,

She says she intends it to be much shorter.

I bet the books are becoming less profitable.

Maybe she's trying to save money on the editor's salary.

Well, I don't dispute the luxury of fuck-you money. King and Rice can both write exactly the books they always dreamed of writing.

It's Rice's insistence that Editing Is Bad For Her Art that makes me ill.

It's Rice's insistence that Editing Is Bad For Her Art that makes me ill.

Which is something I've never heard King espouse (if you read ON WRITING, he pretty much says just the opposite, in fact). That he ISN'T being edited vigorously is a whole other issue.

Short interview with Jennifer Crusie on Powells.com.

King gets snippy about the critics saying his books are too long (especially in the intro of his short story collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes), but his ire seems to be reserved for the critics rather than the editorial process itself.

Well I'm picking up my library held copy of King's The Dark Tower (Book 7) today. I'm a bit chagrined that when I heard he was in that terrible accident, the first thing I worried about was that he'd never finish the series.