[quote name='Drocket'][quote name='epobirs']A few novelist really cranked out stuff fast and had to do the same thing. In their early careers a single novel might only earn a few thousand dollars. Not enough to quit the day job but the publishers didn't want more than one or two titles from a single name per year. So Stephen King created his Richard Bachman pseudonym.[/quote]
Actually, that's not why King created Bachman - by the time Bachman was created, King was already a best-selling author, had a couple movies under his belt, and overall was doing just fine, money-wise.
The key reason Bachman was created was that King was rather annoyed that quite a few book critics claimed that he simply got 'lucky'. They basically said that King really wasn't anything special of an author and had no qualities that set him apart from 5,000 other horror writers. His first book (Carrie) just happened to be popular, causing him to become famous, and that all his other work was drek that only sold because of his already-established fame. King had a few extra novels laying around (because his publisher didn't want to saturate the market, and King is an insanely fast writer), so King published them under another name to find out if the criticisms were true or not. They weren't - Bachman didn't catch on quite as fast as King, but by the third or fourth book, he was already ranking pretty high on the bestseller-list.
Ok, I'm off-topic, but I'm a big Stephen King fan and had to set that straight
On the actual topic: celebrity voice-overs are just fine if they do a good job. I honestly don't care if they're a celebrity or not as long as the voice work is good. That's really the only thing that matters.[/quote]
My books are in storage right now but I pretty distinctly recall that King was hard up for money and needed to get more of his work sold. Keep in mind when Carrie sold he was dirt poor and Carrie only did mildly well until the movie came out. The paperback with Sissy Spacek covered in pig blood sold 100 times what the previous edition had moved. In an interview in Heavy Metal magazine around the time 'The Stand' was first in paperback he mentioned how much he'd hated the original cover because Carrie was depicted as too pretty and it conveyed none of what the story was about. He admitted it was weird to prefer the movie tie-in cover but he liked the casting of Sissy Spacek and the gruesome image.
Sure King had some other motives than money but he wasn't doing better than upper middle-class by that point and getting those old novels into print for just the advance was plenty of motive in of itself. As you mentioned, they'd previous been shot down for fear of oversaturating the market for his name, which is completely in line with what I'd said earlier. He was also a bit naive at that point and had no idea that many very big names in the novel business were producing a lot more work than attributed to their name.
Only tangentially related but if you can find it, Robert Silverberg did a great article once about the period after the collapse of magazine distribution in the late 50's (there was organized crime and embezzling involved) the number of available venues for his work was cut to a fraction of what he'd been accessing to support himself. Not long afterward, an editor friend approach him and asked him how quickly he could crank out a softcore porn novel. This was a newly booming field as a lot of places were lifting their censorship laws. Silverberg found himself producing about one a week to keep the bills paid while still working on more serious material. After a while the editor asked him to take on some editing work as well. This brought Silverberg into contact with a few dozen contributors of whom many were household names among readers. Silverberg mentioned that one especially famous writer (my impression from other sources is that this was James Michener) was doing this solely for a separate income hidden from his wife that was used to maintain his mistress in a Manhatten apartment. How cool is that?
One writer and friend who I've heard speak on the subject a lot, Jerry Pournelle, always tells people to hold on to everything that gets rejected. There is no telling how valuable it might become if your later work catches on. When H. Beam Piper committed suicide the people who were asked to examine his files were astonished at how much unpublished material he had stowed away, much of it apparently never shown to any publisher.
