Authors 'publish from grave'
Great authors continue to have a strong impact long after their deaths, especially when their families employ good estate managers.
Readers last week welcomed a new Hercule Poirot mystery into the fold, the first new novel in the Agatha Christie series since 1975's Curtain.
Taking a path now well-trodden by the Margaret Mitchell estate, the Christie family and the Agatha Christie company gave permission for novelist Sophie Hannah to pick up the well-loved character.
Good intellectual property management is a hot topic for writers, especially once the dollars start rolling in.
It's not uncommon for authors to move the copyright for their novels into a company, allowing them to carry over early losses to future financial years when they are hopefully drawing in tidier revenues.
In a similar vein to the Christies, the late Roald Dahl's estate managers have also taken another step in the property management sphere, releasing a never-published chapter of the much-loved classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The new Willy Wonka chapter is titled The Vanilla Fudge Room and was released about three weeks ago ahead of this month's 50th anniversary of the children's adventure.
Dahl's editor had taken a red pen to the manuscript, culling 10 winners to five. The Roald Dahl Nominee company takes a multifaceted approach to the Dahl brand, also celebrating the author's September 13, 1916, birth with its annual Roald Dahl Day celebration last Saturday.
Unsurprisingly, so-called posthumous brand management requires buy-in from authors before their deaths, as the creators set their own visions for the future.
Man Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood, 74, is a case in point of a writer taking a long-term view.
The Blind Assassin author's next novel is not Stone Mattress, her short story collection due out next month, but rather an untitled manuscript which will be locked up for 100 years.
Atwood is headlining The Future Library project, an initiative to commission a new work each year until 2114.
The high-profile Canadian's work will be displayed alongside others in a special room at Deichmanske public library in Norway from 2018.
It's an interesting experiment in building buzz, likely to ensure continued focus on her work long after her death.
