Marilyn Ross Books on CD. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

I guess the Ross estate has no right to do this.

The Ross CDs are also being offered at Barnes and Noble and Books a Million.

I  checked to see if the listings were removed from Amazon and discovered that the reader has changed." Kathryn Leigh-Scott is now listed in place of the Ronny Nordlinger. Unless this is a hoax, I would expect an official announcement soon.

As Uncle Roger would say, curiouser and curiouser...

And no, dom, the Ross estate has no right to do the CD because, even though he wrote the books, DCP holds the copyrights to them...

Perhaps an announcement will be made at The Paley Center.

A fan who attended the Paley Center event stated that Jim Pierson confirmed the release of the Ross audiobooks. This was reported today on social media.

G.

Fascinating. And I'm very happy for the fans who are actually interested in the CD. I'm not one of them because, as I've said many times, the main reason I continued to buy them after I happened to find/buy the first five after they were reissued in October of 1968 was for the cover photos - and I lost interest in reading them after I read about half of them. They have so little to do with the show, even going so far as to greatly contradict it with Barnabas out of his coffin and gallivanting all around in time periods when he should have still been chained in his coffin. Though I suppose, given the way Ross wrote, the books wouldn't have worked any other way...

Thanks for the info, Gothick. 

I personally think of this latest project as going beyond scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of marketing stuff related to the series. I'm surprised that they didn't start with the book BARNABAS COLLINS, given that other marketing strategies always start with the Barnabas character.

It's nice to see that some fans genuinely are excited about these, though.

G.

I'm with you guys. I bought them all back in the day. It's basically the same plot repeated 32 times. Some incredibly dimwitted ingenue comes to Collinwood, falls in love with Barnabas but only likes Quentin. She endures all sorts of nastiness from the villain of the piece, which usually culminates in burning one of 8,000 gothic mansions. Just when she's ready to give Barnabas a little something something, he tells her that that the parting has to be to preserve their love.Tears flow. Reset.

Uncle Roger, as much as I enjoyed buying and reading the novels back in the day, you're so right about the plots.  It's like all those current Hallmark movies.  Make sure to put the world "Love" in the title, cast a bunch of washed-up has-beens, the whole thing is he meets her and she meets him, he hates her and she hates him, he loves her and she loves him, they dance, they get married. 

Gerard

 Gerard, I know that I have posted this before but I think that it bears repeating. Mega DS fan Jeff Thompson did his doctoral thesis on the collected works of Marilyn Ross. Not just the DS books but the entire Ross library which got the author into The Guinness Book of Records.
I had two reactions when I learned this. First, I think that the faculty had to be pretty sure that he didn't buy a prewritten paper.  The second was Wow. He actually read all that, uh, stuff.

No mention of who would be reading them,

Amazon and Amazon Audible are two different things.
You don't even get Audible with Prime.
(I actually dropped Amazon a note about their viewings aren't great, but, the Audible is; they thanked me.)

Gildart Jackson is a good narrator (Gideon from 'Charmed').
(I'm actually currently listening to my 2nd or 3rd Audible book from him now!)

Patti

Wow, that was most informative. Thank you all. Now my teeth are chattering a bit at the price of a new paperback starting at $819.16! Yikes.

I guess, Uncle Roger, we must give "Ms. Ross" his due (some still don't know that he was a man and that was one of his pen names).  He pumped out tons of paper from his typewriter (and I'll bet it was a manual) back at the height of gothic novels back in the early/mid-seventies.  All the plots, whether they were DS or other-orientated, followed the same plot which you perfectly stated.  He made lotsa moola doing that because the audience was out there.

I worked in our local public library during that gothic novel height and it had an entire section just for the books, most paperbacks.  They all had the same cover:  a spooky mansion in the background with only one window lit while some young, pretty thing in a nightgown was running away in the dead of night.  By the late '70's, the gothic novel saw its collapse and in the '80's came the trend of "romance novels" about some young, buxom girl being wooed by a chesty, handsome, long-haired hero.  Fabio gained fame as a model for the book covers which always showed him, bare-chested, holding on to the heroine with bosoms barely kept inside.  It was common to make them period, especially in the 18th century, so she could suffer from some disease but eventually recover.  They had titles like "Love's Wildest Dreams" and some-such.  By the '90's, they had come and gone after flying off the shelf in bookstores and libraries.  On an episode of The Golden Girls, Blanche tried to write one.  She ended up with insomnia when she got "writer's block."

Gerard

Marilyn Ross was one of his many pen names. He had quite a few of them, depending on what genre the book was meant for. He used his own name, Dan Ross, mostly for westerns. His wife was named Marilyn, so he couldn't get sued for usurping someone's real name.
There's a historical story that I read somewhere where a deadline was approaching and the book wasn't finished. It needed another chapter. So he drove his car to the local post office and typed out the rest of the book in the back seat. Needless to say, he made his deadline.