On the State of Fantasy

John C. Wright recently blogged about an old article by Leo Grin The Bankrupt Nihilism of our Fallen Fantasists and the brawl that resulted with Joe Abercrombie.

The point of Grin's article was to argue that the fantasy genre, or at least the subgenres of High Fantasy and Sword-and-Sorcery, is in decline. From its birth in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard through its hey day with the game Dungeons & Dragons and movies like Excalibur, Clash of the Titans, and Conan the Barbarian, Grin's opinion is that the genre has lost its mojo.

Whereas Grin had fallen for

the elevated prose poetry, mythopoeic subcreation, and thematic richness that only the best fantasy achieves, and that echoes in important particulars the myths and fables of old.

he now finds that

The mere trappings of the genre do nothing for me when wedded to the now-ubiquitous interminable soap-opera plots (a conservative friend of mine once accurately derided “fat fantasy” cycles such as Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time as “Lord of the Rings 90210″). Nor do they impress me in the least when placed into the hands of writers clearly bored with the classic mythic undertones of the genre, and who try to shake things up with what can best be described as postmodern blasphemies against our mythic heritage.

Grin reserved special scorn for the work of Joe Abercrombie, an author I quite admire (although with some reservations). Writes Grin:

Take the latest novel by popular Brit author Joe Abercrombie (b. 1974), who regularly hits the UK bestseller lists with his self-described “edgy yet humorous un-heroic fantasy.” ... “Abercrombie takes the grand tradition of high fantasy, and drags it down into the gutter, in the best possible way,” gushed Time magazine about Best Served Cold, his previous book.

Alas, I haven’t read it — Abercrombie’s freshman effort, the massive First Law trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They Were Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings) was more than enough for me. Endless scenes of torture, treachery and bloodshed drenched in scatology and profanity concluded with a resolution worthy of M. Night Shyamalan at his worst, one that did its best to hurt, disappoint, and dishearten any lover of myths and their timeless truths. Think of a Lord of the Rings where, after stringing you along for thousands of pages, all of the hobbits end up dying of cancer contracted by their proximity to the Ring, Aragorn is revealed to be a buffoonish puppet-king of no honor and false might, and Gandalf no sooner celebrates the defeat of Sauron than he executes a long-held plot to become the new Dark Lord of Middle-earth, and you have some idea of what to expect should you descend into Abercrombie’s jaded literary sewer.

On various blogs you can find critics raving about this mythic bait-and-switch. “Gritty, violent, morally ambiguous and darkly funny fantasy with a streak of intelligent cynicism,” says Adam Whitehead of The Wertzone. “Dark, almost nihilistic, yet shot through with black humour,” writes Simon Appleby at Book Geeks, adding approvingly that, “[Abercrombie] writes about ordinary people thrust in to extraordinary situations who seldom, if ever, acquit themselves heroically.” 

I had problems with the ending of the First Law trilogy, too. But I loved the grittiness and the fact that the characters behaved like, well, "real people" with real weaknesses and real limitations. (Abercrombie's own thoughts on Grin are available on his blog).

Grin has some choice words for Matthew Woodring Stover, Steven Erikson, and Michael Swanwick. For example:

The latest entry in Steven Erikson’s ten-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen, a series running many thousands of pages, is described by one exhausted fan as “pointlessly depressing. . . a lot of death that seems purely random and serving no purpose at all.” “Despair and fatalism dominate,” confirms another reader. (For those who haven’t gotten enough, Erikson recently announced that, with the help of another writer, he will now be expanding his opus from ten volumes to twenty-two — assuming both he and his fans live that long.)

I have a lot of problems with Erikson and likely won't be tempted to finish the series (I stopped after three books, I think). But the occurrence of random and depressing deaths of major characters was not one of them. In fact, the willingness of these authors to confront the nasty dirty business of war provides, in my opinion, an important counterpoint to the glorifying and romanticization of warfare that has been a staple of the fantasy genre.

What amazes me is the level of affront claimed by Grin:

The other side thinks that their stuff is, at long last, turning the genre into something more original, thoughtful, and ultimately palatable to intelligent, mature audiences. They and their fans are welcome to that opinion. For my part — and I think Tolkien and Howard would have heartily agreed — I think they’ve done little more than become cheap purveyors of civilizational graffiti.

Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it’s just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It’s a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein’s monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten.

In the case of the fantasy genre, the result is a mockery and defilement of the mythopoeic splendor that true artists like Tolkien and Howard willed into being with their life’s blood. Honor is replaced with debasement, romance with filth, glory with defeat, and hope with despair. Edgy? Nah, just punk kids farting in class and getting some giggles from the other mouth-breathers.

Grin then resorts to reminding the reader that Tolkien wrote from the experience of warfare:

It’s quite rich to see many of the guys writing fantasy today being praised for (to once again quote Publisher’s Weekly talking about Joe Abercrombie) successfully exposing the “madness, passion, and horror of war.” How soon we forget that some of the early work of J.R.R. Tolkien — the man who pioneered the selfsame High Fantasy now being dragged “down into the gutter” to make it suitably “edgy” — was penned while he sat in the trenches of World War I, even while most his closest friends were being killed. Tolkien later wrote the a sizable amount of The Lord of the Rings during the Second World War, while worrying about two of his sons as they headed off to do their part.

Call me humorless, call me old-fashioned, but I daresay the good professor had a much better idea of war and heroes than the nihilistic jokesters writing modern fantasy.

Perhaps he did. But it did not come across in his writing. One rather suspects that Tolkien felt no need to revisit these horrors in his writing; his books were his escape from horror. The mistake is ours to think that Tolkien's caricatures are are literal representation of his wartime experience.

John C. Wright, also in an older post recently linked to, Postmodern Blasphemies against Myth, agrees with my analysis while supporting Grin:

Tolkien’s work was such an unparalleled success, in my opinion, precisely because of the cynical nihilism so popular in Europe between the wars and in America after: in the Twentieth Century all trace of the fantastic and supernal had been successfully erased from literature. In rebellion, the younger generation of lovable yet stinking hippies joined hands with their grandfather’s world of Roman Catholic old-school conservatism, the conservatism of that type that seeks conservation: because both rejected the fundamental falsehood and ugliness of a world both godless, drained of magic, paved, and industrialized. It was an odd and original alliance, as odd an original as Tolkien’s work itself.

We disagree in the implications: I see Tolkien as an inevitable over-correction to the horrors of war; Wright sees a return to the proper way of things. As he writes:

Mr. Leo Grin in his essay makes clear that he upholds the right of those who adore such degraded things to write and read their chosen poison. He is more generous than I. It is my judgment, shared of many ancients, that there are certain proper emotional reactions and relations one ought to have, and improper ones one ought not. A child raised to curse and despise his parents, trample the crucifix, burn the flag, abhor kittens and Christmas scenes and motherhood but adore torture porn and satanism and deformity, that child’s tastes are objectively perverse and false-to-facts. He has been trained to spew his mother’s milk and drink venom. Fair to him is foul, and foul is fair. In the same way that to say A is not-A is an offense against logic, to hate the lovely and love the hateful is an offense against aesthetics, a disconnection from reality.

I do share Wright's disdain for what I would describe as "secretly subversive" authors; that is, authors who write as though part of a given genre tradition only to dramatically depart from that tradition in the conclusion of the book. In my opinion, if you want to be subversive, you should be open about it in order to be fair to the reader.

However, I did wade through the unsanitary sewage of Mr. Michael Swanwick’s IRON DRAGON’S DAUGHTER for about half the book, before realizing than Mr. Swanwick was having a joke at my expense, and at the expense of all his readers, and a rather dark and bitter joke at that.

Stated as a ratio, IRON DRAGON’S DAUGHTER is to honest fairy stories with real magic to them as the movie version of STARSHIP TROOPERS is to that novel of the same name: an elaborate and obsessive long-drawn-out paean of hatred and contempt of a cramped and unlit soul crouched in a fen or cave against the sunny upland glades of some larger and more glorious thing he can neither understand nor adore: a harpy excreting the excess of diseased bowels on festal delicacies her digestion cannot accept, and elfin wines her tongue not savor.

The analogy to the book and movie versions of Starship Troopers is a fitting way to summarize my disagreement with Wright. Whereas I agree with Wright that the movie version betrayed the book version, I saw plenty of merit in it as an alternative work of art. I feel the same way about both traditional epic fantasy and the trend towards dirty and gritty modern fantasy, as long as the modern version is open about its intentions.

The Best SFF Book Titles

Following on from my previous posts about SFF Novels with the Best Opening Lines and on Crafting Great Book Titles, the latter based on some recent posts by Mike Flynn, below we look at some favorite titles using Flynn's posts as a jumping off point.

In Mike Flynn's Entitlement Part II he asks 9 authors to list their favorite titles, both of their own books and other writings, and of the writings by others.

Their own books and writings:

1. Michael Swanwick
1. “Mother Grasshopper”
2. “‘Hello,’ Said the Stick”
2. Geoffrey Landis “Sultan of the Clouds”
3. Juliette Wade “Cold Words”
4. Ed Lerner “Dangling Conversations”
5. Bill Gleason “Into That Good Night”
6. Harry Turtledove
1. In the Presence of Mine Enemies
2. The Man With the Iron Heart
3. “Lee at the Alamo”
7. Jack McDevitt
1. The Engines of God.
2. Time Travelers Never Die
8. Nancy Kress
1. “Out of All Them Bright Stars”
2. “The Price of Oranges”
9. John Wright
1. Null-A Continuum
2. Last Guardian of Everness
3. “One Bright Star to Guide Them.”

Other author's books and stories:

1. Michael Swanwick
1. Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire”
2. Geoffrey Landis
1. Roger Zelazny Creatures of Light and Darkness
3. Juliette Wade
1. Michael Flynn “Where the Winds are All Asleep”
2. Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
4. Ed Lerner
1. Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep
2. Vernor Vinge A Deepness in the Sky
5. Harry Turtledove
1. For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
2. Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
3. Lest Darkness Fall (deCamp)
6. Jack McDevitt
1. Glory Road (Heinlein)
2. “Out of All Them Bright Stars” (Kress)
7. John Wright
1. The Dying Earth (Jack Vance)
2. Well at the World’s End (William Morris)
8. Mike Flynn
1. As the Wolf Loves Winter, by David Poyer
2. When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, by Lawrence Block. 
3. Cordwainer Smith “The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All"
4. Harlan Ellison "‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman"
5. R.A. Lafferty “The Groaning Hinges of the World”

There are some excellent examples above. I especially like Vernor Vinge's titles.

To these I would add:

1. Alfred Bester The Stars My Destination
2. Robert A. Heinlein Have Spacesuit, Will Travel
3. C.S. Lewis Out of the Silent Planet
4. Robert A. Heinlein The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

What else am I missing?

In John C. Wright's blog post referencing Flynn, he also asks and answers the following question:

Which science fiction or fantasy title was the biggest turkey you ever heard tell of?

Titles are supposed to be evocative. The title is supposed to be a hint of magic to lure the reader in, to set the viewer wondering. For my money, the two most evocative titles ever penned are: WELL AT THE WORLD’S END. I don’t think any book can live up to the eerie sense of awe that title evokes.

The second: THE DARK IS RISING.

You see, the title THE DARK IS RISING sounds so much more unchancy and supernal than, say, a book titled THE NAZIS ARE INVADING or THE NORSEMEN RAID or MARS ATTACKS or even THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. There is something unspeakable and unnamed in the Dark, so that way before you know what or who it is, you sure don’t want your lifetime to be the time of the rise. You do not want to peer out the window over the snow and see the lampposts being extinguished one by one quite silently, or the stars.

Harlan Ellison once wrote an essay on evocative titles — my memory cannot dredge up the title or the year — where he proposed a great title would be something like THE OTHER EYE OF POLYPHEMUS. He liked the title so much he promised in the essay to write a short story with that title (a promise he has since kept). But he contrasted this with the lest evocative title he could invent: THE JOURNEY.

It tells you it is a story about someone going somewhere.

Harlan Ellison then confesses that coming up with a title as bland and meaningless as THE JOURNEY was difficult. It had taken him hours and driven him to the bottle and caused him to sweat drops like blood. It takes true anti-genius to be able to invent a title so unimaginably unmeaningful.

Well, someone matched that genius, or at least came close. When Hollywood made THE DARK IS RISING into a film, they changed the title to THE SEEKER.

It tells you it is a story about someone looking for something. Or playing quidditch.

I defy anyone, even a mad genius like Harlan Ellison, to come up with a title even more bland, unappealing, uninformative, unevocative, unmagnificent, unmagical.

THE SEEKER! A guy looking for something!

To take the most evocative title in fantasy-dom and turn it into the least is noteworthy, if not awe inspiring, for the same reason seeing corpses of cows spilled out of a train wreck of cattle cars and flung across bundles of smashed and burning freight is noteworthy.

Coming up with Good SFF Book Titles

In a recent post, I discussed a number of SFF books that had great opening lines. Of course, before a reader gets to the opening line, they must read the title of the book. This begs the question: what makes a great book title?

John C. Wright recently posted a link to an older post on book titles by Mike Flynn Entitlement Part I and Part II in which Flynn interviewed a number of notables including Nancy Kress, Harry Turtledove and John C. Wright about what makes a good book title.

Flynn starts his analysis with a quote from Twenty Problems of the Fiction Writer by John Gallishaw:

Now the ultimate Beginning of any story, that part which comes at once to the reader's attention, is the title. From the point of view of interest, a good title is, then, your first consideration in arousing the reader's interest. The title should be arresting, suggestive, challenging. Kipling's "Without Benefit of Clergy" has all these requirements. So has Barrie's "What Every Woman Knows." So has Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw." So has O. Henry's "The Badge of Policeman O'Roon." So has John Marquand's "A Thousand in the Bank." ..... You may say definitely that the first device for capturing interest is in the selection of a title which will cause the reader to pause, which will whet his curiosity.

Flynn then elaborates on what he thinks arresting, suggesting and challenging mean with the help of the group of authors he interviewed. My edited version of his post follows.

Arresting. Especially arresting titles include When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes (Lawrence Block); “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” (Samuel Delaney), “Out of All Them Bright Stars” (Nancy Kress). Of course, arresting titles need not be elaborate. The Maltese Falcon is short, descriptive, and carries a hint of the exotic. Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer and Greg Bear’s The Forge of God are effective for the same reason. John C. Wright would like a title to be “brief, striking or memorable to the reader, and to tell the reader immediately what genre the book is. If the title includes an odd or invented word, or a combination of words not normally found together, this is better still.”

A good way to arrest the attention is to evoke imagery. “I want graphics,” writes Jack McDevitt. “I want a visual, connected with an emotional impact, or at least an insight into where the narrative is going.” He suggests joining a physical object with an abstraction. For example, his own Eternity Road (which is one of my own favorites) joins the physical Road with the abstraction of Eternity and “takes on the changes brought about by the passage of time.”

Because genre readers like to read genre, John Wright suggests the title include words like star or world or otherwise suggest SF and offers The Star Fox (Poul Anderson), Rocannon’s World (Ursula K. LeGuin), Forbidden Planet (“W.J. Stuart” (Philip MacDonald)) and World of Null-A (A.E. VanVogt) as examples. 

For my part, I tend to shy away from books with invented words in the title, but that is just a personal foible.

Suggestive. Michael Swanwick writes that the title “should suggest that something really interesting is happening in the story.”

The simplest way to do this is with a title that captures the essence of the story. Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky is not only arresting (a tunnel in the sky?) but suggests what the story will be about. William Trevor’s mainstream story “The General’s Day” chronicles the banal events of one day in the life of a retired British general (with a devastating ending).

However, “suggestive” does not mean flat description. Suggestive means to hint, to adumbrate something about the story.

1. Not too revealing. Ed Lerner cautions that the title should avoid giving away anything critical in the story. Geoff Landis concurs: “Something evocative and also fitting for the story, but doesn't give away key points of the story.” The art of story-telling is to present events to the reader in an order that produces the best artistic effect.
2. Metaphoric or symbolic. Edmund Hamilton's The Haunted Stars concerns the discovery of an abandoned alien base on the Moon, and the imagery of vanished peoples and long-ago deeds pervades the book. John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider concerns a protagonist who “surfs the wave” of Future Shock. Juliette Wade tells us that her titles grow out of thematic ideas or important recurring concepts in the story, like the title of her novel, For Love, For Power. Nancy Kress also admires titles that work on both a plot and a thematic level, like LeGuin's "Nine Lives." Sara Umm Zaid entitled her 2001 Andalusia Prize story “Making Maklooba.” Maklooba is a Palestinian dish in which the bowl is turned upside down on the tray and removed. If the maklooba is good, the food retains the shape of the bowl. The dish is used as a metaphor for a woman whose life has been turned upside down and emptied by the death of her son and its subsequent political exploitation. John Dunning used the title Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime for a tale of murder set in the days of live radio and World War II. Kipling’s “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows” is likewise suggestive while also being descriptive – it is the name of an opium den where the main story takes place.
3. Atmosphere. The title might also be suggestive by conjuring an atmosphere. For science fiction, that might be a title that conveys a sense of “cosmic deeps of time.” For fantasy, one that conveys a “haunting sense of melancholy.” In fact, Roger MacBride Allen wrote The Depths of Time, which surely conveys that sense of cosmic deeps of time! The sequel The Ocean of Years succeeds by pairing ocean with years. Edmond Hamilton’s City at World’s End does a little of both, hinting at depths of time and a sense of melancholy. 

Challenging. You can also catch the reader’s attention with a title that challenges him. An odd word might be used – Null-A, Dirac Sea, Feigenbaum Number, and so on. Ed Lerner suggests that the relevance of the title might become evident only after the reader has finished the story and reflects on it.

Juliette Wade likes titles that can have more than one meaning, such as her own “Cold Words,” which is both literal and metaphorical. John Dunning’s detective title The Bookman’s Wake seems to mean one thing during the course of the story, but takes on another meaning at the end. Patrick O’Brian’s naval novel The Surgeon’s Mate also carries two meanings. Sara Umm Zaid’s “Village of Stones” refers not only to the material construction of the dwellings, but to the enthusiasm with which the villagers stone a young girl who has dishonored her family. We might call these double-take titles.

But be careful. A title may be so challenging that the prospective reader scratches his head in bewilderment and goes on to another book or story. Long, obscure titles could tip over into a perceived pretentiousness. Apparent metaphors could fail to deliver. James Blish’s The Warriors of Day had a nice title, but it turned out to be prosaic: actual warriors from a planet called Day. Double meanings could be unintentional. “The Iron Shirts,” my alternate history story for tor.com, was originally titled “Iron Shirts” until it was pointed out that “iron” might be read as a verb!

It’s Got a Good Beat. A fourth factor that relates to the form rather than the matter of the title is its rhythm or meter. Critic and author Greg Feeley once said of my own title The Wreck of “The River of Stars” that what was arresting about it was how the regular beat of the phrase contrasted with the chaos and irregularity implicit in the words wreck, river, and stars. G.K.Chesterton was fond of alliteration in many of his Father Brown mysteries: “The Doom of the Darnaways,” “The Flying Fish,” and so forth. Try saying aloud such titles as “The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde” (Norman Spinrad), “The Sorrow of Odin the Goth” (Poul Anderson), The Stone That Never Came Down (John Brunner), To Your Scattered Bodies Go (Philip José Farmer). Each has a rhythm that makes it attractive. But a short, punchy title can have its own charms: Warlord of Mars (Burroughs), Jumper (Steven Gould), Star Gate (Andre Norton).

In the second part of his post, Flynn examines the process by which writers come up with titles. Some, like Flynn himself, John Wright, Jack McDevitt, and Geoff Landis begin with a title. Other writers, however, come up with a title after the story is complete or near enough, often after a struggle, as with Michael Swanwick, Nancy Kress, Geoffrey Landis, Ed Lerner, and Harry Turtledove. On the other hand, Juliette Wade and Bill Gleason do not struggle.

As for where authors get their titles, Flynn suggests four source.

1. Setting: A book can take its title from the milieu in which it takes place. This can be literal or metaphorical. Examples include: Ringworld (Niven). “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows” (Kipling). Eternity Road (Jack McDevitt). Venus (Ben Bova). Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson). “Gibraltar Falls” (Poul Anderson). Or my own Eifelheim. Because SF often involves strange milieus, and readers are attracted to futuristic or alternate settings, this is a popular class of title.
2. Idea: The title can be a word or phrase that captures the essential theme of the story. This is probably the most popular category of titles. The idea may be described directly, as in the mainstream book Room at the Top (John Braine) or by means of a double-meaning, as in The Bookman’s Wake (John Dunning) or a paradox, as in Casualties of Peace (Edna O’Brien). Examples in SF include: Thrice Upon a Time (James Hogan), Mission of Gravity (Hal Clement) or Dark as Day (Charles Sheffield).
3. Character: The name or description of a key character, either directly naming the individual (or group of individuals) or by using a metaphor. Examples include: The Odyssey (Homer), David Copperfield (Dickens), and Lolita (Nabokov). Titles taken from protagonist names are less common in SF, but we have Kinsman (Bova), Starman Jones (Heinlein), and of course Conan the Barbarian (Robert E. Howard). Metaphorically, we have character-driven titles in The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkein), The Revolving Boy (Gertrude Friedberg), and “The Man Who Came Early” (Poul Anderson).
4. Event: A name or phrase that captures some peak situation or occurrence within the story. Typical examples include “The Madness of Private Ortheris” (Kipling), The Fall of the Towers (Samuel R. Delany), and “The Green Hills of Earth” (Heinlein). The last refers to a poem composed by the character Rhysling during the story crisis. Mars Crossing (Landis) and “Nano Comes to Clifford Falls” (Nancy Kress) are summaries of their respective plots.

Flynn also has six avenues for generating titles:

1. Simple description. A nanotech story of mine was called “Werehouse” because that was where people went to be illegally transformed into animals. Such titles often take the form:
   Noun (The Syndic, C.M. Kornblunth)
   Adjective Noun, (The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett)
   Noun Noun (Dinosaur Beach, Keith Laumer)
   Noun of Noun, ("Flowers of Aulit Prison," Kress)
   and so forth. For place-titles, try tossing prepositions like At, In, On, To, etc. while you ponder your story and you might come up with To the Tombaugh Station (Wilson Tucker), “On Greenhow Hill” (Kipling), In the Country of the Blind (yours truly).
2. A line from the story. Search the text of your story for a line that seems to encapsulate the story. That was the origin of my in-progress novella, “Places Where the Roads Don’t Go.” It was also how Nancy Kress found titles for "Out of All Them Bright Stars" and "The Price of Oranges," and R.A. Lafferty obtained “Camels and Dromedaries, Clem.”
3. Famous (or not so famous) quotations. Make a list of key words from each of the four categories mentioned above and go to Bartlett’s to see if there’s a quotation that illuminates the story. Shakespeare and the Bible have been overused, though there is a good reason why people fish there for pithy quotes. But why not look for the road less traveled and try Matthew Arnold, Algernon Swinburne or Lewis Thomas? This was how I found “Where the Winds Are All Asleep,” “Great, Sweet Mother,” and “The Common Goal of Nature.” I also mined quotes for “Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth” and “The Clapping Hands of God.” Harry Turtledove took “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” from Psalms 23:5 – and “The Road Not Taken” from Frost. Bill Gleason, as already mentioned, used Dylan Thomas. Lawrence Block’s Small Town comes from a passage by John Gunther – and refers to New York City, which makes for an arresting contrast.
4. Pairings. BruteThink is a creative thinking tactic. It consists of finding two words that are individually contrasting but which in combination capture the story. From the list of key terms suggested by the four categories, look for pairs that clash. Charles Sheffield’s Dark as Day, for example; or Nancy Kress’ “Flowers of Aulit Prison.” Flowers + Prison? What’s that all about? Another contrast, which Jack McDevitt has mentioned, is to join a physical thing with an abstraction, as in his Infinity Beach, Nancy Kress’ Probability Moon, or Kipling’s “Dayspring Mishandled.”
5. Crossing categories. A good title might suggest itself by pairing key words from different categories. For example, an event and a place, as in Kipling’s “The Taking of Lungtungpen” or Dashiell Hammett’s “The Gutting of Couffignal”; or a character and a place, as in de Camp’s Conan of Cimmeria. Try each pairing and see what comes up: “The Character of Setting,” “Of Idea and Character,” and so on.
6. Random matches. Mozart used to roll a trio of dice to suggest chord progressions. He would take the randomly-generated chords and see if they inspired his creative juices. If not, he would keep rolling until something came up. The writer can do the same thing, taking words from the list of key words purely at random and rubbing them against one another to see if any of them strike sparks.

I got a lot out of reading Flynn's posts and commend the rest of them to you.

More Reaction to Recent Facts About the Fiction Market

I recently wrote about some evidence on the state of the market for fiction. I was predominantly concerned with how small the sales numbers were for some recent highly praised literary releases, and what this might mean for author incomes in SFF.

A number of other authors has weighed in on similar issues, motivated in addition by three recently released studies on author incomes and book sales. The first study summarizes the results of a survey of members conducted by the Authors Guild. According to Publishers Weekly, the survey revealed that "the majority of authors would be living below the Federal Poverty Level if they relied solely on income from their writing."

This is a scary conclusion. Is it correct? There is some evidence that the survey sample may not be representative of the wider population of authors

is based on responses from 1,674 Guild members, 1,406 of whom identified either as a full-time author, or a part-time one. The majority of respondents also lean older—89% are over the age of 50—and toward the traditionally published end (64%).

Specifically, the sample seems to exclude a lot of self-published authors, focusing on older, more established and traditionally published authors. But punting on its accuracy for now, the numbers are grim

Given that a single person earning less than $11,670 annually sits below the poverty line, 56% of respondents would qualify, if they relied solely on income from their writing. The survey also indicated that not only are many authors earning little, they are, since 2009, also earning less. Overall, the median writing-related income among respondents dropped from $10,500 in 2009 to $8,000 2014 in 2014, a decline of 24%. The decline came for both full-time and part-time authors with full-time authors reporting a 30% drop in income to $17,500 and part-time authors seeing a 38% decrease, to $4,500.

The conclusion many have drawn is the one pushed by Mary Rasenberger, executive director at the Guild: “Authors need to be cut in more equitably on the profits their publishers see, or we’ll stop seeing the quality of work the industry was built on.”

The second study was conducted by Association of American Publishers (AAP), whose 1200 members include the “Big Five”: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette. The results were summarized by Alexandra Alter in the New York Times in an article whose title The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far From Dead summarizes the message:

Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.

E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.

The Times article also cites the rebound in the number of independent bookstores as evidence that print demand is stabilizing.

It is important to note, however, that the AAP study also focuses on sales of traditional publishers and ignores independents. Some evidence on independents can be gleaned from the third study, the recently released Author Earning Report, which looks at eBook sales through Amazon, and which finds that

the “Big Five”: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette — have seen their collective share of the US ebook market collapse:

• from 45% of all Kindle books sold down to 32%
• from 64% of Kindle publisher gross $ revenue down to 50%
• from 48% of all Kindle author net $ earnings down to 32%

Other authors have weighed in on this, and the data I discussed earlier this week, with some varying opinions.

Chuck Wendig weighed in with his thoughts in Peaks and Valleys: The Financial Realities of the Writers Life. Like me, he also noted that the sample may not be representative by pointing out that neither he, nor most authors he knows, are members of the Guild. As for whether excluding eBook sales matters, Wendig points to this:

Of course, what you also need to note is that publishers set the e-book prices, and have in the last several months bumped those prices up, up, up — and Amazon undercuts those prices by dropping the physical copy cost.

John Scalzi has also weighed in with eBook Sales and Author Incomes and All That Jazz. Scalzi addresses both issues raised above. On declining author incomes, he points to alternatives sources of incomes for writers that are probably not counted in the Guild survey:

But with respect to writer incomes dropping via the Author’s Guild survey, this is one place where I wish we had better (which is to say more comprehensive and in some way independently verifiable) reporting from indie authors, because I suspect there’s a lot of money not being reported out there, not only in terms of direct indie/self-publishing unit sales, but through other avenues like Kickstarters and Patreons, which I anecdotally see adding a non-trivial amount of income to writers’ bottom lines. I suspect these are avenues that a lot of writers who are used to particular income paths are either not aware of, or exploiting — or perhaps can’t exploit because their established audiences are used to paying in them in particular ways. I’d love to see the figures on who crowdfunds, in terms of age; my suspicion is that it skews younger.

Would this money I suspect is going missing substantially move the needle in terms of overall author incomes? I don’t know. I suspect it might, but it’s possible not as much as some people cheerleading indie/self-publishing would like to admit.

I’ve noted before that I think in general there are three kinds of authors: Dinosaurs, mammals and cockroaches, where the dinosaurs are authors tied to an existing publishing model and are threatened when it is diminished or goes away, mammals are the authors who rise to success with a new publishing model (but who then risk becoming dinosaurs at a later date), and cockroaches are the authors who survive regardless of era, because they adapt to how the market is, rather than how they want it to be. Right now, I think publishing might be top-heavy with dinosaurs, and we’re seeing that reflected in that Author’s Guild survey.

What we’re missing — or at least what I haven’t seen — is reliable data showing that the mammals — indie/self-publishing folks, in this case — are doing any better on average. If these writers are doing significantly better on average, then that would be huge. It’s worth knowing.

As far as eBooks, he is inclined to think the data reflect short run factors related to traditional publishers relationship with Amazon:

I don’t think declining eBook sales from publishers means they’re doomed, doomed, either. This is in part because (and this seems to be a point of some confusion) there’s more to publishing than maximizing eBook sales numbers in the short term. Publishers, for example, might decide that it’s in their long-term interest to stabilize and even grow the print market, and price both their eBooks and print books in a manner that advantages the latter over the former in the short term.

Why would they do that? For a number of reasons, including the fact that Amazon is still 65% of the eBook market in the US, and publishers, as business entities, are appropriately wary of a retailer which a) clearly has monopsonist ambitions and tendencies, b) has been happy to play hardball with publishers to get its way. Investing time in strengthening alternate retail paths makes sense in that case, especially if, as the article suggests, consumers are happy to receive the book in different formats for an advantageous price. If people fundamentally don’t care if they read something in print or electronic format, as long as they get a price they like, that leaves publishers a lot of room to maneuver.

He also points to other short term factors associated with the rise of the eBook market itself, such as this point made by a publisher:

.@scalzi A publisher's take: ebook sales inflated as people bought up backlist releases. Now down to more realistic levels overall.

— Beth Meacham (@bethmeacham) September 23, 2015

Cedar Sanderson, an independent author, gives us her two-cents worth in Publishing’s Bellwether. Sanderson pays particular attention to problems with data on book sales:

See, here’s the thing. Print books are, in theory, externally trackable through the Nielsen BookScan data, which is notoriously unreliable. In theory, publishers ought to know what their sales numbers are, but there are two problems with that data. First, they aren’t going to release proprietary and sensitive information to the public. Secondly, publishers themselves often rely on BookScan, and as Dorie Clark writing for the Harvard Business Review put it “Shockingly” slow and outmoded: “Publishing through a traditional house? Most of us get weekly Nielsen BookScan reports—courtesy of Amazon—and sales figures every six months from our publisher.” Studies compiling data from both BookScan and the Association of American Publishers have ‘holes’ in their data. “The AAP and Nielsen data, while providing useful information that can point to important trends, does have some holes. As mentioned, AAP data doesn’t cover the entire industry, while Nielsen BookScan data doesn’t cover e-books. And lack of reliable e-book data is the most important omission.”

Sanderson interpret the sales data that I talked about last time as evidence of cross-subsidization in book selling and, in particular, the subsidization of "literary" work by best-sellers:

So the books that pay off for the publisher obviously subsidize the books that are published solely on ‘literary merit’ and the scapegoat trots off blithely into the desert to take his chances with the fickle public. With the rise of Indie Publishing, the scapegoat is no longer a necessary thing. No one can force an independent to bear the burdens of his less fortunate fellow authors, who write for awards rather than to sell books and make money.

The flock is hearing that bell jingle, and they are changing their path to follow him toward the good green pastures. “It’s a world where authors with plenty of Big 5 sales experience choose to say, ‘You know what, I’m not playing this game any more.’ Where authors make a positive choice to walk away from the terms offered by good, regular publishers. This new era of publishing is one where authors have a meaningful choice.”

In her mind, the rise of independent publishing will result in the end of this cross-subsidization.

Amanda S. Green has views that are similar to Sanderson's.

I think there is a lot of truth in each of the above opinions. I suspect that the fiction market is in decent shape driven by the expansion of independent publishers, but also supported by some strength (if not strong growth) in the sales of traditional publishers. The experiments that traditional publishers have been running with the pricing of eBooks probably explain some of their recent sales results and especially the decline in their share of eBooks. I do not think this bodes well for their long-run financial health but suspect that they will eventually realize that they need to reform their eBook pricing model.

As for the end of cross-subsidization, I would point out that the inherent riskiness in publishing---it is hard to know in advance exactly which titles will sell---means that publishers will always release a portfolio of books knowing that some will do better than others. Ex post (after we know how sales turned out) some books will turn out to make money while others lose money. This looks like cross subsidization but is really just the outcome of holding a diversified portfolio of titles.

That does not mean that there is no ex ante cross subsidization: some well-known authors are no doubt surer bets than many new authors. But how much cross subsidization is going on here? I suspect the well known authors are commanding much bigger advances and more lavish supporting expenditures. But if there is cross-subsidization, I think Sanderson is correct that some of these bigger authors will eventually take the independent publishing route in order to collect some more of the profits that they generate. However, nothing in economic theory says that cross-subsidization is inevitably bad for consumers, and so in contrast to Sanderson's opinion, ending this system need not be a good thing for consumers as a whole.

Recommended SFF Reading for Women from Bustle.com

Bustle.com has an interesting little article by Crystal Paul entitled Sci-Fi Books Every Woman Should Read.

First, the article dispenses with the stereotypes surrounding SFF:

Thinking of a science fiction reader may conjure up images of a nerdy white man clutching his worn copy of The Hobbit in one hand and a PlayStation controller in the other. But hold up: That's definitely, definitely not the case. Women aren't only welcome in sci-fi, they freakin' thrive here. You see, not only do women read science fiction, but there are also tons of women writing science fiction, and they do it damn well, too!

And since science fiction is a genre of literature with a long history of highlighting social issues, including gender and feminism, that’s a really really good thing. Because that's the case, there's so much that this genre has to offer every woman, even if she doesn't think she's a "sci-fi kind of gal."

It then gives a list of recommended reading "for women" although I think it applies equally to any SFF fan:

1. Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
2. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
3. The Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai
4. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
5. Filter House by Nisi Shawl
6. Ink by Sabrina Vourvoulias
7. The Female Man by Joanna Russ
8. Ancient, Ancient by Kiini Ibura Salaam
9. Ancillary Justice by Anne Lecke
10. Octavia’s Brood by Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown
11. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

There were a couple on there that I had not heard of and look forward to checking out.

For a list aimed at women and focusing on feminist themes, it was a little strange to see the author describe Ancillary Justice as:

When the lead character of a novel is simultaneously a sentient spaceship as well as the bunch of ungendered “clones” that man the ship, you know you’ve got an interesting novel on your hands. Gender, religion, culture, and tyranny get a mind-blowing treatment here.[emphasis added]

But who am I to judge?

Submission Fees for Literary Journals: An Academic's Perspective

Earlier this year, The Offing magazine was launched as a spin-off of the Los Angeles Review of Books (you can find it here). The launch attracted a great deal of interest including a write up in the Washington Post by Ron Charles: Who really needs another literary journal?

Not long after launching, but after receiving 1000 submissions in one week, The Offing announced that it would charge a $3 submission fee to prospective authors. The fee would be waived for paper submissions, as well as on a regular schedule throughout the year, so that authors could avoid paying the fee in various ways. Nonetheless, the decision attracted a large amount of criticism (Lincoln Michel provides a good survey in Is it Time for Literary Magazines to Rethink Slush?)

Perhaps most vocally, author Nick Mamatas got into a long twitter debate on the subject that has been storified. Mamatas's argument is essentially that this is a scam (or like a scam) in which aspiring authors are charged and the resulting money used to pay for work by established authors. The aspiring authors who pay, on the other hand, will typically get nothing (giving that publication rates from the slushpile are typically very low).

As Mamatas summarizes it, somewhat uncharitably, in his blog post here, the view from The Offing seems to come down to this:

1. editors work on a volunteer basis for free, thus writers must pay.
2. Submittable and web space and other elements of running a magazine cost money, thus writers must pay.
3. Audiences cannot or should not or will not pay, thus writers must pay.
4. Various fund-raising techniques can only be used partially and casually—they will not function systemically in a lit journal context—thus writers must pay.
5. Our projects are designed to publish writers from marginalized demographics, thus writers must pay.
6. Lit journals exist outside the market, thus writers must pay.
7. Lit journals are victims of capitalism, thus writers must pay.

The response by The Offing is that they need to raise revenue to pay for overhead and to compensate authors for submissions. Until reader contributions and advertising sales grow, the submission charges will carry some of this burden (authors will initially be only paid $20, less the submission fee, with the hope of later raising it to $100).

Other authors jumped to defend the submission fee model. Nathaniel Tower gives 5 Reasons Why Submission Fees Really Aren’t the Scourge of the Publishing World (each reason is followed by my summary of his argument)

1. Submissions have never really been free. Traditionally, authors had to print submissions, put them in envelopes, affix postage to the envelopes, and place a SASE inside the envelope. Therefore, charging a submission fee means nothing has really changed as far as expenses that authors must pay.
2. Submission fees keep writers in check. Too many writers submit stories that just aren’t ready to be submitted. Too many writers spam out their stories without paying attention to submission guidelines. The writer knows to make every submission count. $3 is too much to spend on crap.
3. It reduces the workload for overworked lit mag editors For the most part, lit mag editors are volunteers. Of course, that’s their choice so we needn’t pity them. Turnover is pretty high in the slush reading industry. Why? Because many of these volunteers quickly get tired of reading tons of stories that have no business being submitted. A submission fee weeds out these bad stories. When there’s no risk involved, everyone thinks they should send out their stories. This leads to many grumpy editors who have to read far more (and far worse) work than they should.
4. There’s almost always a free option. Almost every magazine that charges fees for online submissions also provides some “free” alternative. Whether it be an open reading period a couple times a year or the option to snail mail your submission, there’s usually a way for you to get a story to that publication without giving money directly to the magazine. If you don’t want to pay, you don’t have to.
5. Submission fees can help a magazine exist. There are many ways to pay the operating costs of a literary magazine. It’s important for writers to understand that lit mags cost money. There are domain fees, hosting fees, submission manager fees, marketing/promotional fees, printing fees, etc. It can really add up. Most lit mags are not profitable. Yes, this is the choice of the editors. But there needs to be some funding to back it up. That money can come from a variety of places: the pockets of the editors, subscription fees, ad space, donations, book sales, crowdfunding, or even submission fees.

Coming from academia, where almost every journal has a submission fee (or requires that you purchase membership in some society in order to be able to submit), and having worked on the editorial boards of five major academic journals, I was a little bit surprised by this backlash. As Tower points out, and my experience confirms, submission fees are very helpful in reducing the number of junk submissions. They also help pay referees to give informed opinions on papers. Unlike Tower's claim, I do not know that they do much to make authors polish their work to a shine before submitting; the fact that, once rejected a paper is typically not considered for resubmission tends to act as an incentive to make it the best you can the first time you submit. But overall they do help make an editors job manageable.

Of course, things are different in academia (or at least my slice of it). For one thing, our employers often pay for our submissions. But perhaps the biggest difference is that, at least traditionally, all papers receive referee reports from experts in the field (there has been a recent tendency for editors to "desk reject" a paper without a referee report, but in this case the submission fee is typically refunded). Some of these referees are more expert than others, and some do a better job than others, but a good editor makes sure that they have at least read the paper and given some thought to the comments. In some cases, good referees provide many tens of pages of comments and contribute immensely to making a paper better. Most academics will gladly pay for anything approaching this kind of feedback.

Which begs the question: could we make this kind of a system work for a SFF magazine?

That is, could we construct a business model for a SFF (or indeed, a literary) magazine in which all submissions received feedback from a selected group of referees and associate editors in return for a significant submission fee? The fact that there are many courses for aspiring writers that appear to be well subscribed suggests to me that many aspiring writers would be glad to pay for good criticism of their work. And if media reports of low author incomes are to be believed, many authors might welcome another potential source of income (even if it is only modest).

Could it work? It all depends on whether we can make the sums add-up correctly, and the truth is that I do not know if it can be done. For all my experience on the editorial board of academic journals, I know little of the business side of them. And I simply do not know enough about the market for genre journals to know the cost structures they face or the size of the potential market. Nonetheless, I thought it might be useful to do some simple back-of-the-envelope calculations to see if we could make it work. Corrections and clarifications from anyone who knows more about these issues than I do would be very much welcomed!

Suppose the journal set out to publish roughly 500,000 words per year and is published monthly. At something close to 10 cents per word, this means $50,000 of payments to authors per year. Throw in another $10,000 per year for artwork, website hosting, and hiring some administrative support (but assuming that a lot of other administrative time was donated).

How much of this would be paid for by subscriptions and advertising? Most of these journals seem to retail for about $2 to $3 per issue, with discounts for annual subscriptions. How many subscribers could the journal get? I found it hard to get subscriber information (although I did not devote much time to it). Clarkesworld claims that it is read by 35,000 fans per month. I expect many of these readers do not pay and in any case it would be impossible to get this kind of readership base initially.  Let's say the paying subscribers come to 5,000 (after a few years of publication) and the magazine gets $1 (net of fees) per paying subscriber per month. That comes to $60,000 in revenue, which covers the costs above. Anything raised from advertising could go towards covering other costs I have not mentioned, and amortizing the initial set-up costs which include subsidizing the magazine during its initial years when subscribership is low, website set-up, advertising etc etc etc. If the journal was only released online there would be no printing costs and fewer distribution costs.

That leaves the submission fee and compensation for editors and "referees". Suppose we set the submission fee to $100, with discounts available to people living in middle income countries ($50 fee) and low income countries (no fee), as well as to registered full-time students ($50 fee) and subscribers (fee reduced by cost of annual subscription). The fee would be refunded if the story is accepted.

No doubt this seems like a large sum, although it is modest by academic standards. In my field,
The Journal of Finance charges $250 for non-members of the American Finance Association, and $200 for members, if the member lives in a high income country. These fees are reduced for residents of middle income countries to $150 and $100 respectively, and to zero for residents of low income countries. The Journal of Monetary Economics charges $250, reduced to $150 for full time students. The American Economic Review charges $100 for members of the American Economic Association, $200 for non-members, with residents of middle and low income countries eligible for half or zero fees respectively. Econometrica only accept submissions from members of the Econometric Society. The Journal of Political Economy charges $125 for non-subscribers and $75 for subscribers.

Suppose each referee was paid $80 to write a report at least one page long (longer at the discretion of the "referee" writing the report). If we think it should take about 2 hours to read enough of a submission to decide on whether it is publishable and to write up a one page report explaining why, this amounts to a wage of $40 per hour (less if the referee is slower at these things, or if they are inspired to write more). If a referee wrote 20 reports per year that is $1,600 in additional income to them for about one weeks work spread throughout the year.

How many submissions would the journal get at that price? I have no idea. Suppose there were 400 per year each averaging 10,000 words in length. 50 would be accepted per year which is a pretty high acceptance rate. With fees for accepted papers refunded, that means that net of referee costs there would be about $7,000 in additional revenue to cover the cost of (partially) waiving the submission fee for some submitters, as well as to contribute to covering the many other costs that I have no doubt neglected to include in the calculations.

I have no idea if these numbers are reasonable, but I expect that they are not too unreasonable. If that is correct, then it may be possible to make such a magazine work.  If I was going to run it (and I am not volunteering to do so) I would seek to get 20 established authors to add their names to an editorial board with a commitment to read 20 stories each per year (if there are enough submissions). If my understanding of author incomes is correct, $1,600 in extra income might be appealing to some midlist authors. And given the large number of aspiring writers prepared to spend money and time to attend writing workshops, I imagine there would be some who would pay $100 for this kind of feedback about their writing.

Based on these calculations, I conclude that it might just be possible. Comments, corrections, clarifications, and volunteers to do all this work would be most welcome!

EDIT: An updated and, I think, more accurate version of these calculations, is available at The Market for Short SFF: Could The Academic Model Work?

Facts About the Fiction Market

There are have been a couple of recent articles on the market for fiction that I have found quite interesting. The first, entitled Tyler is top-selling Man Booker longlisted title, by Kiera O'Brien and Sarah Shaffi, looks at literary fiction and in particular the sales figures of the 13 titles longlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year. The story is interesting both for informing us of the relatively low sales figures for literature, as well as giving us a sense of how much an appearance on the longlist is worth in terms of sales.

The key points by title (all sales were as of 10th September):

1. Anne Tyler A Spool of Blue Thread (Chatto & Windus) is the bestselling of the 13 longlist titles selling 20,102 copies in total across all editions through Nielsen BookScan. It sold 7,680 copies since the longlist was announced.
2. Anne Enright The Green Road (Jonathan Cape) sold 2,355 extra copies since being longlisted, for a total of 8,938. 
3. Hanya Yanigahara A Little Life (Picador), which was published three weeks after the longlist announcement, has sold 7,542 copies
4. Marlon James A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld Publications) has sold 6,694 copies, which is 3,471 more than before the announcement. 
5. Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations (Faber & Faber) sold 457 copies since the longlist was announced, for a total of 3,273 copies. 
6. Marilynne Robinson Lila (Virago) has sold 12,184 copies, but only 625 copies since the longlist. 
7. Tom McCarthy Satin Island (Jonathan Cape) went from 922 to 1,511 after the announcement. 
8. Sunjeev Sahota The Year of the Runaways (Picador) went from 413 copies to 1,302.
9. Anna Smaill The Chimes (Sceptre) went from 411 to 1,008. 
10. Laila Lalami The Moor’s Account released on 27th August, has sold 1,783 copies. 
11. Bill Clegg Did You Ever Have a Family (Jonathan Cape) released 1st September, has sold 885 copies. 
12. Chigozie Obioma The Fishermen (One, Pushkin Press) had not charted when the longlist was announced and has now sold 1,252 copies.
13. Anuradha Roy Sleeping on Jupiter (MacLehose Press, Quercus) had not charted and has now sold 604 copies.

These are startlingly small numbers for the best books written in English last year. And while sales will continue to grow, particularly as some of the books are released in paperback, it underlines the fact that most literature (which does not receive this sport of acclaim) does not sell very well. This is true even when the book is by a previously acclaimed writer, such as Anne Enright (a previous winner of the Mann Booker Prize).

The second derives from an NPR report that also looked at literary fiction. In When It Comes To Book Sales, What Counts As Success Might Surprise You, Lynn Neary. According to this report, success can be defined as follows:

So what is a good sales figure for any book?

"A sensational sale would be about 25,000 copies," says literary agent Jane Dystel. "Even 15,000 would be a strong enough sale to get the publisher's attention for the author for a second book."

But if that second book doesn't sell, says Dystel, odds are you won't get another chance.

The third report is by SFF writer Kameron Hurley who discusses her own book sales in The Cold Publishing Equations: Books Sold + Marketability + Love (which follows up on a previous report 2014: Some (Honest) Publishing Numbers, and (Almost) Throwing in the Towel) as well as some average figures for publishing as a whole:

The average book sells 3000 copies in its lifetime (Publishers Weekly, 2006).

Yes. It’s not missing a zero.

Take a breath and read that again.

But wait, there’s more!

The average traditionally published book which sells 3,000 in its entire lifetime in print only sells about 250-300 copies its first year.

But I’m going indie! you say. My odds are better!

No, grasshopper. Your odds are worse.

The average digital only author-published book sells 250 copies in its lifetime.

Regarding her own publishing success, Hurley writes:

my first book, GOD’S WAR, which I was paid $6,500 for and which earned out its advance and started making money in its first 6 months – after selling only its first 5500 copies. It has since gone on to sell over 20,000.

And

MIRROR EMPIRE did even better, with a $7,000 advance and sales in excess of 13,000 copies already. It’s in its second printing and now has a mass market version as well. It’s also sold audio rights and foreign rights to Germany and the Czech Republic. It’s not making me or my publisher millions, but it’s keeping the lights on.

 Hurley also reports on some more unfortunate outcomes for authors she knows:

So while all this sounds mid-list rosy, I want to talk about the not-so-rosy stuff, because I have seen sales numbers that would leave you sobbing your guts out on the sidewalk (ha ha if you’re already sobbing at the ones I’ve shared YOU ARE IN FOR A SURPRISE). There are authors – authors you may have heard of – who have sold a couple hundred copies of a title in its lifetime. I’ve seen publisher spreadsheets that show some authors selling just a dozen copies over eight months. I remember one author had sold four copies in twelve months and I thought for sure it was a typo but it wasn’t.

These things happen. They happen to great writers, and exceptional books.

And they fuck up people’s careers. Many of us don’t come back from it.

I nearly didn’t.

In the case of numbers this bad, there are usually a lot of things that go wrong all at once – publisher fuck-ups, poor timing, bad pitching to bookstores, no author-driven marketing, bigger books moving to the top of reviewers’ piles, big news events that drown out signal, and yes, sometimes it’s just not a great book either, etc.

These are striking facts. I am very grateful to Hurley for sharing them publicly. While I did not love her book The Mirror Empire (see my review here), I will read the next in the series and wish her nothing but the best in her career.

The facts are also more than a little depressing. As a consumer of SFF (and fiction more generally) I am concerned whenever I hear that the economics of publishing may be discouraging potentially good writers to write. I can't help but wonder if we are moving towards a system of micro Patronage through sites such as Patreon?

Eric Flint on Popularity and Literary Awards

A couple of weeks ago, Eric Flint wrote up a lengthy post getting at the oft-circulated idea, which appears to have been at least part of the motivation for the Puppy campaign at the Hugo Awards, that there is a divide between those SFF works recognized by the awards and those that are popular. Back in 2007, Flint set out to ascertain whether this divergence was in fact real.

As Flint points out, this is a difficult topic to analyze because popularity is typically defined to be sales and data on sales by author is not publicly available. In fact, if I understand the situation correctly, the data might not even be privately available to the author, and there is some doubt as to whether publishers have accurate sales data, too!

To get around this problem, back in 2007 before e-book sales were nearly as important as they are now and when amazon.com was smaller, Flint sought out to get around this absence-of-data problem by proxying for sales by looking at shelf space at major book chains like Barnes & Noble and then then-still-solvent Borders.

Flint he claims he went to multiple such stores all over the country and recorded the names of authors who were regularly able to command four feet of shelf space, as opposed to three feet of shelf space, or only two feet of space. This was taken as a measure of "popularity" which could be then compared with the names of the authors who won awards. For reference, Flint asserts that back-in-the-day the sets of authors who were popular and who won awards would have a large intersection. The question he wanted to answer was: is this less true today?

Back in 2007, Flint found that there were seven authors who could command four or more feet of shelf space in the SFF section:

1. Jim Butcher
2. Orson Scott Card
3. Raymond Feist
4. Mercedes Lackey
5. Terry Pratchett
6. J.R.R. Tolkien
7. David Weber

Note that this excludes authors like JK Rowling, Stephen King and Michael Crichton who are typically not shelved in SFF.

As for the performance of these authors with awards:

From the standpoint of measuring these authors in terms of awards received, of course, we have to start by subtracting J.R.R. Tolkien. He pretty much antedates the awards altogether. (Although he did receive a very belated Hugo nomination in 1966 for “best series ever.” But he was defeated by Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.)

Of the six remaining authors, four of them—Butcher, Feist, Lackey and Weber—have never received a single nomination in their entire careers for any major F&SF award. No Hugo nominations—forget wins, they’ve never even been nominated—no Nebulas, no World Fantasy Awards. Nothing.

Terry Pratchett has been nominated. Exactly twice. Once for the Hugo, once for the Nebula. He didn’t win either time.

With the last figure in the group, of course—Orson Scott Card—we find ourselves in the presence of a major award-winner. Card has been nominated for sixteen Hugo awards and won four times, and he was nominated for a Nebula on nine occasions and won twice. And he was nominated for a World Fantasy Award three times and won it once.

But…

He hasn’t been nominated for a WFC in twenty years, he hasn’t been nominated for a Nebula in eighteen years, and hasn’t been nominated for a Hugo in sixteen years. And he hasn’t won any major award (for a piece of fiction) in twenty years.

I seem to recall a rumor about Pratchett declining a nomination and I am not sure if that is included.

A similar pattern emerges if the list is expanded to authors commanding three feet of shelf space in SFF:

1. Terry Brooks
2. David Eddings
3. Eric Flint
4. Neil Gaiman
5. Terry Goodkind
6. Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson
7. Robin Hobb
8. Tanya Huff
9. Robert Jordan
10. George R.R. Martin
11. Anne McCaffrey
12. L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
13. John Ringo
14. R.A. Salvatore
15. Harry Turtledove

According to Flint:

Of those fifteen authors (counting Herbert and Anderson as a single author) eleven of them—that’s almost 75%—have never been nominated for any major award. Again, forget winning. These authors aren’t even on the radar.

Harry Turtledove has gotten some recognition: one WFC nomination; two Nebula nominations; and three Hugo nominations, one of which he won.

But, being blunt, six nominations and one win is a pretty screwy record for an author with Turtledove’s popularity, wide range of output, and longevity. Forty or fifty years ago—thirty years ago, for that matter—he would have been nominated at least as often as Gordon Dickson.

Anne McCaffrey has gotten quite a bit of recognition in her career, taken as a whole. She’s been nominated for a Hugo eight times and won once; and nominated for a Nebula on three occasions, of which she won once.

But she hasn’t been nominated for a Nebula in thirty-eight years and hasn’t won in thirty-nine years. And she hasn’t won a Hugo in forty years. The last time she was even nominated for a Hugo was sixteen years ago—and that was her only nomination for any major award in the last quarter of a century.

A quarter of a century, mind you, in which she kept writing and never once lost her popularity with the mass audience. But, as with Orson Scott Card, she long ago lost the favor of the in-crowds.

The situation’s a little better with George R.R. Martin. Martin, of course, has a very impressive track record when it comes to awards. He’s been nominated for a Hugo on seventeen occasions and won four times; nominated for a Nebula thirteen times and won twice; nominated for a WFC nine times and won once.

And, true enough, Martin did pick up some nominations recently, unlike Card or McCaffrey. Several of the novels in his very popular A Song of Ice and Fire series were nominated for Hugos and Nebulas in this century, although none of them won.

Still, even with Martin, most of his award history is now far in the past. Of the many nominations he’s gotten in his career, the great majority date back to the 70s and 80s, and most of them are now a quarter of a century old.

Here’s the truth. Of the twenty-two authors today whom the mass audience regularly encounters whenever they walk into a bookstore looking for fantasy and science fiction, because they are the ones whose sales enable them to maintain at least a full shelf of book space, only one of them—Neil Gaiman—also has an active reputation with the (very small) groups of people who vote for major awards.

And they are very small groups. Not more than a few hundred people in the case of the Hugos and Nebulas, and a small panel of judges in the case of the WFC.

With them, Neil Gaiman’s popularity hasn’t—yet, at least—eroded his welcome. He’s gotten five nominations and two wins for the Hugo; three nominations and two wins for the Nebula; eight nominations and one win for the WFC—and almost all of them came in this century.

The situation is similar for those authors commanding two feet of shelf space, although as Flint notes there is much more variation in the set of such authors from store to store.

What does all this mean? Flint takes it as confirmation that awards have drifted away from recognizing purely story-telling skills, towards focusing on how the story was written:

To go back to the issue at hand, this is the inevitable tug-of-war that affects any literary or artistic award. Do we lean toward the tree or toward the forest? Do we focus on the way a story is written, or on the story itself?

That’s a simplistic way of putting it, granted, but it does capture the heart of the matter. What usually happens over time is that awards given out by a group of people who are a small sub-set of the mass audience for that particular form of literature or art tend to lean in the direction of contemplating the trees.

There’s nothing wrong with that, in and of itself. You just need to understand the phenomenon, not take it personally—and above all, not to characterize it as the product of foul play.

And that was the Original Sin, as it were, of the Sad Puppies. (The Rabid Puppies are a different phenomenon altogether.) As it happens, I agree with the sense the Sad Puppies have that the Hugo and other F&SF awards are skewed against purely story-telling skills.

They are. I’m sorry if some people don’t like to hear that, but there’s no other way you can explain the fact that—as of 2007; I’ll deal with today’s reality in a moment—only one (Neil Gaiman) of the thirty authors who dominated the shelf space in bookstores all over North America regularly got nominated for awards since the turn of the century.

I do not necessarily disagree with Eric's conclusions.  But I am not certain.

For one thing, it is not entirely obvious to me that the situation was different back in the 50s, 60s and 70s.  Of course, I wasn't alive and/or paying attention back then, and so I need to rely on the reminiscences of Flint and others instead. And they may be correct when they assure me that things were different. But there is also a tendency for people's memories to be distorted by time. Looking back, are we more inclined to remember the books that were both popular and that were given awards? Were the bookshelves of the period actually filled with books that were popular but that did not win awards and that have not passed the test of time? Perhaps John Norman's Chronicles of Gor dominated the shelves (as far as I know, they never won any major awards)? I simply do not know and wish we had some hard data as a check on the reminiscences of others.

For another thing, even if we accept that popular best-selling work does not win as many awards these days, does it necessarily imply that story has been subordinated to form in the awards? One thing we know is true is that the market for SFF is more crowded today than it was in the past. As a result, it is harder for new authors to amass large followings. If many more good authors---authors who has mastered story as well as form---are having trouble finding their audience, then voters may have compensated by giving awards to works that have escaped attention. Or alternatively, maybe on average (there are obvious exceptions) it takes an author with a long career to be a best seller these days. If so, and if authors write their best books when young, then awards might inevitably be going to the work of younger, less established and hence less popular authors.

I don't know and in the absence of hard data we probably never will. But I thought Flint's solution to the problem of lacking hard data was a helpful step forward, in spite of all the problems that remain (and that Flint does a very good job of acknowledging in his post).

More Pratchett Commentary in The Guardian

A few weeks ago, we joined in the internet outrage over an article in The Guardian by Jonathan Jones who disparaged the work of Terry Pratchett despite admitting he had never read any.

A week ago, Jones wrote another essay, this time after having read one of Pratchett's earlier novels, Small Gods. His opinion of Pratchett has not improved dramatically, although he at least acknowledges that he had "snorted contempt" for Pratchett in his earlier article, and he is able to identify some aspects of Pratchett's writing that he admires:

This is Pratchett at his best: expansive and lucid, taking one of the greatest ideas in western thought ... and having a bit of fun with it. ...

You can praise Pratchett for his witty exposition of big ideas, his creation of a fantasy world that gives readers an alternative home (and will surely one day become as seductive on screen as Martin’s Westeros has in Game of Thrones).

Perhaps most importantly, Jones now articulates clearly what he doesn't like about Pratchett relative to some of his own literary favorites: the quality of the prose. In Jones opinion:

[F]or some reason, the fantasy genre is a graveyard for the English language.

and

Pratchett’s deflationary jokes, like his Plato parody, are often funny in isolation, but taken together, they result in a determinedly unambitious, unexciting style. He seems to love handling clichés as if they were shiny pebbles:

“The sky was blue.”

“It was a million-to-one chance, with any luck.”

“Simony laughed bitterly.”

There’s nothing wrong with these sentences from Small Gods – the book is full of such expressions – but there is nothing special about them either.

That’s what I’ve felt previously when I looked at Pratchett’s prose, and following it for 397 pages has not suddenly transformed it into Henry James. The ordinariness of this writing is surely deliberate: it makes the book warm and friendly, like a normal chat with a normal bloke.

Why would anyone confuse this with the kind of literary prose it so emphatically does not want to be?

This is the difference between entertainment and literature – the novel as distraction and the novel as art. You cannot divorce a literary novel from the way it is written. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, literature is the words and nothing but.

Plenty of novels get published and loved that are not literature in this sense, but all I am saying, and all I was saying, is that I prefer the literary kind. I prefer it by a billion Ephebian miles.

You can praise Pratchett for his witty exposition of big ideas, his creation of a fantasy world that gives readers an alternative home (and will surely one day become as seductive on screen as Martin’s Westeros has in Game of Thrones). But you cannot say: “Pratchett writes really ordinary prose yet is a literary genius.” 

We can argue about what constitutes a literary genius, but I do not dispute Jones's right to value the quality of prose in a novel above other aspects of the writing. If that is what floats his boat, more power to him.

Indeed, I also take a great amount of enjoyment from the quality of an author's prose. One of my favorite authors is Peter Carey, one of only three two-time winners of the Man Booker Prize: in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and in 2001 for the True History of the Kelly Gang. Carey possesses a stunning command of the English language. At times his prose is so beautiful that I have to put his books down to savor for a moment the power of his words. Other times, his prose is (deliberately) extremely difficult, as with the aforementioned True History of the Kelly Gang, a historical novel written in a 19th century vernacular with little concern for punctuation or grammar. It is hard to read a Carey novel and not be impressed. But for both of these reasons, Carey's books are not immersive; the prose is simply far too visible. This is fine if you---like Jones and me---find enjoyment in the art of writing exceptional prose.

But there are times when I want to be immersed in a story. And for these times, invisible prose is what is needed. This also requires great skill even if, because it is invisible, it doesn't attract the attention of critics.

Kate Paulk makes many of the same points in a more strongly worded fashion over at the Mad Genius Club:

This, dear Mr Literary Columnist, is an example of making the prose invisible. Yes, it’s deliberate. Pratchett doesn’t want excess fancy getting in the way of the reader. If I stop to admire pretty words, you’ve lost me. I don’t remember Pratchett’s phrasing, I remember his characters. His situations. The subtle parallels he draws that show disturbingly plausible ways to go from civilized to barbaric. Dear lord, I can remember and talk about this and give bloody examples when it’s been something in the order of seven years since I last read the book.

Fuck prose. If I can remember the meaning of a book that long after I last read it when I’ve read – quite literally – hundreds of other books since then, that author is doing it right.

Paulk has a point. She is more interested in debating the meaning of the term "literary" than I am:

Ah. No. Literary prose does not mean the contents contain literature. Usually the opposite is the case. Unless, of course, you happen to be a pretentious wanker who wants to impress people with how much he knows about Arte. ... 

And as for Jones's claim that:

Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, literature is the words and nothing but.

I concur with Paulk's view is that this is

Bullshit. The stuff that’s the words and nothing but? That’s the stuff that will be forgotten in a generation, if it lasts that long. The things people remember and love? That’s literature. ...

Oh, yes, you can, sir. Real literature, the kind of thing that lasts past the flash-in-the-pan praise of the pretentious fashion-slaves who call themselves literary? That has meaning. Meaning that percolates and matures and emerges sometimes years later in the realization that there was a lot more to that fun romp than you’d have thought at first.

Well said!

SFF Novels with the Best Opening Lines

I just finished reading Charles Stross's Saturns Children (see my review here) which has one of the best opening lines that I have read for some time:

Today is the two-hundredth anniversary of the final extinction of my One True Love, as close as I can date it.

The opening line of a story has to do several things. I think Stephen King said it best (as he often does) in an interview in The Atlantic entitled Why Stephen King Spends 'Months and Even Years' Writing Opening Sentences:

There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line. It's tricky thing, and tough to talk about because I don't think conceptually while I work on a first draft -- I just write. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar.

But there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.

How can a writer extend an appealing invitation -- one that's difficult, even, to refuse ...

[A]n intriguing context is important, and so is style. But for me, a good opening sentence really begins with voice. You hear people talk about "voice" a lot, when I think they really just mean "style." Voice is more than that. People come to books looking for something. But they don't come for the story, or even for the characters. They certainly don't come for the genre. I think readers come for the voice. ...

An appealing voice achieves an intimate connection -- a bond much stronger than the kind forged, intellectually, through crafted writing.

When people think of great opening lines they often refer to the same old examples. Some openings are so famous that they have made their way into everyday conversation, as with the opening to Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The same is true for the opening to A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, the first few words of which read “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ...” Other times, they think of a classic hook as with 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

In a SFF novel, the role of the opening line is arguably even more important as it is the introduction to the world that the author has created. What are the best? Erin Bow lists five of her favorite opening lines in a recent post at tor.com. The five books, and the corresponding opening lines, are:

1. “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”—Feed by M.T. Anderson.
2. “The first thing you find you when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say.”—The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.
3. “It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried out bed of the old North Sea.”—Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve.
4. “Day One: My lady and I are being shut up in a tower for seven years.”—Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale.
5. “I’ve confessed to everything and I’d like to be hanged. Now, if you please.”—Chime by Franny Billingsley.

I think you'll agree that all of these are pretty good; I especially liked Philip Reeve's hook and will seek him out as a result.

Joel Williams also has a pretty good list at Ink Tank:

1. “I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one.”—Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card.
2. “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” —Neuromancer, by William Gibson.
3. “A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.” —Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
4. “Monday morning when I answered the door there were twenty-one new real estate agents there, all in horrible polyester gold jackets.”—The Hacker And The Ants, Version 2.0, by Rudy Rucker.
5. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13.” —1984, George Orwell.
6. “The morning after he killed Eugene Shapiro, Andre Deschenes woke early.” —Undertow, by Elizabeth Bear.
7. “At the end, the bottom, the very worst of it, with the world afire and hell’s flamewinged angels calling him by name, Lee Crane blamed himself.” — Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, by Theodore Sturgeon.
8. “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” —A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
9. “The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light years and eight centuries.” —A Deepness In The Sky, by Vernor Vinge.
10. “It was a pleasure to burn.” —Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.

Other lists abound (from people like Charlie Jane Anders, or Mark from Momentum Books)containing a lot of overlap with the above, but also a few other items:

1. “They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair.” —Count Zero by William Gibson.
2. “Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.”—Angels & Demons by Dan Brown.
3. “I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.” —Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
4. “He woke, and remembered dying.” —The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod.
5. “In the summer of his twelfth year - the summer the stars began to fall from the sky - the boy Isaac discovered that he could tell East from West with his eyes closed.” —Axis by Robert Charles Wilson.
6. “I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.” —House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
7. “I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.” —The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursuala K. Le Guin.
8. “All children, except one, grow up.” —Peter Pan and Wendy by J.M. Barrie’s

All of the above are pretty good and some are downright great. But I think there are four pretty great ones that they missed, in my not-so-humble-opinion.  They are:

1. “Prince Raoden of Arelon awoke early that morning, completely unaware that he had been damned for all eternity.” —Elantris by Brandon Sanderson.
2. “I always get the shakes before a drop.” —Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
3. “Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” ―The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.
4. “When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.” —The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham.

Am I missing any?