The End Of Empires

At the time I didn’t realize it, but I grew up in a very strange time and place. In the late mid 20^th century, a small town on the outskirts of Porto, Portugal was a bewildering mixture of old and new – our doctoring for instance went from medieval to somewhere around the thirties for the rest of Europe.

Medieval because most of the time you tried to take care of things with herbs and traditional knowledge and, if that failed, you ended up reluctantly sending for the doctor who could prescribe a lot of things but mostly – at least to me – seemed to prescribe aspirin, which people treated with all the careful respect reserved here and now for the more potent chemotherapy drugs.

But probably the feature of my childhood that would strike most people as truly odd was the summer nights. You see, I can’t swear that I had relatives in EVERY corner of the globe. It’s entirely possible that between both families we left Burrundi and possibly Tuvalu untouched. But the impression I had as a kid, was that I had relatives everywhere. And in the summer, they all came back.

My grandmother’s house fronted on the street with only a narrow sidewalk  We lived in the back, where the kitchen door opened to a flagstoned patio. There were stone pillars around the patio and crisscrossing wires above. The wires supported grapevines, which grew in little flagstone-free spaces by the pillars. This was a perfect system because in spring and summer, when the vines were in full leaf, it made the patio a cool place with varying patches of green shade – kind of like being underwater.

In summer, when we had varying (but always largish) numbers of relatives staying with us or with other relatives nearby, everyone gathered at grandma’s for dinner. My grandfather had a deck chair he’d brought with him from his travels (don’t ask) and which was my particular property.

After dinner, for which we always brought my grandmother’s big kitchen table outside, the adults would sit around the table talking and (the men) smoking. I’d setup the deck chair a little ways away and read my comic book while there was light, and then just lie there listening to stories of faraway places.

There were of course stories of marvelous fruits and strange dressing habits, of things people believed in those faraway lands that we knew just weren’t so, and… well, you know. Travelers’ tales. (I’ve often toyed with writing a space-version of my family, maybe as a YA.)

However, this was the late sixties and early seventies and the world was in ferment. More often than not the stories were of societies being upended; of revolutions; disruptions; businesses that could no longer be carried out; governments that failed. The stories talked of the relatives jumping ahead of the turmoil, sometimes just in time, sometimes so late that they left behind all their possessions and everything they’d worked for all their lives. Almost always, they left behind their livelihood: the hotels they’d built, the career they’d established, the shops they’d grown from little stands. These men and women usually in their forties and fifties were moving to new countries, learning new languages and new customs, starting anew.

At the time, of course, the world was very new, and anything that was then had always been. (I always thought now and forever, world without end works perfectly read backwards that way when said by a very young child.) Conditions changed suddenly, unexpectedly. The change wiped out your entire livelihood. You had to retool, learn a new language, go elsewhere. And if you found a safe patch of ground, a place where you could start a business and grow it, you called your relatives and you said, “Hey, guys, this is a great place. Bring the kids!”

I thought this was what it was like being an adult.

I was right.

Perhaps I’ve mentioned on the blog before that when I was fourteen my parents gave me a typewriter. This was very expensive and our family wasn’t doing that well financially at the time. But they knew I wanted to be a journalist and a novelist. So they bought the best machine they could, a manual Olivetti which could take a beating and continue working with minor tuning. It was, after all, something I’d use my whole life.

Only at 22 I got married, and had to learn to type again with a different keyboard, on my husband’s beat up electrical typewriter. (You had to wind the ribbon manually.) I wrote my first novel on that, but proofreading it proved too much for my husband’s nerves. So two years later we bought me a computer, and I learned the programs needed to write, to spell check and to chain the programs (since even with a freakishly large hard drive, we couldn’t keep the entire novel there. So there were tricks and work arounds so the pagination was right when you printed the novel.) And we invested in a daisy wheel printer because I wanted to be a writer, and I was going to use it the rest of my life…

You know how that went. In between a lot more things happened, including my learning the protocols of a new society (well, stereotypes exist because they’re predictive. Portuguese society in general is far less demanding of exactness be it in time-keeping or proofreading) and tried to learn the ropes of publishing. A lot of the books I read on how to write and submit were so outdated that they were actually counterproductive.

And then I took a workshop in the Oregon Coast with Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, and I realized that what I’d observed in publishing made sense, because the field convulsed and changed every few years, upending itself. What used to be “the way to build a career” suddenly was a fast track to nowhere.

Of course, I managed to break in in 2001. In Kris’ post You Are Not Alone she mentions that as the year the industry went nuts. Well… yeah. I only know from nuts. Or, to be more polite, I came in at a time of change faster than any experienced before in SF or the rest of the writing field.

The problem is that change is never uniform. I’ve actually been reading a lot about slow and sudden societal change because it’s relevant to both societies (Eden and Earth) in Darkship Thieves sequels. What I’ve found is that change that is society (or industry) wide happens in pockets and by fits and starts.   Mathematically, it follows the mechanics of a sand pile which seems firm, till it all slides at once.  Worse, it happens before anyone realizes it. Because humans are primates set up to fit in and climb a social structure, we have certain ways of ingratiating ourselves to power. Even the most rebellious of us – stands up to be counted – doesn’t realize how far he/she can rebel. There’s always a “well, that’s just crazy” backstop.

The other problem is that often change seems to be moving in one direction, and then something happens and it turns and runs in the other faster than ever before.

A great part of the insanity since 2001 as far as I can tell came from concentration of power in a few hands. This went all the way up and all the way down and started in 85 or so with the consolidation of the various publishing houses under mega conglomerates; their abolition of slush reading; the emergence of mega-chain bookstores and somewhere around the 90s the emergence of computers and ordering by computer to numbers that didn’t take in account: distribution; cover; “push” or how attuned the book was to local audience. On my side of the business there was the abolition of slush, or rather its moving to agenting houses, which gave the agents a lot of power and took them from being “the author’s advocate and employee” to a de facto first line manager, a middle manager if you will, or perhaps the Metraton taking the word from on high to the masses. If your agent said “this will never sell” you tabled it, because there were very few agents and they all read from the same hymnal. Again, Kris has mentioned this, but there were entire books, entire workshops, an entire industry telling you how to sell to the big six houses and how to sell in such a way that they’d promote and “push” your book. Because without it, your book wouldn’t even be on the shelves.

Yes, publishers could determine how many books you’d sell. That they WANTED to is the thing that never made sense to me, but they thought their duty was to “educate” public taste. (Go figure.) Also, within publishing houses the incentives were set up so that “guessing” correctly how many books would sell was something to be desired and rewarded. And of course, the concentration of the chains and their top-down management style allowed this.

Then in the late nineties I noticed things changing. The internet allowed agents (and one house) to be away from NYC and I thought “uh. I wonder how that will change things, just in terms of experience that allows agents and editors to not live in each other’s pockets? In twenty years, how different will things be?”

And I will confess that for all my knowledge, the thing that took me by surprise is how fast this change has been. Perhaps more so since we’d ALL given up on ebooks ten years ago. And now, as a pocket changes, and then another, our perceptions race to catch up, and the entire sandpile is shifting, moving, reforming.

Humans react to change in different ways. Some antecipate it. Some jump just-in-time. Some lag it. And some stay, toes dug in firmly, refusing to admit anything changed. Oh, and some jump the wrong way. From a bad place to a worse, say.

When you’re in the middle of it, it’s very hard to anticipate. Sometimes if you’re absorbed in your own life and work, you might not notice how things have changed. I confess even when I wrote about the changing times, I didn’t realize how fast they were changing. It was the reaction, the sudden panic and mad fury that what I thought was a rather dull and obvious post inspired that made me realize the sandpile was already moving under me.

Will agents survive? Probably not in the current form, though I’ll note that Europe lags us and the rest of the world still likes dealing with constituted authority. Will publishers survive? – probably. The question is WHICH and in what form. The thing about creative destruction is that you never know who will adapt and who will crash hard. Because my preferred outcome would be to see the conglomerates disgorge some of the nice houses they swallowed it doesn’t mean that’s what will happen. D W Smith says that right now it’s too risky to send stuff to the big six. And he might be right, though of course it depends on what portion of your output it is. If you write six books a year, risking one or two isn’t too bad.

But as The Passive Voice points out, ebooks are the growing segment of the audience. And most of us – myself included – haven’t managed to stay abreast of what was going on, because we were still writing –furiously —  for the legacy structure.

So, come October, I’m headed to the Oregon Coast where Dean Wesley Smith is running something called How to Be Your Own Publisher, which sounds from their description like part workshop, part sharing reunion about how to re-tool for the new publishing age. And I had an interesting email exchange with a writer who has taken a break from writing to create a website with resources for writers for the new working space (I haven’t checked it out yet, but I will and report on it). And I’m working with a copyeditor who is retooling to serve us instead of publishers. Laura Resnick has given us a list of IP lawyers. And… If I had time, and if I didn’t love writing so much, I’d retool into a translation services agency for writers. As is, I hope someone else can do it.

I’m sure someone will, because these things tend to organize spontaneously.

One of the things I like about this change is that writers are coming together.  the old system gave us the impression that you had to climb up over the bodies of others, but in the new system abundance encourages abundance.  And writers are acting just like my relatives. As each of us finds a patch of ground to get a toe hold in, we email (okay, things have changed) all our “relatives” and friends and say “Business is great here. Let me teach you how you grow this new, weird fruit.  Come along, and bring the kids.”

And as we learn from each other, we build the shape of what will be “the way we do things” in the probably not too distant future.

This time the future taking shape seems to be, much like the one in the seventies, the death of empires and the fracturing of – in this case intellectual – geography into more idiosyncratic, but ultimately freer spaces. There will be a terrifying time before that freedom fully manifests, and some of us will go under, but let’s try to make it as few as possible, okay?  The end of empires is a terrifying place. And an exhilarating time to be alive.

The future is right ahead. And there’s gold in them there hills. And land so rich you spit on the ground and get a crop. Come quick. Never mind everything you’re leaving behind.  Bring the kids.