Specifically Spec Fic

Score one for our side!

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 03:27:58 GMT

The Sunday Washington Post magazine has a nice one-page feature called "First Person Singular" where each week a DC-area person talks about some aspect of his or her life. This week it's Virginia Democratic Senator Jim Webb, who starts out by saying, "The most disciplined thing I've ever done in my life is probably the act of writing a book — and novels are harder than nonfiction."

For a guy who wrested a Senate seat back from Republicans in a state so red it's practically blushing, that's quite a nice compliment to writers. There's some stuff on the how-I-finally-got-published logistics in the middle, along with some nice metaphors on politics ("dancing with a bear") and then he closes with, ". . . nothing gives me greater pleasure than to write something that I believe is really good. Writing is what I will always do, no matter what. My mind always writes. You never stop writing if you're a writer."

Here, here!

Writing outside the box?

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:03:01 GMT

GalleyCat had an item about William Gibson that includes a video of an interview. Gibson, credited by many with inventing cyberpunk, says that he thinks all science fiction stories are really about the here and now—or at least their authors' here and now. That makes Neuromancer "about" the 80's. Gibson credits September 11 with pushing away from writing science fiction but it seems to me that he was moving in that direction all by himself before that.

I think there's something in the idea that all fiction is of its time, not so much because writers can imagine anything other than their own time, but because readers can't relate to anything that is so strange that it simply won't fit into their frame of reference. Science fiction readers have a much bigger frame than most folks, but they still have one.

A different approach

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:23:59 GMT

This morning's Washington Post had an interesting article about a new "product" called Bit o' Lit. It's basically a new approach to marketing books—create "magazines," sized for easy reading on subway trains, that contain book excerpts. The magazines are free and are subsidized by the book publishers.

Here's a paragraph from the website that explains the Bit o' Lit philosophy:

We believe that while readers support the idea of reading new books, in practice, they are hesitant to risk their time and money on untested books or authors. This is undeniably why there were no new authors among the thirty bestselling books last year.

It sounds like a cool idea to me! I just hope they can make a go of it. They may be overly optimistic as it sounds from the Post article like it's all one woman's doing.

Equal time

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:25:34 GMT

Having blogged about the Kindle so much lately, I feel a need to give equal time to other e-readers. One I had mentioned ages ago when I first started looking at e-readers is the iLiad by iRex. It sounds like it might well turn out to be the betamax of e-readers—technically superior but it never catches on. For one thing, it's even more expensive than the Kindle, either $600 or $700 depending on the model. Whoa!

I also found this article and video of an e-book prototype developed by a couple of university research departments. It's different because it has two screens. You can open it like a book and see two facing pages, or you can detach the halves and have two separate screens if you want to display two documents at once. And you can mimic the page turning action of a paper book instead of pressing buttons to advance the screen. This model's developers seem to have spent the most time on the matching the paper-book reader experience to new technology, but what I'm not sure of is how much of that experience is really necessary. If young people are already used to a new experience why work at perpetuating the old one? The article mentions an earlier (2004) commercial two-screen effort by Toshiba that went nowhere.

But what it may come down to is, it's easier to see gasoline-burning cars if you already have a bunch of gas stations everywhere people need them. In the e-book reader arena, Amazon has a decided edge.

How did I miss this?

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:37:34 GMT

Newsweek ran a cover story on the Kindle back in November of last year. I tripped over it doing a Google search. It was an excellent article! It mentioned earlier e-book attempts, and it also talked about the reading experience. The article describes the trance-like state induced by a good book as the story taking the reader "down the rabbit hole," a nice spec fic allusion.

I'm starting to think the Kindle could really make a difference! One thing the article makes clear is that unlike some earlier book readers, the Kindle doesn't make you chose between a book and the web. This thing is designed for a web generation. It could restore reading novels for entertainment to the level of popularity it enjoyed in earlier times just by making it easier to do.

Now if only they can get the price down sometime soon....

Publicity Blog!

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:41:32 GMT

I noticed on GalleyCat today, an interview with by Yen Chiong , Assistant Director of Publicity at Viking and Penguin, and author of The Book Publicity Blog. The interviewer asked her about social networking sites, and she backed FaceBook as the likely winner for the near future.

Most of the posts seem to be about how to use technology effectively in getting the word out about specific books. It looks like a useful blog for anyone who needs to keep up with the latest trends in publicizing books. Most of the posts are short—just like this one!

From the Silk Road to the Entertainment Highway

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:26:15 GMT

Of all the places in the world, I would not have thought of China as a place for e-book publishing, but it has happened, in a way. NPR is running a series on various aspects of life in modern China. This morning's installment centered on a new kind of "Cultural Revolution." Writers in China are posting novels to the web on a site that charges readers by the chapter. It's China, so it's only 2 cents a chapter! Still, at least the writer gets a cut.

It doesn't sound like Henry James for the 21st Century, but more like Dickens, serializing popular stories for an avid public. The website featured a snippet by an author who writes under the name Fu Tian. Her books is an historical novel that sounded more like a Chinese The Princess Diaries than anything else. But in China, she's so popular, the website provider actually pays her health benefits—and some of the Internet e-books have been published in print or made into movies.

As China is 1/5 of the world's population, I find this an encouraging sign for the future. Someone is still reading!

Notting Hill meets 84 Charing Cross Road

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:24:21 GMT

A recent article on The Guardian titled "Chick lit author on Dream Street with literary prize" describes the Melissa Nathan Award for comedy romance, which was recently won by novelist Lisa Jewell for her book 31 Dream Street. To quote the article, "The book tells the story of the burgeoning love between a misfit, failed poet and his neighbour, who has for years been watching him and his string of unusual tenants from her house across the street."

The article quotes Jewell as saying, "The award is definitely something the genre needs, and more importantly is something the reader needs. People say 'chick lit' and what they mean is 'crap'."

I'm sure most spec fic writers could empathize. And unlike the Hugo, which is nice but comes with just a statue, this award comes with £5,000 (about $10,000 USD, these days). Not that I'm sneering at the Hugo, but extra bucks to go along with the honor never hurts.

A new kind of tool?

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:54:01 GMT

Rcently, scottedelman posted an entry that illustrated the content of one his stories using Wordle. It was neat! Wordle makes a word cloud from whatever text you paste in, which shows you graphically which words occur most often (by default, it ignores "of," "the," "and," etc.).

It looked like a fun thing to try, so I pasted in one of my stories (click on it to get the image larger):

This story was about a little girl named (your guessed it!) Aveline.

Next I pasted in a 65,000 word YA urban fantasy about a 16-year-old named Jason. I was impressed Wordle didn't choke on that amount of text! Here's what I got from that one:

If you look, you'll see that Jason's name appears only in small type near the top right hand corner. The difference was that the novel was in first person and the short story was in third. I had not realized how important the Marjani and Esi subplot was to Jason's story until I saw the size of their names.

What a neat tool!

[note: the full text of Aveline's Price is posted on my website if you want to read it.]

Kindred spirits

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 19:00:27 GMT

I was watching some of the extra stuff that comes on the DVD for the Golden Compass, (a movie I enjoyed a lot) and I heard Phillip Pullman say that as he was working on the story, at one point he realized that because it was a fantasy he could do anything he wanted to do.

I could identify! I find fantasy a very liberating genre to work in, even more than science fiction. I also thought it was interesting that Pullman wrote not just YA but actually children's books. There was a tremendous fuss in the UK when The Amber Spyglass became the first children's book to win the Whitbread Prize. It also won the Whitbread for best Children's Book that year, so it's not like they were saying it wasn't a children's book.

Silver linings

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:59:44 GMT

It's been a few weeks so it's not really news, but I had a great time at Balticon this year. I went to some excellent panels, a great reading, and even lucked into a really nice room. There was one bad thing that happened; my husband fell on his face in the con suite, trying to navigate his way around the old Studebaker they keep at the back of that room. He looked terrible the next day—just as if I had hit him with a baseball bat!

The silver lining to that dark cloud was that while I was consoling him in the bar, our friend scottedelman came in. We invited him to sit down, which he did, announcing as he pulled out his chair, "I'm supposed to meet Connie" (Scott knows everyone!). Sure enough, five minutes later Connie Willis came in from her autographing session and joined us for some lemonade and conversation.

My husband asked if Connie's husband had known she was a writer when he married her (Charlie himself has never recovered from the shock). Connie said they had gotten that straight before they married, and then she talked about her early days getting started, about how long it had taken her to sell her first story. When I explained how I had met scottedelman through the writer's group he helped to found, she talked about her own group. We had similar stories about our first group meeting where we weren't sure if the group was a cover for axe murderers or other nefarious crimes! It was a magical 45 minutes.

I've posted my Balticon photos here, but I'm including the one of us and Connie in this entry.

More on chickens and eggs

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:53:26 GMT

An article on CNN titled "Are we spell-bound by e-books?" puts forth the notion of a "magic scroll"—an e-book reader with all the books you could ever want to read in one place. The article recaps the history of past devices (Sony, iLiad, etc.) and decides the Kindle is the closest yet to the magic scroll—close but no cigar.

CNN reporter Cherise Fong concludes that e-books won't succeed until they are plentiful, which of course puts the book reader in the classic chicken/egg conundrum. Publishers won't publish e-books until there's an established base of people with book readers, but consumers won't buy e-book readers until there's a big library of e-books available.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon has no doubts. Here's quote from the article: In response to the lingering fetish for the printed page, Bezos sighed: "I'm sure people loved their horses too, but you're not going to keep riding a horse to work."

A related post on GalleyCat describes author M. David Hornbuckle chatting with his small-press publisher about his career plan. The post references a subscription-only article but also includes a quote from Hornbuckle:

"A few weeks after I submitted my novella to Cantarabooks ... they offered me a contract to publish it as an e-book, sold exclusively on their Web site as a PDF file. The contract specifies that they will offer me a paperback contract once the e-book sells above a certain threshold, indicating that my readership is wide enough to justify the cost of printing. The terms are very generous; because of the e-book format, they have little overhead, and I make a 40 percent royalty on all sales."

This is the first time I've seen an e-book publisher offering this kind of deal. In a way, it makes a lot of sense—it shifts the risk to the author instead of to the publisher. Although I'm not sure "risk" is the right term in this case. I suppose it depends on how desperate (or self-confident) the author is.

Speaking of terminology, I think they could come up with a better term than "reader." I am the reader, dammit, not the Kindle or the Sony. How about making up something new?

Seasonal update

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:42:04 GMT

We had a horrendous and very sudden thunderstorm yesterday afternoon. Plus, kids are home from college, and the public schools are finally closing. That must mean it's summer!

Ergo, I have updated my website with my quarterly update. Check it out!

Disheartening scam

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:01:00 GMT

The SFWA blog had an alert that someone had posted a scam writing contest in their name. The entry for this bogus contest was still up on Flixer and promised that all contest winners would have their stories published in a Random House book titled Asimovs of the Future.

Cash prizes were to be awarded as follows:

1st Place: $10,000
2nd Place: $5,000
3rd Place: $2,000
10 Honorary Mentions: $1000

The instructions were very precise as to word length and how to submit the e-mail entry, and actually resembled an actual contest, but a few things would tip off the more experienced contest entrants.

First off, this is a short story contest, and the first place prize is $10,000. The other prizes equal $17,000. Way too much money to be legit!

But what gives me pause is, why did this slime ball try to pull this off? Assuming he was in it for the money, he must have thought he could somehow cash a boatload of $10 checks made out to SFWA. Okay, so he makes a rubber stamp that says SFWA and opens an account as the president of the Society of Fresh Water Aquarium-owners. Still, he must have thought that enough people would send him $10 to make it worth his while.

What this means is that while there aren't enough people reading science fiction short stories to keep more than a dozen paying markets going (and many of them are barely paying) there are enough people writing science fiction to make it worth the risk of going to the slammer to try to pull this scam off.

Sigh.

Which came first?

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 02:09:13 GMT

I had problems with the download of the St. Martin's mysteries that I mentioned in yesterday's post. Still, between the Tor free downloads and the set I got through John Scalzi's efforts to get eligible Hugo voters copies of almost all the Hugo-nominated books, I now have a boatload of free e-books.

I have so far read only one! It's a pain to have to read on my laptop or my home PC. I'm seriously thinking of looking at a Kindle. Which leads me to the subject line of today's post: in the e-books and reader situation, which is the chicken and which is the egg? Well, not an entirely appropriate simile because for me, e-books definitely came first. But, if you need a reader to comfortably read e-books, then are all these free e-books an effort to lure me into buying the print versions of the books (or possibly other books by that author), or are they really a hidden inducement to buy the reader?

More on e-books as chum

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:55:07 GMT

If you don't know the term "chum," in this context it refers to the bait (such as fish eggs) that fishermen toss on the surface of the water to get fish to bite.

In this case, the fisherman is St. Martin's Press. Until midnight tonight, they are offering free PDF downloads of the first two books in Julia Spencer-Fleming's mystery series featuring Adirondack police chief Russ Van Alstyne and Rev. Clare Fergusson. The two books are In the Bleak Midwinter and A Fountain Filled With Blood. Ms. Spencer-Fleming's work is being strew upon the waters because she has a new book called I Shall Not Want, and they want you, like the fish, to bite.

GalleyCat had a mention of it today—just in time. I signed up based on the first book's title, which I thought sounded great for a mystery.

Is there a reason this is a "small press"?

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:06:21 GMT

One of the new forums on the PPW website had a notice that someone has started a small press that specializes in "Christian fantasy and science fiction." Now there's a niche market for you! There are people who would consider that genre an oxymoron. On the other side of the fences are the folks who would call it redundant. To each his own, I say.

The company is called Marcher Lord Press and their guidelines for writers explain their requirements. A book has to have a Christian worldview before they'll be interested in it, and (more surprisingly) they aren't looking for YA.

They also have a very different business model from a large publisher:

". . . Marcher Lord Press offers no author advances. None. Authors receive a much higher royalty rate, but get nothing in advance. (Neither do they pay—Marcher Lord Press is not a vanity press or self-publishing entity.)"

They go on to say that their business plan calls for only online sales. If you're at all interested, you should check it out.

E-books, the marketing plan

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 02:07:10 GMT

The New York Times had an interesting piece by Paul Krugman the other day. He described technology guru Esther Dyson's prediction from 1994 that the ease with which digital content can be copied will force some businesses to sell or even give away their "creative" products—software, music, movies, and books. Dyson's idea was that businesses would make their money from selling related products or services, and her prime example was the Grateful Dead, the band who let people tape their live concerts but then sold them tee shirts and more concert tickets.

Krugman jumps over any question of reader acceptance of e-books and foresees this scenario applying to their publication:

"Right now, publishers make as much from a Kindle download as they do from the sale of a physical book. But the experience of the music industry suggests that this won’t last: once digital downloads of books become standard, it will be hard for publishers to keep charging traditional prices."

I'm not sure I buy that e-books correlate to print books the way that downloaded music correlates to CDs. I think there is too much difference in the user interface for that. But there are similarities. Krugman takes it one step further:

"Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors’ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it’s good enough for me."

Now that I just don't see. For one thing, a lot of good authors are lousy readers. For another, it's too expensive to do. Look at how few authors do book tours now.

I don't think it's the Grateful Dead who provide the business model for the Internet age but rather Google—give away the product but sell ads. So instead of Annie Proulx's selling tickets to her reading of The Shipping News, her publisher will post it on the web and sell ads to cruise lines, chocolate manufacturers, and family counseling services.

Hey, buddy, got an agent?

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:17:55 GMT

If you write spec fic, and you've been on the great agent hunt, there's fresh game afoot. The ever-useful Pikes Peak Writers list serve reported that there is a new agent out there and she handles science fiction (and YA, too, if you write that). The list serve cited a blog entry interviewing new agent Rachel Downes of the Caren Johnson Literary Agency. Caren Johnson represents fantasy authors, too, so the agency seems reasonably spec fic-friendly.

It looks like they only take e-queries; they even have their own online form.

How much does genius buy you?

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 15:44:00 GMT

An item on GalleyCat reports that Harlan Ellison is putting a bunch of his work on E-Reads. The item also includes a video trailer for a movie about Ellison called "Dreams with Sharp Teeth" that's coming out this summer.

Watching the video brought back memories of hearing about (and thanks to YouTube, in one recent case, seeing) Harlan Ellison's past escapades. He has for decades been the "bad boy of science fiction." Yes, he's a great writer; yes, his work has been to some extent ignored by the mainstream because he worked in spec fic (even though he gets mad if people call him a science fiction writer); yes, he is, in fact, a genius. Equally clear is that his ego shines through his public performances every bit as much as his talent shines through his work.

I don't buy the argument that being a genius gives you the latitude to behave like a jerk. It's not like every great writer does. Look at Neil Gaiman, Joe Haldeman, Nancy Kress, and Connie Willis—all known for unfailing politeness to fans and fellow writers as well as the excellence of their prose.

Maybe Harlan Ellison is just insecure where they are not.

Maybe it's a prize for perseverance, too?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:30:20 GMT

The Guardian had an interesting article about Joanna Kavenna winning the Orange New Writer Award. Her novel Inglorious is by no means spec fic, but I liked what the author had to say about the seven novels (or in a different article, 13) she wrote before she got this one published: "I see it as an apprenticeship, rather than thinking I squandered 10 years."

I think that speaks to the importance of optimism as a trait that furthers one's goals. I also liked her comment on the chick-lit label: "I don't understand what chick-lit means, and to a degree it's just used to dismiss quite a lot of writing by women. ...It's a blanket term that renders a wide variety of literature frivolous. It's used either to dismiss the writing or to avoid thinking about it."

Considering that the related Orange Broadband Prize, the British award for the best English-language novel published in the UK and written by a woman, exists because some people felt that women writers weren't getting enough recognition, it's an interesting comment. I don't know of such an award in the US. Does anyone else?

It's not heaven if there's no ice cream

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:17:18 GMT

My mother died very early Sunday morning. She had the best death she could hope for in her circumstances—her family nearby, no pain, no tubes or machines—but still, it's hard for us to know that she's gone. In some ways, we lost her years ago.

In other ways, she'll always be with us. I know one reason I have the self confidence to write is that my early years were spent with a mother who lavished devoted, uncritical love on me. I can still remember proudly showing her a picture I painted in kindergarten. She spent a minute or two praising my use of colors and telling me how much she liked it before she got around to asking me, ever so tactfully, what it was a picture of.

She was 86 and spent that last several years in declining health, but she never lost her happy smile or her joy in life itself. Until shortly before she died, you could still light up her face by offering her ice cream.

We will miss her.

Failing fast

Thu, 29 May 2008 19:14:20 GMT

Non blogging again, but for a sad reason this time. I am in Richmond, VA, to be with my family. My mother has had Alzheimer's (or something like it) for years and now she is failing fast. We don't expect her to live more than a few days.

No blogging for a bit

Fri, 23 May 2008 00:56:00 GMT

Hey, ho, hey, ho! It's off to Balticon I go!

If you're there, too, I hope to see you!

What if?

Thu, 22 May 2008 20:36:12 GMT

A while ago Google ran a kid's art contest asking kids in kindergarten through high school to design a Google doodle that asked (or answered) a question that began, "What if . . . "

The winner is up on Google today, and all the regional winners are posted, too. Some of the entries have a spec fic cast to them, either science fictional (What if we could explore space? What if artificial intelligence was allowed limitless enhancement? ) or fantasy (What if fairies were real?). Check them out. All are fun and interesting!