Cat Rambo's Blog, page 33

Nattering Social Justice Cook: Defending Yourself

Monday, in the wee and terrible hours of the morning, I’m dragging myself off to the first of twelve women’s self-defense classes, which meet three times a week for the next month.

While I’m not fond of the circumstances pushing the need for something like this, it’s something I’d thought about for decades, so probably it’s good to be going ahead and doing it before I get so creaky that I worry about breaking a hip. As it is I know I’ll be collecting some bruises.

It coincides with a gun class halfway through, since I figured as long as I’m living in a house with guns, I might as well know how to pick one up and shoot it in the case of a zombie apocalypse. (This is an interesting year! So far I’ve added the following skills, all at 1st level, to my character sheet: scuba, lockpicking, coffee roasting. Basic CPR is another I want to append before year’s end.)

Mainly this will be interesting because it’s a big change in mindset. The last time I hit a human being with my fist was, I think, second or third grade. While I’ve played sports, they’ve never been rough and tumble ones; softball, golf, or tennis are more my style. Maybe bowling. I did fence briefly in high school and have always regretted not sticking with it.

But, plain and simple, I’m going to be grappling with my own fight or flight instinct and learning how to look at the landscape a bit differently. I plan to journal throughout because I think I’m going to run up against my own internal anger and deal with it in a way I’ve never had to before. I know it’s there because I glimpse it every once in a while.

While I was at Snake River Comic Con, I was talking with some other women about self defense classes, since a couple of them had taught them (in fact, SRCC’s kids track included a Hogwarts Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher showing them how to use a quarterstaff). They all agreed that they’d hit a particular phenomenon (“It happens all the time,” one said.) A man shows up to a women’s self defense class in order to demonstrate to the women that the class is pointless and in each case getting taken down by the instructor. And that night, when I was thinking about the mindset required to appoint oneself the policer of women, showing up to give the message that men can hurt them no matter what skills they acquire, I could feel that anger creeping along my body, extending outwards along my limbs, tensing them in a way I had to consciously concentrate on in order to stop.

I am aware of my surroundings at most times that, when on the street, does factor getting grabbed, because I have been groped, grabbed, squeezed, and otherwise forced into physical contact that I didn’t want multiple times. That sounds paranoid, but I think many women know what I mean. For me it’s a result of this encounter when I was a young adult, maybe 19 or 20. I was walking to work around 9 in the morning, downtown, when I passed an elderly man. There was nothing about his appearance or demeanor to distinguish him from a normal human being. But unlike one, he grabbed my ass as he passed, not a tentative little pat but a full-out invasive, startling, unexpected move that stopped me dead, spun me around, while he walked on, smiling broadly.

Where was the pleasure in that act sited for him? Was it the feel of my flesh? Or in the fact that he’d violated my boundaries, there in daylight? I’m pretty sure it was the latter.

How shitty does your soul have to be to get enjoyment out of hurting another person, either physically or verbally? Seriously. Trying to rebuild the crumbling brickwork of internal sense of worth while not realizing this is the very thing that’s destroyed it. Taking pleasure from hurting a fellow human being is vile. It corrodes your humanity in a way Uncle Screwtape would have heartily approved of.

Nowadays, I’d react differently. I’d take a picture, call the cops, and follow him till they arrived. Because that sort of shit needs to stop.

Beyond two actual attacks, since then plenty of subway gropes, elevator boob brushes, lingering hugs. Laughing invitations to sit in men’s laps. Sometimes meant to intimidate, but often unthinking, like the fourth grade teacher known for snapping girls bra straps but who also gave me my first Heinlein novels to read. And you know, I don’t really care about a lot of that myself because I’m older now and know how to roll my eyes while at the same time keeping an elbow ready for that man standing waiting for the airplane bathroom and rubbing his crotch on my shoulder. (Yes, taken from life.) But that’s armor I’ve acquired. Many of my fellows, particularly the younger or particularly different ones, don’t have the same toughness.

Maybe we can try to create a world where they don’t need to. In some ways I’m encouraged by the way 45 has actually forced some formerly more wishy-washy allies into solidarity, made them go, well, okay, maybe the mentality informing “you can grab ’em by the pussy” isn’t really so much humorous as it is toxic.

I ramble. That’s okay. We are all made up of impressions, encounters. Moments frozen in our memories and shaping our thoughts for decades to come. What does it mean that there’s people out there who want others — particularly women — to have moments of fear, powerlessness, humiliation, pain? How do you heal those broken souls so they stop spreading their poison? Is that the right strategy? It seems the best longtime one, the one with the most result for the human race.

Call-out culture is something I was thinking about this morning. It seems to me the teaching there is aimed outward, not at the person being called out so much as the people witnessing. Perhaps more effective but also one that takes the center target and leaves them humiliated, angry, hurt. Yet that’s not the intent so much as collateral damage from pot shots at the system. I find talking privately usually more effective, but there are times when that’s not appropriate. Thinking about the guy who grabbed me, it would have seemed pretty appropriate to call him out because it would have made him realize sometimes there are consequences to oneself from committing and taking pleasure in assault.

Maybe this rumination is all particularly appropriate for a Sunday morning. Figuring out this shit is hard and looking at the Unitarian church’s sermon today to see if it’s applicable, I see they’re going to be discussing arguments for and against changing the wording of the First Principle from “person” to ‘being”. Probably a lengthy walk in order to think would be more useful, and luckily it’s a nice day for it, blue skies and leaves still on the trees being all beautiful and autumn-y.

Still waiting on that Adulting for Dummies book I was metaphorically promised as a child. Maybe they’ll hand them out in the first session of that defense class.

We shall see.

Interview with Sherwood Smith on Omniscient Point of View in the Inda Series

Recently the question of omniscient POV has come up in several classes, so I started reading some examples of it. One of the best I hit was Sherwood Smith’s Inda series. I figured, why not go to Sherwood and ask some questions about how she pulled that off.

What drew you to using omniscient point of view for the Inda series? What sorts of stories work particularly well with that POV? Were there any models that you looked when working with it?

I had always written in omni. I’m a visual writer (with all its pluses and pitfalls), which means I see a movie in my head—not just dialogue but characters’ inner lives. Omni always seemed the easiest way to get that movie down.

But when I started selling, I was told to switch to limited third, which I had to learn.

Segue up a couple decades, I was desperate to escape the limitations of third, and omni was no longer (trigger doom music) Forbidden. I had to relearn omni, by which I mean consciously grasping the difference between omniscient voice and head-hopping. (Some readers will call omniscient voice head-hopping. My guess is that some of these readers might have had little exposure to early novels.)

To review omni, I went back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century books I’d grown up reading, with an eye to the development of narrative voice: I noted how Jane Austen invented the modern novel with her mostly-offstage narrator, which had been influenced by Henry Fielding’s rudimentary narrative style in Tom Jones, and Samuel Richardson’s experimentation in Clarissa. I reread William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, whose narrator strides right out on stage, breaking the fourth wall to directly address the audience.

I came to the conclusion that every novel, actually, has a narrator. Including those written in limited third or even camera-eye view. But many writers don’t recognize that. Maybe they don’t need to. Everybody’s process is different. For me, it’s a helpful rule or reminder for handling diegesis as well as mimesis, and how to incorporate elements like public, private, and intimate space (each with its discrete focus), how to slide into free indirect discourse, etc.

Anyway, with Inda—with any big, braided story—I find limited third so, um, limiting. It’s so difficult to get all the POVs in you want and not jerk the reader back and forth in time, or break the narrative into little scenes in order to properly isolate those POV changes. If you’ve got a narrator, and know why that narrator is telling the story, I think one can better see the entire structure of the novel, and determine how many POVs to use, where, and when.

What difficulties presented themselves as a result? What did you have to be mindful about as you were writing?

Slipping too frequently into diegesis, especially when tired, and summarizing what ought to be scenes. When I say tired, I don’t mean single sessions, though that is true, too. I mean those long months, even years, it takes to write a novel—sometimes forgetting it takes a few hours to read it. Another aspect to be mindful of is limiting the access to characters’ thoughts to those needed for not just the action through-line but the emotional through-line. And cut out all the other voices yammering, or they can proliferate fast into side-stories.

What issues did it present when rewriting?

Those side-stories. Also, figuring out when to let the narrator come forward.

Was there anything that surprised you about using it?

Not really, because I’d grown up writing omni. The surprise was the realization that all novels have narrators.

One of the biggest concerns about using omniscient POV is that readers have been trained to spot “head-hopping” as a flaw. Do you have any strategies for avoiding this?

Some readers are not going to like it no matter what. Maybe a matter of taste, or of training—if you’d grown up reading only first or third, omni can come as a surprise. I’ve heard readers say they won’t read first person, or second, or present tense, or omni. That’s a taste call. I think it makes it easier to get used to when the writer works to make certain that every shift or transition is grounded—that there are no floating pronouns so the reader is forced to go paging back for the antecedent. (And yeah, it’s so easy to screw up even when trying to focus on that specifically.)

What are you working on right now and what POV is it in?

A series, called the Young Allies, that will begin coming out from DAW next summer. It is all complete, and written in omni. Same narrator as Inda.

What’s the best entry point into your work if a reader’s looking for a book to start with? Inda or something else?

I guess that depends what type of story they are looking for? YAs I usually direct to Crown Duel, which is an early work, but it’s stayed in print since the nineties. (I recommend the ebook version though—it has fewer errors.) Then there is the four-book Inda series, for fantasy, and the ebook version of Exordium, a five book space opera I wrote with Dave Trowbridge.

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For more about Sherwood Smith, visit her website at www.sherwoodsmith.net. Follow her on Twitter here.

Talking About Fireside Fiction’s #BlackSpecFic Report, Part 2 of 2

In Part One I presented a discussion between writers Steven Barnes, Maurice Broaddus, Tananarive Due, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Tonya Liburd, and Nisi Shawl about Fireside Fiction’s reports on black writers in speculative fiction. In this part I want to talk about SFWA and what it can learn or has already learned from both the report and the discussion, along with listing some of the action items I’m taking away from it.

What’s Happened So Far

When the original 2015 report came out, we discussed it on the SFWA Board but little conclusive was achieved. I wrote about some of that discussion as well as my own thoughts.

Of the various action items the SFWA Board talked about, some have been fulfilled.

We successfully surveyed the membership in a project started by Justina Ireland and brought to completion by Erin M. Hartshorn, and are working on analysis of the results. We pushed hard on this, and I used part of my discretionary fund to pay for 10 $25 gift cards to use as prizes for filling the form out. Over half the membership responded, which I think may be a greater percentage than we’ve ever had in recent decades. I would like to think renewed enthusiasm and faith in the organization’s direction drove participation as much as the gift cards, but truth be told, the gift cards were probably responsible.
The Grants Committee’s decisions were informed by this during the last round, and I also looked at the decision afterward to make sure we were serving a number of diverse groups. That’s a step that needs to get formally written into the process, in my opinion. Over the past year I’ve been reaching out to groups supporting writers and F&SF works of color in order to let them know the grants are there and worth applying for, such as HeroNation.
On a personal level, as SFWA President, I’ve been trying to read in a way that informs me, while also making sure I’m promoting black writers while working towards overall diversity.

But there’s more to be done. (For example, that publishing house outreach is something I need to figure out, so my next step is asking our volunteer wrangler to find me someone to compile that list. Or the SFWA Star Project has been pretty inactive, so I need to prod around and see if someone won’t start driving it while firmly resisting the urge to do it myself.)

There is a fine line between asking for help from black writers in fixing the issue and expecting them to fix it. I still try to navigate this in addressing the issue, and with the podcast, my hope was to a) facilitate discussion that promoted awareness of the issue and b) gather information that helps me — and the rest of the SFWA Board — figure out what SFWA can/could/should best do.

Gleaning Action Items

Beyond the podcast, I looked to the original report, its follow-up, the accompanying essays, and some of the pieces it sparked in order to inform myself. This is accordingly an imperfect view and does not touch on every related piece, but I think I’ve created a decent list of things to do.

When the Fireside Fiction report came out, I was dismayed initially, and remain a bit daunted by it. For me it was hard to look specifically at this one aspect, black writers, rather than diversity issues overall. Realizing that was revelatory and only came about because of feedback that someone graciously gave me. Attitudes about class, race, gender, sexuality all play together in the make-up of our own personal filters on the world; I found it useful to try to change that filter and I’m very grateful to the essay writers as well as people who talked personally with me about the issues for their valuable time and effort.

Two black writers have been important to my own career. The first was Octavia Butler, one of my Clarion West instructors. The second is Samuel R. Delany, whose The Fall of the Towers was one of the first pieces of adult SF I read, and which inspired me to try to find out for myself all that SF could be.

One of my core beliefs is that if I’m leading an organization, I need to make sure that organization is doing what I believe to be the right thing. So what can I help SFWA do? Here are my notes.

Nisi Shawl: Ones and Twos and Rarely Threes. Shawl mentions editor Gardner Dozois telling her Clarion West class in 1992 that writing and selling stories in a particular universe is a good path to selling a novel in that universe. She references Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing and makes the observation that the suppression of thought requires nothing more difficult than misunderstanding. For me that raises a question about how to recruit and train slush readers. She also notes that “you have to be printed to be reprinted.” In the podcast this came up again: for there to be better representation in the slushpile, there needs to be more black publishers, editors, and slush readers in the system.

Action item: Think about slush readers. How do we create systems that recruit widely and also teach those readers and editors to read without so many filters? (Reading these essays might be a pretty good start on that.) Figure that out, then figure out how to spread that knowledge via panels, podcasts, handouts. Slush readers and interns are where the majority of our editors and publishers come from; change at this level will spread upward and do so within a few years, particularly if we figure out ways to help first-time anthologists and newbie editors as well, perhaps simply with resources.

Brian White: A Note from the Editor of the #BlackSpecFic Responses. White’s piece is most useful to me in talking about the changes Fireside itself made in reaction to the report. They included an anonymous way to self-report when submitting, something that SFWA could adapt to its membership form. They added special submission periods aimed at specific groups. That I’m not sure about translating – an obvious way would be grants or awards aimed at those groups, perhaps, but that’s not a substitute for inclusion in the existing ones. Changing staff to be more representative is another step, and something SFWA can incorporate in its staffing and volunteer (perhaps?) process. As is amplifying and building on the discussion itself.

Action items:

Look at how we’re staffing and talk to the volunteer coordinator.
Budget in 2018-2019 for analysis that looks at the Nebula awards/nominations/recommended reading lists in terms of racial/gender/class diversity.
The podcast is one way SFWA can further the discussion. Figure others out. What can we do to leverage this effort more effectively? What sort of follow-ups are useful?

Tobias Buckell: Boldly Going Nowhere. Buckell talks about Leonard Nimoy and how Spock’s mixed race character was one that Buckell could identify with himself. He notes “Getting validated is really important to us humans.” He talks about being told repeatedly that characters of color don’t sell, and looks at the numbers that he’d expect from SFWA.

Action item: How can SFWA help with validating black writers? Our annotated reading lists, handed out at places like the Baltimore Book Festival, is one place. Inventory what we have and figure out holes. Then start filling them. As a follow-up make sure this material gets into our “SFWA-in-a-box” packet that lets members run SFWA meetings/panels at local cons and events.

And while I’m at it, we should probably make sure that membership survey gets done at least every two years.

Justina Ireland: Two Percent. Ireland points out that “promoting diversity and inclusion isn’t a passive state, it’s an active one.” She debunks issues of quality and, like White’s piece, hers presents some steps: 1) support successful black authors and SF mags publishing them, 2) challenge panel line-ups (and I’d add topics, and structures, and alls sorts of practices), 3) be vocal regarding supporting and promoting black writers, and 4) make spaces welcoming and inclusive.

Action item: For me, this underscores an existing issue that’s been slowly getting better, but not fast enough: the SFWA forums. Which deserve their own, and lengthy, post, but I am postponing that until I finish setting up a meeting with the expanded moderation team and talking to them about policies.

Troy Wiggins: Speculativeness Blackness. Wiggins talks about the disappointment of science fiction, “a space defined by creating new and different realities,” not looking at racism. Racism is very much part of American culture and in the news right now – to not question it seems a retroactive move. He talks about what magazines can do: soliciting from black authors, hiring black editors (and slush readers), not using a blind submission system as an excuse, tracking submission rates, heavily publicizing and promoting stories by black authors, and openly courting stories from connected authors. This last point puzzled me a bit — did it fit into a mentorship program, perhaps? It wasn’t until I read Jemisin’s later reaction to something that happened to her after the initial report came out that it clicked for me.

Brian White: Interview with N.K. Jemisin. Jemisin is unsurprised by the numbers. She references a strong black self-published fiction segment and that intrigues me enormously, because I know we have a lot of resources that self-publishing folks will find useful. She also notes that after #Racefail, many magazines began including a statement that they were interested in diverse fiction, and that for her a magazine that lacks that is signaling an editor who is either nor current with the industry or not interested in publishing diverse fiction, including fiction by black writers.

Action item: Look at the overall magazines and see who has such a statement and who doesn’t. Publish best practices to go along with our model magazine contract.

Anonymous – We Are Writing the Future. They talk about some of the reaction and charges of flawed data, and make valid points. I love this line, “Black people are in your science fiction, writing your future.”

No action item there, just a quote to be jotted down in my notebook.

Reactions to the First Fireside Fiction Report

I looked to the second report as well as some of the pieces reacting to the report for more insight, and found the following particularly useful:

You can find all of #BlackSpecFic material collected by hashtag here.
The FIYAH #BlackSpecFic Roundtable by the FIYAH Magazine Staff explores many of the different levels of the issue.
Related guest post, Reading Our #OWNVOICES by Lamar Giles, for Book Riot included this line, “If helping someone (presumably underserved readers) is dependent on you feeling welcome, who are you really trying to help?”
Submitting (SFF) While Black by Phenderson Djèlí Clark
BlackSpecFic Feelings by Shannon Barber.
Why Discrimination Can’t Stop the Black Imagination by Tonya Pennington included an important line, “knowing the history of black speculative fiction is crucial to its survival.” SFWA’s History project is something I’ve been kicking along since it began, and it seems to me this dovetails nicely, so I added another action item here, to talk to Erin M. Hartshorn about the History Project and how an effort to celebrate black voices might fit into that.

Finally, as a result of reading I began to understand that phrase “openly courting stories from connected authors” when I read about an upsurge in invitations to established black authors immediately after the first report was released. Yes. Mail established black authors not just for their stories but to get -their- lists of people we should be helping. Ask them to suggest slush readers. Let their network come into play and amplify the hell out of it.

Reactions to the Report

One of the things that happened after the Fireside Fiction report came out was that I, like a number of other figures in the field (or so I would suspect) received an email from “Lev Bronstein” saying they and a group of “editors and writers” had put together an analysis that “suggests that we can’t draw any useful conclusions from Fireside’s report.”

In reading the report, I found that they had quoted me as part of their justification for their actions, and I replied saying not to use my name in that fashion. I’m still irritated by the assumption that I’d want to be associated with the amount of privilege showcased in both that email and the essay that they briefly posted then took down as a result of the absolutely inevitable and IMO justified Internet reaction to it.

It was, alas, not the only thing that in my perception would attempt (perhaps deliberately, perhaps simply a result of the misunderstanding Shawl references) to divert, distract, or otherwise detract from the message of the report. But it would be wearisome and discouraging to begin to assemble anything reporting on that.

Yes, you can perform verbal things and come up with “no useful conclusions.” Or you can believe the voices that work together in the accompanying essays to say, Yes, this is what we’ve experienced. Yes, this is an issue. Yes, we need to change it because it is harming people and the field overall. I believe the stories I’ve been told and they hurt my heart. The friend who had an editor highly interested in her book and looking forward to working with her — until the point where they met face to face and the white editor realized my friend was black. The friends who wryly compare notes on which of the black authors they regularly get mistaken for. And I believe the lack of representation in F&SF hurts the field and deprives us of some voices with a whole lot of things to say.

Conclusions

One thing I know is that this analysis should have happened sooner. I am, alas, only one woman, and I juggle at least a dozen SFWA-related things at any given time. There’s an essay about a complaint I received regarding a Service to SFWA award that goes with this, and that will be appearing soon. The wheels of bureaucracy grind exceedingly slow, particularly when powered by volunteer labor, and SFWA has brought that lesson home to me again and again.

Making sure we are useful to members, particularly self-published ones, is important. All writers want value for their money, including black writers. A membership card and a chance to say you’re a member isn’t enough by a long shot. So here’s something about what we offer and will continue to offer, what we’re trying to accomplish, and why. A list of what I’m trying to do, and the promise that I’ll listen to — and try to understand — feedback about it.

So. I don’t have any of the answers, I think. But I’m working at moving forward. As with other SFWA-centric blog pieces, I am following my philosophy about transparency whenever possible, not just in terms of processes, but the decision making behind them. I’m happy to answer questions about any of this, and to those with toes I’ve stepped on unnecessarily, I hope you’ll let me know so I can sidestep your feet in the future.

Peace out,

Cat

#sfwapro

Talking About Fireside Fiction’s #BlackSpecFic Reports, Part 1 of 2

A few days ago Steven Barnes, Maurice Broaddus, Tananarive Due, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Tonya Liburd, and Nisi Shawl were kind enough to let me record their conversation about Fireside Fiction’s reports on blacks in speculative fiction. The discussion centered specifically on what SFWA can learn from the report in order to improve/expand existing efforts as well as things it should or shouldn’t be doing.

The Subject Under Discussion

For those unfamiliar with the report, you can find Antiblack Racism in Speculative Fiction: #BlackSpecFic: A Fireside Fiction Company special report (2015) here, and the follow-up 2016 #BlackSpecFic Report here.Both reports are accompanied by a wealth of essays by black writers.

Here is the central fact they present. Black writers are underrepresented in fantasy and science fiction short fiction magazines. The 2015 figures: 2039 stories in 63 magazines, of which 38 stories were by black authors, in 2015. The report noted the flaws (I’ll talk more about some of the reactions later) but it was a pretty good effort at analysis no one had done before.

In preparing for the conversation, I went not just through the reports, but the accompanying essays and some of the pieces inspired by the topics that had been raised. One of the pieces of data I acquired recently that wasn’t answered earlier was the results of the survey SFWA administered in 2017 to its members: information about the composition of the organization’s membership. Here it is from the survey, administered during the middle of this year.

Ethnicity:

Answer Choices Responses

White 85.40% 778

Hispanic 0.77% 7

Black 0.99% 9

Asian 2.09% 19

Pacific Island 0.00% 0

Mixed Race 3.07% 28

Indigenous 0.11% 1

Prefer not to answer 7.57% 69

Other (please specify)* 25

Answered 911

Skipped 38

(The answer to “Other” ranged from the serious to the not-so-serious.)

For the sake of very broad comparison, American demographics as of July 2016 (according to Wikipedia) were 13.3% African American, 17.8% Latino/Hispanic, and 61.3% white. Like the magazines when it comes to publishing black writers, SFWA’s population skews much whiter than figures might lead one to assume.

The Roundtable

I’m very grateful to the participants for a discussion that was illuminating, informative, and always interesting. I tried to assemble a group that could talk in an informed way and come from different perspectives.

I asked Liburd if she would be our representative of a newer writer, someone who’s hit many of the barriers. At the same time, she has her editorial experience from working with Abyss and Apex. Barnes and Due come from the perspective of long experience with the speculative fiction community. Shawl was one of the people who contributed an essay to the issue. Johnson and Broaddus are both established black writers who work with short fiction.

My apologies for the not-so-great quality. This was recorded via Google Hangout and I do not claim to have anything but the most rudimentary video skills. I ended up converting it to .mp3 file, which is available here:

SFWA Roundtable Podcast on Fireside Fiction’s #BlackSpecFic Report, featuring Steven Barnes, Maurice Broaddus, Tananarive Due, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Tonya Liburd, and Nisi Shawl.

This was a terrific conversation. I was scribbling notes down throughout most of it. In a day or two I’ll post those notes and action items, along with an account of what’s happened so far, but today the focus should be that discussion.

SFWA and Independent Writers, Part Four: What Lies Down the Road

2017 Nebula conference swag bags assembled and awaiting distribution.

This is the final part of a four part series. In this part, I’ll talk about plans down the road and make some predictions for what SFWA will witness over the next few years. Overall, I think it’s going to be nothing but positives and that SFWA will continue its tradition of helping authors.

The series so far:

Part one describes the organization and its history.
Part two talks about the decision to admit independent and small press published writers.
Part three talks about what happened when the independents were first admitted.

Going forward, I expect more and more indies to enter the organization as it proves that it’s giving them solid valid for their membership in the form of:

Community
Knowledge sharing
Publications like the Bulletin and the Singularity
Chances attend and sell books at places like Baltimore Bookfest, ALA, and other book-related events
Marketing opportunities for themselves such as the Speakers Bureau
Promotional opportunities for their work such as the New Release Newsletter
Reading material (there’s a lot on those internal forums)
The wealth of networking and information available via the SFWA Nebula Conference
Existing programs like Griefcom, the Emergency Medical Fund, and the Legal Fund

I also expect the SFWA offerings that attract indies to expand and develop. Here’s some specifics, ranging from those already in the works to some still in the planning stages.

SFWA Storybundling

I want to start by plugging that SFWA Fantasy Storybundle again, because it’s still up, and b) it’s a great example of a program that we’ll continue to expand. Next year we go from two bundles to three altogether — one focused on SF, one on fantasy, and a third on games — and we’re thinking along the lines of a Nebula nominee bundle for 2019 that would provide some financial benefit to being on the ballot, which I think is nifty.

It’s also an example of SFWA writers working together. All of the Storybundle contributors have been coordinating social media and interviews, and it’s definitely going to make it worthwhile to participate, plus raise a little money for the organization in the process.

Partnering

The Storybundle partnership, as well as the terrific Nebula-based HumbleBundle that ran this year, are examples of good partnerings. Another is the support of Kickstarter, who has sent representatives to our Nebulas and Worldcon to talk with our members about not just the basics of running a Kickstarter but the advanced details that help them finetune such a campaign.

Kobo’s another example, as is ACX and Bookbub. Overall, though, there’s plenty of opportunities, and the sky’s the limit as far as expanding things go.

SFWA Nebula Conference Programming

I’d like the 2018 Nebula conference to be the first where we don’t get complaints about the indie programming, but human beings are human beings and that remains to be seen. There will always be glitches. I do expect it to be even better than last year. And as I said in the previous piece, I believe part of last year was more a question of perception rather than actual lack.

SFWA Stuff in the Works and Coming Soon

Several projects with strong implications for indies are in the works, such as:

SFWA Ed will be SFWA’s online school, offering content that will include plenty aimed at indie publishers, such as book cover design, book marketing basics, and working with social media. This project’s at the point where its coordinator is working with individual contributors and companies on the first wave of content; I expect to see it manifest fully in 2018.

The SFWA First Chapters Project is a budget item I pushed through this year. For those that haven’t worked with nonprofit corporations, one way to earmark some energy for a project is to make sure it’s represented in the budget, and while I had to yank it the previous year, this time I got it through.

Just as buying a book is an expenditure financially, reading that book represents an investment of time for most people. Accordingly, my thought is a compendium of only first chapters, giving the reader a chance to dip into a book and see whether or not they want to make that investment. Available only electronically (perhaps somewhere down the road in print form, who knows?), this would ideally hold first chapters from books by publishers ranging from indie to trad, but it’ll take time to get to that point. Therefore, we’ll start with the group that most needs some boost to their discoverability, and start with the indies.

I would like to stress that this is not open for material yet. If you want to make sure you get e-mailed when the project portal goes live, please e-mail me or comment below in a way that will let me know what your e-mail address is. (If you have been requested to not contact me, please direct that e-mail to office@sfwa.org.)

Still in the Planning Stage

Other items are a little further down the road, like these:

SFWA Mentorship Program is something I expect very soon. I’m looking forward to seeing what SFWA Board member Sarah Pinsker and her committee have put together.

SFWA Review Site with Listings for Editors and Other Publishing Resources is still nascent to the point where it’s a budget item I’ll propose for the 2018-2019 financial year. I’d like to see a portal where SFWA members can review copy & developmental editors, book formatters, cover designers, book publicists, and similar resources in a format modeled after review sites like Yelp or Angie’s List.

We do have a spreadsheet some members have contributed to, but recent issues make me think that we need to rework it in a way that lets people know if an individual has a pattern of bad behavior.

Whither SFWA?

Right now while there are some hybrid authors on the boards, the majority remains traditional. That a major one of the many reasons I’m sorry that we lost Maggie, but she put in a hell of a term and a half, and many efforts simply would not exist without her. So I hope we’ll see not just one but several indie members stepping up and running for the SFWA board in coming years. This is for selfish reasons — I’ve learned so much from our indies so far.

Supporting indie writers has strong implications for diversity, including meaning we can better serve the indie groups that have arisen because of traditional publishing’s obstacles, which can take many forms. I’m finishing up editing a SFWA roundtable podcast about the BlackSpecFic report that references this, along with a blog post about what action items for SFWA I perceive, and hope to have that up Wednesday or Thursday.

What else lies down the road? I don’t know. I love this organization and continue to think it’s worth putting a whole lot of volunteer time into every week, particularly at a time when for many of us, our financial livelihoods are in jeopardy. I get a whole lot of intangibles, including knowing that I’m paying it forward, in exchange for that time.

One great joy of working with creative professionals is the tremendous amount of talent, imagination, whimsy, and overall enthusiasm that they bring to projects. I close with one such example, our SFWA anthem, “Radio SFWA,” created by Henry Lien, in a Nebula conference that exemplified one more reason to join: just how much fun SFWA can be sometimes. I believe every time you hear someone screaming “woooo” in the background, there’s a very good chance it’s me.

#sfwapro

Pitches and Synopses Workshop: Some Highlights

[View the story “Pitches and Synopses Workshop with Jennifer Brozek” on Storify]

SFWA and Independent Writers, Part Three: Launches and Lurches

This third of a four part series about the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s decision to admit independently published writers talks about the first wave of independent members and SFWA’s efforts to add value for those members. Here is Part One: History of the Organization and Part Two: Bringing in the Indies.

Swinging the Doors Open to Independent Writers

The doors opened on March 1, 2015 and SFWA Executive Director Kate Baker was standing by to process and admit our new folks. This gave us a chance to observe the new criteria that the Board had been working on for so long in action with a mind for what sort of refinements might be necessary further on down the line in order to make SFWA even more welcoming to independent and small press writers.

I was glad we’d prepped the message boards. The new forums were immediately put to use and introductions made, with plenty of delighted welcomes. There was – in my perception – no contention, only enthusiasm.

Some statistics for the number-minded:

We admitted twelve new members in that first wave, and there’s been a steady influx since. At the same time, existing members that had independent published experience felt more empowered to step forward and share their knowledge.
According to the recent membership survey, 14.10% of the current membership identifies as indie, with another 37.57% considering themselves hybrid.
Only a small percentage (less than 5%) derives more than 50% of their income from crowdfunding.

All My Expectations of Indie SFWA Members Confirmed

As I and others had argued repeatedly, the change did not result in an influx of unqualified, affluent hobbyists trying to buy their way into SFWA, and we could, finally, put that particular straw man to rest and play taps while other straw folk were being assembled in the background.

As you can see by the numbers, it wasn’t a massive surge, but a solid number. For some people it was part of a lifelong dream. For others, it was a cautious exploration of just what SFWA had to offer them. More than anything else, these were pragmatic, working writers. In a thread on the discussion boards, people began to share their sales number in a revelatory and instructive way that emphasized what a smart move for SFWA this had been. I still inist one of the smartest moves that happened during my time with the board.

I kept meeting new members at cons, to my pleasure and delight. We began to offer more SFWA-focused programming at conventions, such as a panel about What SFWA Offers at GenCon, Norwescon, the Nebulas (that was a no-brainer), and others.

Unexpected Results from the Indie Wave

We found we’d done something groundbreaking without realizing it: become the first organization to allow crowdfunded projects to qualify. The question of net versus had been a subject of much discussion during the Board’s conversation, to the point where the overall category was in jeopardy, so I was happy to discover pushing to keep it alive had been useful.
Rarely did people have to combine sales in order to prove they’d hit the 3k in one year mark. Instead it was usually a question of “Do you want my sales from Amazon or Kobo? (or something else).
A delightful surge of volunteers and new energy should have been expected, but it took me by surprise nonetheless.

New Members Benefits — And Vice Versa

With that surge in volunteer energy came a lot of new stuff, primarily driven by Vice President Maggie Hogarth. People entered wanting to not just to connect with other members but to add their energy to the organization and help it grow to meet their needs.

Among them:

The New Release Newsletter . Taken from the description: “The newsletter goes out every two months, and feature science fiction and fantasy new back-list re-releases from SFWA members, including books, stories, games, and other creations.” (SFWA members can sign up for it here. Releases that are announced should be from the month before or the month after the newsletter goes out.) That newsletter goes out to close to 1000 subscribers and has an above-average open rate.
The Partners Program has been more successful in some areas than others, but overall it’s tried to build connections with industry contacts. Particularly successful ones include BookBub, HumbleBundle, Kickstarter, Kobo, and Storybundle. Today we launch one of the results of that, the second Storybundle we’ve done, this time the SFWA Fantasy Bundle (that link will go live Wednesday morning!). The Sci-Fi bundle earlier this year netted each of its writers a nice chunk of money, around $900, along with the curator’s payment, an equivalent amount which I donated to SFWA, as I’ll do again with this one. Next year our Self-Publishing Committee will take over running this program, and there will be three bundles altogether.
The Netgalley Program was a long long time coming and something I don’t know would have happened without Maggie lending her voice to insist this was something useful for our members, but it’s now something people frequently ask me about. I stole the idea from Broad Universe, which was to buy a membership that our members could use for individual books for a substantially cheaper cost than getting such a membership on their own. Here’s how to use it to promote a book.

The SFWA Star Project was a cool effort (and remains one) but it’s been a bit of an uneven project. Originally proposed by Rob Balder, it used a small budget to promote and support worthy crowd-funded projects. Material rewards gained by supporting a Kickstarter go to SFWA’s fundraisers to be used there.
Expanded Nebula Programming was a natural outgrowth of the new energy, and programming tried to bring in both partners that year as well as create programming aimed at the new members. One lesson learned that first year was that the usual basic level stuff was not what people wanted, but rather in-depth looks at specific aspects of the industry and how to use SFWA’s services to the most benefit. Another was that we needed to figure out a new bookstore policy in order to accommodate everyone.

Nebula programming for the indies would be an issue both that year and the following one, with many indies feeling they were unrepresented and saying so on the discussion forums. The second year seemed to me to be partly an issue of perception and bad framing rather than actual lack: while many of the panels were aimed at indies as well as hybrid and trad pubbers, they were not marked as being of interest to indies. To my mind, they have progressed significantly each year: for me last year’s highlights included the mentoring program, the chance to hear experts talking about their wide range of expertise in office, and the fact that we managed to give everyone, including the indies, a way to have their books for sale there at the events. (Thank you Sean Wallace!)

Many existing services were already there for the new members such as the Featured Book/Artist program, the Nebula Awards, and appearances at events such as WorldCon, the Baltimore Book Festival, GenCon, and others. Other new things were applicable to all sides, such as the SFWA Speakers Bureau, introduced in early 2016 or the emerging Grants Program. I tried to make sure that indies were represented on the SFWA Recommended Reading List, and continue to do so, as do a number of other people.

All in all – things were swell, and continue to be so.

Next time, in Part Four (the final one) — what does the future hold in store? Includes talking about data from the recent SFWA member survey as well as revelation of at least one cool project designed to help people reading novels for all yearly awards, including the Nebulas, Hugos, Dragon, World Fantasy, among others. *cue mysterious music and exit*

#sfwapro

Media Consumed in September

I was on the road for most of September. That photo’s taken in the elevator of the Flatiron Building while I was in NYC, but other places I stayed included Dallas, Texas and Pocatello, Idaho. (More on that to come!) Here’s what I read in September, according to my notes, which always seem to leave out some stuff. Bolded indicates a particularly notable read.

Alex P. Berg. Red Hot Steele.

Jillian Blake. Antisocial.

Ramsey Campbell. The Parasite.

Jessica Cluess A Shadow Bright and Burning.

Justin Evans. The White Devil.

Rumer Godden. Black Narcissus. Interesting because I’d been thinking about omniscient POV, which this book uses.

Joe Hill. The Fireman.

Tami Hoag. Cold Cold Heart,

Aaron James. Assholes* A Theory. Some useful stuff on dealing with bad-faith actors.

Stephen King and Owen King. Gwendy’s Button Box.

Stephen King. End of Watch.

Mur Lafferty. Six Wakes.

Carrie Ann Noble. The Gold Son.

Dan Padavona. Crawlspace.

Sarah Porter. Vassa in the Night.

Susan Kaye Quinn. Third Daughter. Enjoyable steampunk romance with an Indian-flavored milieu.

Ron Ripley. Berkley Street.

Jon Ronson. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Fascinating read about social media and publicity gone awry.

Sherwood Smith. Inda, The Fox, King’s Shield, and Treason’s Shore.

Wendy Corsi Staub. Lullaby and Good Night.

Steven Rasnic Tem. Deadfall Hotel.

I’ve been watching DC’s Legends and am halfway through Season 2 so far.

Media Consumed in August

I had plenty of travel time in August, so yay for reading. My primary focus this month was to read as many of the Dragon Award nominees as I could before voting, but there were a number I just didn’t get to or did not finish. I had read some before, luckily, and am particularly pulling for D.B. Butler’s Witchy Eye, which I loved.

Works that are bolded are ones I found particularly outstanding or otherwise remarkable and would recommend.

Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine

Peter S. Beagle: Summerlong

Betsy Cornwall: Mechanica. I wanted to like steampunk Cinderella, but it didn’t feel very new.

Nathan Crowder: Ride Like the Devil (lots of fun for fellow Seattleites)

Pippa DaCosta, The Heartstone Thief

Robert Dugoni: The Trapped Girl (could have done without the complaints about the various restrictions the legal system places on police officers)

Patrick Edwards: Space Tripping

A.W. Exley: Ella the Slayer (I really did not expect to like Cinderella + zombies).

Kate Elliott: Court of Fives, The Poisoned Blade

Ruthanna Emrys: Winter Tide. If you like Lovecraft novels, you need this one.

Carrie Fisher: The Princess Diarist

Eric Flint: 1636: The Ottoman Onslaught

Amy S. Foster: The Rift Uprising

Theodora Goss: The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter FABULOUS and is the 19th century equivalent of Cat Valente’s The Refrigerator Monologues)

Brian Guthrie: Rise

Renee Carter Hall: Huntress (loved this, but book is structured in a frustrating way)

Elizabeth Hand: Aestival Tide, Icarus Ascending

Faith Hunter: Blood of the Earth

Shirley Jackson: Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings. Not enough writing on craft, but what there is, is solid.

Dennis Lehane: Prayers for Rain

Alison Littlewood, The Hidden People

Gabrielle Matheiu: The Falcon Flies Alone. Modern melodrama that pulls from all over the place in a way that is unexpected.

Robert McCammon: Gone South. McCammon is the frickin’ BEST at this sort of novel. Delicious.

Brian Niemeier, The Secret Kings

Richard Paonelli: Escaping Infinity

Lucian Randolph: The God in the Clear Rock (has my vote for most attention paid to a point of view character’s breasts in a book)

Delia Sherman: The Porcelain Dove (very pretty, but the structure makes it feel as though the book evaporates away just as you hit the end)

Shayne Silvers: Beast Masters

Dale Ivan Smith: Empowered: Agent

Safari Spell: Long Live Dead Reckless

Arkadi and Boris Strugatski: The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn

Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread

R.R. Virdi: Dangerous Ways

Martha Wells: The Edge of the World

Stuff I’m Watching: Big Brother (yes that’s my guilty pleasure and I don’t know which I loathe more, Josh or Paul), The Defenders, Orphan Black Season 5, Rick and Morty. Watched BRILLO BOX (3¢ OFF), which was an intriguing documentary if you have any interest in Warhol. Also Extraordinary: The Stan Romanek Story, which I thought was pretty silly.

SFWA and Independent Writers, Part Two: Bringing in the Indies

In part one of this series, I talked about the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writes of America (SFWA) prior to the move to bring in the independent writers. This section will discuss the decision and the process, as well as some of the reactions. My sources in putting all of this together are my own faulty memory, my personal notes, and the Internet. The discussion of the indie admission took place in a number of venues, including e-mails, blog articles and comments, social media, and the SFWA discussion forums. In drawing on the latter, I have tried to ensure that I did not violate their confidentiality rules, quoting only with permission.

Nomenclature has varied, but when I refer to independently published writers, that is the same group that others have used self-published, self-pubbed, indie, and other terms to describe. Self-publishing has been conflated with vanity publishing in the past; I believe them two distinct things.

Beginning to Recognize Independently Published Works

As far as I can tell, the question of whether people should be able to qualify for membership with independently published sales was first brought to the board by Vice President Mary Robinette Kowal in 2009. Discussion focused on a couple of points: how to translate the SFWA requirements for professional writers into ones using self-published material and whether or not the gatekeeping done by traditional publishing represented a quality bar. I’m framing that last badly, primarily because I don’t agree with it, but I can understand why, depending on their relationship with traditional publishing, someone might be invested in that view. That discussion moved on, but the question of indies had been raised and would continue to be something discussed at board and business meetings, with increasing support for allowing indies in on the part of some Board members.

In 2011, the reincorporation passed. In 2012, a question was raised to the board about self-published work being including in SFWA promotional resources (and decided in favor of yes). The board continued to discuss the question. In the summer of 2013, the Self-Publishing Committee was formed under the leadership of SFWA Board member Matthew Johnson. Its two mandates were to figure out the ways criteria for self-publishing might be implemented as well as how the organization might better serve existing members who were self-publishing.

It should be noted that the committee’s mission was not to decide whether or not indies should be admitted; the decision had been made by May of 2014 to take the question to the membership and let them decide and the conversation was already carrying on hot and heavy on the internal discussion forums.

A few members were firmly against it. Relatively early on in the discussion, our webmaster Jeremy Tolbert said to me, “Have you noticed that people talk about the indies as though they were the Sackville-Bagginses?” And it was true. One Board member had publicly called people putting stuff up online for free “scabs” a few years earlier, a remark that would repeatedly get mentioned to me and which had really damaged some of SFWA’s goodwill with some of the people people exploring new publishing models. A small number of members persisted in calling such writers hobbyists and fan writers. (The relationship of SFWA to the word “fan” is worthy of an entire essay in itself; I’ll save it for that book on SFWA’s history.)

At the same time, many of the writers already in the organization were seeing more income from independently published work than traditional publishing. An internal poll gave us this data: of those responding, 43% of Active members and 38% of Associate members were trying one form or another of self-publishing, sometimes multiple kinds. More and more of us (including myself) were becoming hybrid writers, trying the new models. One of those people was M.C.A. Hogarth, who had graciously let me talk her into running for Vice President. Hogarth was smart, savvy, and very in tune with the independents; I knew she’d serve them well, and she proved me right in multiple ways.

She helped drive the endless discussions. And they were endless. SFWA gave its members three months to weigh in, in order to make sure that they had ample time for all communications, including if they wanted to write a letter to be published in SFWA bi-monthly members only print publication, the Forum. (One of the changes under the Rambo administration has been to implement a monthly electronic members newsletter, the Singularity, and make the Forum a twice-yearly, formal account of SFWA business, while renaming it the Binary. The only person still getting print versions of either is Harlan Ellison, because I print them out and mail them to him.)

The Discussion Around Admitting Independently Published Writers

In writing this, I went back and looked at the scads and scads of posts, and I don’t want to recap them too closely. I will, however, mention some highlights and significant issues.

Some people suggested that the self published rate be higher than the traditionally published one, with their rationale usually being that this was an adjustment for the quality value that a traditional publication automatically had. Others suggested that it be higher because independent publishers were making more per book sold than their traditionally published counterparts.

Some of the more common and rational questions that emerged:

The tradition qualification had been based on an advance for a novel. How much time should an independently-published work be allotted in which to earn the qualifying amount or not?
Should there be an equivalent to the Associate membership for independently published writers wishing to use short stories for admission?
Independently publishing people were making more — but they were also spending more, in the form of hiring editors, cover artists, book designers, publicists, and other roles sometimes provided by traditional publishing. Did that need to be factored in?

What Could SFWA Offer Independently Published Writers?

To my mind, the most important question that Hogarth sought the answer to was what SFWA had to offer to independent writers in the first place. Some programs were a clear match: the Featured Author and Featured Book sections on the SFWA homepage, for example. The website gets monthly hits in the 50-60 thousand range, so that’s not insignificant exposure. Another was the SFWA presence at places like Worldcon, the Baltimore Book Festival, and the ALA Book Festival. The Speakers Bureau project, already in the works, required little adjustment.

Others would need expanding or tweaking. Independents needed to be represented at the Nebula Conference each year, which meant programming aimed at their needs, particularly when they differed from those of traditionally published writers. The timing here was fortuitous; the events team was pushing to expand conference programming from a desultory single track to multiple tracks with high-level programming.

The discussion forums, one of the central contact points for the SFWA community overall, didn’t take much tweaking. We did make sure that there was a discussion forum section aimed specifically at independent publishing resources, information, and conversation. We looked at SFWA publications like the Bulletin to see what they were providing. One of the questions that arose was whether or not to do another edition of The SFWA Handbook. In the end, we felt that things were changing too fast to make that publication feasible. Instead, Hogarth took up a new project, the SFWA Guidebook, intended to be a handbook for new members introducing them to what the organization has to offer. While this is still underway, I hope to see it realized by the end of the year.

And there were definitely things we could add. Early on, Hogarth and I began pushing for a SFWA NetGalley membership, an idea taken from Broad Universe. NetGalley is a site that allows publishers to put up review copies in electronic form for access by reviewers. Broad Universe had bought a membership, which ran close to $600, and let its members use it for a small fee. This program, implemented in 2015, has proved reasonably successful, and has been pointed to by several members as something significantly increasing the value of their membership.

Part of the difficulty in all of this was that SFWA was still in the process of getting its volunteer structure unkinked; issues had led to potential volunteers not getting connected with projects, and we were still recovering from that situation. Ideas abounded; the energy to implement them all was the main hindrance, while SFWA’s financial situation, with the Board and financial team handling a setback that is its own story, was tight, with the Board already trimming existing programs and simply not having the budget to implement new items.

July 31, 2014 was the deadline for letters to the Forum. In early August, SFWA sent a simple survey to members. Then President Stephen Gould said, partway through the survey period:

“To date, I personally have seen two kind of responses in emails. ‘Yes, we should do self-pub qualification,’ and ‘What’s taking so long to do self-pub qualification.'”

The Vote to Admit Independently Published Writers

All through August the Board spent its time in the final debate. It was interesting, sometimes heated, and exhaustive. The board made its decision that the vote to be put to the membership, for a voting period to end November 30. Steven Gould put forward the motion: “That the board put before the membership a ballot on the addition of self-publishing qualification criteria for SFWA membership on or before 1 November 2014. Furthermore, the ballot will include the OPPM income and verification requirements and any modifications or additions to the by-laws required to implement the new criteria.” The motion passed unanimously.

I blogged that September about why I thought SFWA should admit independently published writers, and that post sums up a lot of controversy, including one I’d forgotten, that the decision would lead to ugly public feuds between trad and indie pubbers. Luckily that one has proved as unjustified as I predicted.

As the vote went out, the Board invited any further comments or discussion. By this time, a lot of people shared my impatience with the process. The first comment on the thread opened for last comments was from member Kyle Aisteach: “I’ll be the first to say it. What’s taking so long?”

The vote passed by a strong majority (over six to one in favor), and only a few people writing in to threaten to quit if the measure went through. In November the board also passed a vote to begin looking at allowing game writers to qualify. The qualification rates were changed to the following:

Moved that the Board set the levels for the new OPPM section, “Member Qualification Rates” at the following:

(1) Active Membership:

(a) novel: $3000 advance from a qualifying market or total income including advances, royalties, or earned over the course of a single, contiguous 12-month period for a work of minimum 40,000 words; or

(b) short fiction: minimum $0.06/word earned by each work for at least three different works, from qualifying markets or each earned over the course of a single, contiguous12-month period, totalling a minimum of 10,000 words; and

(2) Associate Membership: One work, minimum $0.06/word, minimum $60.00, from a qualifying market or earned over the course of a single, contiguous12-month period;

contingent on the passing of the upcoming amendment to Article IV of the Bylaws by the membership. Verification methods to be outlined in the OPPM.

One thing I haven’t touched upon is that this meant some additional changes. For one, people could now qualify with a combination of advance and royalties that made it possible for some small press published books to qualify. Another, somewhat inadvertent but gratifying, change was that we found SFWA was the first writer’s organization to accept crowdfunding as a model for qualifying.

Preparing to Admit Independently Published Writers

We sent out press announcements to let people know about the changes and waited to see what would happen as people began applying when the doors opened on March 1, 2015. One of the biggest questions had been how people would provide proof of sales, particularly when gathering together multiple outlets, such as Amazon, Smashwords, and Kobo. But what turned out was that many – I’d go so far as to say the majority – of them didn’t need to do that at all, but simply wanted to know which of the multiple outlets qualifying them they should present.

As they started entering, something very cool started happening, which I will discuss in part three.