(urth) OT: R.A. Lafferty estate sale

Gwern Branwen gwern0 at gmail.com
Mon Mar 7 13:48:01 PST 2011


On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 3:46 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Actually, what's really disgusting is that the high bid is $70K. 23
> novels, for ghod's sake.

Yeah, that is very high an asking fee for novels that never sold very
much. ($70k invested over the remaining ~70 years of the Lafferty
copyrights is *a lot* of money; I can't see how the Lafferty
copyrights could possibly compete. Some quick figuring with the net
present value approximations says that at 70k, to be a good
investment, the royalties/revenue would have to average like $4000 a
year every year.)

Presumably the target audience is Lafferty fans, or those seeking
status & prestige (kind of like how Encyclopedia Britannica or the New
York Times stay afloat).

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net



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