Homage to the Ace Double

Like me, they were born in 1952. Unlike me, they died in 1978, though in truth I don’t remembering seeing them after I got out of high school in 1970. The Ace Doubles were two short novels in a single mass-market paperback volume. Back when I was in high school 1966-1970, they cost 60c, and I usually bought them at the long-gone Arcade Bookshop, which was in the basement of the strip mall at Harlen and Foster Avenues in Chicago, almost under the Walgreen’s there. Some were westerns. Some were mysteries. But I think most were SF. Here’s a list.

I bought a lot of them. I have two left. My favorite will always be Destination Saturn by David Grinnell and Lin Carter, 1967. Its bookmate, Invader on my Back, by Philip E. High, was…so-so. Some of the others I judged as unreadable and threw away; a lot of them just fell apart after I read them a few more times. I’m sure I loaned several to friends and forgot to ask for their return. It doesn’t matter. Once I cleaned out all the SF in my local public library, the Doubles got most of my money and attention. They definitely shaped my early understanding and appreciation of SF. They were not great fiction, but that didn’t matter to me because as a high-school freshman I had very little to compare them to. When I was 14 or 15, they were just dazzling. The covers were sometimes better than the novels themselves, especially after I was older and had read a lot more of much better SF. (The above cover is a Kelly Freas.)

So. Zoom forward from 1971 to 2011. I launched the drumlins stories in 2002, with “Drumlin Boiler” in IASFM. I had begun The Everything Machine in 2006, but didn’t finish it for another 19 years. (Long story, and the long story is not the novel, heh.) I had a concept for a drumlins novel that didn’t have to be monumental. I offered my good friend and author Jim Strickland a chance to write a drumlins novel of his own. At some point in 2011, we got the idea of publishing them together, both in a single volume.

Then it hit me: We could publish a double SF novel as homage to the Ace Doubles. How? It’s called tête-bêche, which is French for “head-to-tail.” The two novels are published back-to-back, but one is upside-down with respect to the other. Both have covers. The best way to explain this is simply to show you the tête-bêche cover image we used for our double:

The cover was the easy part. It was much tougher to build a complete PDF of the text with half the book upside-down with respect to the other, and pages in reverse order. Jim figured it out, and the body PDF happened.

I published the paperback on Lightning Source (now owned by Ingram) and a few copies were sold before they canceled the book for lack of sales. However, we knew that the ebook market was catching fire, so we (mostly Jim) created an ebook edition for Kindle, which was published in April 2011. I’ve published most of my SF books in both ebook and paperback editions, but 95% of my sales have been ebooks, even back in the teens. So I wasn’t in a huge hurry to publish the paperback double on Amazon. I never expected to sell hundreds of copies. But I wanted to publish a tête-bêche paperback volume in honor of the cheap SF books I cut my teeth on when I was a high schooler. Cheap, but novel in their way (heh) and in my opinion, a damned clever format.

Alas, as I found this morning, Amazon won’t accept the paperback for publication. They say they don’t publish “flip books.” Huh? My understanding of flip books is that they’re a way of animating images on paper by drawing images that change slightly on each successive page of a book. You flip through a flip book by placing your thumb on the edge of the book, and pressing the book so that the pages appear rapidly, in sequence, animating the image. The only detail I got about the refusal is that parts of the book (almost half of it, in fact,) are upside-down. Well, yeah—that’s what tête-bêche books are: Books that are actually two separate blocks of text upside-down with respect to one another, and covers on both sides of the book.

So where do we go from here? I’m not sure. My first impulse is to try Lulu.com. I have an account there and published several early books there, including the Carl & Jerry series, which are now on Kindle as paperbacks. I’ll post an entry here if Lulu accepts the book, or if I have to look further and finally find a place willing to sell it onesy-twosy.

Am I nuts? No. I understand completely that the ebook edition of the double novel is what people will buy. But the Ace Doubles left a mark on me, and I’m honoring them with the tête-bêche paperback of Drumlin Circus and On Gossamer Wings. I will sell a few—and these days paperbacks are useful to wave around at convention huckster tables or panels, even if what people end up buying are the ebooks. Watch this space—I’ve gone too far with the project to stop now.