Weekly Links, 2-5-2015

Writing/Publishing Links:
Kameron Hurley on how "writing every day" doesn't work best for everyone: Life on 10,000 Words A Day.

Alex Shvartsman on The Art and Science of Anthology Editing.

Deborah Ross on How To Succeed As A Writer In 2015.

(I've posted my own comments on the last two.)

Last minute addition: Kristine Kathryn Rusch on Business Musings: Following The Crowd.



World/Political Links:
This story has, rather appropriately, gone viral already, but hey: GOP Senator: Don't Force Employees To Wash Hands After Using Toilet. This is the triumph of ideology over sanity. The GOP's tolerance and endorsement of extremists and public menaces like Senator Tillis is a major reason why I haven't voted for a Republican office-seeker in years.


Related to the above: The Sepsis Alliance is an organization promoting awareness and prevention of sepsis (aka "blood poisoning"), runaway infections that are the third-leading cause of death in the US and leave large numbers of survivors with physical and mental impairments. A primary cause of early infections developing into full-blown sepsis is insufficient education and enforcement of sanitary procedures.


Food/Cooking Links:

Cooking Will Be Suddenly Awesome If You Buy Any of These 19 Products. (Pictured: The Defensive Swordsman.) [via Cascata Nerina]

Modern Farmer gives an interesting overview of The New Food Police.

Oh dang, I missed National Chocolate Cake Day on January 27th! To make up for it, here's baking-savant Dorie Greenspan's recipe for Double Chocolate Marble Cake.


Art Links:

Here, Kitty, Kitty....  Because nothing says "Sci-Fi" like a Cowboy Space Bear riding Rocket Sharks in pursuit of a Space Cat With A Jetpack. Doing it in black-velvet-painting style is a bonus. (Design by Cory Freeman and chazwick31. I liked it so much I bought the t-shirt!)


Zim & Zou are the team of Lucie Thomas and Thibault Zimmerman, French artists who work in paper, leather, and other materials. The image at left is a sample of their work. The link above goes to a large list of other projects they've posted on behance.net.

Non-Performance Art, Centenarian Books, and the Survivors of 1914

Over on tor.com, there's a post about the Future Library "art project".  Scottish artist Katie Paterson plans to 1) plant 1,000 trees in Oslo, Norway, then 2) commission 100 stories from 100 writers, one per year over the next century, and not publish them until 3) in the year 2114, harvest those 1,000 trees and turn them into paper on which to finally print the 100 stories.  Margaret Atwood has signed on to write the first story. 

I suggested in comments that this  could be considered "non-performance art".

I figure that if I want to think about having to wait years and years and years to see a story published, I can get pretty much the same feeling just by looking at the submission-tracking spreadsheet for my own fiction. So I have a hard time taking Ms. Paterson's idea seriously.

I can't help wondering, considering the "Scottish artist" label, whether this might be yet another Scottish invention -- like golf, bagpipes, and haggis -- meant to cement Scotland's reputation as the world's greatest and most evil practical jokers.

Other commenters raised the question of whether writers of 2014 would still have a viable reputation after a century's passage of time. Commenter StrongDreams suggested comparing popular writers of a century ago, from 1914, to see how many have survived the passage  of time and would still be considered publication-worthy.

That sounded like a good idea. Googling ensued.


via Wikipedia, bestsellers of 1914:

The Eyes of the World by Harold Bell Wright
Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter
The Inside of the Cup by Winston Churchill
The Salamander by Owen Johnson
The Fortunate Youth by William J. Locke
T. Tembarom by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Penrod by Booth Tarkington
Diane of the Green Van by Leona Dalrymple
The Devil's Garden by W. B. Maxwell
The Prince of Graustark by George Barr McCutcheon

Most of these writers would be unrecognized by much of today's audience, and even the recognizable names aren't represented here by their best work, with the possible exception of Tarkington's Penrod.

Blogger Linda Aragoni has recently reviewed all the 1914 bestsellers on her Great Penformances blog, a site dedicated to reviewing vintage books..

More pertinent might be this list from Goodreads for the 200 "Most Popular Books From 1914". The selection criteria is how many people have added a 1914 title to Goodreads, ranging from over 100,000 for James Joyce' Dubliners, to 23 for The Auxilia of the Roman Imperial Army by George Leonard Cheesman. (The Goodreads list mixes fiction and non-fiction.) 

Writers familiar to the SF/F/H community on the Goodreads list include Frank L. Baum, Algernon Blackwood, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lord Dunsany, George Allan England, H. Rider Haggard, Franz Kafka, Arthur Machen, A.A. Milne, Sax Rohmer, Bram Stoker, and H.G. Wells.  A lot of that familiarity is because of their historical importance; stylistically, I suspect most wouldn't be able to sell original fiction in today's world.

I don't really see much point in the Future Library project.  Whatever Atwood writes will probably be better appreciated and more widely read if published today than by seeing print, finally, a hundred years in the future. The same applies, to a decreasing degree, to future writers commissioned for the project. Only the last, oh, dozen or so writers contributing to the project, from about 2099 on, will be writing in a style and about a society that won't be considered antiquated, quaint or obsolete by 2114. It strikes me as a "stunt" project, not a literary project.

A Hard Search For Hard Case Crime

Last week, one of Amazon's "Daily Specials" for e-books was offering a $1.99 price on a wide selection of e-books from Hard Case Crime.  The Hard Case Crime line, edited by Charles Ardai, has re-published a number of hard-to-find hardboiled works by writers such as Donald Westlake and Robert Silverberg, as well as new fiction in the hardboiled/noir tradition by a number of newer writers.  It's one of the publishing companies whose output I like to keep an eye on, so I was tempted to buy and download a number of titles to my smartphone's e-reader app.

But... I've noted in the past that I don't like Amazon's business practices, so rather than spend money there, I hied over to the Barnes & Noble website to see if the same discounted prices for Hard Case's books were being offered there.

Well, they were, but it was a hard slog to find the Hard Case titles on bn.com.  On Amazon's site, entering "Hard Case Crime" in the search window brought up a full list of HCC's available titles.  Reset the filter for "Low To High Price", and all the $1.99 titles were shown grouped together.

Not so much on Barnes & Noble's site.  Enter "Hard Case Crime" in bn.com's search box, and you end up with a scattered selection of ebooks, most with the word "Hard" in the actual title or in the description, and only a very few of Hard Case's books included.

B&N has an "Advanced Search" option available, with "Publisher" as one of the search categories available.  So I tried that, entering "Hard Case Crime" and got... zero results.

Wait, what?  Zero results?  How could that happen, when the first, regular, search had at least brought up a couple of Hard Case titles?

So I went to the page for one of those titles that had come up in the earlier search, and went down to the "Details" section.  Where I found that the listed publisher for the Hard Case title was "Titan".

Ho-kay.  So apparently Hard Case has a deal with Titan Books for distributing and marketing their books, much like DAW Books has a deal with Penguin.

But to find Hard Case titles on B&N's site, you have to enter "Titan" as the publisher.  If you don't know about the arrangement (I didn't until I ran into this), you can't search for Hard Case Crime under its own name.

When you do a "publisher" search for Titan, though, you end up with all of Titan's own titles (a lot of science fiction and other categories), with Hard Case titles mixed into the batch.

A list of categories appeared to the left of the search results, so I clicked on "Mystery & Crime" to narrow the search.  And finally I ended up with a list of mostly Hard Case titles (a few books from other arms of Titan also appeared).  Do another sort by price, and I finally had a list of the Hard Case titles on sale.

Well... not quite.  I noticed that several titles I'd seen in Amazon's search results weren't included in the B&N results.  One was David Schow's Gun Work.  A specific search for that title brought it up on B&N's site, but apparently it's not categorized as "Mystery & Crime" or "Thriller" like almost all the other Hard Case titles.  There were a few other titles in similar straits.

Why does Amazon give more inclusive, and a lot easier, search results?  That's simple:  On each product page for Hard Case titles on Amazon, after each title is the parenthetical addition of "(Hard Case Crime)".  So entering "Hard Case Crime" even in Amazon's general search window will trigger a hit on all those parenthetical additions.  Plus they list the publisher as "Hard Case Crime", not Titan.

I'd rather spend my money at Barnes & Noble than Amazon.   But it would be nice if B&N didn't make it so damn hard.

(I'm sending a separate copy of this post directly to Hard Case editor Charles Ardai.  This problem really needs to be fixed, because it means a damn good publisher is losing potential sales on the second-most popular bookselling site.)

The Brave Free Books

I've been checking out a few e-books offered for free online.  One of the popular marketing techniques for getting people to read and talk about your e-book is to offer it for free for a period of time.  In the case of self-published e-books, this usually seems to be for several months, followed by a low price ($2.99 seems to be the most popular price point, or $0.99 if the work isn't a full novel) being attached.  Ideally, the free copies downloaded create word-of-mouth that brings people in to actually buy copies after the free period expires.  (And some self-publishers just want people to read their work, so they keep their work available for free.)

Some traditional publishers also offer particular books either heavily discounted for a short promotional period, or actually free.  The latter mostly seem to be for the first volume in a series, offered briefly when a later volume is just coming onto the market.

One place I've found for those offers is Barnes & Noble's "Free Fridays" .  Every Friday, a free book is available for download to a Nook e-reader or Nook app for a week.  Categories vary from week to week: epic fantasy, romance, urban fantasy, mainstream lit, suspense, inspirational, etc.  So it's a bit of a potluck, but I've downloaded a few Nook books from the Free Friday offerings, and generally find them worth reading.

Well . . . not always.



EVERYBODY'S DAUGHTER by Michael John Sullivan is a Christian time travel fantasy, wherein a troubled father travels back in time to Jerusalem about the time of Jesus' arrival and subsequent crucifixion.  He's followed by his teenage daughter, but the daughter arrives at a different time, when her father is nowhere to be found.  (This is not their first trip back to Jerusalem.  In an earlier book, Necessary Heartbreak, they apparently went back together and met Judas Iscariot, among others; the father still carries some of Judas' silver in his pocket from that earlier trip.)

The book unfortunately opens with a howler of a first sentence: "Jingling the silver coins between his fingers that he had retrieved so many centuries ago[...]".  The writing, on a sentence level, gets better after that, but I had trouble with the characterization and plotting of the book.  The characters seemed inconsistent, especially some of the secondary characters.  Ideally, plot flows naturally from characters' actions as they react to the events around them.  I got the impression that Sullivan had plot points planned, and he forced his characters to move towards those plot points whether they wanted to or not. 

The big choking point came with trying to figure out just when the father and daughter had made their separate arrivals in Jerusalem.  For most of the book, it appeared that they had arrived at least months apart.  I also wondered if the father and daughter's presence might have created two separate timelines.  But if the last few chapters Sullivan seems to be saying they were not only in the same timeline, but only a few days apart.  My suspension of disbelief was blown out the window.

(Sullivan's portrayal of Jesus is also a very "Godly", Sunday-school version.  When I read portrayals of Jesus, I always prefer they be more human, with smelly armpits, dirty feet, and flashes of temper and despair.)

I wanted to like the book.  I didn't.

(Since the Free Friday offering, the price on the ebook has gone back to $3.47)


From the general free listings at B&N, I also tried one of the "always-free" books:

KILL-BASA: NEW FLAVORS IN ZOMBIE HORROR by Sean Graham is a collection of five zombie stories.  Most are very pulpish, with slam-bang non-stop action.  "Dummies" gives a more traditional, non-Romero style zombie story.  "Lee's Decision" has Robert E. Lee making a Faustian bargain to win the Civil War.   But neither story impressed me, despite the attempt to put a twist on the idea of zombies.

The one story that did impress me, a bit, was "Ten Count".  It was a Romero-style zombie story, a meme that's getting really stale.  But it impressed me because the characters in it weren't cartoons or cardboard, which was where the other stories mostly failed.   But it needed polish, it needed still more depth to the characters.  It impressed me because it had potential, but it also disappointed because it could have been harder-hitting, even moving, with a bit more work and development. 

Sean Graham's had a number of other short stories published in small press venues.  I'd like to see him get a little more experience and practice before I try his work again.


I've got a few more of the Free Friday offerings and a couple of other free books sitting in the Nook app on my smartphone.  I may make "The Brave Free Books" a semi-regular feature here.

Self-Publishing: Should I Join The Crowd?

I've been eyeing the explosive growth in self-publishing over the last few years, and pondering the idea of collecting together some of the short stories I've had published over the years.  I'm about 98% decided to go ahead with the idea.

One of the reasons I haven't considered it more seriously until now is that self-publishing was mostly seen as the field of amateurs and not-ready-for-prime-time writers, the people who in previous eras would have paid big bucks to vanity presses for a pallet-load of printed books that would sit in their garage forever afterwards.

The explosion started with the advent of print-on-demand publishers like Lulu.com, where the book's contents would sit as an electronic file on Lulu's servers, until -- Oh, my god! -- someone actually ordered and paid for a single copy to be printed and shipped.  Drawback: Printing books one at a time, even with largely automated and standardized printing technology, made the books pretty expensive.

Enter the spreading democratization of e-books.  The Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, the Sony Reader, e-reading applications for computers and smartphones, all creating an increasingly large base of customers who are willing to read books off a video display instead of having an actual printed book in their hands.  Concurrent with that, an explosion of services started coming available for ordinary citizens to produce and make available their own works.  (Smashwords is probably the best known.)

The problem is making your e-book stand out from the crowd.  Traditional publishers are still able to provide better design, marketing and distribution resources, even for their shiny new e-book divisions.  Professional writers, if they can, still prefer to be published that way.  But we're seeing more and more pro writers using e-books as a way to replace the largely vanished backlist, to republish their older books that have gone out of print and had rights reverted.  This, in turn, is giving self-published e-books a new measure of respectability.  I think this is a great thing.

But there are still all the amateur and not-ready writers out there still publishing their darlings in the thousands, with their thumbnail images cluttering up display pages on numerous bookseller websites.  It's a mob out there, and you need to stand out somehow.

One way is to have a name.  That's one reason more and more professionals are putting their backlist books online; they're a known quantity, so they make (usually slow, but steady) sales based on that recognition factor.

I don't have much of a name.  People tend not to remember mostly-short-stories writers, even the best (otherwise Robert Reed would be a science-fiction superstar).  My output of short stories, even at my best, was usually only two or three a year, not all of which sold.  Scattered over thirty years, I didn't get published frequently enough to be remembered much between stories, or over my writing career (such as it was).  Google me, and the big-ticket item that stands out is the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ("Clues") I wrote back in 1990.  That's not fodder for re-publishing.

But a few of my stories still get occasionally remembered and inquired about, particularly "Death and the Ugly Woman".  So if I were to put together a collection, that be the lead story.  So I've got a little (tiny) (eensy-weeny) advantage over a complete newbie casting their work into the waters of e-commerce.

I've looked over my published stories; not all of them have a crying need to be reprinted.  I'm thinking of collecting about a half dozen of the best published stories, plus a few selections from my unsold efforts.  (Some of those unsold works deserved their fate, but a few of them... they may not have sold, but dammit... they should have!)

One of the most common things that makes people look askance at self-published books are the covers.  Designing a good book cover is a skill.  It's not a skill quickly learned.  I've got a little (tiny) (eensy-weeny) advantage there, too.  I've been putting out fanzines since the early 70's, and have been goofing around with covers and illustrations almost all that time.   Some of those goofing-arounds worked, some didn't, and I hope I've learned a little about which is which in all that time.  Plus I did the rough concept and design for COPPER STAR, the "Southwestern fantasy" anthology I edited and produced for the 1991 World Fantasy Convention.  (It got a professional tweaking before going to press.)

Looking at cover images of self-published books is great fun, if you like having your eyeballs bleed.  There are some... spectacularly dreadful... covers out there.  And lots and lots more that loudly go *clunk* or are just just unimpressive.  So one of the most important things I'd want would be a striking cover.

I've been looking at a lot of images online.  Because I'm a tightwad, I'd prefer to use cover elements available under public domain.  A detail from Heironymous Bosch got strongly considered; some other images got considered and abandoned.  I also came across a couple of pieces on DeviantArt that could have been suitable, if I decided to go ahead and pay for repro rights.  But then I stumbled across the work of Kathe Kollwitz, a German Expressionist artist in the early part of the 20th Century.  In particular, a 1921 print called "The Widow" seemed to have strong resonance with the themes of sorrow and loss in "Death and the Ugly Woman".  In keeping with the laudatory principle of K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid), I worked up a cover rough using just black and white and red.  I think it works pretty well.

This isn't a finished cover yet. The title font has some clear kerning problems, and the author-name font looks too heavy. I put this together using some of the default fonts that came installed with Word 2007, and the final fonts will almost certainly be different.  Typographical placement and size will probably be tweaked a bit, too.  But it shows what I'm trying for, and I think it works pretty well.

 

A cover's just one step. Final decisions on contents, supplementary material, page design, proofreading, ISBN and barcodes, pricing, etc., etc., are still ahead.  Plus considerable study and fiddling around with software and resources to make it the best I can make it.  (thebookdesigner.com has a lot of useful articles.)  I figure it will probably be several months before the collection is available, probably longer if my second shoulder surgery happens in the interim.

 

Tsundoku, and the Ace Science Fiction Specials

If I had a word tattooed on my forehead, it would likely be this one:

I think I've mentioned before that I tend to buy more books than I have time to read.  When you've been doing that for forty years, your TBR pile tends to get, umm, large.

The oldest book in that TBR pile (which is actually multiple piles, and shelves, and boxes) is one of the old Ace Science Fiction Specials, Bruce McAllister's Humanity Prime:

I actually took this with me to Army Basic Training in 1972, with the intention of reading it in my spare time.   HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!  Spare time in Basic Training?  What a charmingly naive concept.  In the years since then, it's floated around wherever I've lived, sometimes in handy reach, sometimes in an accessible but inconvenient spot, and sometimes unfindable for years at a stretch.  (Current status: unfindable.)

I think one of the reasons I never quite got around to actually reading the book is that it reminds me of a sad moment in science fiction history.  Humanity Prime was the first Ace Science Fiction Special to not have a cover by Leo & Diane Dillon.

The Ace Science Fiction Specials were edited by Terry Carr at Ace Books.  Carr was the junior SF editor at Ace, under the senior SF editor Don Wollheim.  Wollheim discovered science fiction in the 1930, while Carr was a generation younger, becoming active in SF fandom in the 50's.  Ace Books' SF line, while having some gems, was mostly oriented towards a more pulpish, action-adventure style of plotting and writing.  (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

In the 1960's, SF began going through a period of experimentation and horizon-expanding, as a new generation of writers, dissatisfied with the pulp traditions and styles of most SF, tried to write new works of greater depth and style.  (The "new" generation included some established writers like Robert Silverberg and John Brunner, known for rapidly-written slam-bang SF stories and novels, who chose to stretch their abilities in new directions.)

Terry Carr was more open to this new style of SF, and he was able to get Wollheim and their bosses at Ace to approve a "Special" line of Ace books, giving these new and upcoming writers a venue for their books.  A significant number of the Ace Science Fiction Specials that Carr brought out have gone on to be regarded as classics of the SF genre.  (Left Hand of Darkness by Le Guin, Pavane by Keith Roberts, Past Master by Lafferty among them.  Many other titles in the line were nominated for or won Hugo and Nebula awards.)

The Specials were distinguished from Ace's regular line of books by having distinctively styled covers, done by Leo & Diane Dillon.  The Dillons' paintings were done in styles more reminiscent of other media (stained glass, batik fabric patterns), "artistic" as opposed to the pulp-style "illustration" of most paperback covers.  Here are some of my favorites:

The bad news was: The Ace Science Fiction Specials didn't sell as well as hoped.  The books, and their covers, were getting great respect and admiration, and occasional awards, within the SF field, but not from the buying public.  Ace Books decided (I'm not sure from what level, Wollheim or someone higher) that the covers were just too unusual; the public didn't recognize them as science fiction.  So the Dillons were dropped as the cover artists for further Specials.

The Davis Meltzer cover for Humanity Prime is not a bad cover.  But it's not a great cover, either.  I'm still a bit wistful that we never got to see what the Dillons might have done with this book or the others in the Specials line.  And I think that regret may be part of why, in all the years since I first bought it, I've never actually read the book behind that first non-Dillon cover.  To me, a cover by the Dillons was an integral part of an Ace Science Fiction Special.