Chicon 7 Panel Reports – Part 4

This will be my last blog post about the Chicon 7 panels. Another four left to report about:

The next panel of interest to me was about genre bending since some of my books are happily mixing genres as well. The next one I will send into the race is a historical fantasy playing itself out on a second world planet with SF elements?!%&?. The main problem with selling books like that is that publishers and bookstores don’t know where to shelf them. There are only three “subcategories” when searching for a book at Amazon and in a book store you have only one choice where to shelf it.

Panelist Ginjer Buchanan, top editor at Penguin’s Ace/Roc imprints, said it’s no big deal for an author these days to write SF as well as Fantasy (maybe under different names) but genre bending will always leave the problem as to where to shelf something.

One nice anecdote from Ginjer – she said that if you are still alive you write fiction, if you are dead what you produced might become literature

The panel I attended after the genre bending one was of a similar theme – SF in the mainstream.

Latest since “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, which is a dystopian novel written by a “literary” author, many so called “literary fiction” or “general fiction” authors have ventured into the land of genre. Some of them don’t mind a genre fiction label, some of them furiously oppose one.

The general opinion of the panelists was that the stigma against SF is declining but it still remains.

A genre “guy or gal” does not get a review in the New York Times for example.

The New Yorker recently did an “SF” issue, funnily though all the “SF” stories came from “mainstream, literary or general fiction” or whatever you want to call them writers.

The discussion strayed a bit into why fantasy is so much more popular these days than SF. One possible answer being that people are “disappointed” with SF. We don’t have stations on the moon and Mars by now as many of the hard SF books of the 50ties and 60ties suggested. Thus people turn to the truly fantastic of fantasy where nobody cares whether it will come true, and have fun with that.

The panelists suggested that we speculative fiction authors should view SF and fantasy as tools to express what we want to, and we should take the freedom to use the conventions of these genres for our convenience. More genre bending ahead after all?

The last convention day is always only a half day since the closing ceremony is around 15:00 and people have to clean up the mess we made over the past five days.

I attended two panels only on day 5, the first of which was “getting the most out of writing groups”. My main interest here was whether there were some tips that I can transfer to my own writing groups. I am in charge of the Odyssey Online critique group, for example.

Here some tips in case you are looking for a group, are a member somewhere or are running a group like me:

1) Go for a high level

2) Look for peers but also for people who are a little ahead of you

3) Look for people who are willing to work hard (critiquing, as well as submitting)

4) Establish clear rules for your writing group

5) If you have a face to face group, the author may not speak while his work is being critiqued. He/she can ask questions etc. after the critiques are done.

6) If you submit a piece that might be offensive to some people announce so in advance.

7) A third of a critique a third is opinion, a third is just talking and one third is the useful stuff.

8) Don’t take everything too gravely to heart.

9) 6 to maximum 10 people is a good size for a face to face group, with the lower end being the better size.

10) Note it in your critique when you find grammar and punctuation mistakes but don’t waste time talking about the grammar in the face to face group.

I will suggest one interesting thing to my online critique group which is the so called “red line”. You can draw a “red line” in a manuscript, indicating where you would have stopped reading if you were an editor or an agent or simply a reader. Of course in the critique environment you read on and critique the whole story or chapter, etc. but as a reader/editor/agent you would have stopped e.g. page 3 line 5 because of xxx reasons.

The last panel of the 70th SF Worldcon I attended was about self publishing once more and in a way it nicely summed up the feeling and vibes of this con from a business point of view.

This panel had a nice mix of two self-published authors, the boss of a small press and the main acquisitions editor of the independent publisher Night Shade, Mr. Jeremy Lassen.

Jeremy brought up an interesting point. He does not like it that the self publishing community has started to call themselves “indies”. The name is already taken – meaning the independent publishers like Night Shade who fought hard for their achievements. A woman from the audience then said the best thing in my opinion: she is an artist and the artists have done already 30 years ago what the authors are trying to do now. They left out the “freelance” or whatever from before their jobs as illustrators or artists or designers. We authors should do that too and simply say “I’m a writer” instead of I am a “published writer”, or “indie published”, or “self-published” writer. I have already done so by omitting the term “self” or “indie” from my publishing related blog posts.

Jeremy made another valiant point, which is that the readers want to have filters. So far, and still, the publishers and agents have provided filters. No really good filter mechanism for indie has emerged yet. Amazon rankings or the few reviewers out there do not and cannot provide adequate filtering of the indie market. We’ll have to see whether some kind of service will appear in the not too far future that can provide this kind of filter for the “indies”.

One suggestion of the panel was that the self-published authors will be the new slush pile. Who has some sort of moderate success with the self-publishing will bop to the surface and be picked up by traditional publishing. With the next book of course, which is not already out there. Only in some exceptional cases will the already self-published work be picked up, meaning, a publisher will only do that if he thinks that there is still a market left for this piece of fiction.

All in all it was a great con and I learned a lot and re-connected with a lot of people and with some new ones. Next year I have already booked my membership for the World Fantasy Con though instead of SF Worldcon because I’ve never been to a World Fantasy Con yet