Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 32
August 11, 2014
I don't give a shit.
When do you see this much physical humor and expert comic timing on TV anymore?
You don't.
RIP Robin Williams.
You don't.
RIP Robin Williams.
We can shut down Twitter now
The ultimate Tweet has been achieved.
Hello @wwf remember when I was your fucking champion and I beat the fuck out of every animal in the world?
— The Iron Sheik (@the_ironsheik) August 11, 2014
August 9, 2014
Was H.P. Lovecraft a good writer?
There's a petition going around requesting that the World Fantasy Award change its prize from a bust of H.P. Lovecraft to one of Octavia Butler, and it is a ridiculous petition for several reasons. The one non-ridiculous reason is that H.P. Lovecraft's racism stains his legacy and upsets many people, as well it should. Back in 2011 I made an alternative suggestion of a chimera for the World Fantasy award's prize. With that out of the way, let's discuss the reasons the petition is ridiculous:
1. Octavia Butler was not known as a fantasist, did not write fantasy for the most part, and did not primarily identify as a fantasist. The one big exception is Kindred, which she declared a "grim fantasy", even as critics have suggested that it is SF about genetics and evolutionary psychology. (An example.)
2. She's a well-loved figure though, which means that there's a lot of enthusiasm for the petition right now. It also potentially makes a heavy brickbat for anyone who comes out against the petition. A few years ago, some people tried to rally HWA to get the Bram Stoker First Novel category named after Charles Grant...who had little to do with first novels other than having published one himself. (He did cultivate new authors via short stories.) When some objected to the name change, there were all sorts of quivering lips and lamentations that garsh too bad people don't care that Charlie is moldering in the ground, alone and forgotten snif snif... So, you were either in favor of the name change, or in favor of digging Grant up and shitting on his corpse, you meanie.
Or, shorter: it is always a bad idea to make a person into a prize, since the prize is then tied to the reputation of the person. (Sometimes prizes are designed to rehabilitate a reputation, a la the Nobel.) With writers, whose works are always up for reappraisal, this is especially fraught. The Lovecraft/World Fantasy issue is an example of that. Is Butler's reputation so fully bulletproof, forever? Don't count on it.
3. The petition also claims that Lovecraft was "a terrible wordsmith." Wrong. Lovecraft was a superior writer. As I put it on Twitter, "he had a pretty clear aesthetic and used polyphony well to build authority for the ineffable." Generally, complaints about Lovecraft's writing boils down to "He said 'squamous' and I had to look that up." Petitioner Daniel José Older previously said of another word associated with Lovecraft, cyclopean: "What image are we to take from this? Buildings with a single window at the top? Buildings built by one-eyed giants? It means nothing to me visually, yet it’s clearly one of Lovecraft’s favorite adjectives." Yes, well, look it up. Cyclopean means gigantic and uneven and rough-hewn. Cyclopean masonry is a term of art in archeology. Lovecraft was actually a skilled wordsmith, and chose very specific language. Older himself notes that Lovecraft used "collage[s] of firsthand documents and local lore told with thick, regional accents." Lovecraft wasn't a one-note bleater of ten-dollar words; he used the lingo his various characters would have. And as such, he could be
whimsical: Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. ("Dreams in the Witch House")
understated: Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about "the moving colours down there." Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave about it. ("The Colour Out of Space")
baroque: I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever. ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth")
self-reflexively ironical: My tale had been called “The Attic Window”, and appeared in the January, 1922, issue of Whispers. In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly milksops; but New England didn’t get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my extravagance. ("The Unnameable")
parodic: Later traded to Jacques Caboche, another settler, it [the skull of a Roman named "Ibid"—NK] was in 1850 lost in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named Hans Zimmerman; being used by him as a beer-stein until one day, under the spell of its contents, he suffered it to roll from his front stoop to the prairie path before his home—where, falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery upon his awaking. ("Ibid")
hysteric: The space-time globule which we recognize as the totality of all cosmic entity is only an atom in the genuine infinity which is theirs. And as much of this infinity as any human brain can hold is eventually to be opened up to me, as it has been to not more than fifty other men since the human race has existed. ("The Whisperer in Darkness")
straightforward: The train service to Brattleboro is not bad - you can get a timetable in Boston. Take the B. & M. to Greenfield, and then change for the brief remainder of the way. I suggest your taking the convenient 4:10 P.M. - standard-from Boston. This gets into Greenfield at 7:35, and at 9:19 a train leaves there which reaches Brattleboro at 10:01. That is weekdays. Let me know the date and I’ll have my car on hand at the station. ("The Whisperer in Darkness", from the same Akeley letter, composed by aliens as a trap, as above. The implied story point in shifting from hysteric to straightforward is obvious.)
We could go on picking sentences and paragraphs indefinitely, but let's not. We should also look at pacing. One might say that a Lovecraft story stays afloat by way of masterful deployment of eerie details. That would be a quote from Older again, who apparently thinks what...that Lovecraft was a good writer when it came to pacing, but a terrible one when it came to words and sentences? And yet pacing is simply a matter of the speed with which one is compelled to read on. So we can't mean sentences, but just individual words—a wordsmith that creates a masterful pace out of bad word choices?
It's really not that difficult. Why does "cyclopean" appear in, say, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"? The narrator is a student and a declassed part of New England's elite. (He discovers that he's a descendent of the wealthy Obed Marsh.) He'd know the word and use it. Would the station agent in the same story use it? No, he'd say something like "Leaves the square - front of Hammond's Drug Store - at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. unless they've changed lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap - I've never been on it." And he does. Lovecraft's narrators are often intellectuals—is it really a surprise that Peaslee, a professor of political economy, narrates "The Shadow Out of Time" like so:
This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources. It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows—though even this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. But the chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came from somewhere else—where, I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.
Let's compare it to the rhetoric of an actual political economist:
On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the European family. Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin, which Germany began, by a Peace which, if it is carried into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have restored, the delicate, complicated organization, already shaken and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live.
That's Keynes, btw, in the introduction to The Economic Consequences of the Peace from 1919. Similar sentence structures, similar free use of figurative language, and a sense of holding court even in the preliminary throat-clearings before a case is being set out. Switch Keynes for a Yithian for a few years, and he'd come back nervous and drooling and sounds even more like Peaslee than he already does.
Of course Lovecraft's prose is not perfect, and is not beyond criticism. But if there are aspects to wordsmithing that go beyond matching prose to character; the ability to strike several different tones and moods both within and between stories; and pacing that keeps a reader riveted to the page and suspending disbelief despite unrealistic, phantasmagorical, and occasionally gruesome descriptions, they are minor aspects. It's perfectly acceptable to object to Lovecraft's themes, which are often explicitly or implicitly racist and xenophobic (and inseparable from the text), but that's not the same as claiming that he's a bad writer or a terrible wordsmith. It's also perfectly acceptable to complain that most of his narrators just have some horrible experience, or hear about one from the past after coming across traces of a supernatural reality, and then go crazy. But that's not about being a "wordsmith" either.
When you don't know the meaning of a word, look it up. It was good advice in third grade, it is good advice now.
1. Octavia Butler was not known as a fantasist, did not write fantasy for the most part, and did not primarily identify as a fantasist. The one big exception is Kindred, which she declared a "grim fantasy", even as critics have suggested that it is SF about genetics and evolutionary psychology. (An example.)
2. She's a well-loved figure though, which means that there's a lot of enthusiasm for the petition right now. It also potentially makes a heavy brickbat for anyone who comes out against the petition. A few years ago, some people tried to rally HWA to get the Bram Stoker First Novel category named after Charles Grant...who had little to do with first novels other than having published one himself. (He did cultivate new authors via short stories.) When some objected to the name change, there were all sorts of quivering lips and lamentations that garsh too bad people don't care that Charlie is moldering in the ground, alone and forgotten snif snif... So, you were either in favor of the name change, or in favor of digging Grant up and shitting on his corpse, you meanie.
Or, shorter: it is always a bad idea to make a person into a prize, since the prize is then tied to the reputation of the person. (Sometimes prizes are designed to rehabilitate a reputation, a la the Nobel.) With writers, whose works are always up for reappraisal, this is especially fraught. The Lovecraft/World Fantasy issue is an example of that. Is Butler's reputation so fully bulletproof, forever? Don't count on it.
3. The petition also claims that Lovecraft was "a terrible wordsmith." Wrong. Lovecraft was a superior writer. As I put it on Twitter, "he had a pretty clear aesthetic and used polyphony well to build authority for the ineffable." Generally, complaints about Lovecraft's writing boils down to "He said 'squamous' and I had to look that up." Petitioner Daniel José Older previously said of another word associated with Lovecraft, cyclopean: "What image are we to take from this? Buildings with a single window at the top? Buildings built by one-eyed giants? It means nothing to me visually, yet it’s clearly one of Lovecraft’s favorite adjectives." Yes, well, look it up. Cyclopean means gigantic and uneven and rough-hewn. Cyclopean masonry is a term of art in archeology. Lovecraft was actually a skilled wordsmith, and chose very specific language. Older himself notes that Lovecraft used "collage[s] of firsthand documents and local lore told with thick, regional accents." Lovecraft wasn't a one-note bleater of ten-dollar words; he used the lingo his various characters would have. And as such, he could be
whimsical: Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. ("Dreams in the Witch House")
understated: Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about "the moving colours down there." Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave about it. ("The Colour Out of Space")
baroque: I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever. ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth")
self-reflexively ironical: My tale had been called “The Attic Window”, and appeared in the January, 1922, issue of Whispers. In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly milksops; but New England didn’t get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my extravagance. ("The Unnameable")
parodic: Later traded to Jacques Caboche, another settler, it [the skull of a Roman named "Ibid"—NK] was in 1850 lost in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named Hans Zimmerman; being used by him as a beer-stein until one day, under the spell of its contents, he suffered it to roll from his front stoop to the prairie path before his home—where, falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery upon his awaking. ("Ibid")
hysteric: The space-time globule which we recognize as the totality of all cosmic entity is only an atom in the genuine infinity which is theirs. And as much of this infinity as any human brain can hold is eventually to be opened up to me, as it has been to not more than fifty other men since the human race has existed. ("The Whisperer in Darkness")
straightforward: The train service to Brattleboro is not bad - you can get a timetable in Boston. Take the B. & M. to Greenfield, and then change for the brief remainder of the way. I suggest your taking the convenient 4:10 P.M. - standard-from Boston. This gets into Greenfield at 7:35, and at 9:19 a train leaves there which reaches Brattleboro at 10:01. That is weekdays. Let me know the date and I’ll have my car on hand at the station. ("The Whisperer in Darkness", from the same Akeley letter, composed by aliens as a trap, as above. The implied story point in shifting from hysteric to straightforward is obvious.)
We could go on picking sentences and paragraphs indefinitely, but let's not. We should also look at pacing. One might say that a Lovecraft story stays afloat by way of masterful deployment of eerie details. That would be a quote from Older again, who apparently thinks what...that Lovecraft was a good writer when it came to pacing, but a terrible one when it came to words and sentences? And yet pacing is simply a matter of the speed with which one is compelled to read on. So we can't mean sentences, but just individual words—a wordsmith that creates a masterful pace out of bad word choices?
It's really not that difficult. Why does "cyclopean" appear in, say, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"? The narrator is a student and a declassed part of New England's elite. (He discovers that he's a descendent of the wealthy Obed Marsh.) He'd know the word and use it. Would the station agent in the same story use it? No, he'd say something like "Leaves the square - front of Hammond's Drug Store - at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. unless they've changed lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap - I've never been on it." And he does. Lovecraft's narrators are often intellectuals—is it really a surprise that Peaslee, a professor of political economy, narrates "The Shadow Out of Time" like so:
This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources. It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows—though even this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. But the chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came from somewhere else—where, I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.
Let's compare it to the rhetoric of an actual political economist:
On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the European family. Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin, which Germany began, by a Peace which, if it is carried into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have restored, the delicate, complicated organization, already shaken and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live.
That's Keynes, btw, in the introduction to The Economic Consequences of the Peace from 1919. Similar sentence structures, similar free use of figurative language, and a sense of holding court even in the preliminary throat-clearings before a case is being set out. Switch Keynes for a Yithian for a few years, and he'd come back nervous and drooling and sounds even more like Peaslee than he already does.
Of course Lovecraft's prose is not perfect, and is not beyond criticism. But if there are aspects to wordsmithing that go beyond matching prose to character; the ability to strike several different tones and moods both within and between stories; and pacing that keeps a reader riveted to the page and suspending disbelief despite unrealistic, phantasmagorical, and occasionally gruesome descriptions, they are minor aspects. It's perfectly acceptable to object to Lovecraft's themes, which are often explicitly or implicitly racist and xenophobic (and inseparable from the text), but that's not the same as claiming that he's a bad writer or a terrible wordsmith. It's also perfectly acceptable to complain that most of his narrators just have some horrible experience, or hear about one from the past after coming across traces of a supernatural reality, and then go crazy. But that's not about being a "wordsmith" either.
When you don't know the meaning of a word, look it up. It was good advice in third grade, it is good advice now.
August 8, 2014
For kest
Finally, A Free Lunch!
“Misha, help!” Emily screamed. She had always wanted to talk to Misha Collins, but those was all she managed before the elopus’s tentacle-trunk wrapped around her face, filling her mouth and constricting her throat. “Mmrph mmrph.”
Misha Collins reached for his smartphone, ready to tweet for aid, but then from the darkness something came hard and heavy across his wrist. He flinched from what he thought must be another deadly elopus tentacle-trunk, but then he saw the truth. From a cloud of inky elopu-blackness stepped...her.
“Liz Saxe-Coburg!” Misha exclaimed, like a bad actor from a worse television show. “Why?”
The Queen twirled her umbrella casually. “I’m hungry. I’ve ever so hungry,” she said.
“But you can’t eat my fans!”
“Oh no, never them,” the Queen agreed. Then she unhinged her jaw and swallowed Misha’s head.
kest
writes: so I'm doing this scavenger hunt thing and I was wondering if you, as a published sci-fi author, by any chance would be up for writing a 140 words max story involving Misha Collins (actor who plays Castiel on Supernatural), the Queen of England, and an Elopus (half elephant half octopus). It would need to be today. (And it's of course ok to say no - it's a weird request on short notice, but I figured it didn't hurt to ask)PS: buy my book.
August 6, 2014
Thomas Ligotti and True Detective
It wasn't difficult to notice that the HBO TV show True Detective was influenced by philosophical horror author Thomas Ligotti, and recently the Lovecraft ezine ran some articles on the possibility of plagiarism. The show is cool/important enough that even Gawker is now throwing together some links and copy—and claiming that Ligotti is a professor at Wayne State University!!!—and the result is being widely linked to. Many writer types are outraged on his behalf, and others don't see the plagiarism at all.
I have only two things to say on the subject:
1. If Ligotti is silent on the subject, it may well simply be because he already received a payout, small or large, in exchange for his silence. The fans are in business for themselves here.
2. Ligotti has a new book, Spectral Link, which is comprised of two stories, and is very good. The publisher still has an expensive limited edition available, and various bookstores have a trade edition. Both the NOOK and Kindle editions are $2.99 today, and it is a little embarrassing that the fans so eager to be upset are not taking the publicity opportunity to talk about this new book...a new book about which Ligotti has also been silent, perhaps because of issue #1 above.
I have only two things to say on the subject:
1. If Ligotti is silent on the subject, it may well simply be because he already received a payout, small or large, in exchange for his silence. The fans are in business for themselves here.
2. Ligotti has a new book, Spectral Link, which is comprised of two stories, and is very good. The publisher still has an expensive limited edition available, and various bookstores have a trade edition. Both the NOOK and Kindle editions are $2.99 today, and it is a little embarrassing that the fans so eager to be upset are not taking the publicity opportunity to talk about this new book...a new book about which Ligotti has also been silent, perhaps because of issue #1 above.
August 1, 2014
Friday Quick Notes
The owner and head foreman of a farm in Greece have been cleared over the shooting of a group of migrant workers in which 30 were wounded.
The Greek left has to now focus its primary attention not on the troika or the euro, but on rooting out fascist elements in the state or society, which is the only reason these two were acquitted. If the far-right isn't destroyed, Greece will be a Francoist regime by 2020.
In other international news, we'll leave this right here: http://www.bdsmovement.net/
If you're in New York City and want some great homestyle Korean food served with all the warmth and tenderness of a mess tent, please try Kunjip on 32nd Street. I like Korean food fine and know it well enough to tell good from bad, but don't normally seek it out. But this stuff was amazing. It's also close to Penn Station, which is good since you're not allowed to linger in your seat and thus will never miss your train. Yelp explains.
Finally, I have ascended to the next level, by which I mean I have sold a novel before even writing one word of it. More details TK, but for now know that my next book will be a murder mystery and is tentatively titled I Am Providence.
The Greek left has to now focus its primary attention not on the troika or the euro, but on rooting out fascist elements in the state or society, which is the only reason these two were acquitted. If the far-right isn't destroyed, Greece will be a Francoist regime by 2020.
In other international news, we'll leave this right here: http://www.bdsmovement.net/
If you're in New York City and want some great homestyle Korean food served with all the warmth and tenderness of a mess tent, please try Kunjip on 32nd Street. I like Korean food fine and know it well enough to tell good from bad, but don't normally seek it out. But this stuff was amazing. It's also close to Penn Station, which is good since you're not allowed to linger in your seat and thus will never miss your train. Yelp explains.
Finally, I have ascended to the next level, by which I mean I have sold a novel before even writing one word of it. More details TK, but for now know that my next book will be a murder mystery and is tentatively titled I Am Providence.
July 29, 2014
Out East
I am on the East Coast. O's parents are churchy, so we baptized the baby in their a United Methodist church, which takes about five minutes. (An Orthodox baptism ritual is both interminable and spectacular, with flames and threats of drowning, yeah!) Also, their whatevertheycallit was a woman, so there were calls for a do-over. Anyway, here is a photo from the party afterward.
I have a red-haired gray-eyed baby. Whodah thunk it?
I have a red-haired gray-eyed baby. Whodah thunk it?
July 25, 2014
Self-publishing and writer organizations
The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has decided to allow self-publishing as a criterion for its membership, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) is currently contemplating the same. Membership in both groups had previously been means-tested only to allow membership to writers who sold a certain number of short pieces at a certain pay rate, or a novel for an advance of a couple thousand dollars. (There are also other kinds of membership for publishing professionals, but that's not relevant here.) Much anxiety and discussion has ensued, though of course there has been more light than heat.
The problem is that nobody understands the putative goals and purposes of these organizations, of which I was a member of both for a number of years—and a former Trustee of HWA and a former member of the grievance committee of SFWA. I am not a member of either right now, and have no plans to rejoin either group any time soon. I am a member of the Mystery Writers of America, however, though MWA is sufficiently tight-lipped about its own operations I'm actually less qualified to talk about it.
The first question is this: why wasn't self-publishing allowed before? The real answer has little to nothing to do with the ease of self-publishing, or "gatekeeping", or the stigma attached to self-publishing, and it certainly had zero to do with the idea that self-published works make for worse reading than commercially published works. Though of course self-publishing is fairly easy, there are gatekeepers, there is still a stigma attached to self-publishing, and self-published works are, on the whole, more likely to be bad and to be bad in ways that bad commercially published fiction is not.
Self-publishing wasn't a criterion for membership previously because the goal of these organizations was in large part to serve as a guild that would defend the commercial interests of their members against the state and the publishing industry. That is, publishers were the class enemy—even though editors and publishers could theoretically join the organization, and even though there is nothing to stop an editor from joining as a writer, as I did. Of course the groups had other goals: to give out awards, to provide some number of publishing opportunities via the licensing of member-only anthologies, to hold parties, to create and maintain a mailing list, and to make the mediocre feel grandiose. The goal of defense was incompletely manifested and riven with contradictions, but that's life.
Who is the class enemy of the self-published writer? In times past, when self-publishing meant storing books in one's garage, there was no class enemy. There were many enemies—bookstores that refused to stock books, mice and other vermin chewing away at the boxes, angry mail carriers, printers who get things wrong—but they are not class enemies. So there was never a reason for the self-published to join HWA, SFWA, or other groups, though of course the desire of the mediocre to feel grandiose led several to agitate for a seat.
And, it turns out that it is much easier to sell awards and grandiosity than it is to fight for writer interests, especially when the publishers the organizations dealt with would first collapse and then reform into far more powerful organizations thanks to conglomeratization. (The big achievement of these orgs over the past few years was to get a few magazines to pay five, and now six, cents a word, instead of three cents a word, for short fiction.) It used to make sense to have separate organizations for romance writers, science fiction writers, etc. Now, when the difference between a romance publisher and a science fiction publisher is which phone rings on which desk in the same office space, it does not. However, when it comes to awards and parties and grandiosity—well, you don't get a lot of play on a country club scheme if anyone can walk off the street and join, especially when some of them are gross ugly nerds who smell like landfill uh I mean science fiction writers. In the pre-Kindle days, a number of self-published writers wanted to join, were rebuffed, and complained that they were "pros" too and made ever so much money—far more than three cents a word for a short story or whatever the going rate was at the time.
Amazon.com and the Kindle changed everything for self-publishing. It solved the two problems of self-publishing, distribution and quality. The Kindle made distribution simple, and the ability to price one's titles cheaply solved the quality problem: people don't care as much about products that cost them a dollar, especially when high-quality substitutes cost between eight and twenty-five times as much while only being twice to five times as good. Plus, as amazon's new Kindle Unlimited rule about a reader needing to read ten percent of a book before amazon will pay the writer suggests, lots of people are buying dollar books and then promptly forgetting to even look at them.
Self-publishing today is more accurately called direct publishing via online networks that operate under some set of terms of service. The class enemy stands revealed! And yet, heavy subsidies by amazon and competitive pressures from other firms—if you like your 70 percent royalty, thank Apple for forcing amazon's hand, not the other way around—makes it appear subjectively that amazon is not a class enemy. That is, self-published writers have gone from rejected to accepted, from poor to rich, from mediocre to grandiose! With the press of a button, and the ritual payout to freelance "editors"—most of whom in fact do not edit. (Relatively few editors tell their clients, "Throw this book away. Do nothing but read widely and deeply for five years. Then try again." This is an important part of the editorial process, formerly made manifest by the ubiquitous rejection letter.)
The only thing missing...the stamp of approval from a guild. Well, now they got that too.
What they don't have are fighting organizations. What would SFWA and HWA do if tomorrow amazon decides to cut royalties in half, or if Google decides to give every book away for free, or if Apple decides that vendors get paid only after 100 percent of a book is read? They would do nothing. They can do nothing. If the CEO of Macmillan can't score more than a twenty-minute meeting with amazon execs, and if Hachette finds itself outboxed and outfoxed by the company, what can a bunch of sad little midlisters (SFWA) and, to be frank, a mess of small-press tyros and wannabes (HWA) do? Within the caste elite of publishing, amazon reigns supreme. And its subsidy to the self-published and only slowly increasing demands (audible.com royalty reductions, increased pressure for exclusivity to thwart B&N and Smashwords) mean that most sellf-published writers are not interested in an organization that will fight against amazon. The irony is that while successful self-published writers complain that the writer organizations were acting as gatekeepers and such, it is the top tier of the self-published who are truly the labor aristocracy, to only slightly misuse the Marxist term.
The lower tiers? Well, Steinbeck's quip about "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" comes to mind.
So, what does this mean for the groups? Well, it means that now we will see more self-published material on the Nebula and Stoker Awards ballots, as being in a group is always the best way to get nominated by the group. Increasing amounts of the internal conversations in the groups will be given over to pricing schemes for Kindle, the creation of "box sets", cross-promoting by writers, and laments when these strategies start working less well because now everyone is doing them. The promotional tactics of the self-published will also be focused internally: you-read-ten-percent-of-mine-and-I-will-read-ten-percent-of-yours, vote for me and I shall vote for you, and the like. When New York makes its countermoves against amazon by squeezing margins on its writers, well, that will just prove the point that self-publishing is better, and by then it will be too late.
What should have happened is this: in the 1990s, SFWA, HWA, MWA, RWA, and whatever other groups out there should have merged. As stated above, there is no compelling reason to keep separate writer organizations when publishing conglomerates run mystery and romance and science fiction and Western and other fiction publishing. A significant group of size—with little affinity branches to hand out the various legacy awards and throw the parties and publish innocuous newsletters—could have perhaps done something about both New York and Seattle. The groups should still merge, but this would be a rearguard action at best.
What will happen is this: the last impulses toward guild status and interest-defense will fall to the wayside, and the groups will become fan/aficionado clubs. If you want an extant model, think of the cruises occasionally held by Turner Classic Movies. Do famous people show up for the cruises? Sure they do. Are the cruises interesting and fun? Sure they are. Are the cruises a useful tool for organization to change TCM's programming, or to agitate for better pension plans for aging stars, or even to encourage better storage facilities for old film reels? Of course they are not, even if a petition is passed around or a small educational meeting is held. They are for fun. SFWA, HWA etc. are for fun. They were mostly for fun before, and will be almost entirely for fun and nothing else, at all, in five or six years. Not because self-publishers are the bad pennies flooding the market to adulterate the Real Horror and the Best Science Fiction, but because the battle was lost before it was joined. Before amazon was even founded.
And thus the grandiose shall have their mediocrity revealed.
The problem is that nobody understands the putative goals and purposes of these organizations, of which I was a member of both for a number of years—and a former Trustee of HWA and a former member of the grievance committee of SFWA. I am not a member of either right now, and have no plans to rejoin either group any time soon. I am a member of the Mystery Writers of America, however, though MWA is sufficiently tight-lipped about its own operations I'm actually less qualified to talk about it.
The first question is this: why wasn't self-publishing allowed before? The real answer has little to nothing to do with the ease of self-publishing, or "gatekeeping", or the stigma attached to self-publishing, and it certainly had zero to do with the idea that self-published works make for worse reading than commercially published works. Though of course self-publishing is fairly easy, there are gatekeepers, there is still a stigma attached to self-publishing, and self-published works are, on the whole, more likely to be bad and to be bad in ways that bad commercially published fiction is not.
Self-publishing wasn't a criterion for membership previously because the goal of these organizations was in large part to serve as a guild that would defend the commercial interests of their members against the state and the publishing industry. That is, publishers were the class enemy—even though editors and publishers could theoretically join the organization, and even though there is nothing to stop an editor from joining as a writer, as I did. Of course the groups had other goals: to give out awards, to provide some number of publishing opportunities via the licensing of member-only anthologies, to hold parties, to create and maintain a mailing list, and to make the mediocre feel grandiose. The goal of defense was incompletely manifested and riven with contradictions, but that's life.
Who is the class enemy of the self-published writer? In times past, when self-publishing meant storing books in one's garage, there was no class enemy. There were many enemies—bookstores that refused to stock books, mice and other vermin chewing away at the boxes, angry mail carriers, printers who get things wrong—but they are not class enemies. So there was never a reason for the self-published to join HWA, SFWA, or other groups, though of course the desire of the mediocre to feel grandiose led several to agitate for a seat.
And, it turns out that it is much easier to sell awards and grandiosity than it is to fight for writer interests, especially when the publishers the organizations dealt with would first collapse and then reform into far more powerful organizations thanks to conglomeratization. (The big achievement of these orgs over the past few years was to get a few magazines to pay five, and now six, cents a word, instead of three cents a word, for short fiction.) It used to make sense to have separate organizations for romance writers, science fiction writers, etc. Now, when the difference between a romance publisher and a science fiction publisher is which phone rings on which desk in the same office space, it does not. However, when it comes to awards and parties and grandiosity—well, you don't get a lot of play on a country club scheme if anyone can walk off the street and join, especially when some of them are gross ugly nerds who smell like landfill uh I mean science fiction writers. In the pre-Kindle days, a number of self-published writers wanted to join, were rebuffed, and complained that they were "pros" too and made ever so much money—far more than three cents a word for a short story or whatever the going rate was at the time.
Amazon.com and the Kindle changed everything for self-publishing. It solved the two problems of self-publishing, distribution and quality. The Kindle made distribution simple, and the ability to price one's titles cheaply solved the quality problem: people don't care as much about products that cost them a dollar, especially when high-quality substitutes cost between eight and twenty-five times as much while only being twice to five times as good. Plus, as amazon's new Kindle Unlimited rule about a reader needing to read ten percent of a book before amazon will pay the writer suggests, lots of people are buying dollar books and then promptly forgetting to even look at them.
Self-publishing today is more accurately called direct publishing via online networks that operate under some set of terms of service. The class enemy stands revealed! And yet, heavy subsidies by amazon and competitive pressures from other firms—if you like your 70 percent royalty, thank Apple for forcing amazon's hand, not the other way around—makes it appear subjectively that amazon is not a class enemy. That is, self-published writers have gone from rejected to accepted, from poor to rich, from mediocre to grandiose! With the press of a button, and the ritual payout to freelance "editors"—most of whom in fact do not edit. (Relatively few editors tell their clients, "Throw this book away. Do nothing but read widely and deeply for five years. Then try again." This is an important part of the editorial process, formerly made manifest by the ubiquitous rejection letter.)
The only thing missing...the stamp of approval from a guild. Well, now they got that too.
What they don't have are fighting organizations. What would SFWA and HWA do if tomorrow amazon decides to cut royalties in half, or if Google decides to give every book away for free, or if Apple decides that vendors get paid only after 100 percent of a book is read? They would do nothing. They can do nothing. If the CEO of Macmillan can't score more than a twenty-minute meeting with amazon execs, and if Hachette finds itself outboxed and outfoxed by the company, what can a bunch of sad little midlisters (SFWA) and, to be frank, a mess of small-press tyros and wannabes (HWA) do? Within the caste elite of publishing, amazon reigns supreme. And its subsidy to the self-published and only slowly increasing demands (audible.com royalty reductions, increased pressure for exclusivity to thwart B&N and Smashwords) mean that most sellf-published writers are not interested in an organization that will fight against amazon. The irony is that while successful self-published writers complain that the writer organizations were acting as gatekeepers and such, it is the top tier of the self-published who are truly the labor aristocracy, to only slightly misuse the Marxist term.
The lower tiers? Well, Steinbeck's quip about "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" comes to mind.
So, what does this mean for the groups? Well, it means that now we will see more self-published material on the Nebula and Stoker Awards ballots, as being in a group is always the best way to get nominated by the group. Increasing amounts of the internal conversations in the groups will be given over to pricing schemes for Kindle, the creation of "box sets", cross-promoting by writers, and laments when these strategies start working less well because now everyone is doing them. The promotional tactics of the self-published will also be focused internally: you-read-ten-percent-of-mine-and-I-will-read-ten-percent-of-yours, vote for me and I shall vote for you, and the like. When New York makes its countermoves against amazon by squeezing margins on its writers, well, that will just prove the point that self-publishing is better, and by then it will be too late.
What should have happened is this: in the 1990s, SFWA, HWA, MWA, RWA, and whatever other groups out there should have merged. As stated above, there is no compelling reason to keep separate writer organizations when publishing conglomerates run mystery and romance and science fiction and Western and other fiction publishing. A significant group of size—with little affinity branches to hand out the various legacy awards and throw the parties and publish innocuous newsletters—could have perhaps done something about both New York and Seattle. The groups should still merge, but this would be a rearguard action at best.
What will happen is this: the last impulses toward guild status and interest-defense will fall to the wayside, and the groups will become fan/aficionado clubs. If you want an extant model, think of the cruises occasionally held by Turner Classic Movies. Do famous people show up for the cruises? Sure they do. Are the cruises interesting and fun? Sure they are. Are the cruises a useful tool for organization to change TCM's programming, or to agitate for better pension plans for aging stars, or even to encourage better storage facilities for old film reels? Of course they are not, even if a petition is passed around or a small educational meeting is held. They are for fun. SFWA, HWA etc. are for fun. They were mostly for fun before, and will be almost entirely for fun and nothing else, at all, in five or six years. Not because self-publishers are the bad pennies flooding the market to adulterate the Real Horror and the Best Science Fiction, but because the battle was lost before it was joined. Before amazon was even founded.
And thus the grandiose shall have their mediocrity revealed.
July 23, 2014
Next up, Telegenic Dead Authors
The Amazon/Hachette conflict continues, and Amazon needs to get some better PR people:
When PW contacted Amazon about the conversation, a spokesperson for the company said: "You have to look at the parent company--Lagardère Group--rather than just the Hachette division. Kindle books are only 1% of Lagardère Group's sales. They can afford it, and should stop using their authors as human shields."
Human shields! Two notable elements here:
1. Amazon has adopted the language of military propaganda.
2. In doing so, Amazon admits implicitly that it considers itself to be a. at war with Hachette and b. the larger more powerful antagonist in an asymmetrical battle.
When PW contacted Amazon about the conversation, a spokesperson for the company said: "You have to look at the parent company--Lagardère Group--rather than just the Hachette division. Kindle books are only 1% of Lagardère Group's sales. They can afford it, and should stop using their authors as human shields."
Human shields! Two notable elements here:
1. Amazon has adopted the language of military propaganda.
2. In doing so, Amazon admits implicitly that it considers itself to be a. at war with Hachette and b. the larger more powerful antagonist in an asymmetrical battle.
July 21, 2014
Monday Quick Notes
I attended a rally and march in solidarity with the people of the Gaza Strip yesterday, and tweeted some photos. Here they are, via Storyify, for your viewing convenience.
My next online writing class starts in a few weeks. Sign up if you'd like to know why you keep getting rejection letters! (We're heavily oriented toward writing for publication.)
And now, the best new amazon.com one-star reader review ever: click here.
Finally, some time ago my 2007 novel Under My Roof was optioned by the independent production company Tallgrass Pictures, which is known primarily for television commercials. Recently, Tallgrass launched a Twitter account for the in-development film. Can't say too much about it, but if the book, the idea of the movie, or independent filmmaking is of any interest to you at all, you definitely want to start following the @_UnderMyRoof here, by, let's say, November.
ETA: apparently, I can tell you: Under My Roof begins principal photography on November 10th.
My next online writing class starts in a few weeks. Sign up if you'd like to know why you keep getting rejection letters! (We're heavily oriented toward writing for publication.)
And now, the best new amazon.com one-star reader review ever: click here.
Finally, some time ago my 2007 novel Under My Roof was optioned by the independent production company Tallgrass Pictures, which is known primarily for television commercials. Recently, Tallgrass launched a Twitter account for the in-development film. Can't say too much about it, but if the book, the idea of the movie, or independent filmmaking is of any interest to you at all, you definitely want to start following the @_UnderMyRoof here, by, let's say, November.
ETA: apparently, I can tell you: Under My Roof begins principal photography on November 10th.
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