A Review of R.F. Kuang's Yellowface

I have just finished listening to the audiobook of R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface (not to be confused with the novel by Henry Hwang) and I’m completely blown away. It is the most brilliant novel I’ve come across in a decade and the best about writing and publishing ever. Anyone interested in writing or editing or publishing has to go read it, RIGHT NOW--or better yet, listen to the excellent audiobook narration by Helen Laser.

First and most obviously, it’s the most thorough, balanced, nuanced discussion of cultural appropriation and ‘representation’ I have ever come across. Every perspective is covered by at least one character in the novel, so we hear all the arguments, counter arguments, and the often subtle niggling underlying issues that arise to screw up even the most confident proponent of any side. It’s awesome.

But for most of us, all that is secondary to the thorough evisceration of the writing life and the publishing world. It alternates between wincingly funny and painfully accurate. Everything from writer’s block to the maddeningly brutal impact of social media on one’s confidence is laid out in excruciating detail. Every wonderful and painful thing that can happen to one navigating their book through agents, editing, book tours, readings, interviews, and initial sale numbers is laid out. I can’t think of anything that has happened to me as a writer, editor, working for a publisher, or listening to any of my author friends/clients’ anecdotes that doesn’t turn up sooner or later in this novel. If you ever had questions about what happens after you finish your novel, good or bad, this novel lays out what it FEELS like, second by second. Absolutely brilliant!

Maybe a touch discouraging at times, but forewarned is forearmed, eh?

But wait, there’s more!

Yellowface is the best example of the use of an “unreliable narrator” I have ever encountered. I love unreliable narrators and have written/published a bunch of flash stories using the technique myself, but I have NEVER seen a writer able to sustain that for an ENTIRE novel. It is a tour de force performance. The closest I have ever seen before is the classic noir film, Detour, in which our narrator keeps telling us he had no choice but to make the choices he does, even though it’s obvious to the viewers these are really, really bad choices. Yellowface’s protagonist, June Hayward, is similarly inventive in coming up with rationales for her questionable choices, and Kuang convincingly portrays Hayward constantly slipping into believing her own propaganda, how Hayward constantly sees herself as the victim. We have all met people who do this, and I suspect we’re all guilty of it ourselves sometimes, but watching Hayward cycle back and forth between guilt and rationalization is a compelling case study.

Kuang makes Hayward a sympathetic character with whom we can identify, even though she’s being kind of awful. Because we get it. Writing is hard! Publishing is harder! And it’s all totally unfair! One has so little control! We can see why Hayward is more than a little tempted, and how she gets trapped once she starts down her particular road.

How much do you want to read a book on the writing life, publishing, the technique of unreliable narrator and the modern issue of representation/cultural appropriation? What if we threw in, absolutely free, a section on what it’s like to teach writing?

Author Kuang assassinates every mean and useless writing coach any of us have ever had in her portrayal of Hayward’s good intentions versus how the class actually goes. Hayward’s complete lack of self-awareness in her plagiarism of cliched workshop techniques and her shift from mentor to monster is howlingly funny— ‘howling’ because I was wincing the whole time.

[It reminded me of a long-since departed colleague who taught writing workshops for years, even though he had never published a single word in his life, never finished a draft, merely attended so many workshops he was able to reproduce them verbatim. It literally never occurred to him that stealing other people’s exercises is, you know, plagiarism, and that his workshops were entirely inauthentic and inappropriate as he had no personal experience with which to respond to questions. And even real writers can turn mean under the guise of being ‘brutally honest’ with students about their work. (Indeed, I can think of one example where the professor was so damaging, his students so traumatized, that they processed their PTSD by banding together to start a magazine, now in it’s 35th year.)]

Kuang is obviously familiar with such colleagues and finally got the chance to skewer them here. The whole thing is only a single chapter, but nails an entire industry to the wall.

My all-time favourite scene, though, is when Hayward is working with her editor and together they completely undermine the novel Hayward has stolen and now rewritten. The whole point of the original is to represent a little-known historical event through an own-voices account. But the editor pushes Hayward to up the role of the white saviour characters (so ‘readers can better identify’ with the story), and calls for Hayward to downplay some of the crucial cultural elements (that ‘readers won’t care about’). Hayward, of course, has no problem with that at all, believing she is improving an otherwise likely unsalable book. Again, neither character gets the irony of how outrageously racist they are being, how they are destroying the entire purpose of the original. This one very brief scene cuts to the heart of how the lack of representation and the ongoing cultural appropriation remain key components of the industry among legacy publishing. It’s hilarious and gut-wrenching and so accurately portrays the subtleties of the issue, I am left wondering how many readers will miss the scene’s significance entirely.

The whole book is like that: each scene blows up some aspect of writing, publishing, movie options, social media, fickle audiences, families, and cultural portrayals. Kuang is a satirical genius.

But wait, there’s more!

In addition to all these unbeatble themes and insights, Kuang throws in a page-turning, edge of seat narrative, so filled with unanticipated twists and turns that it leaves the reader breathless. Whenever I thought, ‘Oh, well, Kuang has beautifully made the case for ___, there’s no possible response to that’, Kuang switches gears and we meet a character who demonstrates why that argument was full of holes, why this other viewpoint makes perfect sense (at least to those who hold it). Anytime we or the characters start to get comfortable, Kuagn throws them (and us) down a completely new rabbit hole. Each new development pops up out of left field! The only thing we ever know for sure is that things are going to get even worse for June Hayward.

I laugh-groaned out loud at the penultimate resolution because it was completely, outrageously believable, but then Kuang threw that one out as well and pushes us to the very edge. No spy thriller could come as close to making my head spin as did Yellowface.

In the end, we as readers are left questioning everything we thought we knew about publishing, and more importantly, questioning every decision we have ever made about which books are worthy of our attention, why we actually choose to read what we read.

Act now, and for no more than the price of the hardcover, you can receive the audiobook voiced by Hellen Laser. Seriously, I recommend Laser’s performance over trying to read this yourself. Laser gets every nuance, every subtlety of Kuang’s purpose and carries the listener along past the bits were I might have been tempted to put a print copy down as 'too much' to cope with. One can’t “Yes, but...” the text if it is being spoken and the speaker just carries on.

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My apologies to readers who are too young or not Canadian and may not be familiar with the ‘but wait’ format of the old K-Tel ads. I wanted to portray the same level of excitement, if not the dubious quality of most infomercial products

I confess that parts of the novel came a bit close to home for me, as following the passing of the late, great Dave Duncan, I have half a dozen of his partial manuscripts on my desktop to finish, though I came by them honestly. And I have run a lot of writing workshops/courses in my day and have been guilty of advising authors to take or add in this or that element (though not cultural ones, I don’t think) if they wished to increase the book’s commercial potential. I have even confronted own-voices issues of including trans themes or characters not of my culture in my own writing. Reading Kuang has helped me articulate what I’ve been trying to say on these matters in a more articulate way, and appreciate the way Kuang has shown that none of these have clear cut lines.

Though clearer than June Hayward believes....

Inside the Publishing Industry

Fascinating article here on the book industry at the hearings on the proposed Random House merger with Simon and Schuster...if the merger goes ahead, we'll be down to the Big Four:

Antitrust trial puts book publishing industry in the dock;— by HILLEL ITALIE Associated Press

Bundoran Press Closes

Yet another Canadian speculative fiction press has closed. Bundoran Press has been around a long time,  with the current owners taking over from Virginia O'Dine in 2013. Under authors Hayden Trenholm, Elizabeth Westbrook-Trenholm and Mike Rimar, this latest incarnation of the company published 4 anthologies and 20 novels, racking up awards and nominations. The press can take pride in its illustrious history and the professionalism and integrity of the publishers. The press is also to be congratulated on taking the decision to wrap things up on a high note.

Short Story Submissions

The elements that we consider make up a "well written" story tend to be those we've observed in stories we like. When we consider stories for Neo-opsis, the first thing we consider is, "did we like the story?" not "would my English teachers have approved of all the elements of the story?" One story didn't have what some would consider the best writing techniques, but when I read the story, I felt like I was in the story watching it, rather than looking at words on a page. That to me is far more important than whether their grammar was perfect, if their tenses always matched, etc.

It's easier to fix the grammar in an interesting story than it is to make a well-written boring story less boring.

—Karl Johanson
Editor, Neo-opsis Magazine

Interview with Terry Fallis

Fabulous interview by Mark Leslie Lefebvre with Terry Fallis about going from self-published writer, to Stephen Leacock Medal winner, to bestselling author with one of the world's largest publishers. Terry talks about writing a novel no one was interested in publishing (a satirical novel about Canadian politics--well, duh!) but nevertheless reached the audience he needed to reach.

If you don't have time to watch, do what I did and listen to the audio podcast at the link included. It has the advantage that you can listen on your headphones as you do the dishes or vacuum or walk the dog, so you get two things accomplished in the time for one. Also, the audio version includes 15 extra minutes of Mark's commentary on HIS writing life, in this case, excellent advice on how to keep from being overwhelmed by too many writing projects or being discouraged when you (inevitably, in my view) fall behind self-imposed deadlines.

My favourite Fallis advice to writers from the interview—something I've also been telling students and clients for years—is not to chase trends:

For crying out loud, write something that you care about. If vampires are all the rage right now, don't write a vampire novel because of that. If you love vampires, by all means. But I remember meeting a writer, an aspiring writer, and she said, "Yes, I'm writing a novel about vampires because they're so hot now". (In the rise of Twilight.) And I said, "Oh, do you, are you interested in vampires?"
"No, not really."
"Do you know much about them?"
"No, not yet. But I'm just researching them now."
"Do you know any vampires?"
"No."
"Are you a vampire?"
"No."
"Are you touched in any way by vampires?"
"No."
So I could only imagine the challenge it would be to write a book that feels real, and powerful, compelling, authentic, when there is no connection at all between the subject matter and the writer, beyond the marketing imperative of the high profile of vampires at that moment in time.
So when people would say,"Why would you write a politcal satire of Canadian politics, that sounds like a terrible idea," and maybe it was, but at least it was something I cared about, and knew about, I'd lived in that world, I had some views on it and I had a story I wanted to tell to illuminate a different path we might take in how we practice politics in this country. And I think it's hard to write your best work when you're not writing about something that you care about.

I've seen this again and again: writers chasing a trend. Even those talented enough to write something half-way decent are wasting their time because by the time their book is ready, the market has been flooded by copycats, and the trend is over. Any book you can write fast enough to cash in won't be good enough, and any book that's good enough will take too long to write, have edited, go through the submission/or self-published process to appear while the trend is still there. The only authors who were able to cash in on Twilight's success, were those who already had a really fine vampire book in their bottom drawer before vampires were hot.

Similarly, there is no hope of predicting what the next big thing will be to get ahead of the curve—would you have expected Canadian political satire, for example? And even if you could predict, it still has to be something to which you actually have a connection. Certainly, every genre editor can spot when a mainstream writer has decided to "knock out a genre novel" on the grounds of "how hard can it be" and reinvents every cliché that died out 50 years ago—or worse, believes an SF or Romance novel has lower standards. No thanks!

The whole interview is awesome because Mark is a great interviewer and has known Fallis forever, certainly before Fallis was known outside of Hamilton, and because Fallis is a fascinating guy with an unusual career path. (And for older writers like myself, it's encouraging to know you can still make it as a writer after age 35.)

I'd also recommend Mark Leslie Lefebvre's Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing for not just this episode, but as an ongoing series. Mark was the founder and former director of Kobo's Writing Life program for independent authors, was a long-time bookseller and one of the first to install an Expresso Book Machine in Canada (i.e., print-on-demand before anyone else had heard of POD), and is an established author himself. He has an insider's knowledge of both traditional and self-publishing, and extensive experience as a bookstore manager. So...yeah, you need to be listening to this if you want to understand what's happening in the industry.

Highly recommended.

Is there money in self-publishing?

A well researched report reported in the Guardian newspaper reports that

Despite the splash caused by self-publishing superstars such as Amanda Hocking and EL James, the average amount earned by DIY authors last year was just $10,000 (£6,375) – and half made less than $500.

...

Romance authors earned 170% more than their peers, while authors in other genres fared much worse: science-fiction writers earned 38% of the $10,000 average, fantasy writers 32%, and literary fiction authors just 20% of the $10,000 average.

...

Self-publishers who received help (paid or unpaid) with story editing, copy editing and proofreading made 13% more than the average; help with cover design upped earnings by a further 34%.

Read the full article here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/24/self-published-author-earnings?CMP=share_btn_fb

Note that the 'average' (i.e., mean) was highly skewed by a handful of high earners. The mode was closer to $500 and a quarter did not earn back their costs. One should probably start with the expectation of making less than $500 on one's first book...

I do know self-published authors who are making a living, though. Krista Ball comes immediately to mind, since she is also one of my favorite authors. But she had a long term strategy and really works at both the writing and marketing...Nobody could say she had found a get-rich-quick scheme. If you're in writing for the money, I think you're in the wrong business. There are a lot easier ways to make a living. But if you're in it for the love of writing, yeah, you have a shot at making...$500.

It only makes sense to seek professional editing if one amortizes the cost over not just one manuscript, but over one's whole career—what one learns from having one's first book edited should show up as a better first draft of #2, and getting #2 edited teaches you how to write book #3 and so on. Editing gets less expensive as you go because your manuscripts start out cleaner, and so take less time to edit. That's theory, anyway. Doesn't always workout that way--being creative, authors can always come up with new ways to screw up a manuscript. But I for one like to think of myself as an educator as much as an editor for any particular manuscript.

Interesting review essay on the role of the editor in a book's success:

Red Pens and Invisible Ink by Colin Dickey.

Essential Edits takes the stand that we work for the author, so do our best to follow and bring to fruition the author's vision. We will from time to time, point out issues that might impact the book's commercial success—such as scenes in a YA that might be objectionable to teachers and parents, or content that might be negatively reviewed—but our job is just to flag potential issues, not to censor them.

This is different than the role of acquisition editors and agents, the people to whom one is trying to sell the book if not self-publishing: the job of the acquisition editor or structural editor at a press is to alter the book to fit the vision of the press, which usually translates as 'make it more commercial'. There is nothing inherently wrong about that, because they usually won't buy a book unless it is already (mostly) consistent with the publishers vision of its books; and most authors have no objection to making changes that will increase sales. Most publishers will not initiate the complete rewrites spoken of in the article above, because it is too time consuming and expensive for them...they will just look for another manuscript closer to their own needs.

Still, authors sometimes feel editors have gone too far. If you are an author and you are unhappy with the changes the editor is asking for after you have made them, then there is something wrong. Every author naturally hates making changes insisted upon by their editor—it's just human nature to resist the effort and ego-bruising that changing even a comma implies—but usually, after the author has calmed down enough to actually fiddle around making the change, they come to see that the editor was right, and that this revision is in fact way better. If you don't feel that way, you are either working with the wrong editor or misunderstood what the editor was asking for. (Or, I suppose, there are who simply do not believe that there is a single flaw in their writing, and that every editor who fails to recognize their genius is an idiot, in which case they probably haven't gone to an editor in the first place. Self-publishing has its share of those.) If you like your book less in the edited version, then stop, go back to the original. The freelance editor works for you and does not get to dictate their vision. A good freelance editor can help you realize your vision for the book. It is okay for them to make suggestions, and it is usually a good idea to at least give it a try to see how that would look, but if the editor/agent is telling you to change the gay character to straight, the black character to white, or to add pointless sex or whatever, time to walk away.

The Collapse (and Rebirth?) of the Textbook Market

Headline: Nelson Acquires McGraw-Hill-Ryerson

*Sigh*

The continuing consolidation of the legacy publishers into one giant corporation continues apace. Even when the branding remains to provide the illusion of consumer choice, the reality is that there are fewer and fewer publishers to whom authors can submit, and fewer and fewer differences in content for consumers to choose between.

As each publishers seeks to increase profit and therefore market share, it is much easier to do so by buying out the competition, then by predicting which books will sell. As the giant publishers acquire every other imprint, they do so by taking on debt (on the assumption larger market share will pay off the new debt over time). Having debt on that scale requires that each title produce a higher profit margin then when they had no debt, since the debt has to be serviced in addition to all the previous costs, and the only way to do that without moving price point beyond anything consumers would accept, is with economies of scale. Which means each title has to sell in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Mid-list authors no longer earn enough to be kept on, and niche markets can no longer be served.

These trends mean publishers can no longer afford to take risks, which means we’re looking at an increased tendency towards lowest common denominator and processed cheese.

In the Sf markets I write for, the number of major imprints (defined here as being available in brick and mortar stores) has fallen from over 40 when I started my novel to about 6 I can think of now. It’s worse in the textbook market—the strains have reached critical mass and the whole damn thing is (in my view) about to crash. My daughter’s textbook for the course she is taking in summer school is $210. But what choice does the instructor have? There are no cheaper choices because there are no other publishers, certainly no cheaper publishers, to choose from. But that is a ridiculous price! That could be a $5 ebook. Students complain, and instructors shrug, but eventually that trend will lead to rebellion. Instructors will (like me) stop assigning texts that students won’t even pretend to read, because they can’t afford to buy them. (My daughter’s roommate showed us her new $1000 bedside table in residence: it was a pile of four textbooks with a lamp on top.)

The collapse of McGraw-Hill-Ryerson in the k-12 market signals the end of the Canadian market—Nelson has made a miscalculation. As the increasing monopoly drives textbook prices even higher, there will simply be no k-12 textbook market left for it to service. The current attitude among the remaining publishers seems to be, well, what are schools going to do? Buy ereaders for every student and buy ebooks? No problem, we control the ebook market too and will make them pay hundreds for an ebook. Schools have to have textbooks, right? Bwahahahahahah!

But that’s not going to work this time. As I may have mentioned here before, I still have colleagues from when I worked in Alberta Learning (Albert's ministry of education) and I am reliably told that Alberta has made the policy decision to completely stop buying textbooks in 2018. That’s it’s. Done. No more textbooks. Because, they said, textbooks are "so 19th century" and no longer serve any purpose.

Textbooks were invented as a way a getting readings into the classroom economically when books were scarce. Previously, itinerate teachers would teach from whatever book they happened to have in their backpacks, but when schools evolved as stable public institutions, they became stable book markets: textbooks were provided via the state to make sure every classroom had a set of books cheaply; then to ensure that every classroom had a set of approved books [the Irish Readers being the first official textbook, whose explicit purpose was to teach Irish school children loyalty to the British Empire and suppress republican sentiments. The first Canadian Reader was the Irish Reader with a new cover on it; it wasn’t until the 1920’s that Irish Reader was replaced with a pro-Canada version]; and then to better organize material by grade and reading level.

And that tradition has continued pretty much up to now. Largely out of force of habit. But the Alberta government has figured out it can save millions by not buying any more textbooks. Because, why bother? Teachers can assign the appropriate entries on Wikipedia, or choose from the millions of pages—or more likely, video*mdash;of appropriate material available on the web. Which will be more up-to-date than any textbook, since it takes years for textbook to go from commission to publication, and so are two to three years out of date by the time they reach classrooms. But schools only renew textbooks for any particular curriculum once every ten years. In Alberta, it's done on a rotating basis, so this year social studies, next year Language arts, and so. That way curriculum committees have ten years to refine the next curriculum based on new research, assigning authors to write the update, arranging with publishers and so on. . . And schools only have to invest in textbooks for one subject per year, keeping those textbooks for ten years while they buy one other subjects per year, by the end of which time those initial texts are both worn out and too out of date to continue using, but then that subject comes up again in the rotation. But the down side has always been that teachers always had to supplement to bring up to date, particularly in social studies and science. Now, skip the cost and inconvenience of the outdated textbook entirely and let teachers use free, uptodate materials by following self-updating wikipedia and various teacher sites. Let classroom teachers custom make the readings for their particular class’ range of abilities and interests, for their particular community and neighbourhood (let’s use the Chinese examples in this class since 28% of this neighbourhood is ethnic Chinese, or use Calgary example for this class in Calgary, etc) for their particular slant. Let math teachers show the Khan academy videos. Why pay for textbooks at all?

So Alberta is done. Alberta is always at the forefront of any trend in Education (the Deputy Minister appointed my former colleague to the explicit position of seeking out innovations and mandated that there wasn’t to be a single innovation anywhere in the world that Alberta wasn’t on top of evaluating, and immediately adopting if it worked) so I won’t be surprised if we’re the first to go textbook-less. . .but um, won’t be the last.

At the university level, I think there is increasingly the opportunity for small presses and independent authors to put out inexpensive ($10) ebooks or ($40) Print On Demand textbooks without any role for these mega-corporations. Let me finish my text on test construction, post it to Amazon, and let individual instructors decide whether it meets their needs for their class. The author makes $5 per copy, instructors get an expensive text for their students, and everybody’s happy. Universities will eventually figure out to count self-published texts towards a professor’s output by asking about sales (i.e., how many other instructors are using their book) rather than by asking how prestigious the publisher is.

A more boring textbook for Teacher Education than it needed to be.

And we will get much better, much more interesting textbooks. I’ve no doubt already mentioned in previous posts how the publisher of my first textbook insisted on me taking 95% of the humour out because a few of the referees thought I was not sufficiently serious about the subject. So I did take the funny bits out (because I needed the publication credit for tenure), and that textbook tanked after two years—but the stuff I took out and subsequently distributed myself is still in use in some Education Faculties across Canada, 25 years later (and has made me more money than the publisher paid as the advance for the whole book) precisely because they are funny/outrageous. History is BORING, for example, because textbook publishers explicitly remove anything remotely controversial, lest it be unacceptable to some market somewhere: as the saying goes,"if you can’t sell it in Texas, you can’t sell it anywhere.” So no evolution in biology texts, nothing but the bare facts of history, because talking about Louis Riel sells differently in Quebec than Alberta, so just avoid the whole controversy and stick to just dates and indisputable (i.e., uninteresting) facts. Nothing local, because we have to sell the same book to everybody, everywhere. (Or more recently, make only token changes in the new “pick and choose your chapter” textbooks which switch “Alberta” into the sentence from “Ontario”, which are about as useful and meaningful as those kids books you can buy which will print your kid’s name in as one of the character names.) Why you hated every textbook you’ve ever read, but loved every science book by Claire Eamer. . . . Let’s just go with Clarie’s books from now on, eh?

Thus endith today’s rant.

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And now it's another day:
ADDENDUM

Years ago the Social Studies Curriculum changed to include an understanding of the Acadians (specifically, the community of Meteghan, NS) in Grade 2. Unfortunately, teachers found that when they came to that portion of the program of studies, the province hadn't actually gotten around to writing a textbook or providing any other resources about Meteghan. Since I had a daughter in Grade 2 and was an Education professor, I set out to prove to my student teachers how easy it was for a classroom teacher to produce their own curriculum materials--that they don't need to wait around for, or be dependent upon, textbook writers. I produced the "Tigana Learns About the Acadians" website, gathering & filming the material in one day, and constructing the actual website in about two to three weeks of after hours fiddling. And that website got over 80,000 hits by Alberta Grade 2s, until the province got around to producing resources three or four years later.

And that was before YouTube was really a thing! (2006 is so long ago that most modern browsers won't show the .MOV files on that site without some fiddling, though there are workarounds for teachers who are still using the site with their Grade 2 classes.) It is WAY easier to do that these days: which begs the question, why ISN'T producing their own curricular materials an expectation on teachers?

Not every objective in every course, of course, but maybe one thing a year? So that all together we in effect crowd source the whole curriculum? Sounds ridiculous, but it really isn't. Every teacher I have ever met has one unit in their curriculum where they think the text is stupid or the module is missing something key, or whatever...so, don't just complain, upload something better. Then let other teachers grab it or not, based on their classes and their tastes.

There are in fact, lots of websites like that today--some charge teachers to download lesson plans and pay the teacher who uploaded it a percentage, like any textbook publisher, only better because it's custom made by the people who are teaching the concepts, the frontline workers, not someone who hasn't seen a classroom in 20 years. Not that there isn't room for authored books (see Claire Eamer example above) but teachers could regain a degree of professionalism, of professional autonomy, if as a profession they produced at least some of their own collaborative materials.

Or in sociological terms, the separation of curriculum design from classroom teachers reduces teachers to deskilled workers: technicians who implement other's design, which inevitably leads to alienation from the work process. Allow teachers to develop their own resources and you automatically get better teachers and better resources. The Wiki format or the upload/down load for cash format, or just everyone produce their own Youtube videos and self-published books for sale on Amazon...or something new we haven't thought of yet...it doesn't matter, we just need to take charge of our own teaching again.

2016 WWC Guest of Honour Speech

Dr. Robert Runté speaking at When Words Collide.

The When Words Collide writers' conference (held each August in Calgary) has a podcast page on which they release Guest of Honour speeches, panel discussions, and interviews. These are generally well worth a listen.

My Guest of Honour speech August 2016 was just released: "WWC 2016 GOH speech finds the curmudgeonly, retired professor Robert Runté questioning English teachers and praising fan fiction".

Staying Out of Bookstores

[This was written in response to Paul Cipywnyk's "Where the Ink Meets the Road: Insights from Working in a Bookstore" posted in The Editor's Weekly the official blog of Editors Canada, Canada's national association of editors, Nov 15, 2016. http://blog.editors.ca/?p=3956]

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I used to love going into bookstores; now I mostly find them depressing.

As an acquisition editor, I am depressed knowing that the fabulous books I have acquired and edited are not even in the store, because the Indigo/Chapters/Smith/Coles monopoly chain made the decision not to carry independent publishers anymore, when it switched 50% of shelf space from books to cute stuff, because books weren't selling enough. Thankfully, the micro publisher (60 titles and growing!) I work for saw that coming and therefore survived that change when many other Canadian small presses folded overnight when they suddenly found themselves—not just effectively shut out of brick and mortar stores—but faced with six figure bills as their entire inventory was returned to them in one ruthless weekend.

As a critic and reviewer, I'm depressed when I see rows and rows of books in the SF/Fantasy section devoted to TV and movie series; to series written to a single formula; to the exact same book written by dozens of different authors all trying to catch the current fad by writing the predictable processed cheese designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator among consumers. It often feels like the big five publishers are so focused on predictable sell through that they have given up on taking risks, on caring about quality and innovation and promoting new authors. I know that perception isn't accurate, because I've met some of the editors at those big houses and they are fine upstanding individuals who love books as much as I do, and who are doing their best in a tough business. But I miss the days when presses were small and when the acquisition editor and the developmental editor were the same person and made the final decision based on their own tastes and gut feelings without having to worry about shareholders and the marketing department. When publishers were brands that readers could seek out to know that the editor shared their tastes and the reader could buy an unknown author or a new concept because they could trust the editor. Now the consumer can mostly trust that they won't be challenged by what they choose, won't have to think as they read, and will only feel what they've always felt reading the previus 80 Star Trek (or whatever) novels. As a writing coach, I am depressed because 95% of those who approach me for instruction want to know how they can become best sellers, how they can lose their voice and sound like every other author in the store. They want to know which of the current fads they can write to; or, better yet, can I tell them the secret of what the next fad will be. Or, how can they write like a 'gay person' (sic, I quoting here) or 'write black' or First Nations because so many writers guidelines these days say the publisher is open to/especially looking for LGBTQ/diverse authors, and these clients get upset with me when I raise about cultural appropriation. Or, I have to tell them to stop trying to be Margret Atwood (if they have graduated from university creative writing programs) or Robert Sawyer (if they are trying to write commercial genre fiction) because we already have Marget Atwood and Robert Sawyer and what we really need instead is their unique voice and their unique perspective and insight. And then we both get depressed when they ask me, 'Will I be able to make a living writing as myself' and I have to answer, 'Probably not, no'.

As an author, bookstores depress me because as I look around at the thousands of titles on the shelves—even ignoring all the processed cheese clogging the space and only looking at the authors I respect because they are pushing boundaries or allowing their uniquely Canadian voice to guide their writing—even if I just look at the books I love, there are so many more here (just today, not even talking about the turn over month to month—all those pallets of new books arriving each morning that Paul unpacks) l can never hope to read them all. If I cannot possibly buy and read all of their wonderful books, how I can I possibly expect anybody, anywhere, EVER to read my poor effort?

Not that my book is likely to ever end up in an actual brick and mortar store.

Most depressing of all, I can't remember the last time I actually went into a brick and mortar store. (To buy a book, I mean. I remember when I bought my daughter a leather bound notebook, and when I got the wife a coffee mug, and—well, you get the idea.) But I mostly read on my Kindle app or my Kobo, and when I finish a book, up pops a link to the next book by that author; or I take five minutes to search online for another title from CZP (the last great independent publisher in our genre) or from one of the small presses I follow because I know the editors, know the innovative fabulous work they are doing and know I won't find any of their books in the bookstore.

Don't get me wrong: "Where the Ink Hits the Road" is a great piece, and authors and editors should indeed occasionally visit bookstores to check out the real world of publishing. That there are still bookstores and readers at all is a positive thing! Not trying to argue that bookstores are out of date or that big publishers are evil or anything of that ilk. That would be nonsense. (I may be envious, but I'm not delusional, as some commentators on these issues appear to be.) Rather, just saying that we need to be careful when examining where the ink hits the pavement that we don't twist ourselves out of shape trying to figure out how to sell out to get a piece of that action. One should always start from one's own voice (or the client's voice, if you're the editor) and look for the market where that book belongs, and not start from the market and try to fit one's voice to it. The number of writers I've known over the years who've tried to write that Romance or SciFi novel to earn the big bucks, and failed miserably because they didn't even read romance themselves or know SF isn't not called scifi by anyone in the field, far exceeds the number (zero) who made that work for them. The authors I know who became successful all kept to their own voice and only became "overnight successes" after twenty years of nonstop effort to become the best writers they could become, ignoring fads and get quick rich schemes.

And who managed not to get so depressed about bookstores, and the economic realities of modern publishing/distribution, to give up writing completely.

Copyright Law Changes and the Decline of Canadian Publishing

I have been reacting in various listserve discussions to articles like this one in the Globe and Mail which purport to show that the recent changes in Canadian copyright law are robbing authors of their royalties and killing off publishers. It is, of course, pure nonsense. Correlation is not causation, and the confabulation of copyright changes and troubles in textbook and other publishing is often a deliberate attempt by corporate lobbyists to grab off more than their fair share of the writer's revenues. Michael Geist has written a much better researched and argued piece on the topic than I could, so I refer you to his column "False Alarms: Examining the Misleading Claims About the State of Canadian Publishers". Highly recommended.

In Praise of the Hobby Writer

The wrong attitude—go ahead, try it!

One response to the explosion of vanity self-publishing (as opposed to professional authors choosing to cut out the middle man) is for authors to emphasize the difference between 'professional' authors, and the 'amateur' or 'hobby' writer.

The emphasis on 'professional' is outdated. (Actually 'professional' was never a real thing: read my literature review article on professionalism.) As I argued last post, whether one can make a living as a writer has more to do with being in the right place at the right time than anything else. (This is particularly true for all those early adopters who have written books on how they made millions through social media—none of which tricks are still valid by the time you read about them....) And, as is obvious to anyone flipping through any best seller (e.g.,books by Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer, etc) it's often not about the quality of the writing. The hobby writer is as likely—perhaps even more likely—to be a great writer, given that they may not be trying to cash in on the latest trend or reach the widest possible demographic, as do those aiming for the best-seller list. There is nothing wrong with writing and publishing for the art of it, and making a living some other way. Most of the writers I most admire have a day job or the support of an employed spouse.

One of my very favourite writers, and my favourite example of a hobby writer, is H.A. Hargreaves, whose 1976 SF collection was the first ever marketed as "Canadian science fiction". I used his stories to define Canadian SF almost as long as I have been lecturing on the topic (35 years) and he was recently (Oct, 2015) inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. His collection, reprinted and still available as North by 2000+, contains only 15 stories, but it has had a profound effect on Canadian SF, influencing an entire generation of authors that followed. But his biggest influence on me was the realization that hobby writing was okay. Hargreaves was a Professor of English at the University of Alberta, and his academic work kept him too busy to write—except for one week each year he took off to write one story. Not what you'd call a professional level of output. (Contrast that with 2015's other inductee into the Hall of Fame, Dave Duncan, whose recent release, The Eye of Strife, was his 50th published novel.) Nevertheless, over the course of nearly two decades, Hargreave's stories added up, not just to his North by 2000+ collection, but to a significant contribution to the genre.

Hargreaves was clearly not writing for the money, and he was not writing for the lowest common denominator to get on the best seller list; he was writing for himself. What he wrote were some of the finest short SF stories ever, and he pioneered the genre of Canadian science fiction. Each of his stories was originally submitted to John W. Campbell, the leading American SF editor of the time, who rejected each story in turn with a two page letter explaining how the story would have to be rewritten to fit into the pages of Analog. In each case, Hargreaves ignored the rejection, and the advice, and sent the story on to the British magazine New Worlds where it was published as is. Rather than change his story for the American market, Hargreaves stuck to his guns, and created something really new and worthwhile.

I aspire to someday get to the level of a Hargreaves. I am never going to be a full time writer because I could not possibly earn more writing than I did as a professor, and I insist on a better lifestyle than the gentile poverty that defines the life of most of my writer friends. I love writing and editing, and put some effort into getting better at both, but the amount of money available from these activities is not sufficient to take seriously as a career. As a hobby, I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. As an avocation, writing is something I am passionate about and I hope that I have some talent for. I seem to be able to get whatever I write published, but thanks to other demands on my time, I only seem to average about one or two stories a year.

Quantity and quality are different dimensions, however, and vague ideological terms like 'professional' tend to confabulate these two very different criteria along with the (largely random) criteria of 'sales'. Just because Stephenie Meyer has made more sales and more money than I will ever see, does that necessarily qualify Stephenie Meyer as a better writer than some hobbyist? I don't think so. I'll grant her the status of more influential writer, because far more people have read her writing than those published in SF mags or small press anthologies. I'll happily grant her the status of major writer, because her books have taught a lot of kids (including my then 12 year old) how to read. In spite of my reservations about the Twilight series, realizing that my daughter's lifetime reading page count tripled in the week it took her to read through all the Twilight books, yeah, I owe Stephenie Meyer a lot. You go girl! But is she a better writer than the hundreds of hobby writers I know? Not so much.

I'm on the membership committee of various writers' organizations, and the issue of the hobby writer comes up a lot, especially now that some many people are self-publishing. On the one hand there are those that are trying to keep the organization an exclusive club, defining membership criteria in dollars and cents or copies sold or some other measure of professionalism to keep the vanity self-publishers out. I have some sympathy for this view. I do meet a lot of wannabes who don't qualify in my mind because they are uninterested in learning to write. These vanity self-publishers are motivated by get-rich-quick dreams where readers are supposed to flock to their badly written first drafts and turn over large quantities of cash in return for very little effort. These are the authors who put no effort into learning their craft, who are too incompetent to recognize the extensive flaws in their structures, who care little for grammar or spelling, and who are deaf to feedback that might help them improve. There is little passion for writing in such individuals, just gigantic egos and a craving for fame and fortune.

Such individuals are, however, the minority. A loud, obnoxious minority that gets more than its fair share of attention by virtue of how annoying they can be, but still not the norm.

Most of the hobby writers I meet are NOT vanity self-publishers.

(If you were wondering if I might be bashing you in the preceding tirade, allow me to assure you this is not the case. Anyone who reads obscure posts on writing is by definition not the sort of non-learner to whom I was referring. Further, if you feared even for a moment that I might be talking about you, then by definition you are not that sort of ego maniac.)

Most hobby authors are talented writers trying to hone their craft to produce quality work. I would very much like them to be able to join writers' groups/communities and become part of the conversation. They, like H.A.Hargreaves, have much to contribute to that conversation; to the discourse that is our culture. Excluding them by imposing some arbitrary quantity of sales seems to miss the point entirely. (I would much prefer some test of quality, but fully understand that the subjective nature of the assessment makes such evaluations untenable.) So I would prefer to loosen the criteria to allow more people to participate in the conversation, rather than form a too exclusive club.

Similarly, at writer's conventions (though notably not the case at either When Words Collide or CanCom) I often see a hierarchy imposed on the gathering based on sales....but this completely wrong-headed. The hobby writers are often as interesting and knowledgeable as the full-time, commercially successful writers. New writers tend to flock to the full-time/commercial professionals in hopes of discovering the secret of their success. Since the secret is they hit the trend at exactly the right moment; or they discovered an overlooked audience, or—and this does happen occasionally—they happen to write really well; asking for the secret handshake that gets one into the big publishers rather misses the point. Asking about how to pace a scene; or starting a discussion of whether prologues are ever acceptable; or talking about how to manage the writing process—those are the conversations that help one improve one's writing. And a long-time hobbyist is as likely to have useful comments to contribute to that discussion as the big seller.

So please, let us not confabulate "hobby writer" with either "rank beginner" or "vanity self-publisher". There is nothing wrong with writing part-time. Indeed, Chaucer had a day job (as Minister of Public Works, no less), as did Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges and Lewis Carroll, and well, pretty much everybody before the pulp era. (And folks, the pulp era is over). Indeed, I would make the argument that the part-timer might be a purer form of the profession, because they are motivated by the need for self-actualization (the 'need' to write) and write according to their own vision, rather than trying to match some commercial formula dictated by the best seller genre. Or, to put it another way, the part-timer is less likely to prostitute their art for filthy lucre..... :-)

Related Posts: Why we published North by 2000+

How Do I Become a Professional Writer?

I am often asked by aspiring writers, especially those with some critical success writing short stories or winning contests, "How do I become a full-time writer?". The short answer is, "You don't."

I don't actually mean that too personally. It's usually not that one is not a good enough writer, it's that that career line simply doesn't exist any more. In the 1920s and 1930s, writing fiction for the pulp market could garner one a decent income. Unfortunately, that pulp market, and the pocketbook market that replaced it, are essentially gone. The few fiction magazines that remain still pay the same rates they were paying in 1930, so it is no longer possible to make a living from writing short fiction; and pocketbooks are pretty much down to a few dozen best sellers. When I started my career, there were 42 different publishers to whom I could send an SF manuscript...now we're down to maybe five. Given that everyone else is submitting to the same five editors, the bar for entry has been raised too high for mortals to cross, and the wait times to even have one's manuscript read (given the thousands of manuscripts submitted to the same five markets), this is simply no longer a viable career option.

For example, out of the three hundred or so published writers I know personally, perhaps three make what one would consider a decent middle class living; another 20 or so live by writing, but consequently live extremely humble lifestyles. For example, I recall one woman—the author of about i5 books at that point—who exclaimed to our writer's group, "Now I'll be able to buy tea!" when a royalty check arrived. I don't know about you, but not being able to afford a box of tea for months at a time does not constitute "making a living" in my books.

Most writers I know have day jobs to support themselves and their families. Many work as technical writers, so that they are still practicing their craft, but computer manuals and political speeches are not what they would 'count' as their actual writing. Others have jobs in unrelated careers, such as 'spouse'. (Though one writer told me lately that she would have married anyone prepare to support her writing, so maybe that is a related career after all.)

To which aspiring writers often retort, "Well those guys (pointing to the best seller counter) make a very good living. How do I get to be one of them?"

You don't. Because it is not enough to be a great writer anymore; you have to be outrageously lucky as well. (Or, you know, deal-with-the-devil seems the only plausible explanation for the success of some writers, but that's beyond the scope of the current post.) Unfortunately, pointing to a successful best-selling author these days and asking how to get there is much like pointing to a lottery winner and asking me how to make a living buying lottery tickets. Yeah, there are folks that worked for because somebody has to win, but I think we're all agreed that if one mortgages their house to buy lottery tickets,they're an idiot. One has a better chance playing for the NHL as a career path than making it to the exalted ranks of best selling author, so most career counselors will recommend having a backup plan to even the best aspiring hockey players.

The good news is that becoming a published writer is easier than it has ever been. Getting into the big five is next to impossible without an agent, and getting a respectable agent to take one on is pretty difficult, but it is possible, provided that one's work is both to that standard and commercial. But there are lots of smaller presses around, which can deliver a fair degree of quality and prestige,if not best-seller scale sales. And if one can't find a publisher to take one, one can always self-publish. (If you're going to self-publish, I suggest starting with Kobo Writing Life, which is an author-friendly interface, run by author and book nerd, Mark Lefebvre.) Seeing one's book in print (and digital) is easy--getting anyone to buy it after, not so much.

Bottom-line: if you're in it for the money, you're likely going to be disappointed. If you're in it for the writing, then happy days.

Estate Planning for Authors

Got my copy of Writing After Retirement: Tips by Successful Retired Writers [edited by Christine Redman-Waldeyer and Carole Smallwood. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press (Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)] with my chapter, "Estate Planning for Authors" in the mail yesterday. My suggestions are pretty basic, and come with the disclaimer that I am no lawyer, but hopefully get people thinking about how they want their literary legacy handled after they're gone....

The other 26 chapters in the collection are filled with tips on how to write by successful authors from across a variety of genres and communities. Together, they provide a pretty realistic portrayal of the challenges / obstacles aspiring writers face. This collection is aimed at writers starting after retirement, but most of the advice would be applicable to everyone.

The Importance of Contracts

March 1st sees the long-awaited release of the mystery novel, Old Growth, by Matt Hughes.It’s the sequel to Downshift, Hughes 1997 mystery, published originally by Doubleday Canada and rereleased last year by Five Rivers Publishing.

In announcing the release of Old Growth, Matt tells the following story:

Both novels follow the trials and tribulations of Sid Rafferty, who is kind of an alter ego of mine — a freelance speechwriter living on Vancouver Island in the 1990s, though he gets into more trouble than I usually did.

Official publication date is March 1, but the ebook version is already available on Amazon.

Here's the may-be-interesting part: in the 1990s, I was on my way to becoming established as a Canadian crime writer. The late and wonderful Bunny Wright (L.R. Wright on covers) one of our best mystery authors, had introduced me to her editor at Doubleday, and the editor wanted to buy a mystery novel from me. The problem was, the marketing department wanted Doubleday to go more literary and not sign another genre author. After a five-month argument, the editor won and bought Downshift. It was to be first of a series and she told me to start writing the sequel, which I did.

But three months before Downshift's release, the editor left Doubleday and went to Macmillan, which was a nonfiction house. Immediately, my printrun was cut and whatever promotional budget there was went to some other book. I was let to understand that the sequel, then four-fifths written, would not be welcome. And, of course, as a trusting newbie, I had never asked the editor for a contract. Downshift got good reviews, but most of the sales were to libraries. When I asked, a year later, to buy the remainders, they told me they hadn't bothered to do that -- as the returns came in, they went straight to the pulper.

Now Five Rivers has republished Downshift and the belatedly completed sequel, Old Growth. The lesson: no matter how friendly and enthusiastic your editor may be, don't write a word until you've signed the contract.

The first chapter of Old Growth, is now available for a free read: http://www.matthewhughes.org/excerpt-from-old-growth/

Buy Your Favorite Author a Latte

Reading a "review" of Five River's new Dave Duncan release on Amazon, I was taken aback by someone rating the book was one star because it was priced at $4 for a novella. The reviewer made it clear that he hadn't actually read the book, but was merely incensed at the price.

Leaving aside the obvious disservice of erroneously giving a one star quality rating when really the complaint is about the cost rather then the quality of the writing, I simply don't get the attitude that authors, editors, cover artists and publishers should all work for free. An unfortunate result, perhaps, of the burgeoning self-publishing industry where substandard authors—desperate for an audience—price their books at $0.99, or give it away free in hopes of attracting readers. I understand the principle of giving away the first book in a series in hopes of attracting sales to more recently issued volumes in the series, but what we're seeing is a race to the bottom.

Promotional giveaways notwithstanding, in general you get what you pay for.

Or to put it another way, I don't get why some people seem to believe that writing should be sold by the pound or linear foot. Fifty Shades of Grey is 528 pages long but does that really make it worth a cover price three times higher than Duncan's novella? To me, it should be the other way around: Duncan's books are the ones worth reading. Once you get past the actual paper costs (not relevant in digital books), there is no reason to assume that longer should necessarily cost more, or that shorter needs be massively discounted, to the point where writing and publishing are no longer economical.

I think a novella by Dave Duncan is worth $4. I pay more for my morning latte. Dave's novella took considerably longer to read than a latte to drink, and the pleasure of that reading lasted longer yet.

If the cover of the latest issue of, say, Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine included a short story by Dave Duncan, I would have immediately paid $6 for the magazine to get that story. Indeed, I did renew my subscription to NeoOpsis  Magazine awhile back because they had a Dave Duncan short story in the latest issue. So why is it that some people suddenly find $4 an outrageous price for a novella when its a standalone package?

I love Duncan's stuff, and I want him to write more of it, so am willing to pay him to go do that. Specifically, to write the next two books in this series. A consumer will end up paying $11.95 for all three novellas in the series. And you know what? I'm okay with paying $11.95 for a Duncan novel or story collection. His books are worth at least that much of my coffee money.

So here's the thing: if you ran into your favorite author at the mall, wouldn't you offer to buy him a latte if you got to sit and listen to him tell a story for an hour?

Simultaneous submissions

Ran into an established YA author I hadn't seen for awhile, and greeted her with my standard, "written any good books lately?" She replied that she had just sent the latest manuscript off to a new publisher she had just found.

"A new publisher?" I asked. "Did X reject it?" (Because I was surprised that her previous publisher would even consider letting her go.)

"Well," she replied, "I never heard back from them on it, or from my other publisher, and it's been nearly two months, so I thought it was probably time to send it out again to somebody new."

My face must have revealed my shock, because she said, "What?"

"You've sent the same manuscript to three publishers? At the same time?"

"Well, yeah. What's wrong with that?"

The answer is that simultaneous submissions are a very very bad idea. It's like trying to sell the same car to three different buyers. It can get you into a lot of trouble.

Most publishers are very explicit on their websites or in their submission guidelines that they do not accept simultaneous submissions. (There are a few--very few--exceptions, that explicitly accept simultaneous submissions, but even they insist that you tell them it is a simultaneous submission.)

The publishing industry is filled with stories of editors who, finding that this or that title missed a crucial deadline or otherwise isn't ready to go to press, reached down into the waiting pile of submissions, pulled out the next title in line, and fast tracked the editing, artwork, book design, etc etc, and then sent off the good news to the author that their manuscript is not only accepted but already halfway to press -- only to find that the author has just sold the manuscript to another publisher. (Yes, yes, smart editors would not order artwork before they had a signed contract in hand, but it has happened often enough to be the stuff of legends.) Needless to say, publishers get very pissed when they find themselves holding a cover to some other publisher's book; and that that author need never cross their doorway again--and probably shouldn't bother trying to submit to any other publisher that publisher has ever had lunch with, either. There are a million manuscripts out there awaiting publication, a thousand as good as the best, so publishers will often simply decide not to bother with an author they have come to think of as 'unreliable'.

But forget about the anecdotes of books halfway to press before the publisher discovered they didn't in fact own the rights. More commonly, the problem with simultaneous submissions is simply that you are asking the editor to invest 8 to 10 hours reading a manuscript you may not end up selling them. Editors are busy people who already have more manuscripts on their desk than they can possibly read before quitting time, so if they push other manuscripts aside to read yours, you're not just cheating the editor out of his time, you're cheating other writers out of their shot at that editor.

Even in small one or two person presses, it can take two to three months to decide on a manuscript. Admittedly, the first two months are probably spent with the manuscript sitting on a pile of other unread manuscripts while the editor frantically attends to some other more immediate deadline; or just attends to the stack of submissions from two months before that. But even once your manuscript gets that first read, the editor has to weigh it against other submissions, maybe talk it over with another person at the press, maybe play around with how this or that element could be 'fixed', and so on, before a decision can be made. So it is unlikely that you would hear back before at least a couple of months go by. Check the publisher's submission guidelines to see if they have mentioned their response times. If it says 8 to 16 weeks response time, that's how long you should expect to wait. Throw in another couple of weeks for good measure, then send a polite inquiry about the status of your manuscript. If there is no response, or time keeps going by and they don't seem to be making a decision, you can always withdraw the submission and take it elsewhere. Taking it elsewhere without first officially withdrawing it can place the editor in a very tricky situation.

For example, at larger presses, there is typically an editorial meeting at which each editor brings forward her three or four nominees and has to argue for them against the nominees of the other editors. This doesn't just represent the further investment of time in your manuscript, but may actually matter to the editor's career. If they've championed your manuscript at the meeting, but have to go back to the next meeting to confess that your's has been withdrawn because it has already sold elsewhere, than that can represent a significant loss of face for your editor. The other editors will be pissed that their nominees were trumped by a manuscript your editor was not in the end able to deliver. The stakes are similarly increased each time your editor has to defend your manuscript as the decision to purchase is vetted by the marketing department, more senior editors, the editorial board, or the publisher. So editors come to loath simultaneous submissions, even if they haven't invested a dime in production.

So, although it feels like the press should be able to respond immediately, or that they must not be interested if they do not respond within a few weeks, deciding whether to publish your book is a time consuming process. You must therefore give the publisher time to finish the process before taking your manuscript to the next publisher.

Another factor that this particular author had overlooked was that she had previously published with two of these publishers. That certainly gives her a leg up on newcomers submitting to the slush pile, and increased her expectations of a speedy response, but it also greatly increases her responsibility to the publisher. That publisher has already invested in developing her manuscript/talent, in promoting her writing, and so on, so that unless there have been significant problems with the experience, the writer should consider giving that publisher first right of refusal. Indeed, many first book contracts include a clause that make that a legal requirement. Submitting the book simultaneously to the competition may actually leave an author open to suit for breach of contract. (And again, the second publisher will not be overjoyed to find that they are being sued by the first publisher because you submitted a manuscript to them that you shouldn't have.

So basic rule: unless both the publishers to whom you are submitting explicitly say that simultaneous submissions are okay, don't even think about doing it. Allow each publisher in turn sufficient time to make a determination about your manuscript before withdrawing it and moving on to the next. Spend your time working on your next manuscript, rather than obsessing about how long its taking to hear back about this one.

Bots, Books and Pricing

Hilarious but disturbing post by Carlos Bueno on how competing computer programs set the price for Carlos' book without his knowledge or participation. And there is a follow-up post on how a fake online bookstore (Geefts) tricks consumers by offering his book below Amazon's price, but doesn't actually have any books to sell.


Totally bizarre. But clear wake up call for authors and self-publishers.

Fascinating post on e-publishing by Arthur Slade

Gov General Award-winner Arthur Slade on ebook publishing tells exactly how many copies sold, and how much cash made: http://arthurslade.blogspot.com/2012/02/glorious-year-of-ebooking.html

So much of the blogosphere focuses on one or two (highly exceptional) stories to hype self-publishing model, or equally unhelpfully tell us that the average self-published title (i.e., by illiterate, unedited newbies) sells fewer than 20 copies, that it is very difficult to get a handle on actual potential for writers.

On the other hand, I have to say I'm a little shocked. If Arthur Slade can only bring in five grand a year from e-books, where the hell does that leave the writers who haven't won a GG and don't already have 15 titles in print? Yikes.

Of course, we all hope that our particular title will go viral, or can figure out that $5,000 a year might work out okay if that figure grows or remains steady for several more years to come. The typical advance for a new SF author from a major publisher is between $3500 to $6000, so $5000 from self-publishing still compares -- except that the big print publishers throw in editing and cover art and book design and perhaps some marketing for free, so at least half of that theoretical $5000 payout is likely going to cover self-publisher's costs. But bottom line is, are you in the same league as Arthur Slade?*

Mind you, at least one of the authors I've edited for has told me s/he is making more than a $1200 per month off ebooks. So it can be a good revenue stream.

My take on it is that self-publishing works best for (a) established writers continuing to bring out new print books with the majors, but who have reissued their out of print backlist as ebooks (which would otherwise not be earning anything, and which have already gone through extensive editing etc.); and (b) new or experienced authors writing for a niche market too small to attract the major publishers, but sufficiently large and untapped to provide steady modest income to those servicing that market through small specialty presses or self-publishing. In both cases, when a satisfied customer finishes with one title, they may go on to buy an ebook by the same author.

[Update 18/02/2012: *Arthur Slade commented:

Robert, I honestly attribute very little of my sales to my own fanbase. Most of my sales are in the US and UK and they don't know me very well there. It's more whether you have the right book for the bigger audiences. My YA books (other than DUST) don't cross over that much into the adult market, which are the majority of kindle owners. I wish I had a serial killer mystery in my back pocket, or a romance. Or a brilliant fantasy. I think my numbers would be much higher if I did.

Of course, Slade has a point! Most Kindle users are adults, so children's books won't have the same market base. But that may be changing rapidly. I know I download books to read my 8-yr old on my Kobo, and my older daughter (13) has her own Kobo. As all her peers seem to be upgrading to smartphones and/or tablet computers, those that read will more likely read on Kindles et al. Already my students are asking for their texts in e-format...rather than lugging heavy texts around with them all the time. And the provincial government is talking about switching from texts to e-materials in next couple of years. So...give it a minute....]

Good week for ChiZine Publications

One of my favorite small presses, ChiZine Publications (http://chizinepub.com/) just signed a deal with Harper Collins Canada to take over its Canadian distribution, and its global digital distribution. (Diamond Book Distributors remains as the distributor for the U.S. and internationally.) Then ChiZine Publications was named "Best Horror Imprint" in Rue Morgue Magazine; then publisher Sandra Kasturi was profiled for "Women in Horror".... So they are having a pretty good week!

CZP is one of my favorite examples of the small presses evolving to fill the gap left by the decline of the previous publishing model. CZP has three things going for it:

(1) publishers (Sandra Kasturi and Brett Savory) who know a great book when they see it -- in contrast to the majors that have abdicated editorial choice to their marketing department's. Readers know that no matter how far out a particular title appears, if Brett and Sandra have passed on it, its got something. I am no horror fan, in fact I generally despise the genre, but I have yet to read a CZP title that I didn't like. Okay, "like" might not be quite the right word, because some of this stuff is seriously wrong but you know, brilliant. So this is an excellent example of successful branding. There are a billion titles out there and its increasingly difficult to find the good stuff. One the one hand, the big traditional publishers try to play it safe in their quest for the big sellers, and so turn out process cheese; on the other, the majority of self-published material isn't even literate. So the most interesting stuff is being published by the small presses, but their output is often uneven. But once one has identified a particular press as a trusted brand -- and CZP is the current best example of a 'never a wrong note' press -- then the press becomes the guarantor of quality that readers require.

(2) publishers who understand the new publishing model -- and Sandra and Brett have practically invented the new model. As publishers of limited edition hardcovers, they play well to the collector market, readers who want books as objects of art almost as much as for their content. Even their paperback editions are things of beauty. And using that market as their base, have slowly, carefully, thoughtfully built themselves into a significant imprint distributed by one of the big players.

(3) publishers who understand community. I think this is one of the key factors that made for their outrageous success story, and one they may not even totally consciously get themselves. I happened to be in Toronto one week when they had an event planned, so dropped in. And was instantly blown away by the community these guys had grown. They have surrounded themselves with a pool of incredibly talented writers, editors, reviewers, and readers. The sociologist in me was fascinated to watch how they turned a reading series into the best author networking opportunity I've seen in years. I watched dozens of horror's best sitting around bouncing ideas off each other, validating each others work, living the writing life. All facilitated by CZP reading series. No wonder they keep finding great new talent-- they're creating it wholesale by creating a community. CZP isn't just a press, its a bloody movement! A school! I know beyond any doubt that future literary scholars will identify this group as a major turning point not only in horror (the horror community world wide has already clued in that CZP is completely revitalizing that otherwise moribund genre) but for mainstream Canadian literature. Kasturi and editor Helen Marshall, for example, are clearly two of Canada's best poets by anybody's standards, and are slowly being recognized as such by the mainstream literary establishment. When was the last time the canlit crowd took horror seriously? When was the last time you actually thought of buying a poetry book. But I tell you, these two...! And they're just the tip of the ice berg. I wish I lived in Toronto to be part of it, or at least to be there with my notebook to document it all, but even way out here in Alberta I can see that the CZP community is becoming THE up and coming literary circle in Canada.

Remember you heard it here first folks!