Brenda Cooper's Blog, page 22

New Futurismic Column Posted: The Grand Lie

Things can't go on as they are.  I think that's what the Occupy people are sensing, even if they aren't very organized about it.  For my Futurismic column this month, I wrote a bit about what I call The Grand Lie.  Drop by and give it a read….

Marketing Mayan December

Mayan December is different than my other work.  That doesn't mean readers of The Silver Ship and the Sea might not like it, some clearly do.  But – very different than my other work — every unsolicited email or review or comment has been from a women.  A lot of my science fictions readers are male, but clearly this book attracts women.  At any rate, I thought I'd share the things I've tried for marketing and what I thought of them.  So here goes:

I've done all of the usual readings and signings.  And they have been just as successful as usual.  Meaning fun (I really like them), but a slow way to gather sales since it's really book by book by book.  The best I've done that I know of is 18 books at one reading.  I have two more  formal signing events – one at World Fantasy and one at Orycon (at Beaverton Powell's).  At any rate, the return for personal appearances seems pretty low.  To be honest, I think I like them because they are so much more personal than social media, and because I am convinced that having good relationships with booksellers at stores remains useful in spite of spiking Kindle sales.

I sponsored the Adventures in Science Fiction Publishing podcast.  Mostly because I enjoy the podcast.  They also treat the books they accept as sponsors very personally.  I have no way to tell how effective that might or might not have been as a marketing tool.  Anecdotally, however, I did that for a previous book and I think it did help. I heard from a few people who had heard about it there.  I suspect this podcast has a largely male audience, so I tried to balance that by buying some blog ads via Blogads and picking women's book blogs.  That's running now, so I don't have any feedback yet.  So far, it's more expensive than Goodreads, and I guess time will tell if its more valuable.

Goodreads does a great job.  I did a Goodreads giveaway (and there's a blog post about that) and I've also advertised on Goodreads.  I only pay per click and the ads get a lot of impressions and only a few clicks (but within the norms for what Goodreads said they might get).  That many impressions seems pretty good.  I also kind of like hanging around on Goodreads and I think they do a nice job of supporting their authors (all authors – all the time.  Not just when they have an active ad campaign).  I can also target my ads there pretty well by gender and even by looking for readers who like particular authors.

I'd love to hear any other marketing ideas any of you have – whether you're a reader or a writer.

Reading Recommendation: Endurance, by Jay Lake

I liked Green a lot, perhaps the most of all of Jay's work for far.  Endurance is the sequel to Green, and it's even better.  I can see why Publisher's Weekly gave it a starred review.  The word building added more layers to Copper Downs than we saw in Green, and revealed new information in a way that left me with a nice sense of wonder about the setting and the gods, and a more adult viewpoint about the city of Copper Downs.

I always enjoy Jay's world building and prose.  In Endurance, his plotting is tight, as there is a lot of  nuance to his main character.  If you liked Green, buy this.  If you haven't read Green, you have time to finish it before the release date of Endurance next month.

Reading Recommendation: IronWolfe by Darragh Metzger

I saw my friend Darragh Metzger at one of my readings a week ago.  Not only was it fabulous to see her, but I learned that some of her books are now available for the Kindle.  Darragh and I were in the same writing group years ago, and one of the highlights of that time in my life was reading the series that starts with the fantastic Ironwolfe. I also learned a lot from Darragh…I can remember her drilling and drilling me on character reaction.  I can even remember the look on her face when she told the same thing for the fiftieth time.  She is still better at character reaction than I am!

If you love classic high fantasy quest books with horses and fights and honor and magic and kick-ass characters, you'll love these.  Darragh's actual experience with horses and fighting shows up throughout these books; I've seen her joust with the Seattle Knights.

Reading Recommendation: Lev Grossman

I stumbled across a lovely essay in the NYT by Lev Grossman just before I left for some recent travel.  And I'd just watched him win the Campbell Award for best new writer – and graciously accept the tiara and wear it well.  Since I hadn't read any of his fiction, I decided to buy The Magician King.  Well, then I discovered that was the SECOND book and had to head out to ebook land and pick up The Magicians which started the whole thing.

I liked these a lot.  Be warned:  On the surface, they are kind of Harry Potter copycat books.  However, they are so readable I loved them in spite of that.  They are very literary for fantasy, and I found the characters complex and darkly interesting.  Even better, I liked The Magician King most.  It's always a treat when the second book is richer than a first book in a promising series.

A Good Speech….

I am lucky enough to know one of the best technology futurists – Mark Anderson of SNS.  He runs the best conference I've ever attended:  FiRE, or the Future in Review (yes – it's even better than science fiction cons).  But that's a different topic.  He also publishes a newsletter, and a piece of that content was what he hoped would be the speech President Obama would deliver on the jobs issue.  That speech was so good that Mark was asked to make it more widely available. He complied; it's posted on his blog, A Bright Fire.  It's worth reading.

Observations about Australia

I'm about half-way through a trip to Australia.  Yes, there are kangaroos all over.  I find them adorable, but they are also big.  I mean, really big.  I did not imagine how much power they have.  Other things remind me that "down under" is different from home.  The birds all sound different, and birds that are essentially parrots fly around about everywhere.  They look prettier than they sound.  The country is beautiful and vast.

Australia is greener than the US.  I haven't met any climate change deniers.  I'm sure they exist – I've heard they do.  But everyone I've talked to considers climate change real and by and large Australia is acting that way.  They just introduced a carbon tax bill that's expected to pass.  Almost every toilet and shower head I've seen manages water well. Outlets need to be turned on to be used.  Solar power is fairly common.

The Internet is awful.  Slow, expensive.  Almost no free wireless.  They are totally right to be doing a national broadband plan to get fiber to the home.  Good for them!

The economy is rocking down here compared to us.  They have a few stock problems when we have a lot of stock problems, so they're affected by our economy, and Europe's, and I hear some worries.  But they have low unemployment (about 5% which represents the usually unemployable anywhere), and some of the CIO's I talked with at the conference I attended are having great trouble hiring.  Many people attribute much of the current economic strength to the booming mining business which is feeding resource-hungry China.

The people are by and large happy, friendly, and capable.  They like to work, they mostly work hard but not the insane hours many of us work. They seem proud of Australia.  They are mystified by current American politics, and want to understand it (so do I).  They have universal health care and retirement and no real worries or problems with either that I can tell.

This is sort of half-way report after Canberra and Blackheath (in the Blue Mountains) and I've just checked into Sydney, which I'll report out on in the next few days or just after I get home.  I feel insanely lucky to be here.

9/11/11: Changes in Latitudes, Attitudes…

The strangest things happen to writers.  This morning, I woke up with an essay in my head:

I gave a talk to a bunch of eighteen and nineteen year-old students at the University of Washington earlier this week.  None of them were old enough to remember a pre 9/11 world.  They have never traveled without being stripped of their shoes and have never been able to blithely carry their green-apple scented shampoo onto a plane in their purse, or to bring on their own little bottles of alcohol and slip a whisky into their coke.  They have always known we were at war somewhere.  They have almost surely developed small uncertainties about the Muslim world even while they hold almost no issues about sexual preference or black skin.  They know a world with more fear, war and mistrust than the one I grew up in.

I remember what it felt like to expect a better future. Not to fight an uphill battle by saying you expect one and trying like hell to be positive because it's so much more useful than being negative, but to actually be positive and hopeful.

I'm traveling in Canberra, Australia right now.  In January, I went to Bangkok, Thailand, and met people from many Asian countries at a conference about future technology in government.  Although in slightly different ways, both Bangkok and Australia feel more "American" than we do now.

Almost all of the people I met in Asia live in rising economies.  I'm pretty sure most of us would give our right arm to have the Aussie economy, which is booming with raw materials, rich in arts, and where the biggest problem seems to be the strong rise of the Aussie dollar.

In both places, the people I met seem happy and hopeful.  They're friendly in ways America really isn't any more.  Not blindly trusting, but I could leave my shoes on going through security and didn't have to leave my firstborn to rent a bicycle yesterday.  I could wonder around the Parliament building unescorted ,with very little security, and so could everyone else regardless of the color of their skin.

People in both places appear to believe in education, new forms of energy, conservation, science in general, and that the world of tomorrow will be better than the world of today.

If we don't mange to make this shift, these other places I've been recently will be able to take advantage of a new and shiny future that we're not going to participate in.  They'll be actors on the world stage working to solve climate issues and we'll be sitting behind our lobbyists and chanting about drilling oil as if we were two year olds.

I'm not naïve enough to think these countries are perfect, nor blind enough to think the US is completely broken.  They aren't and we aren't.  But a difference in attitude makes a big difference in results.

I want America to feel more like we did before 9/11.  Less fearful.  More curious.  More hopeful.  More courageous.  More educated.

Maybe we should all take a vow to take a class, to do one or two things to moderate our energy consumption, and to find even one way each to make our jobs or our schools or our kids stronger this year.  The attitude shift we need isn't 180 degrees.  It's maybe twenty degrees to the positive.  We can do it.

Some Podcast Stories and Recommendations

I'm back far enough from January's foot surgery to do a lot of dog walking, and thus back to listening to podcasts.  Here are a few that I've rather enjoyed lately.

Through a chance meeting at Worldcon, I discovered that Adventures in Science Fiction Publishing is back on the air (they have been for a while now, but I missed it).  It was good before, and I like it even better now.  In fact, I like it so much, I sponsored them for a little bit.  Win for me (advertising) and a win for them as well.  Give them a try.  It's not fiction – it's interviews and science fiction / fantasy news.   Oh – and I'm giving away a copy of Mayan December over there, and a hardcover of The Silver Ship and the Sea, which has gone out of physical print as far as I can tell. There are a lot of other good nonfiction podcasts out there, too.  Starship Sofa is a favorite of mine, and SF Signal does a podcast these days as well.  Listening to any of these is kind of like listening to my friends chatter on while Nix and I walk.

I also wanted to talk up a few stories.  One is "The Fish of Lijiang" written by Chen Qiufan and read by Kate Baker.  I found it really well-done, a bit sad, and very touching.  It's over at Clarkesworld. I found it a particularly good commentary on our lives, and I enjoyed the feel of the work and setting, which is in China.

I like bar stories.  One of my favorite settings is Larry Niven's Draco Tavern.  So I listened to a bar story by Tim Pratt, called "On a Blade of Grass," read by Mat Weller, way back in in an old issue of Escape Pod.  It's a perfect little conversation, which is exactly what a bar story is supposed to be.

And for a third recommendation, I liked The Notebook of my Favorite Skin Trees, by  Alex Dally MacFarlane and read by Pamela Quevillion, and also in an older Escape Pod issue. It doesn't stand up to any logic at all, and it's light erotica.  I certainly wouldn't expose kids to the story.  But on a podcast you just start from the title, and the story is really lovely.   It's quirky and weird I enjoyed it for no good reason other than it's sweetness and naivete.

Oh, and don't forget to donate to the podcasters you like – most of them operate on a shoestring at best!

Fulfillment: The Goodreads Giveaway Process

Goodreads does a book giveaway program.  This is basically a chance for authors or publicists or publishers to give away copies of the book.  I just finished a run through of the program where I gave away 10 copies of Mayan December.

I like the process of autographing copies and sticking them in envelopes and hand-addressing them.  It seems personal, like a signing is personal.  And so much of this business isn't actually very personal.

It's also a small thing that's not done in cyberspace.  It's physical copies of the book going into physical envelopes and being mailed.  Yes, I love technology.  But sometimes it's good to step away from a screen for a few minutes.  The top picture in the assembly line for getting the books ready. And below are the books are all ready to be shipped out tomorrow.  They are being watched over by the Nixie, the golden retriever…