Nicola Griffith's Blog, page 78

Want to be a character in HILD II?

As I said yesterday, I'm going to be Guest of Honour at this year's Readercon, July 9-12, Burlington MA. 

If you donate $250 to the Readercon Indiegogo campaign to raise money for a convention sound system, I will use the name of your choice (yours or someone else who has given permission) as a character in my next published fiction. If you're willing to wait a while, that will be Menewood (the working title of Hild II). Otherwise probably the character will appear in a novella I'm thinking about.

There's only one, and this will be the last time I offer this particular perk for any cause, no matter how worthy.

ETA: My wee offering is taken. But go get something else: a manuscript critique, a monster, a mug...

Readercon 2015, July 9-12

If you're wondering what to do July 9-12, wonder no more. Come to Readercon in Burlington, Massachusetts. I'll be the Guest of Honour, along with the fabulous Gary Wolfe. Joanna Russ is the Memorial GoH. Seriously, you should come. It's $60 to register for four days and four nights of incomparable social and intellectual brilliance.

What is Readercon?

Readercon is an annual conference or convention devoted to "imaginative literature" — literary science fiction, fantasy, horror, and the unclassifiable works often called "slipstream." 

A typical Readercon features over 150 writers, editors, publishers, and critics, attracting prominent figures from across the U.S., and from Canada, the U.K., and occasionally even Australia and Japan. They are joined by some 600 of their most passionate and articulate readers for a long weekend of intense conversation. 

Readercon is the only convention ever to be honored by a World Fantasy Award nomination (Special Award, Non-Professional, 2010) for its organizers.

Gary and I both like to take the written word apart and look at it. We do it from slightly different perspectives—he's primarily a critic, I'm primarily a novelist—but have many overlapping interests. And we both like to hang out in the bar...

From this point I'm going to stick to my own point-of-view because frankly it's tacky to speak on someone else's behalf—but I wouldn't be surprised if much of what I'm about to say applies to Gary, too.

One of the things I want to do—and to encourage others towards—is to is approach the convention from the stance of radical hospitality. I talked about this on a post about my most recent GoH experience, but here's the gist: 

What's important to me is that people transform the approach to accessibility, accommodation, pluralism and welcoming that is frequently standard: "If you need something, just ask." While that approach is meant to be inclusive and affirming it often ends up putting the onus of arranging accessibility and educating hosts/venues on the marginalized or newcomers. Worse, I sometimes see it used as a justification for what is clearly just bad planning: "We didn't make our panel rooms accessible because no one asked." Or "We don't have a harassment policy because no one has ever reported harassment."
For me, radical hospitality is about making welcoming the norm, not an exception that must be requested. — Leigh Anne Hildebrand

Making welcoming the norm. Yes. To me this means to anticipate the needs of others and provide for them. In advance. Obviously we can't anticipate everything but we should do our best to put ourselves in others' shoes. In other words, don't make anyone ask for help; make sure there's already chair at the table, in every sense. Basically, not only Don't be a dick but be actively kind. 

So to take one example dear to my heart, physical ability: if you see someone looking tired ask if they need a chair—or anything else (a glass of water? a fan? a quiet room?)—and make sure you find one. Even better, make sure there are plenty of chairs (and water) there already. Make sure the bathrooms are accessible. Make sure there are handrails on the steps to the dais or the ramp. Really go there. Imagine what people will need and then provide it, beforehand and on the spot. Make everyone feel equally welcome.
This applies to sex, gender presentation, race, orientation, physical ability, religion, diet and half a hundred things I haven't listed here. Making welcome the norm applies as much to informal events as programming: if someone looks like a newcomer, talk to them. (Do make sure they want you to talk to them. If in doubt, ask. And heed their response.)

So: radical hospitality, my phrase of the convention.
But Readercon is not about radical hospitality, it's about literary fantastic fiction. It is about the story, the craft, the criticism, the business, the community, the ideas, and the people of the genre. It will be about discovering new stories and ways to tell the old ones to old friends and new. 

Also, if Kelley has anything to do with it, it will be about dancing. Kelley is a big fan of dancing. You could say she's a professional. So if you fancy shaking it in July with friends of like mind, well, you know what to do. (We can't guarantee the dance, but we're agitating for it.) Register here. It will be a blast!

ETA: Also, Readercon are running an Indiegogo campaign to raise money for better sound. Better sound = better experience. Go give them something!

Search for Meaning Festival, Seattle University, Saturday Feb 28, 1 pm

If you're in or near Seattle at the end of next month you might want to hear me talk at Seattle University's Search For Meaning Festival about how Hild changed the world. Tickets are $10. Details below.

 NICOLA GRIFFITH "Hild: The Woman Who Changed the World 1400 Years Ago" Location: Pigott 103 Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm 
Description of Presentation:Hild, born 1400 years ago, in what used to be called the Dark Ages, changed history. She is now known as St Hilda of Whitby. In a time when kings were petty warlords and might was right, how did she make such a difference? By being exactly herself. Extraordinary, yes, but very, very human. Because women have always been, above all, human beings: people. Even so long ago... 
Biography: Nicola Griffith is an English novelist (now dual UK/US citizen) living in Seattle. She is the author of six novels, most recently Hild, and a multi-media memoir. She is the co-editor of the Bending the Landscape series of original queer f/sf/h stories. Her shorter work has appeared in venues ranging from NPR and New Scientist to BBC Radio 4 and Nature. Until her diagnosis with MS, she taught women’s self-defense (for groups as varied as the Union of Catholic Mothers and the Equal Opportunities Unit in the UK, and the Girl Scouts in the US) but then switched her attention to writing. She now teaches workshops for writers, focused mostly on creative writing but occasionally more practical issues such as live performance and social media best practices.
Her work has won two dozen awards (national, international, and regional), been shortlisted for many more, and translated in a dozen languages. She is married to writer Kelley Eskridge. They co-founded Sterling Editing and now live in Broadview. Although these days mostly lost in the 7th century, working on the second novel about Hild of Whitby, she emerges to drink just the right amount of beer and take enormous delight in everything.

What goes into accepting or declining invitations

From: Wendy

Forgive my ignorance on such matters, but with all these appearances and interviews, are they required by your publisher? I'm also sure they are fun to do, but are you allowed to pick and choose and then finally just say "Hey, I need to go home and write."

Short answer: I get to choose, to a degree. I get to refuse but I don't always get to initiate.

Longer answer: it's a multi-level conversation. First of all, in terms of travel, I ask myself: 
Does my schedule permit?Do I like the city? This makes a big difference: the kind of food, and hotels, and general stance to the world. The weather is significant: if I'm doing a multi-centre gig, then some conditions can make life impossible. Ice, for example (crutches and icy pavement do not mix) or extreme heat (MS and heat really don't mix). However, a conference or convention in a decent, large hotel or resort is fine in almost any weather, because if it's vile outside I can stay inside and use the facility's bars and restaurants and room service.Do I like the university, bookshop, or library that's invited me? This in itself is a nuanced conversation. Has the bookshop sold a lot of my books in the past? Do they consistently move my backlist? Have they done me favours? Do I just plain like the people there? Do they have any media reach, i.e. can they publicise the event effectively? And—vital—is it accessible?Will the time/energy expenditure be worth the goodwill/sales? This is always a tricky one, with many variables.Then I ask Kelley (because she travels with me):
Pretty much all the above questions, though the emphasis and concerns are not identical. Then, if the publisher will be paying*, I ask them:
In terms of previous, continuing, and projected sales, is it worth it for the to spend the time/staff hours and money getting me to a particular venue?If not, is keeping the author happy worth the time and expense?All the answers go into the mix. Mostly, sadly, the answer is No.

If I had all the money and energy on the planet I'd go to a lot more places. I have many readers, and in a perfect world I'd get to meet most of them. I love reading from and talking about my work, and I learn a vast great deal from listening to readers' response to it. But travel and work and MS present competing priorities. I have to make choices. 

So if you're set on inviting me somewhere, ask early (what I need is here). Talk to both me and the publisher. Be prepared to be specific: How many readers can you bring? And how? (What kind of publicity/media reach do you have, and how many people will encounter your promos? It's good to be super-specific here: show? posters? newsletter? paid advert? social media promo?) How many books do you think you could sell—at the event and over the next month or two? And, if it's a teaching gig, or you represent a for-profit event series, what's my fee?

For interviews, some of the same considerations go into the mix: How long will it take? How many will it reach? What format is it?

Bear in mind that I'm a lot more generous when I've just finished a stage in the publication process: first draft, or rewrite, or copyedit. I'm freer, I have more energy, I generally not yet engaged on the next thing. Right now I am not free but hope towards the end of the year I might be.

* For tour-type stuff, the publisher pays. For university things, it's generally the institution. For genre conventions, it depends—if I'm GoH, they pay; if it coincides with a book release, the publisher pays; if it's just to party and/or show up at an awards ceremony, we pay for ourselves.

The long tail: not the author's friend

Picture by Hay Kranen/ PD. 

The long tail is that of the demand curve of products versus sales. The best-sellers are all at one end, but as we move to the other sales drop off in a long slow curve that never quite hits zero. Traditional retailers draw a line only part-way along this curve, because slow-moving items return less profit than the cost of stocking them. But online retailers backed by huge warehouses and fast stock deliveries can easily afford to keep them permanently available. Helped by clever search engines that can suggest possibilities for customers with special interests, these niche items suddenly become profitable. (World Wide Words)

Chris Anderson popularised the concept of the long tail in his 2004 Wired article, The Long Tail. He was talking mainly about cultural products—books and music—and he believed that digital supply and demand would turn the retail landscape upside down.

Almost ten years on, it's clear that the metamorphosis does not help writers much.

For sellers, Anderson's theory works. With digital products, words or music, it doesn't matter to retailer or a publisher whether a million writers sell one novel or song each, or if one writers sells a million. With no cost (or very little) to store and ship the story or song, the aggregator makes money. Lots of money. They aggregate the payments on an essentially limitless supply of product and walk off with a goodly chunk of change.

For consumers, it works. Imagine you live in a neighbourhood of Denver where there's no book or music store. If you're okay with reading or listening digitally you have millions or perhaps tens of millions of products to choose from, to suit any mood, mode, or model. And those products—that album, that book—are as pristine today as they were when they were first available. One keyword search and, boom, you've got what you need. You listen to a song in five minutes or gobble an ebook in four hours. You find another. There's an essentially limitless supply to meet your almost endless demand—almost endless demand for music, that is.

A music consumer can listen almost anywhere, almost anytime. She multi-tasks: listens to music while she drives to work, or has sex, or washes the dishes, or reads email. I'm guessing some people listen to music 18 hours a day. However, while I can imagine (if I must) a reader who can drive or have sex or wash the dishes while reading, I'm guessing if they're doing both at the same time, they're doing neither well.

For creators—especially writers*—it's different again. If you live in that neighbourhood of Denver and have spent a year writing a novel that sells only 3,000 copies, you can't survive on the proceeds. Readers might be able to discover and buy your novel for the next fifty years but it won't do you much good. Why? Because your book will be competing with an ever-expanding numbers of blockbusters—new ones, every week, with decent-to-massive publicity budgets. Reader hours are not a limitless resource. The limiting factor is time.

Every day we feel as though there's less time to read, even for those of us who love books. We are easily distracted: That lyric, that conversation, that TV show, that article snags our attention. And because skimming an article or vegging out in front of the screen demands less attention, less energy, less focus, we take the path of least resistance; the book lies unread. And next time we want a book to read, we'll pick up the novel we just saw reviewed, or heard/saw talked about; we won't try recall the title of that other book we were interested in.

In other words, for books, supply overwhelms demand. The long tail works in favour of publishers and retailers but not writers.

On balance, I think publishers make a greater percentage on sales of digital books than on hardcover books**. No returns, no shipping, no cost of production after initial costs—which are only a small add-on to the fixed costs of the print development: plant, overhead (editorial and design), marketing, and so on. Writers make less—about half on a digital sale of what they get on hardcover. So the long tail works brilliantly for publishers that have an enormous back list and for online retailers with listings for millions of individual items. It does not help authors.

The long tail will always work for retailers. It will continue to work for publishers—for a while. But publishers need a supply of fresh product in addition to their long tail income and if authors are dying of starvation, that supply line will fail.

My conclusion? It's time for the author to get a higher royalty rate for ebooks. Both online retailers and publishers who rely on the long tail can afford it. For starters, I'm thinking 40% of net...

* Musicians at most levels can derive income from ancillary products—t-shirts, posters—and performance. Writers rely on the writing itself—except mega-authors who can earn (comparatively) low appearance fees.
** It's hard to be sure because retailer and wholesaler terms are a moving target, and I don't have solid figures for 

The Year's Best SF and F

Jonathan Strahan has released the table of contents for his upcoming The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Vol 9, to be published by Solaris in May. It looks like a big book: 28 stories, including "Cold Wind." Over 200,000 words. The full table of contents is here. I'm guessing it will be worth $16 or whatever the list price ends up being.

National marriage equality

So. The Supreme Court will hear four same-sex marriage appeal cases in (probably) April and issue their ruling in (most likely) late June*. 
The situation right now: same-sex marriage is legal in 36 states and the District of Columbia—in total, home to about 70% of the US population. The federal government supports immigration, tax, healthcare, and pensions for same-sex spouses. Most federal appeals courts have struck down bans on same-sex marriage, deciding that the 14th Amendment requires states to recognise same-sex marriage.
However, in November the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals (a federal court that covers four states, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee) decided that Amendment 14 does not require states to recognise—either in terms of issuing licences and recognising licences issued in other states—the marriage of same-sex couples. 

It's pretty clear you can't have a nation state whose courts interpret its constitution so differently on such a vital issue. So the Supreme Court will have to decide which interpretation should apply to the whole country moving forward. They've agreed to hear appeals from all four states affected by the 6th Circuit's decision.
This is one of those history-making decisions. Chief Justice Roberts would, I suspect, I hate to be on the wrong side of history—and given the speed of change in the last couple of years it's clear which way history is going. So he'll vote for the national legalisation of same-sex marriage. So, of course, will the four traditionally liberal justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor. Justice Kennedy is a big fan of states rights but on this one I think he'll opt for human dignity and vote with the majority. Thomas and Alito will not. Scalia... Well, I don't know to be honest. He might. He just might. It's possible we could end up with 7-2 which would make me very happy.
It would also make the Republican Party very happy. Most of them know same-sex marriage is not a vote-winning issue. A Supreme Court decision for marriage equality would render the radical conservative wing's agitations moot.
In my opinion, there's only one way for this to go. Prepare to party.

* Their term ends at the end of June. SCOTUS likes reserving their big ticket items for the end. As when they announced the decision that struck down DOMA and so legalised marriage in many states—on the 25th anniversary of the day Kelley and I met. 

Bookscan numbers vs. real world

Nielsen Bookscan numbers are not always a good indicator of real-world sales.

The other day my paperback publisher told me they'd sold a total of n copies of Hild . On the other hand, for the same period Bookscan shows sales of 0.6 n. I have less exact figures for the hardcover but I think they're roughly comparable. This surprised me because reports I've seen indicate Bookscan captures 75-80% of points-of-sale.

If you factor in digital sales, which Bookscan doesn't report*, then the figure reflects less than half my market. I knew that Hild was doing well via channels that often don't report to Bookscan (smaller independents mostly) but, still, I was surprised.

In a year or so, when the final print and digital picture is clear to me, I'll revisit this, complete with pretty graphs. For now here's my back-of-the-envelope estimate: for Hild, Bookscan gets 46.5% of real-world sales.

* I'm sure it would love to, but Amazon owns a big chunk of the market (65% in the US and far more in the UK) and it won't share that data.

Right now: No

We are only 13 days into 2015 and emails are pouring in asking me for things and the pace seems to be picking up. (Well over a dozen; three just this morning.) This is a post I can link to to save myself many emails in which I regretfully say no.

So, plainly: Right now, no. No, I will not read your book with a view to blurbing it or introducing it or appearing with you when you come through town on your book tour. I will not join your organisation, judge your competition, or blog about your cause, no matter how worthy. I will not signal boost your initiative or organisation, despite it's urgency or importance. I cannot come to your school or book club or library. I am sorry for it.

I recognise that there are many people out there I could help, that I would like to help, especially those who are climbing uphill—women, people of colour, quiltbag folk, people with MS. It turns out that readers in many different rooms might recognise my name and that has some value. So I am lucky, I understand that. But still, no.

I have helped. I do help. I will help again. But right now I'm taking a break.

I am focused on Hild II. I will allow nothing to get in my way. Over the last year I've spent so long talking about my work that I'm a bit out of practise at doing it. Even something that seems simple—responding to a request by email—pulls me out of the seventh-century long enough that it takes hours to get back. So, no, right now I will not help.

How long will this state of affairs last? I don't know. A few months.

But as I've said, I am not averse to helping, generally-speaking, so here are my criteria for travel requests and book blurbs. I'll put together something addressing other requests another time. Right now the seventh-century beckons...

Map of Hild's journeys?

From: Jean

I heard you speak at Elliott Bay. Bought Hild and have been gone "back to Yorkshire" while reading it. I am the family historian for my extended Penrose family. Yes, we are Yorkshire Penroses from small places such as Skipwith, Foxholes, Langtoft, Burton Agnes, Huntington, Bainton, Hutton Cranswick. I have good documentation from 1731 to 1830s when the landless sons of Foxholes butcher decided to emigrate to America.

Over past 45 years I've traveled to these small Yorks places, and always launched myself by bus, train or car from York, Leeds, Beverley, Hull, Scarborough, Filey. Whitby I have a memory of climbing from waterfront of a town on the east coast up to an abbey ruin. I think.

All this is to say that I kept my Ordnance Survey maps of Yorks in my chair as I read Hild. Was forever matching place names in the book with those on your map in the book and with the Ordnance maps.

I wonder if you or any of your readers have ever created a map of the route journeys made by Hild. I keep wondering, where is Menewood? What would it be near today? Would a Yorkshire reader be better able to identify specific wolds, valleys, monuments while reading Hild?

I am now using Seattle Public Library and internet sources to get better informed about Bede, Celtic vs Roman religion, and so many more subjects. My pagan/Unitarian/Universalist spirituality has always urged me to learn and experience feminist spirituality and sources.

Thanks for writing Hild.

Menewood is real: Meanwood Valley, in Leeds. Specifically, the bits I describe are absolutely real. If you visit Meanwood Park you might recognise things here and there. Caer Loid is, in my imagination, the site of Kirkstall Abbey, also in Leeds. I'm deeply familiar with both places and for the book imagined how they might have looked 1400 years ago... You might enjoy this post I did a while ago on my research blog, which includes these two photos I took on one of my recent trips to the UK: Kirkstall Abbey/Caer Loid and Menewood Beck/Meanwood Park in February 2013.

Caer Loid, and ducks on the Aire Menewood beckSome valleys, rivers, folds, cliffs etc in the book will be instantly recognisable to natives. But some might not; so much has changed. (In the first photo, for example, I had to edit out signs of the 21st century, and both depict nature that's entirely too tidy for Hild's time.) But I tried to make sure that the flora and fauna, the weather, the kinds of dirt and rock, are plausibly those that might have been there. Every now and again I fudge a bit (I need Hild to be able to climb a substantial tree at the age of seven, say, and the trees that definitely would have been there would be impossible, so I import a less likely candidate--not impossible, just less likely), or make a mistake (sigh). But I've done my level best to keep things as real as possible.
But no, no one has created a map of Hild's journeys. I'd love to see it, if anyone did.
One more thing. You might be interested in Seattle University's Search for Meaning Book Festival, Saturday February 28. It runs all day but I'll be talking about Hild at 1 pm.