As Glenn Beck made headlines over the weekend, this popped up on my Twitter feed:
Like activism, fandom is moving online–or is it? The extraordinary popularity of events like Comic-Con and Otakon would seem to suggest otherwise. I haven’t heard writers fretting about underattended signings, and the KGB Fantastic Fiction and NYRSF readings I go to here in New York (where 24/7 public transit admittedly makes it easy to stay out until all hours) are always packed. Nonetheless, there’s this persistent idea that unless you make people show up to a book-related event, they would really rather stay home and tweet their Goodreads updates.
Brandon Sanderson would seem to rank high on the list of authors who have no reason to fear empty seats. Since he took on the Herculean task* of finishing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, he’s been one of the highest-profile authors at Tor (not exactly a shrinking violet of an imprint). A recent charity auction for a pre-release copy of his latest hardcover, The Way of Kings, brought in $510 in just three days of bidding. The man clearly has dedicated fans. That isn’t stopping the publicity team at Tor from rolling out an unusual promotion that seems designed to boost attendance at signings. From the press release:
Starting tomorrow, Sanderson (co-author of last fall’s The Gathering Storm, the first in a final trilogy to complete the series) goes on-tour for new original novel, The Way of Kings. Simultaneously, an exclusive secret from the Wheel of Time will go live on Brandon Sanderson’s website.
But it won’t go live without a fight: the page will be entirely encrypted.
To unlock it, fans will have to hunt down the many unique digital codes, printed on the back of Wheel of Time bumper stickers that Brandon will hide inside copies of The Way of Kings along each stop on his tour. (Which kicks off tonight!). Each tour city has at least one hidden code.
This sort of promotion is pretty pricey, as is a multi-city tour. Will it be offset by readers buying copies of the enormous, shiny hardcover? Will those readers offset their own costs by selling the bumper stickers on eBay? Hard to know. I’m just trying to figure out why Tor is putting this much effort into publicity for an author who doesn’t really seem to need publicizing, and into motivating fans who don’t seem to lack motivation.
* Is it more like obtaining the girdle of the Amazonian queen or cleaning out the Augean stables? Your call.
Locus Magazine has released the list of the World Fantasy Award Nominees. Of special note to myself and Rose are the inclusion of James Enge, whose latest novel, The Wolf Age just received a starred review. We’re glad Enge is getting more recognition for his under-appreciated work. We’re also glad to see our friends and acquaintances get nominated: Genevieve Valentine’s name in the list for her short story Light on the Water, appearing in Fantasy Magazine, Richard Bowes for I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said, Ellen Datlow, both for Poe, and “editing anthologies” (perhaps the award for blinding all of her friends with flahsbulbs will come next year?) and a non-pro award to Bob Colby, B. Diane Martin, David Shaw and Eric M. Van for Readercon.
I was also surprised to note a few absences in the novel section, particularly Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente.
Back in the staid and stolid late 1990’s artist Bree Sharp wrote a love song to David Duchovny as Fox Mulder. It got a reasonable amount of play, and then vanished under the wave of Bananaphone and Gonads and Strife videos. Those were the days…
That level of fan squee is clearly not enough for the callow, jaded youth culture of today. Now we have women tarting themselves up schoolgirl-style and offering profane suggestions to geriatric writers. Won’t someone think of the delicate hearts of the aged, before crying out “Fuck me Ray Bradbuy!” (Do I have to warn you that the lyrics are NSFW?)
Genreville respects the power of obsessions with pop stars, especially after derailing yet another boring conversation about politics at the last KGB Fantastic Fiction after-dinner by asking who would be the best partner for RPS involving China Mieville. But don’t let your obsession get out of hand! It’s best to find a like minded spirit, and not pine after someone on a pedestal. Take the advice of the Internet One-Hit-Wonders, Lemon Demon, and find a like minded geek to fall in love with.
Want to read Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings before it’s in stores? Bid on a copy here and know that your money is going to a good cause: 100% of the proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders, who are currently doing amazing work helping flood victims in Pakistan.
PW’s review says that Sanderson’s “talent for feeding out revelations and action scenes at just the right pace will keep epic fantasy fans intrigued.” You know you want it.
Brian Keene reports that, according to unnamed sources, Don D’Auria and Leah Hultenschmidt are gone from Dorchester, leaving Chris Keeslar as the sole remaining editor. If this is true, it effectively puts paid to the Leisure Books horror line. Keene pays moving tribute to D’Auria and then gives Dorchester management a scathing dressing-down:
Now keep in mind, this is my opinion only, and should not be taken as fact, but I give the company six months. Maybe a year, but I think six months is more likely…. Just days before the announcement that they were switching to digital format, the publisher was still signing authors to contracts for multiple books without telling the authors of the digital plans.
Worse, from what I’ve been told, the company is apparently not filling orders to vendors, bookstores or authors.
[...]
It is my opinion that neither myself or my fellow authors will see many more royalty checks (checks which, as I mentioned last week, are already woefully late)…. What’s my advice to my fellow Leisure authors? Run. Get the fuck out and don’t look back. It is my opinion that we are well and screwed. At this point, you’re an absolute fool if you sign with them for anything else.
My question is, where do those authors have to run to? It’s not like there’s a whole lot of mass market horror originals being published by anyone other than Dorchester these days.
(Thanks to @SmartBitches for passing along the sad news.)
EDIT: PW’s Jim Milliot has obtained official comments from Dorchester: “President John Prebich said the departures of the two were part of Dorchester adusting staff to its new operating plan. He said that the product in the pipeline for 2011 will be published and that Dorchester will continue to acquire books…. He told PW this morning Dorchester will take whatever steps are necessary to remain a viable publisher.”
* sold out a signed Limited Edition of 750 copies priced at $75 each in less than 24 hours — remember, this is for an unknown author, not a big name, and that was our fastest sell out since our special edition of The Passage by Justin Cronin
* sold more preorders for the $19.99 trade hardcover edition than we’ve sold for any book not written by Stephen King in our 22 years in business
* generated more sub-rights inquires than we’ve ever had for any title, including a New York publisher who wanted to know if they could take over publishing the hardcover (!)
* almost 2,200 people entered for a chance to win an advance review copy through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers, making it one of the most popular books in the history of the program
* WOWIO.com has asked to make The Painted Darkness their “Free eBook of the Month” on the front page of their site for October, with a large marketing push to support the promotion
More than 10,000 readers downloaded the book for free during the first two weeks alone, and sales strongly back-up our decision to try this “crazy” idea to promote the book. The free copies have generated more attention for The Painted Darkness than any traditional method of promoting the book could have — at least on our small press budget! :)
I’ve cited a gaming company, Evil Hat, in its frequent freebie giveaways, and the stats they posted bear out the success of this sort of promotion. Adding value to a product on the web is an inexpensive way to promote it. Audible.com and eMusic.com both offer free downloads to first time subscribers and are doing quite well. Baen’s e-ARCs are a boost to both sales and as a promotion.
While I do have an reflexive distaste for self-publishing hucksters who bash “traditional publishing”, there’s a lot of room for publishers to experiment, and in the current environment, standing still is not as safe as it once was. What do you think of this promotion?
Emma Bull’s Territory came out in 2007 and seems to have heralded a whole slew of western-themed fantasies of various kinds. Cherie Priest’s Dreadnought has a starred review in today’s PW. I just edited our review of Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World. Then I went into the bookroom and found galleys of Mike Resnick’s The Buntline Special sitting on my “incoming” shelf. Patricia Wrede’s much-criticized2009 novel Thirteenth Child might arguably be seen as part of the trend as well, though her vision of the frontier, like Gilman’s, bears only a cursory resemblance to our reality. Post-apocalyptic stories in which the west has returned to its wild state include Robert Charles Wilson’s Hugo-nominated Julian Comstock, Brian Francis Slattery’s Liberation, and Justin Cronin’s The Passage.
Obviously the popularity of steampunk has a lot of people thinking about the mid-19th century, but is that all that’s going on here? Have we given up on space as the final frontier and channeled colonial longings into revisiting the past? How are these stories–just about all of which have to do with one group of people using violent means to take land away from another group of people–reacting to the community’s recent conversations about race? And what are readers, particularly readers whose ancestry is more on the colonized side than the colonizers’ side, getting out of these narratives of exploration and invasion?
EDIT: How could I forget Saladin Ahmed’s wonderful story “Mister Hadj’s Sunset Ride”? I heard him read from it at one of the NYRSF readings and was blown away.
The fabulous Gwenda Bond just linked toWeightless Books, an e-book store that stocks a wide range of titles from two of my favorite indies: Small Beer Press and Blind Eye Books. All the books are DRM-free PDFs and priced to sell. Looks like a very cool little venture, and it’s heartening to see publishers collaborating on an e-book store given the recent news about Samhain.
Over at PWxyz, Craig asks, “Who are the most underrated writers in America?” Let’s expand that to the rest of the world but limit it to authors of SF, fantasy, and horror who haven’t won (and ideally haven’t even been nominated for) any awards for their genre fiction. I’ll start with K.J. Parker and Daniel Abraham, both of whom write viciously brutal and darkly funny fantasy. (If you’d like a free taste of their work, try Parker’s “Amor Vincit Omnia” and Abraham’s “The Cambist and Lord Iron”.) Who else is putting out great work and not getting the respect they deserve?
Boing Boing today included a link to some imaginative samurai cat armor, as well as some samurai mouse armor. I’m reminded of one of my favorite crazy genre authors, Mark Rogers, who’s famous for his illustrated Samurai Cat novels, and of how popular the Brian Jacques Redwallbooks are, along with the Newbery Award winning The Tale of Despereaux. I also can’t help but think of Reepicheep, from C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. Do we love mice more than cats? Personally, I’m more of a cat person myself.
Here’s one cat armor image. This one is more Islamic in origin. Anyhow, Samurai Cat has been done already. Perhaps Saladin Ahmed can start a new Arabian cat adventure craze? I’m sure there’s money in that somewhere.
Over at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog at The Atlantic, guest blogger Alyssa Rosenberg has been talking about her feelings on George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books. She notes that a world that’s been too filled in with detail can leave some readers without much to imagine for themselves. Tolkien, she writes, has such a vast pre-history for his world that deciding for herself, or even guessing about intimate details of the inner lives of the main characters, felt like it derailed the story. Martin, she claims, keeps people guessing, and offers us choices about what we might like best about his world. Tolkien does not tell us which place in his works is best, but the Shire is a clear favorite.
I love books where there are some areas that are sketched out, but that remain out of focus. They can provide material for the author for later books, or they can be shadows forever. It’s really not important. The important part is how it makes you feel to have that larger universe thrust on you, when beforehand, you’d just felt comfortable with a small part of it.
The best example I can think of is from the first Star Wars movie. While there’s two environments shown, everyone in the movie is human, or something dangerous, primitive, and secondary to the humans on screen. And then Luke and Obi-Wan step into the Cantina, and all of a sudden, they’re the aliens. It’s a transition into a larger universe, and there’s a huge number of shadows of greater stories out there.
Later Star Wars novels, comics, and role playing games filled in almost all of the aliens in the Cantina. In a sense, that took away the magic of the greater universe that the viewer knew nothing about, and was startled by. Before that scene, Jawas and Sand People were hidden behind fabric. In the Cantina, faces were bared, and aliens looked humans right in the eye.
Books can be like that as well. Many end up creating whole mythologies, but the ones who can create a sense of a greater mythology without feeling a need to show the reader how the trick is done are master magicians. Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book is a good example of this. The story of Bod is the important part. Questions about who the villains were, who the hero’s helpers were, and why all of the events in the book were predestined don’t get answered. Resolving Bod’s quest doesn’t require wrapping up every mystery in a tight bow and presenting it to the reader as a prize for finishing the book.
Do you prefer books with more shadow or more light, or are you like me, and want both, depending on what you’re in the mood for? If you like books with more shadow (by which I mean more unanswered questions and half-sketched but interesting ideas), which are some of your favorites?
Laura Haywood-Cory of Baen Books informs us that author Mark Van Name is donating 100% of his proceeds from the hardcover sales of his new novel, Children No More, to a charity working towards rebuilding the lives of child soldiers in the Congo region of Africa. Children No More is due out today.
Baen has a history of sending books to support troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other charity projects. They’ve been an integral part of the genre community, and have supported some of its brightest lights, such as Lois McMaster Bujold, Spider Robinson, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and Robert Heinlein. Despite the occasional jokes I make about the lurid covers they sometimes have, I’m a fan of Baen, and appreciate the efforts they make to make the world a better place while making some truly great books.
Cybermage has just finished up a wonderful series of posts on formidable female protagonists in science fiction. He says he’s keen for more ideas, so feel free to go name some names on the 16th installment, which includes a list of all 80 women mentioned so far. It’s an impressive list, all the more so because he seems to be staying very firmly within science fiction and science fantasy, which are generally thought to be rather short on kick-ass heroines.
Speaking of awesome women in spec fic, there are a great many of them in A.M. Dellamonica’s fabulous story “The Cage”, which just went up on Tor.com. Thanks to Nina Lourie for saying “Aroooo” at me until I finally went and read it. She was totally right and it is well worth the scroll-ergs. Arooo!
Rose’s upcoming project, The Wonderful Future that Never Was has me thinking about how often I see people remarking that “we live in the future”. We have pocket computers that have more processing power than large desktops did 10 years ago. Electronic editions of books might eventually become more popular than print editions. Spaceflight is unremarkable and GPS units are commonplace.
For many of us, this is what living in the future looks like. Authors like Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke took pokes at predicting the future in their fiction. Although Clarke was arguably a better prognosticator, they both made a conscious effort.
Where are the authors today who’re predicting our future? Charlie Stross looks like a strong contender. His book, Halting State, talks about Massively Multi-player Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs) like World of Warcraft, where there are actual virtual economies, and drawing a speculative line from EVE Online’s virtual banking scandal, Stross used a bank heist in an online bank as a plot device. William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Spook Country are also near future novels, and both take plausible technology that does not currently exist in large scale, and use it as a plot device by expanding its scope.
But what, readers, do you think someone born today would be talking about when they say, like I sometimes do, “I am living in the future”? Who are authors that should be followed for more predictions?
The Times profile begins with a paragraph that exemplifies the paper’s handling of genre fiction:
If your idea of a science fiction writer is a scrawny guy with computer-glow pallor who’s a little too interested in whether warp speed is a realistic rate of travel, China Miéville is not that person.
To be fair, that is most people’s image of a science fiction writer. But it’s arguable that Miéville’s novel The City & The City is not actually science fiction as most would define it, if they bothered to think about a definition. To be fair, the Times claims:
For the record, Mr. Miéville, 37, calls himself a science fiction writer — or, for those steeped in genre subdivisions, a purveyor of “weird” or “new weird” fiction. But he stands out from the crowd for the quality, mischievousness and erudition of his writing.
Is it just me, or is “quality, mischievousness and erudition of his writing” sort of like saying that he stands out because he’s “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy“? While the profile is a good one, and I’m glad to see Miéville getting mainstream attention, the Times still lacks continuity in its genre reviews. Since David Itzkoff abandoned his hipster snark filled “Across the Universe” column, the Times book section has only had one review by Jeff VanderMeer. It has otherwise returned to a general stable of people who mostly hold the genre and its authors in some form of mild contempt and can be surprised by something like China Miéville having a nicely toned body.
That said, the mainstream attention Miéville is gathering, combined with his notable personal charisma, could well propel him to a level of recognition enjoyed by writers like Neil Gaiman. Miéville’s writing is even more quirky and highbrow than Gaiman, and he lacks the fan base created by Gaiman’s start in comics. Despite that, among the genre crowd, he is known as a “rock star”.
I bemoan the NY Times focusing on his physique, but I’ve known plenty of fans, writers, editors and critics who get twitterpated about Miéville’s good looks. So perhaps the Times was on to something. Will genre rock-stars of the future have to look the part as well as write it?
Readercon signup is unusual in that they specifically ask whether there’s anyone you do or do not want to be on panels with. I gave the names of several people I would rather not ever sit in the same room with, much less share a stage. I also named Graham and John Clute, of whom I think very highly, because I would far rather heckle them from the audience listen to them talk than attempt to keep up with their brilliance. In addition, Graham and I are close friends and we talk quite frequently about books and writing. I was concerned that the two of us on a panel about books would end up dominating the conversation with our usual rapid-fire back-and-forth.
Naturally, we both wound up on the Year in Novels panel. Fortunately our co-panelists were Gary K. Wolfe and Shira Lipkin, who have no trouble speaking up and have many greatly interesting things to say, so I permitted myself to believe that at least from the audience’s perspective it actually looked like a panel discussion rather than the Graham and Rose Show with a couple of special guests. This belief lasted precisely until Jon came up to me and Graham and asked us to recap the panel for his podcast, since we had an obvious rapport. Ah well.
So we set up a time and sat down in Jon’s room with a microphone dangling between us—Jon has quite the sophisticated set-up—and chatted for a while in our usual fashion, mentioning some books we’d discussed on the panel as well as others we’d immediately kicked ourselves for missing. Jon eventually got bored and made us stop talking, though he softened the blow by saying we were “very articulate.” (I was in a snarky mood and replied, “For white people?”) I can’t bring myself to listen to the recording, so I just hope I didn’t say anything too embarrassing. If I did, um, sorry about that. I’m not used to communicating in a medium that I can’t edit later!
In all seriousness, many thanks to Jon for the invitation, and to Graham for joining us. Between this and participating in the Sturgeon read-a-thon, I’m finding myself thinking more about voice acting than I have in quite some time. If there were a Genreville podcast, would you listen to it?
When I arrived at the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading on Wednesday, Matt Kressel, who co-hosts the reading series and also runs Senses Five Press, handed me a copy of Sybil’s Garage #7. I started to protest that I don’t like reading fiction in magazine format. Then I realized he had given me a POD trade paperback. Suddenly I was a lot more interested.
At a young and formative age, I acquired a couple of Terry Carr YBs from the 1980s and became a devotee of SF and fantasy anthologies. It’s still my dream to edit one. (Someday, someday…) As I began collecting anthologies–which now occupy an entire bookcase, floor to ceiling, in my library–I found a special love for unthemed series, like Damon Knight’s Orbit and Carr’s Universe. Sybil’s Garage, a quietly upstart zine for its first six issues, seems to have turned into just such a series with its switch to trade paperback format. Matt confirms that he plans to put out one “issue” a year.
When I asked why he made the switch, he cited distribution concerns. Low-budget small-press zines get shoved to the very top or very bottom of magazine racks when they make it onto magazine racks at all. Low-budget small-press books, on the other hand, are just about as easy to produce and vastly easier to get into stores and in front of readers. Given that, I wonder whether other zines will follow suit. There have certainly been zine/book crossovers, like the Best of Strange Horizons Year One and Year Two anthologies and The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Still, seeing a zine wholly transform itself into an anthology series without any real change in content is fascinating, and perhaps a harbinger of things to come.
The reading was deeply awesome, by the way. The world is about to be very impressed by Cat Valente’s Deathless and M.K. Hobson’s The Native Star. Deathless is still in production and won’t be out for a while, but The Native Star is due out in September; keep an eye out for the review in PW’s online review annex.
In late October—because what would late October be without a sudden rush of horror titles?—Lonely Road Books is coming out with a slipcased hardcover “double”: Stephen King’s novella Riding the Bullet on one side and Mick Garris’s original screenplay adaptation of same on the other. Also included are color and B&W illustrations by Alan W. Clark and Bernie Wrightson (most of which appear to involve naked women being groped by supernatural creatures; hope that’s not a spoiler!) and photos from the set of the movie. Anyone in the mood to spend $75 on such an item can preorder it from Lonely Road.
Is there a chance that you could highlight multicultural UF or Paranormal Romance? A lot of the heroes and heroines I read are pretty white-bread, and I feel like there’s got to be more out there that I’m missing. Nalini Singh and Meljean Brooke tend to have diverse casts (and mixed race couples semi-frequently, something completely neglected by the cover artists, to my unsurprised frustration). I know of the Mercy Thompson (Patricia Briggs) series and the Jane Yellowrock (Faith Hunter) series as well. The Allie Beckstrom (Devon Monk) books have a mixed-race main couple, but the heroine is (by all appearances) white. Much to my shame, I seem to completely miss African-American writers/heroes/heroines in F/SF overall, so I know I must be missing them in UF/ParaRom as well. Anyway, I’d love to have more good non-white-centric UF/ParaRom pointed out to me (and I’m sure I’m not the only one!), and you must see some of it cross your desk.
There’s not as much of it as I’d like to see, but it’s out there! Alaya Johnson’s Moonshine and Terrance Taylor’s Bite Marks and Blood Pressure have a lot of fun with non-white supernatural entities in historical New York. I’ve heard great things about L.A. Banks’s Vampire Huntress books (and their emphatically non-whitewashed covers; kudos to St. Martin’s). S.J. Day’s urban fantasy Eve series has a Japanese-American protagonist. Jane Lindskold’s Thirteen Orphans et seq. are Chinese-influenced UF, and Eileen Rendahl’s Don’t Kill the Messenger is Chinese-influenced PR. Mario Acevedo’s Felix Gomez and Marta Acosta’s Milagro de Los Santos are Hispanic vampires, and Laura Anne Gilman’s Hard Magic et seq. feature Hispanic forensic magician Bonita Torres (who first appeared in the Retrievers series). Charles de Lint, the original urban fantasist, has a ton of Native American characters.
Some other resources for you: Dear Author has a post of multicultural romance recs that includes lots of paranormal romance; search the comments for “paranormal” or “PR”. It’s from a year ago, so most of what’s recommended there should still be findable in stores or online. This great essay on race in urban fantasy gets lots of recs and some disrecs from readers, and it was republished on Racialicious to even more comments.
O Genreville readers, you were so awesome with suggestions for my young friend. (She says, “After reading that post I don’t think I’ll ever run out of books!”) So I turn to you once again: Got any recommendations for A.A.?
Genreville covers science fiction, fantasy, and horror publishing news from around the world. We welcome reader feedback and tips emailed to genreville@gmail.com.
from rolling out an unusual promotion that seems designed to boost attendance at signings. From the press release:
