RL: An excellent description of Quake was provided in the British periodical Time Out. The reviewer wrote, “LA is hit by the big one, but instead of giving us a standard disaster scenario, Laymon sets up a wicked female-in-peril situation as the earthquake provides a perfect opportunity for pervy Stanley to get his hands on a woman trapped in the ruins of her home. In the aftershock chaos, can her blinded husband and daughter reach the house before she is attacked? There’s enough cat-and-mouse suspense here to leave your nails in shreds.” (By the way, the daughter isn’t blinded—R.L.)
A reviewer for the Manchester Evening News wrote, “It’s a catalogue of horrors that makes Nightmare on Elm Street look as cosy as Coronation Street.”
Quake was inspired by my own earthquake experiences. I’ve been in three large earthquakes (and too many smaller ones to count), but the idea for Quake came to me in the wake of the Whittier shaker of 1987. When it hit, I was alone in a second-story law office in Glendale, not far from the epicenter. I was also about thirty miles from my home in west Los Angeles. After the quake ended, my only concern was getting home to my wife and daughter. Not knowing the extent of the damage, I was terrified for their safety.
I took that experience, magnified the size of the quake, created a bunch of characters, threw in my perceptions of modern Los Angeles civilization (or lack thereof), and presented my own version of how things might be for a family trying to survive—and save each other—after a major quake has broken down not only the walls of the city, but the rules of decent behavior.
In other words, LAPD is shut down and people are left to fend for themselves.
This book was nearly finished when the big quake hit us on January 17, 1994. The manuscript, a stack of about 500 loose pages, was sitting on a wobbly TV tray in my home office. Our chimney separated itself from the house, bookshelves toppled, televisions hit the floor, the refrigerator and stove marched across the kitchen, cupboards emptied themselves onto floors, a window broke, walls cracked, our fireplace collapsed...and after it was all over, I discovered the loose manuscript pages of Quake still neatly stacked on the wobbly TV tray as if nothing had happened.
EG: Quake has all the virtues and none of the vices of too many bestsellers. Big cast, big theme, yet it keeps the voice and viewpoint that make all your books so solid. Were you aiming for a larger audience?
RL: Was I aiming for a larger audience? Not consciously. For the most part, I was just trying to write a book that would please myself, my agent and editor, my friends, and my fans.
In the United Kingdom, all my books have a large audience. Over here, however, none of them since The Cellar has been given enough distribution to have a chance at a large audience.
So, in a way, there seems to be no point in “aiming for a larger audience.” There is a vast potential audience in this country for plenty of writers, including you and me, but the audience isn’t likely to notice any book that isn’t given a large push, at the outset, by a publisher with clout. If it doesn’t get The Big Push, it’ll die on the shelves, mostly unseen and unbought.
My book Savage seemed like a novel with fairly large sales potential. It’s a very unusual book, sort of about an English Huck Finn hunting down Jack the Ripper in the American West, told from the boy’s point of view in a brand new language that mixes British idiom and old American slang. I figured Savage should appeal to mystery fans, western readers, horror fans, plus anyone who enjoys a large, mainstream adventure novel. Add all the Jack the Ripper buffs, and the thing could’ve been a smash.
But it got little or no publicity, a small printing, and very little distribution. In effect, the hordes of people I envisioned falling in love with my book never had a chance to know it exists.
The same goes (to a lesser degree) for The Stake, which I figured had a lot going for it. As vampire novels go, The Stake seemed to have huge mainstream potential.
But it didn’t get the Push.
So...I might as well have written a trite little genre potboiler, for all the difference it made in terms of distribution and sales in the U.S.
Those experiences have given me the idea that “aiming for a larger audience” is a waste of time. No book, no matter how good, has a chance of reaching a large audience unless the publisher SEES the book’s value.
Which makes a nice segue into the next subject. As opposed to what happened in the U.S., The Stake and Savage both did extremely well in Great Britain. (And continue to sell over there, since my entire backlist is in print in the U.K.) The first U.K. printing of Savage went so fast that it’s now a collector’s item here in the States. I’ve heard of people selling copies for $175.00.
EG: Can you explain why you’re now a major name in England but aren’t nearly as well known in your home country over here?
RL: My agent, Bob Tanner, had a lot to do with it. He helped me find publishers who love my stuff and know how to sell it.
Here, we’ve never had such luck.
My British publisher once told me, “We don’t publish books, we publish authors.”
In that one sentence is the heart of the difference.
The author, here, is generally treated like crap. I know of one U.S. editor who said, “Why should I give Laymon $10,000 for a book when I can pull Joe Blow off the street and pay him $2,000?”
Cute, huh?
Do I sound a little annoyed?
I am. I shouldn’t be angry for myself, though. Thanks to England and all the REST of the world, I make an excellent living as a writer. But I resent that, because of what I see as the stupidity of many American editors, there are great numbers of people in the U.S. who are missing out on my books. (Even my American fans resent it. They have to spend twice as much money, or more, because so much of my work is only available in British editions.)
The real shame, however, is that bunches of American writers have to depend for their livelihoods on American publishers.
Plenty of U.S. publishers pay $2,000 to $5,000 for a novel. Very few writers can get more than $10,000-$15,000 for a single book. Which means that most writers are paid so miserably by American publishers that they would need to write four or five books a year (if not ten) to even reach the poverty level established by the U.S. government.
If that isn’t enough of a disgrace, few actually PAY the money on time. They have to be brow-beaten before they’ll put a check in the mail—and THEN many U.S. literary agents will keep the check for a few MORE months, apparently using it to cover gambling losses, or God knows what.
Which may all sound like wild exaggerations—except to those of your readers who are writers. I don’t know a single pro who hasn’t been shafted time and again by U.S. publishers. I also know quite a few writers who’ve noticed how wonderful, by comparison, the British publishers are.
For a writer, being published by a company such as Headline in England is like “Dying and going to heaven.” Also not an exaggeration. I have letters from a few writers who’ve used that actual expression.
A bit more than you probably bargained for, Ed, when you asked me that one.
EG: You seem to have started out as more of a mystery-crime writer than anything else.
RL: My first sale was to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. I subsequently sold several stories to EQMM, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine. This was back in the 1970s. There were no good markets for short horror stories (other than a couple of men’s magazines) so I concentrated on the mystery magazines. They were each buying more than a dozen new stories each month.