Tag: publishing

A Couple of Good Things

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The first is a link to an IndieGoGo fundraiser for Hadley Rille Books, a small press specializing in speculative fiction and prioritizing “new voices from women and other historically marginalized points of view” since 2005. They’re raising funds for the expansion necessary to stay competitive in today’s commercial environment.

Rewards at various levels include e-books, hardcover novels, and e-book bundles, manuscript critiques and full-manuscripts edits, tuckerization† in a novel by a Hadley Rille author, and more.

The second is a link to the on-line archives of Florilegium, the journal of the Canadian Society of Medievalists/Société canadienne des médiévistes, who now have the complete run of their back issues, dating from 1979 onwards, available in digital form.  Writers of fantasy and historical fiction set in actual or pseudo-medieval societies would probably have a good time prowling through the articles available.

As usual, the internet is full of wondrous things.  Go forth and enjoy.

†A term from the sf/fantasy community, referring to the inclusion of a person, or the use of the person’s name, in a novel or story, usually as a complimentary in-joke. Opportunities for tuckerization are often offered as prizes in benefit auctions and the like. The term derives from the name of sf writer Wilson Tucker, who pioneered the practice.

 

Clash of the Titans

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If anybody ever wants a reason (besides brain chemistry or childhood family dynamics) for why writers can sometimes be a depressed and paranoid lot, they need only to look at the latest round of hostilities between major publisher Hachette and major online seller of damn-near everything from books to baby booties, Amazon.

The two entities are currently in the midst of negotiations over terms, and Amazon – not content with such ploys as tweaking discount policies and dragging its feet on things like delivery and restocking – has now removed the preorder button from the listings of a number of Hachette titles.

I’m not wasting my time on sympathy for Hachette; they’re big boys, and presumably knew what they were letting themselves in for when this dispute started.  Besides, they are a major publisher, which means that they’ve played plenty of hardball themselves, and presumably have built up the calluses.

No, my sympathy is all for the authors, whose books – which is to say, their livelihoods – are currently being stomped on and tossed about in this battle between two giants.  Because in the end, Amazon will continue to make money, and Hachette will continue to make money – and a whole bunch of authors will have lost potential sales (and money) that they’ll never get back.

Radio Silence from the Northland

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This hasn’t been much of a week for posting stuff, for which I am sorry.

Then again, it hasn’t been much of a week for doing anything. I’ve had one of those springtime bugs that only make you feel really lousy for about a day or so, but spend about two days creeping up on you beforehand and leave you enervated for another three or four days afterward, and the next thing you know there’s a whole week gone.

Meanwhile, today’s publishing news:  Harlequin (with its assorted publishing lines) is being sold by its parent company to HarperCollins.  Harlequin’s authors, not surprisingly, are worried – changes in the publishing industry are almost never good for authors, at least in the short run.  Most of us have our survival strategies exquisitely fine-tuned to the present moment (trust us, we’d love to have them fine-tuned for the future as well, but life has unaccountably failed to provide us with working crystal balls), so any sudden alteration of the status quo has the potential to throw all our careful arrangements into disarray.

It’s Almost Like Being Respectable

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – that eminently respectable publisher with eminently respectable bloodlines (I’ve been in this business long enough that I can remember when Harcourt was a separate publishing house) – is adding a science fiction and fantasy volume to its annual Best American series.

This isn’t the first, or the only, annual “Best of” anthology out there; but it’s (maybe the first?  I don’t know that answer) one that’s coming out not from a known genre publisher or fantasy/sf imprint, but from a mainstream house that’s very much into serious literary business.  They’ve also had the good sense to take their series editor ( John Joseph Adams) and the editor for the inaugural volume (Joe Hill) from the ranks of people who are actually working in and familiar with the field, instead of hauling in some college professor or mainstream critic to do the job.

(I have nothing against literary critics or college professors, mind you; it’s just that their taste in fiction tends to privilege those works which provide the best fodder for classroom lectures and articles in academic journals.  Which is not necessarily the same thing as those works which are good.)

Thinking About Anthologies

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Anthologies, especially in genre fiction, cycle in and out of fashion.  At the time when my coauthor and I started writing professionally, they were at the start of a boom phase – our first sale was to the YA anthology Werewolves, edited by Jane Yolen and Martin Greenberg, and we had other anthology sales afterward.  As usually happens, though, there came a time when so many anthologies were being published that reader fatigue set in, and then for another decade or so hardly anybody edited original anthologies any more.  Now anthologies are coming back in again, and once again we’re selling an occasional short story (we’re novelists; all our short stories are occasional) to those markets.

Setting aside reprint anthologies, which are a different creature, anthologies come in two basic flavors: general and themed.  A general anthology is inclusive in its scope – its guidelines don’t get much more restrictive than, say, “original science fiction under 10,000 words.”  A themed anthology can be as specific as the editor desires:  “hard science fiction between 500-1000 words about broccoli,” or “fantasy novellas or long short stories on feminist themes with an emphasis on nontraditional magic systems.”  Themed anthologies can, paradoxically, be a lot easier to write for and sell to than the more open-ended ones. Either you’re the sort of writer for whom 500 words of hard sf focusing on broccoli come naturally to mind, or you’re not – and if you’re not you already know better than to try.

The other two main flavors of anthology are the open anthologies and the closed, or invitational, anthologies.  For an open anthology, the editor basically puts up a sign saying “SF Stories About Broccoli Wanted – Apply Within,” and then reads every manuscript that the mailman or the internet brings to him or her and rejects most of them.  This is, not surprisingly, a lot of work, and rejecting that many stories can get depressing, so most anthologies are put together from a list of invited authors, or from market listings in a restricted number of venues.

How to get into such an anthology?  Well, the usual way is to write a good enough story . . . but before you can do that, you have to know where to send it, and the trick to that is to be in the sort of places where word about such things gets spread about.  This is one of the reasons for the existence of professional writers’ mailing lists and on-line forums, and also one of the reasons why writers go to parties at conventions, or hang out in the bar, or talk to other writers at signing sessions or in the dealer’s room.  Because if you’re there, and you hear word of an anthology that’s opening up, then you’re in a position to write to the editor and say words to the effect of, “I understand that you’re going to be editing an anthology of hard sf flash fiction about broccoli, and I was wondering if I could submit a story to it.”

Maybe it won’t work; maybe you’ll get a polite brush-off along the lines of “I’d love to see something from you, but unfortunately all the slots are already filled.”  But you’re just as likely to get a “Sure, why not?” – and at that point, you’ve just been invited to apply.  And while a sale is never guaranteed, you’ll be part of a much much smaller slushpile than the ever-increasing paper and digital stacks of submitted manuscripts over at Rivetty SF.

The next step:  working your way up from “and others” to a name on the cover.

A Brief Guide for the Perplexed

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The book cover theory of genre fiction, as articulated by Debra Doyle, aka me:

Short (classic) form:

If it’s got a rocket ship on it, it’s science fiction
If it’s got a unicorn on it, it’s fantasy.
Once a book has a rocket ship on its cover, the only way to change it back into fantasy is by the addition of the Holy Grail

The inevitable smart-ass in the back of the room: But what if it’s the Holy Grail in the shape of a rocket ship?
Me: Then you’ve got the Hugo Award.

Special bonus side-cues:

If the cover features a person in heavy-duty powered space armor, it’s military sf.
If the cover features a person in a fancy uniform/dress coat with gold braid and similar decorations, it’s space opera.

And:
A zeppelin on the cover means alternate history.
A female person in corset and bustle, or a gentleman in a top hat, in the presence of either gears or zeppelins, means steampunk.

And finally:
Any otherwise mundane cover can be made into a fantasy cover by the addition of random sparkles.

Road Trip Rerun

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Having made it through the Peterborough book signing, we’re now holed up for the night in our favorite inexpensive motel in Manchester NH, and I am pondering the question that always gets asked on occasions like this, which is:  Do readings and book signings actually do a working writer any good?

And the answer comes back, as it so often does in this business:  Who the hell knows?

My own theory, for whatever it’s worth, is that readings and similar activities may not do much to sell the particular book you’re pushing at the time, but they probably do contribute to increasing your “hey, I saw this person once and he was a nice guy, so  why not buy his new book” factor, at least a little bit.

(Don’t be a jerk to the booksellers, though.  Like the folks in Production, they have the means in their hand to exact a  subtle but devastating revenge.)

Tales from the Before Time: Classroom Issues

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For a long time, I was — to put it mildly — skeptical about the value of classroom writing instruction, if by “skeptical” we mean “unconvinced of its utility and halfway convinced that its influence is largely malign.”

I blame early-writing-life trauma.

Picture me, in the eighth grade, bookish and awkward and laboring under the further social burden of being a new kid in the sort of town where everybody has gone to school together since first grade.  I wanted desperately to be — well, not popular, because popularity looked like it came with more strings and preconditions than I felt like dealing with, but ordinary.

At the same time, I was already a beginning writer, turning out lachrymose poetry and lumpy prose and working hard at my efforts to improve both (harder, in fact, than I ever worked at any of the  “draw one line under the subject of this sentence and two lines under the verb” exercises in our English textbook .)  And I was as hungry for outside validation as any writer, beginner or established pro.

Unsurprisingly, there came a day when I had a finished story in hand and wanted somebody else’s opinion on it.  (Needless to say, the story sucked.   I was, after all, only in the eighth grade.)  So I screwed up my courage to the sticking-point and showed the story to my eighth-grade English teacher, hoping to at least get some useful commentary out of the deal.

This was a big mistake, because she liked it.

She liked it so damned much she read it out loud to all her English classes.  Which put paid to any hopes I might have had of appearing ordinary, and got me out of the habit of trusting English teachers about anything.

Three and an Outline

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Or, what goes into a typical query package:  three chapters and an outline of the novel in question.  Plus the cover letter, of course.

It shouldn’t really be necessary to say that when we’re talking about “three chapters” what we mean is “the first three consecutive chapters” and not some random collection of chapter highlights . . . but the conversations I’ve had with slushpile readers have convinced me that yes, it is necessary.  (No, not for you, of course . . . but there’s always somebody who doesn’t yet know the customs of the community.  And we were all of us clueless once.)

Likewise, by “outline” we don’t mean the I-II-III/A-B-C/1-2-3/a-b-c format that our high school teachers sweated so hard to insert into our resistant brains.  What “outline” means, in this context, is a five to ten page synopsis of the novel in question, usually single-spaced, giving the main arc of the plot, the important characters, and something about the setting and general milieu of the story.  If there are important plot twists and revelations, mention them here; your potential agent or editor is not worried about spoilers.  Customarily, in an outline, the plot is narrated in the present tense — rather as though you were telling a good (and non-spoilerphobic) friend the story of this really nifty movie you saw last night.

Writing an outline is not fun, at least not for most writers.  The best way to get through it, I find, is to grit your teeth, tell yourself “It’s not an art form, it’s a sales tool,” and push on through.

As for cover letters — briefer is better, generally.  Include the title and word count and a short description of your book (“a cozy mystery featuring a retired card sharp”), relevant publications if you have them (“three short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine“), and relevant personal information (“I made my living for twenty years as a Mississippi riverboat gambler.”) But the single most important thing you can put into your cover letter is your return address and telephone/email contact info.  There’s nobody quite as sad as an editor who has found a good manuscript . . . and has just discovered that the title page with the author’s address on it has gone missing.

Don’t make an editor cry.  Include a cover letter with your full contact information, even if all that the letter itself says is the prose equivalent of Roses are red/Violets are blue/This is a book/That I’m sending to you.

Making the Rounds

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One of the things I tell myself, when I’ve got a short story out somewhere on submission, is that submitting a story to a market doesn’t mean that you’re asking for an absolute up-or-down verdict on its ultimate worthiness.

When you submit a short story, you’re doing the equivalent of sending it out on a blind date.

And we all know how blind dates work.  A few of them are utter disasters, of the “I’ll never trust So-and-So to set me up with someone ever again” variety; most of them are the sort of forgettable evening that ends with a “let’s not do this another time” handshake and a taxi ride home; and every once in a while, you get fireworks.  (Also, sometimes your best friend has a date with Mr. Forgettable Number 17 and meets the love of her life, because the chemistry between two people is a strange and unpredictable thing.)

So when your story comes back to you with a note saying “We’re sorry, but your submission does not meet our needs at the present time,” for heaven’s sake don’t take it as a polite hint that you should stop writing and take up train-spotting as a hobby instead.  It was just another blind date that turned out to be a dud for reasons that were nobody’s fault.

What to do?  Find another likely market, and send the story out again.  Because — who knows?

Maybe next time, the fireworks.