Each month, we've been offering one or two of our recent 20th century releases as a $2.99 e-book, and the response has been tremendous. So we've been looking at ways to make more great books available at ultra low prices, which has resulted in the creation of a new series, Valancourt eClassics, which will parallel our print series of Valancourt Classics, focusing mainly on rare and hard-to-find Victorian and Edwardian literature at prices as low as $2.99 each.
In order to keep costs extremely low and allow us to price these at less than a cup of coffee (not exaggerating: I was formatting one of them the other day at a coffee shop and was charged $3.17+tip for a small iced coffee), these editions will generally not feature introductions and annotations; they will be carefully proofread texts, formatted and linked for optimal reading on the Kindle and other e-readers.
We've already published the first six titles in the series, including texts by Baron Corvo, Forrest Reid, and Richard Marsh. At first, we plan to focus primarily on current Valancourt authors, so expect to see more of Corvo, Reid, and Marsh, along with John Trevena/Ernest G. Henham, Bertram Mitford, Florence Marryat, Beverley Nichols, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Sheridan Le Fanu, and many others.
Fans of our print editions: don't panic! These are intended to supplement our print editions, not replace them. In most cases, these are out-of-copyright works for which dozens and dozens of low-quality print-on-demand paperbacks stolen from Google Books or Project Gutenberg exist, making it unlikely we'd be able to offer them as paperbacks. (To understand why, just go to Amazon and try to find the print editions we published of Richard Marsh's The Beetle, Bram Stoker's The Mystery of the Sea, Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean, or, in fact, any of our Victorian paperbacks. You can wade through pages and pages of crap and you'll never find them unless you know the ISBN. Thanks, Amazon.)
Are there any 19th or early 20th century authors whose books you'd love to see as $2.99 e-books? We look forward to hearing from readers what they think about this new project of ours and as always we welcome your input!
