Check out these graphs from Mark Lawrence, and some additional discussion about it on r/Fantasy.
My own numbers, while low for a project like this, align fairly well with those trends. Interesting.
publishing
UNBOUND preorders available
StandardThe anthology I’m going to be appearing in–with Jim Butcher, Mary Robinette Kowal, Seanan McGuire, Joe Abercrombie, and Terry Brooks–is available for preorder. Check out the cover art and the table of contents.
My contribution is set during the events of The Way into Chaos. (Spoilers!)
Randomness for 9/13
Standard3) Ice-T will has some startling information for you in these (fake) SVU screencaps.
4) Most Heinous Stories of Role-Playing Games Gone Wrong.
5) Picture Yourself as a Stereotypical Man. “Stereotype threat” and academic achievement, or how to erase any statistical difference between whites and blacks / men and women.
oh god am i really going to write about the hugos again
StandardOkay. I am. A little bit, but only to float an idea.
Eric Flint (possibly aiming for a fan writing Hugo himself) wrote a long post called The Divergence between Popularity and Awards in Fantasy and Science Fiction, in which he argues that the award-winners of Ye Dayes of Olde (before the mid 80’s, I guess) were also the best sellers in the genre, but for the last 25+ years, that hasn’t been true.
He comes at this argument through an odd, winding route, attempting to magically divine the top sellers by seeing how many feet of books are modeled[1] on the shelves, using pre-Amazon measurements he took at B&N and Borders. (Kids, Borders was once a big chain bookstore.)
Which… fine. Let’s just pretend that this is a good measure of sales. Assuming that the big sellers of today are no longer necessarily getting the awards, why not?
Let’s put aside the idea that there’s some sort of left-wing cabal handing them out to their friends, because that idea is dumb. Let’s also put aside the idea that the standards for the awards are especially literary. To quote Abigail Nussbaum:
The truth is—and this is something that we’ve all lost sight of this year—no matter how much the puppies like to pretend otherwise, the Hugo is not a progressive, literary, elitist award. It’s a sentimental, middle-of-the-road, populist one.[2]
I basically agree with her, although I don’t feel the urge to “walk away in disgust” and am in no way disappointed. The Hugos are what they are, and I think that’s fine for the people voting for them.
But here’s my suggestion, tentatively offered: what if the Hugo voters/nominators aren’t the one’s who’ve changed these last few decades? I mean, sure, some folks age out, new folks come in, so they aren’t the same individuals. But what if they’re the same sort of novelty-seeking reader, preferring clever, flattering books to pretty much everything else?
Because that would mean that the bulk of the readership now are the sorts of readers who don’t care about fandom or voting for Awards. Who have maybe sampled a few award-winners and found them not to their taste. They’re the people who came into the genre through Sword of Shannara, because it was the first fantasy to hit the NYTimes list, through STAR WARS and dozens of other action/adventure-with-ray-guns movies that sold millions of tickets, through D&D novels like Dragonlance, or through shoot-em-up video games.
Maybe the award hasn’t changed very much, but the readership now suddenly includes huge masses of people who are looking for Hollywood-style entertainment, with exaggerated movie characterization and a huge third act full of Big Confrontation.
Obviously, some Hugo voters enjoy that sort of thing, too. If they didn’t, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY wouldn’t have won this year. They may not think R.A. Salvatore’s work deserves an award, but they’ll read it and enjoy it. But the few thousand people involved in the Hugos are not enough to fill out the readership of someone like Jim Butcher or Robin Hobb. That’s a whole other group.
Flint’s post seems to suggest that the awards seem to have moved away from the influential big sellers, and he’s not sure why[3]. I would say that science fiction and fantasy have become large markets with a readership that’s less insular. It has more “casuals” to steal a gaming term. Those are the people who are blowing up the sales of the books at the “basic entertainment” end of the spectrum.
That’s a good thing.
It might seem funny at this point for me to say, once again, that I’m not all that interested in the Hugo Awards. I’m really not, although I’m very interested in selling large numbers of books [4]. The divergence between what sells in large numbers and what wins popular awards is an interesting data point.
[1] Modeling: When bookstores make a special effort to always have an author’s books on the shelf. A copy of The Two Towers sells, and a new one is ordered instantly. That’s a good place for an author to be.
[2] I found her writeup in this io9 summary of Hugo articles.
[3] Do the people who give out the Edgars worry that the books winning awards aren’t on the bestseller lists?
[4] Check out my books. I’ve got sample chapters for you and everything.
It only gets harder once you’re published (mostly)
StandardSome days ago, Chuck Wendig wrote a blog post about how writing books gets harder after you get published, not easier as some people seem to think. Yesterday, Clarke Award winner Tricia Sullivan wrote about breaking in and then fighting to stay in.
I used to say all the time that it’s easier to break in than to stay in, and Wendig and Sullivan have different paths. Wendig has been growing his readership and having success. Sullivan’s experience is closer to mine: struggling to find a substantial readership and to get her work out there, although she’s been doing it longer and has that award on her mantel.
I have ten books out, and on Tuesday I passed 30K words on book 11. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get a NY publishing contract for this one, so the backlist bump will hit my self-published work.
And Chuck’s right: I still have all the same insecurities and doubts about the work I’m doing. Worse, actually, is that I sometimes feel that I’ve lost a certain attitude I had when I wrote Child of Fire. I was pretty frustrated when I wrote that book, and I attacked it with an attitude of Fuck it. I’m going to do what I want.
I’m still doing what I want, but the fuck it doesn’t have the same bite. Why? Because that publishing contract was a tremendous relief. I didn’t celebrate it by jumping around and cheering; I flopped into a chair and sighed. I haven’t wasted my life after all.
It’s easy to forget that feeling as the years go by. Even if I never make the midlist and die in obscurity, at least one professional in the field thought my work was worthwhile. Before I was published, I really wanted that. Afterwards, I learned that it’s not enough. It’s something–something good–but it’s just the start.
Guest post for Jim C. Hines, re: replacing willpower and discipline with apps
StandardJust a quick note that I wrote up a blog post for Jim C. Hines’s space, about apps people use to block the internet while they work.
Jim is leaving his day job soon, and a few of us are writing about living the life without other employment. Like a lot of writers, I produced less when I first went “full time” (not that I was ever full time) until I worked out a new system that replaced my rigidly structured days. Check it out.
Authors Acting Badass in their Photos
StandardThis Time article about how “lady authors” were told to promote their work (“do a workout in a bikini”) reminded me of How to Pose like a Man, in which a female author decided to cross the gender divide in author photos and pose the way male authors do.
Except the way male authors pose is mostly embarrassing.
Not all of them. Many try to come across as basically reasonable people: they’re smiling or thoughtful and posed like they’re at their ease. They’re not trying to come across like MRAs desperate to convince the world that they’re “alphas”.
To be clear, I’m not saying the authors are MRA types, just that they have unfortunate author photos. And author photos are tough. Believe me, I know. When it was time for mine, we took hundreds of pictures trying to find something that wasn’t ridiculous and horrible. So I know how it feels to look at a roll of film and go for the least worst.
Even so, when a camera is pointed at a dude, too many try to look grim and dour, as though they’re the badass action heroes they see in the movies. And I can’t help but wonder “What impression do they think they’re giving with this picture?” Because it’s not “Badass action hero.”
Originally, this post contained a bunch of actual po-faced author photos, but I didn’t like singling anyone out for mockery, even if they’re bestsellers, or if they’d passed away. Instead I’ll just say this, generally, to male authors getting their picture taken:
Don’t be afraid to smile.
Don’t want to smile? Try for “thoughtful” instead.
Don’t try to look like you’re an action hero yourself, even if you write about them.
And finally:
By the way, here’s my author photo: No kidding, this is the least worst, if you can believe it.
When you’ve taken more than 600 photos and hated them all, then said “Fuck it. I’m done.” That’s when you get one almost-acceptable one
Linda Nagata says it’s okay to quit writing
StandardAnd I agree. A quote from her post[1] about it:
Quit if you need to. That’s my advice. And I can say that without hypocrisy, because I did it. I quit. Not utterly, and certainly not irrevocably, but I basically walked away from the game for ten years.
The reasons were the usual: money, time, and family. I had never made any reasonable amount of money from writing, so I was working full time, my kids were teens (not an easy time of life), my parents were elderly with issues of their own, my husband was working more than full time, and all those long years spent trying to create some sort of a writing career had begun to seem like a joke. Writing was making me miserable. So I quit. Given that I had only a few spare hours in any day, it was more important to me to spend those hours on my family than on writing. It was as simple as that. We all make choices. That was mine and I don’t regret it.
I walked away, too. I’d been struggling and failing for many years, and I had promised my wife I would go back to school and get an MA in something so I could get a real job when my agent offered to take me on. I returned my GRE study guide to the library and started revising Child of Fire.
There are sacrifices that have to be made, and sometimes the rewards are just not worth it.
Occasionally I’ll see someone online say “I’d KILL to write like you!” to an author, and that always seems weird. You’d kill someone? Steal years from someone else’s life? Because that seems like the easy way out.
Writing takes dedication. It takes hours from your week and years from your life. I’ve sacrifices all sorts of things for writing, from sleep to exercise to a high-paying career, and you know what I have to show for it? Books about a nearsighted faux hoplite who sings like Tom Waits, an ex-con armed with a magic piece of paper, and a genius gorilla in a fucking zoot suit.
Is that worth it? If I had skipped all that and gone to law school, could I have spent my years helping people who need it or earning enough to take my wife on trips? Should I have? Well, I haven’t stopped writing, that’s for sure. I’m still trying to get this right.
Is that the right choice for everyone? Of course not. There may come a time when I quit writing all together, if circumstances warrant it.
So don’t sweat it if you’re a writer who decides to stop writing, and don’t pressure people to keep going when they feel they need to stop.
[1] Like political Military SF? She has a new book out today.
Tor’s Dumb Letter
Standard
A brief history: For years, Tor editor Jim Frenkel was widely known as a serial sexual harasser at conventions. What was done about it? Not much, for a very long time. Eventually, he was encouraged to resign after the public outcry became too much, which was announced with typical corporate blandness.
Last year, Tor contracts manager Sean Fodera publicly attacked one of Tor’s authors, Mary Robinette Kowal, in a typically gross and sexist way. He later apologized, in a half-assed way, and she graciously accepted.
In May of this year, on her personal Facebook page, Irene Gallo (Creative Director at Tor Books) described a group of extreme right wings fans who call themselves “Sad Puppies” as extreme right wing fans. She also described a group of fan who follow a neo-Nazi (he denies the label even though he fits it) who call themselves “Rabid Puppies” as neo-Nazis. That neo-Nazi screencapped her remark and filed it away so he could release it as the Nebula Awards were given out, to distract people from the award winning books.
Did Tor CEO Tom Doherty release a letter apologizing publicly for Frenkel’s or Fodera’s behavior, while insisting that they should have been smarter about separating the personal from the professional? Of course not. For one thing, Frenkel’s shitty behavior happened while he was representing Tor Books at public events. For another, they were dudes and their victims were women. Continue reading
Author attracts a dozen one-star reviews by blowing his stack over one
StandardNo author likes to see a one-star review, but the truth is that they’re a good sign for some books.
However, as mentioned previously, some authors really don’t deal well with rejection.
I’m an indie author. I work over 100 hours a week to get my books to succeed so that I don’t have to be a slave anymore. This review is not good for my business, so unless your desire is to ruin my dreams, it would mean a great deal if you could remove this review from my work and forget about it. But if it’s your desire to hurt me financially and ruin my business, then it’s understandable why you would post such a harmful review.
and
For someone to leave such a toxic review on a book that contains so much gnosis, that people had to die in order to learn in the past, is an utter disgrace to the human condition.
and
Someone that leaves 1 star reviews on someone’s work who didn’t wrong them, who they’ve never met, that’s IS THE MEASURE OF A BAD PERSON.
and one more
NONE of you have any more or less rights than anyone at the NYT. To me, you’re more important than the people that are bought off at the NYT. Or did you think Hilary Clinton could just write a bestseller on her own? Nevertheless, wait till the NYT tries me. I’ll start NAMING NAMES. See what you don’t understand is my experience with the dark occultists of this world that are destroying you from within. You think ToO is some pathetic little fantasy from an author with a God complex. It’s not. It’s an allegorical metaphor for what’s going on because I can’t come out and speak without being in serious danger…
And on and on. It’s quite the train wreck, and he does it in response to other comments as well.
But what he doesn’t understand is that a few one-star reviews mixed in with a bunch of five-stars (and I don’t even want to think about how he got those) legitimizes those positive reviews. Without a few slams, the praise seems like it came from friends, family, and co-workers (or worse, was bought and paid for). He should WANT some dings.
Instead, he’s going on about “dark occultists” and being attacked, which says everything that needs saying about him, I guess.