Beau L'Amour and the Challenge of Keeping Louis' Legacy Alive

 

Beau L'Amour:

           The great challenge following my Dad’s death was reorganizing how we did business.  For a long time he had been creating several new works a year and he was actively promoting them.  That created a great deal of energy going forward and it provided a great deal of momentum for his business.  That effort was backed by an organization at Bantam that was relatively unchanged since the early 1960s … people came and went but the transitions were smooth and the “institutional memory” uninterrupted.

           My job, as I saw it, was to keep the production of new titles (without which you are dead in the book business) going as long as possible and to organize our “back list.”  The back list is a book business term for your catalog or library of previously published books.  Although many writers have written more titles, Louis is remarkable in that all of his are still in print … that means more active titles than nearly any other author.  Basically, I needed to find a way to “go long” … creating new books into the future, and I needed to “go wide” … getting all the books in our back list to support each other better.


           Bantam was useful in this but their abilities are limited.  Any editor (editors do not just edit books, they act as the writer’s representative at the publishing house) could hardly become familiar with all of Louis’s work.  Few remained in their jobs long enough to even read them all, let alone to learn all the deals and the details of what we had done businesswise.  On top of that, personnel turnover increased in the 1990s making the situation more chaotic.

           I had been educated as a film maker but had gone to art school, so I was well versed in the language of painters and writers.  I’d been adapting our Audio Dramas and working on research and editing for a few years before dad passed away and both working with the writers and writing some of those myself made me very aware of how to work with Dad’s material both as an editor and in how to present it to the world.

           Without Louis himself to promote the work (important not only to fans but to book stores and wholesalers) we needed to stay very active.  We needed new titles, projects like the Graphic Novel (an idea I pushed for 10 years before it happened), and the Audios.  The book covers needed to be redesigned to be new and fresh for bookstores but also be identifiable so that long time readers would have a chance of recognizing which stories they had already read and which they hadn’t, same with the copy on the back.  Both art and copy also needed be changed to attract new readers.

           To discover a newer, younger, audience, I built a program that gave nearly a million Louis L’Amour books to the US Armed Forces and reformatted our Audio Dramas for radio, creating a syndicate of over 200 stations in the mid 1990s.  We also built the Louis L’Amour Western Magazine.  It was a wonderful opportunity for new writers but then we closed it down when the division was sold off because it looked like we wouldn’t have as much control with a new owner.  All in all we had to work twice as hard and we still couldn't replace my Dad!


           Just when we thought we were getting a handle on everything the recession hit and there was a huge reorganization at Bantam/Random House.  Suddenly, nearly every relationship we had was gone.  The new situation has it’s upside, in that the new people are willing to try things the old guard weren’t, but most of our friends from over 30 years have left.

           I’m always nervous to talk too much about future plans because then people are asking about the stuff constantly; by the time I have it ready they are burned out because they have been keyed up from expecting it for so long.  I have stopped commenting on the biography (yet here I am talking about it again!) because I decided Louis’s popularity was strong enough to try some other projects first, things that made it feel like Dad was still alive rather than the “wrapped up” tone a biography will bring to his career.  The project is progressing well in the research and archiving phase.  Some of the material is already leaking out … like the pictures that have been appearing on Facebook and Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures which is what I like to call a “Professional” biography.

           We also continue to produce two to four Audio Books a year as Single Voice Readings.  We only work out the schedule a few titles at a time so there is no way for me to tell individuals when their favorites are coming out. Our most recent audio drama is The Diamond of Jeru which was completed in 2015.

           Our new project is Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures which has been created to release some of Dad's more unconventional manuscripts from the family archive. It will include the story behind the story of many unfinished works as well as novels that traditional fans will know and love.