On Self-Publishing and the Hugh Howey / Data Guy January 2015 Report

(Parts of this post originally appeared on my Google+ page and in the comments on Mike Reeves-McMillan's post on the report.)

You may be aware that Author Earnings, a data analysis site run by Hugh Howey and someone called Data Guy, recently released a report on ebook sales and the market share of those sales by the various publishing methods.  There is a lot of interesting information here, so I do recommend checking it out if you have the time.

As you may expect, I have some issues with the report and with responses to the report -- and to my questions regarding the report.  I should start by saying that I haven't bothered with the self-publishing vs. traditional publishing debate in any serious sense for years because I find the entrenched positions on either side to be, in light of the current publishing climate, monstrously stupid.  There are too many pundits out there trying to prescribe the "right" path for publishing while rejecting any alternative as viable; yet, so few of them have much in the way of hard, objective data to back up their arguments.  As it stands, most of the debates about which method is better are based almost entirely on anecdotes or reports like the one I'm going to talk about here.  Unfortunately, that invariably means these arguments are fundamentally faulty.
 
While I don't doubt that a lot of the data here is accurate (and interesting), there are two immediate problems that come to mind:

Reader Entitlement Syndrome: Stacey Jay and the Windmill Full of Corpses

I would like to begin this post with a disclaimer:  what will follow is unlikely to be pleasant; it will be filled with profanity and angry ranting.  If that's not your thing, then you can find a happy home next door where ponies dance in the moonlight and authors get shit all over for no good fucking reason and just have to smile and take it because they're the modern equivalent of the court jester now.  Yeah.

So, if you didn't know that a thing happened over the last few days, then you should probably read this less angry post on Chuck Wendig's blog.  In short, due to poor sales, an author named Stacey Jay (author of Princess of Thorns) was let go by her publisher, Delacorte Press, and decided to start a Kickstarter for the sequel  to her novel.  Among the things she included in her target goal were funds for living expenses ($7,000, to be exact).  Apparently, some people really didn't like that, and even less so the idea that Jay might not release the novel if she couldn't reach her goal.  And so they threw a fit about it.  Jay eventually took down the Kickstarter and threw in the towel, saying she'd continue writing under other pen names.  And still more people threw a fit.

5 Annoying Author Habits on Twitter

I spend far too much time on Twitter, which means I read a lot of tweets from a lot of authors.  Some authors are great at interacting, carving out their little niche and creating a kind of Twitter persona to represent them.  Others, however, are kind of like social media bacterial infections who must do everything they possibly can to sell their own work; they basically turn into walking spam monkeys.  And still others present themselves as bitter, rage-infested monsters fit for the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars.  Neither of these latter two groups are particularly fun to engage, which might explain why the five things I've listed here haven't actually helped many of these individuals develop a steady writing career.

Here goes:

Self-Published Books vs. Literary Awards: A Logistical Problem?

Back in August, The Guardian posted a column by Liz Bury entitled "Why is self-publishing still scorned by literary awards?"  The article doesn't exactly make an argument about the apparent snubbing of SPed books in the literary awards circuit, but Bury does essentially imply in the body of the article that the inability of these awards to address the widespread consumption of SPed books will not work on their favor.  I'm not sure that's true either, to be honest.  These same literary awards are just as relevant as they were before SPing became normal (lots of relevance or no relevance whatsoever -- depends on your view).

I, however, have a different perspective on this problem.  As a podcaster (The Skiffy and Fanty Show) and blogger, I get a lot of requests for reviews, interviews, guest posts, and so on.  On the

Speculation Station: Worlds Without Gunpowder

Liz Bourke foisted this question upon me on Twitter using her profound ability of psychic suggestion and the promise of free alcohol.[1]  The question is this:  what would the world look like if gunpowder had never been discovered?

First, a few caveats:

Writing Question: Best Method for Introducing People of Color?

I'm currently writing a relatively far future military SF novel (or revolutionary military SF, since it involves revolution).  One thing that I want to indicate about this future and its wide-reaching human empire is its relative inclusiveness.  Race is not as much an issue there as it is today, which means that the cast of characters I intend to show will embody a mixed world.

To make that clear in the story, I feel as though I need to identify several characters by their race (or everyone by their race, really).  But I don't want to in part because I really don't know how to go about doing so without essentializing or reducing characters to their race (or even identifying them by something that I personally feel has no say on one's character).  What exactly is the best method for introducing the race of a character (any race)?

I honestly don't know...and I'd much rather have an idea on how to go about it before shoving my foot in my mouth.

The comments are yours.

Professional Writer = No Day Job?

On a recent episode of the Functional Nerds podcast, Patrick Hester posited that based on the prefix "professional" in "professional writer," those writers who do not make a living as writers technically don't count as pros.  I'm paraphrasing, of course, so I recommend actually listening to the podcast here (the comment appears around the 30-minute mark).  The idea is not a new one.  It falls within the same discussions about who gets to call themselves "writers" or "authors," and who has to suck a bag of too-bads and accept that they don't get to use a fancy label.  And it's likewise tied into the longstanding discussions about the term "professional" within our field, most notably in the fact that what the SFWA considers a "professional" publication has very little to do with whether one actually makes a living as a published writer.

It's from that last line that I'd like to suggest that while it's perhaps accurate to apply "professional writer" only to those who make a living as writers, the material realities of the writing life

Postcolonialism 101: Misery Tourism (or, How the Genre Community Still Essentializes Africa)

"What is misery tourism?" you might ask.  At its most basic, "misery tourism" refers to the ways peoples from wealthy, usually Western nations "tour" the "developing" or "undeveloped" world in order to "learn" something.  The process is almost always attached to an assumption of superiority, whether directly acknowledged or buried in the subconscious.  To partake in misery tourism is to justify the superior position of your culture by intentionally subjecting yourself to "lesser" cultures (as a means of justifying the bias embedded in the notion of "lesser" cultures).  To put it another way, misery tourism is what (mostly white) Westerners do to make themselves feel better about their own circumstances.

I bring this up because of the following, which is taken from Bryan Thomas Schmidt's blog post entitled "Broadening the Toolbox Through Cross-Cultural Encounters:  On Resnick, Africa, and Opportunity":

Writing Wonders: Are Flashbacks Evil?

I think with all writing concepts, there are no simple answers.  Flashbacks are no different.  Just as you can ruin a book with poorly constructed multiple POVs, so too can you ruin a book with flashbacks.  It all comes down to how and when you do it.

Case in point:  I am currently reading Tobias Buckell's The Apocalypse Ocean, the fourth book in his Xenowealth series.  One of the POVs in the book is of a woman born from genetically augmented stock by an alien race known as the Nesaru.  But the only way we can really understand what her past means to her in the present of the novel (after the events in Ragamuffin, in which a human revolution against alien control had its first and most important victory) is by flashback.  Buckell could tell us her history in an infodump, but the result would

Bad Worlds, Bad Language, and Worldbuilding Gone Bad

Recently, I've been reading Star Carrier Book One:  Earth Strike by Ian Douglas.  I was intrigued by the epic military SF setting and decided to plow into it.  What begins as a solid piece of action writing, however, quickly dissolves into a linguistic nightmare in the first chapter written from an alien POV.  In this chapter, Douglas stops using standard words for time or distance and instead opts for a series of nearly incomprehensible terms:  mr'uum, g'nyuu'm, g'nya, g'nyurm, and lurm'm. 

I'm not sure what these terms actually mean, nor do I care to find out.  What annoys me about them isn't just that they are incomprehensible, but that no other vaguely scientific (or intensely scientific, for that matter) elements are written in this way.  Douglas is careful to avoid turning all

First Novels: Are They Forgivable?

While listening to SF Squeecast's discussion of Kameron Hurley's novel, God's War, I was struck by the suggestion that the novel's perceived faults were forgivable because it is a first novel. Not having read God's War, I cannot speak to the accuracy of the suggested faults, and therefore cannot directly discuss Hurley's novel. However, the question raised by the hosts compelled me to consider my own position on first novels. Are mistakes in first novels forgivable? If so, when do we start to fault an author for not being up to par?

There are no quick and easy answers to this question for me, in part because I don't think a first novel is a relevant starting point for the discussion. What matters, in my mind, is the reader's first experience with an author, which may occur with that author's first novel, or may occur at any other point in the author's career. From my own experience, once I've read a bad book by an author, it casts the rest of their work in a different light. If I happened to have started with better work, then I can probably forgive that author for a crummier novel, regardless of when it arrives

Not All Editors Are Nice People (or, Some People Live in Imaginary Universes)

I've had the pleasure to work with or receive criticism from a number of wonderful people.  Lyn Perry of Residential Aliens, for example, is one of the most gracious people who has ever published one of my stories.  In fact, when I was rather harsh about the stories in one of his issues last year, he didn't react as you'd expect (getting in a huff over it).  Instead, he was happy for the criticism, and offered up the next issue for my perusal.  He and I are likely to disagree on all kinds of things (personally and religiously), but our relationship has, however brief, remained friendly.

I've had similar experiences with Bruce Bethke, who will be publishing one of my fantasy shorts this year ("In the Shadows of the Empire of Coal"), and Nick Mamatas, who ripped one of my stories a new one, but in a way that showed me what I had done wrong (in a way that was irrefutable).  I've been fortunate to have these experiences, and the many others I don't have the space to talk about here.  The vast majority of editors are in that "nice people" bin.

But this post is about a bad experience.  No names.  No specifics beyond the event itself.

Some time ago, one of my friends pointed an editor with an anthology to fill in my direction.  I

"I Write Genre Fiction" -- Damn You, Dirty Phrase!

Sam Sykes has a great post about how fantasy fans internalize the belief that the genre defaults to crap.  I implore you to read it.  It's good.  Really.

And it's because of Sam that I'm writing about the phrase in the title above.  Only, I'm coming at it from a different angle.  I'm not talking about the belief that good fantasy novels are exceptions, not the general rule (in part because I have no idea what "good" means in this context).  What I'm talking about is the feeling I get when people ask me what I write.

By "people" I typically mean "MFAs at my university."  Somehow the fact that I am a writer on the path towards publication has spread through rumor in my university.  I've probably mentioned my writer status somewhere before, and so people I'm friends with on Facebook simply know.  Regardless of why these folks know I am a genre writer, in conversation with them, the question that often springs up is "what do you write?".  From there, I tend to get sheepish about the whole genre thing.  If I bring it up -- "I write genre fiction" -- it is either said with a hint that I'm not terribly proud of it, or some vain attempt to qualify my statement with nonsense like "I write literary and adventure SF."  None of these presentations makes me particularly proud.

And now that I've read Sam Sykes' take on how readers adopt this attitude about their favorite genre, I think there needs to be a break in my own little world.  I'm done with being ashamed and afraid to say what I do.  No more.

Saying "I write genre fiction" isn't a bad thing.  And to anyone who thinks it is, well, fuck you.  I write genre fiction.  I'm proud of that fact.  I love genre fiction.  Most people love genre fiction, even if they won't admit it to themselves.  Those people should be ashamed of saying things like "I like Star Wars, but that's because I grew up on it; I'm not into that stuff anymore" or "well, that book isn't really genre; it's literary."  Fuck that.  It is genre fiction.  It's also literary.  So what?  It can be both.  It's also perfectly fine to like Star Wars AND the recently-released John Carter, or Star Trek (new and old) and Game of Thrones (the books and the show). Celebrate it.  Love it.

And if you write the stuff, don't do what I've done for far too long:  cower at the prospect of having to justify yourself to someone who "doesn't write that genre trash."  You should throw off the shackles of shame and flip your figurative middle finger off at anyone who scoffs at what you love to do.  Fuck'em.

This is genre.  Hear us roar.

Or something like that...

So They Started Young -- So What? (A Rant About Authors)

L. B. Gale has an interesting blog post entitled "Fantasy Writers:  What We're Up Against," in which s/he profiles George R. R. Martin to give fantasy writers an impression of the writing life of one of the greats.  We learn, for example, that he won his first award when he was 17 and was nominated for a Hugo at 25, with his first novel published when he was 29, and so on.  Martin isn't the only SF/F writer who started getting recognized when he was young, I'm sure, but there is something about looking at age as some kind of impressive element that bothers me.

What exactly is impressive about getting published at a young age, let alone winning awards at said age?  Writing isn't like business, where making millions at a young age might be quite impressive indeed.  I'm sure a lot of people are envious of Mark Zuckerberg, who became a

Why Electronic Submissions Are Necessary

I asked on Google+ whether folks would be interested in this post.  A few people said they were, and so here I am telling you about why people like me (i.e., the poor) need electronic submissions.  For a different take on this issue, see Mari Ness' troubles with accessing a post office due to physical constraints.  My constraints are primarily financial.

I'm not going to pretend that I am the poorest person in the world.  Nor am I going to suggest that I cannot truly afford the occasional hard copy submission.  Anyone with the extra time can probably poke holes into my finances and find the money to pay for postage, whether by cutting out my social life (which isn't all that glorious to begin with) or making other kinds of sacrifices.  But it seems to me that poking holes doesn't really change the point, and it certainly doesn't change the fact that fewer and fewer markets refuse to accept electronic submissions.

In any case, here goes:

Writing: It's Really About Winging It

I've been following Mark Charan Newton's blog for some time now.  He's the author of Nights of Villjamur, City of Ruin, and Book of Transformations, an environmental activist, reviewer, and too many other things to put in a post without wandering into random topics.  He recently posted an interesting response to a Guardian article about Tobias Wolff, from which I draw the following quote:

While I’m in no way intending to put myself anywhere near Wolff on an achievement level, I can really agree with his statement about faking it. Every single time I sit down to write, I feel like I’m winging it. From all the research I do to watching all the reviews come in, it still doesn’t feel real. Those poor Amazon reviews seem like a plot to expose me by those who know the Truth.

I should be just as humble about what I will write below, as I am even less accomplished than Newton in my writing career (a couple of short fiction sales, no novels with agents, and a long list of rejects for stories I am told are quite good -- thanks Adam).

The interesting thing about writing is how muddled the field has become.  There are so many classes and workshops and books about the process of writing that the reality of the writing process seems to have gotten lost.  Everything about writing is about "faking it" or "winging it."  Fiction is always already a symptom of overactive imaginations, its very formation founded in

A Short Story Wants to Get Away From Me

Earlier this week, I started writing a short story entitled "The Girl Who Flew on a Whale" as part of my WISB Podcast project.  The story, as my friend Adam Callaway remarked, is a whimsical fantasy for young readers (chapbook level).  I've always wanted to write a story like this.  They're fun to read and the current venture has been fun to write.  But one of the issues I've had is the tug in my mind to turn this short story into a much larger project.

"The Girl Who Flew on a Whale" is about a young girl who lives in a semi-Victorian-era town on the continent of Traea (many centuries after the events of The World in the Satin Bag).  Her mother wants to prune her for the aristocracy, while the little girl, affectionately called the Dreamer, wants nothing to do with that world -- rather, as her name implies, she dreams of the legends and myths of her world, wondering and wishing some of them are true.  The conflict is one that I'm sure has been seen many times before, but it is also a conflict that is close to my heart.  I don't have children, but know that when I have them, I'll do everything I can to foster their creativity.

Penelope Lively Says We're "Bloodless Nerds" (or An Old Hypocrite Speaks)

If you haven't heard, Booker Prize winner Penelop Lively, age 78, believes people who read books in electronic form are "bloodless nerds."  The article continues with the following:

She said that Kindles and other devices to which you can download novels are no substitute for real books and no self-respecting bibliophile should want one. 

“I have an iPad but I wouldn’t dream of reading a book on it,” she told the Telegraph Ways With Words Festival.

She makes a number of other typical arguments (how kids don't read like they used to and so on), but I think the above is really the crux of the matter.  Here is a person who has an iPad, which we can assume she uses to read things like online newspapers and magazines, blogs, and other forms of content, which at one point were provided to the public in print format.  This same person thinks reading ebooks is bad news...

So excuse me, Ms. Lively, if I treat your holier-than-thou assault on those of us who use eReaders with contempt.  The fact that you benefit from the very shifts in reading formats you deride for the book form is laughably ironic and hypocritical.  You can't say "I use an iPad" in the same breath as "reading electronic books is for bloodless nerds."  Reading is not exclusive to the book, and the shift in reading habits has been going on for decades.  For whatever reason, we're more concerned about the death of the "book" than we are about the death of the print newspaper or the print magazine or whatever other prints have been subverted by online "printing" practices.

Hell, you might as well bitch about all those stupid blogs out there and how in the old days you only got heard by your friends or if your local newspaper printed your letter to the editor.  Those were such good days when you didn't have much of a say in the way things ran beyond your vote.  Screw Tunisia and Egypt and all that social networking and online newspaper-ing and what not...

For the record, I quite like the "book" as we understand it in print form.  I still buy lots of books.  But I don't disparage people who have become readers via eReaders or converted to electronic reading.  It serves a social function as much as an economic and literary one.  In a strange way, that timeless phrase ("don't just a book by its cover") has a double meaning now.  Nothing wrong with that in my book...

All Your Literature Are Belong to Us: Interpretation/Reception and Ownership

I've become interested in the last few months with the idea of intellectual ownership of written materials.  In part this is because of the ways some fiction authors (and others) have responded to criticism and interpretation in the last few years elsewhere and on this blog.  Setting aside instances where someone intentionally spams a book's page with negative reviews, it seems to me that for some authors there is a critical disconnect between the act of creation and the life as the creator.  That is that these individuals believe they have ownership over interpretation after the moment it leaves their hands and becomes a publicly accessible (purchasable) object.  As a writer, I can understand the impulse to want to avoid negative criticism and even to say "I am not X," but responding to criticism or interpretations is not usually a skill writers have learned how to do (or that they can learn how to do without stepping on toes).  They become "problems."

I think it's important for fiction authors--published or otherwise--to understand that they don't

Adventures in Real-Time Story Collaboration: Day Two (Plot Problems)

Adam and I have made enormous progress on our collaborative story.  How much?  Day one ended at about 850 words, which is certainly nothing to scoff at; day two, however, ended at about 4,000 words, which seems to me to be an impressive amount of writing for anyone.  To be fair, I wrote close to 2,500 of that, since Adam skipped out for 45 minutes to take care of some business.  That means it's his turn to add a substantial chunk to the story though.

In any case, some very interesting problems arose as we started work on the project again.  Plotting, for example, proved difficult for both of us, since we couldn't decide where to take the