I swear this is about publishing, so bear with me.
A quick post, as I slept very badly (for reasons having nothing to do with anything emotional. Just one of those nights.)
I hate having people give me gifts. I’ve mentioned this before, right? Oh, not everyone. There are exceptions. My husband, for instance, is one of those supernaturally good gift-givers. His gifts to me have ranged from a little glass owl to two pounds of cold cuts, and in each case they were exactly what I wanted.
On the other hand, the man has an ace in the hole – he can always give me a red rose and I melt. So… hard to go wrong.
There have been other superb gifts throughout my life, but most gifts fall in the category of the ones this guy blames on (and might be) Aspergers. Even when people know me – I think – relatively well, I find myself looking at something that , at best, I wouldn’t have looked at twice in the store, and feeling like I failed a test. Why feeling like I failed a test? Because… what did I do or say to give them the impression that I… Etc. When people don’t know me it can be worse.
I’ve found, for instance, that people latch onto something about me – not just in gift giving – and they seem to think that’s all of me. Like, conferences STILL put me (sometimes exclusively) on the “Shakespeare panels” or create them just for me, because they think it will please me. Do I like Shakespeare? Sure. It was one of my favorite things in college. To be honest, though, partly it was to escape reading the more modern stuff. Also, the study of his biography is fascinating. But I also enjoyed Jane Austen, I love Dumas and I did my master thesis on Flannery O’Connor. None of which, btw, compares to my obsessions with Heinlein, Simak, Pratchett, or even Rex Stout, Christie or Ellis Peters (And we won’t mention the Lord Meren series which I wish the author would self-publish and finish.) So, you know, it’s not like Shakespeare is the all consuming light of my days. And as for my trilogy on Shakespeare, well, it was in another publishing “country” and besides the series is dead. I might go back to it, but it’s about as relevant to my work life as Dumas and arguably less so than Heinlein.
So, you see why I have issues with receiving gifts? Not that I’m any better at giving them. Gifts I give fall into three categories: the gifts I KNOW the person needs. This is usually only my closest friends and relatives. Like, say, I know one of the kids needs new slippers. Then there’s the gifts I think people will like. Again, I’m only good at these if I know you REALLY well. Like, we’ve been friends for years with someone and know that this particular sparkly or that particular statuette is just right, or perhaps JUST ties in with something they’re writing. Or I know the type of chocolate they love. That sort of thing. Of course, it also helps if the person has a prominent hobby-interest that consumes their free time. Like knitting, or cooking or something. A lot of people do, but writers and my family tend to be more eclectic. After that there are “broad category gifts.” These work best for kids. If you buy a set of blocks, chances are a two year old will find a way to play with them. But after adolescence it becomes iffy.
I’ve never fallen into the “give someone something you want.” Well, not since I was ten and gave my brother the complete book of dinosaurs because that’s what I wanted. (He’s ten years older and was in college, in engineering.)
I’ve always assumed these gift dysfunctions, both giving and receiving, were peculiar to me, however, studies show that in fact, about 80% of gifts people receive fall into that “OMG, what am I going to do with this?” category. I think this is why there’s this rise of near-generic gift sets: bath sets with nice-smelling soap and cute towels. Or coffee sets, with mugs and a couple of generic-brews and biscoitti. That sort of thing. (And I shudder to think how many times the non-food ones [one hopes] change hands before finding someone who really, really wanted them.)
Which brings us to the publishing industry. I TOLD you we’d get there.
I will grant you that I’m not the best informed on the history of the business workings of our field. However, from reading biographies about the pulp days, it seems to me there were various niches. People who liked a certain kind of horror tended to read the output of a certain publisher, say. Same for sf and f. The closest we have to that is Analog, which could be called “science fiction for geeks.” (Guilty as charged.) And Baen which could be called “We’re okay with character, we like science/history accurate, but no plot no sale.” And that’s fine, too.
But both Baen and Analog have had fairly clear personal directions and hand-offs, while the rest of the field has been a fest of mergers, short-lived under editors (short lived in position, mind, not saying anything about lifespan) and such.
And the selections of the other editorial houses has been much like the result of getting gifts from strangers. I mean, most publishers these days have under-readers who are (beyond overworked and stressed) not of the field. They might have edited romance last week, they’re editing sf/f today. Most of them have never been to a con. They don’t know us. And then, it’s not just editors. In the major conglomerates these days, you can’t buy a book without “buy in” from the sales persons. And then after that, the sales people/distributors decide what they’ll push. To the extent that bookstores still get any say, they decide what to unpack or not. And most of the time, these people are not of us.
This seems particularly important for sf/f, but mind you, mystery readers have their quirks too. Romance is more of a broad church and might be easier to serve, or at least it has well known niches, which is kind of like a giftee having a hobby.
So, the kind of books that keep getting “push” and which used to be hits just by virtue of distribution – since both publishing and bookstores became conglomerates – were:
1 – the generic – i.e. “Spaceships/dragons, decent grammar. Those sf geeks will love it.”
2 – the repetitive – i.e. “It’s just like that Rowling chick we published last year and they loved that.”
3- catering to hobbies – i.e. “Well, I know tons of people like knitting. Let’s do knitting mysteries.”
4 – catering to fads – “there’s that series on TV about chicks, sex and shoes, let’s do all our mysteries about chicks, sex and shoes.”
5 – catering to general categories “this book will appeal to all the sexually frustrated middle aged housewives.”
6 – and finally “what I would like to read” – which works great, if you are a graduate from an Ivy League school about twenty five years old and interested in impressing people with how high brow you are. For the rest of us? Not so much.
And this is my answer to the “tsunami of crap” – crap by whose definition? Why do you think what’s crap to you is crap to other people? I tell you kids, reading romance has been an education and no, I’m not being snarky. More romance is competently written than sf or mystery, I hate to tell you. But because I’m a stranger to the field, I’ll pick a lot by the stuff that says on the covers. Like “Bestselling author.” And, OMG. Some of those books don’t rise to the level of “crap” to me, just on the historical errors. (Yes, I have a very specialized form of insanity. Why do you ask?) BUT they’re mega bestsellers, whose numbers would make an sf/f writer faint.
So… qui flusheth the crap? Who decides? WHY would you want someone to decide for you? Look, given my obsession with dinosaurs, give me a book on sentient dinosaurs, and I’ll forgive a multitude of sins. Are there enough of me for someone to make a living off it? Probably. Enough for a major house to make a profit when they have to print, distribute the book and MORE IMPORTANTLY convince the bookstores to carry the books? Probably not.
It might interest you to know that the same study on how inefficient people buying gifts for others were, also discovered that people buying for themselves were nearly 100% efficient. So, now that technology allows us to buy for ourselves, why shouldn’t we? And why shouldn’t we write/publish what we want to? Yeah, okay, that falls under giving people the gift you want. But look, you’re not that unique and you’re facing a VERY LARGE potential pool of book readers. (If I had a thousand brothers, say, and I gave each one the book on Dinos, it’s guaranteed that a few – maybe even a hundred – would have loved it.) You’re NOT that unique. So write for the people you know best – those a lot like yourself. And chances are you’ll be rewarded. Doubly, because you’ll be writing for enough people to make you rich, and because you’ll write what you want to.
And please don’t come back and say “but what about the books written in crayon and drool?” What, you think that doesn’t get published now? I remember a bestseller in the eighties that was bought even though it came to the publisher written in crayon on wrapping paper, and yes, I read it, there must have been drool on the edges, and probably obscene drawings. Publisher thought it was “refreshing.”
There is no OBJECTIVE standard for what’s crap in literature. If you think there is, you bought what they sold you in lit classes. And it wasn’t worth what you paid for it.
The standard for good is “what sells” in ANY form of entertainment. Might not be to your taste, but clearly it entertains other people. So, what business is it of yours.
And as for the famed tsunami, having experienced “Mega bookstore and not a book to buy” many, many times, I tell you “I’ve seen the tsunami, and it’s traditionally published.” Doubtless it will be indie published, too, as far as I’m concerned. But I’ll just hie my way among it, picking up from the muck those things that are diamonds to me. Now, you shut up and do likewise.
According To Hoyt 
What there’s no objective standard for “good stuff” or “junk stuff”????? [Wink]
Seriously, from what I’ve seen on-line, there have been plenty of arguments about “objective standards” for what’s good SF (or other fiction).
I’ve had to remember the phrase “Your milage may vary” (YMMV) because it’s “not fun” listening to people “bash stuff” I’ve enjoyed.
Mind you, there is fiction that I wonder “who in their right minds can enjoy that” but I know that apparently it sells.
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I long ago figgered out that the world of reading (and much else) divides into two categories: 1) crap I like 2) crap. The only difference being idiosyncratic. That is why I have been wont to mutter: there’s no accounting for taste, especially other people’s lack thereof.
People choose books for a variety of reasons. For many folks the primary reason is not whether they will enjoy reading that book, it is what folks seeing you reading that book will think of you when they see you reading that book. Books, among other things, are great conversation starters
“Best-selling” means that I am less likely to look the dork reading this book on the beach, and more likely to strike up conversations with random moderately attractive potential sexual partners (okay – that aspect is much less critical since I engaged Beloved Spouse.) E-books don’t display covers and allow you to read whatever you fancy with out the neighbors sidling away (think: “plain brown wrapper”.) This is also why E-readers make great gifts for readers and why price-point for them is critical.
Favorable reviews serve to justify certain readings: “the Times gave it two thumbs up” is shorthand for “I am not a dangerous lunatic in spite of what the dust jacket on my book suggests, and there is no need for you to place yourself between your children and me.”
It is important to recognize your own tastes in relation to the majority. I once ruminated that no restaurant which served food according to my taste preferences was likely to remain in business very long — I eat “Thai-hot” and have to work to persuade the guy assembling my burritto that I really really do want that second hand-full of fresh chopped hot pepper. But I am an outlier and it is unreasonable for me to expect restaurants to routinely serve stuff that I will consider hot. Similarly, books I will like are probably NOT going to be found on best-seller lists. Here is where author loyalty enters: certain authors having demonstrated they serve their work spiced to my preferences are on my “must buy” list and have to work hard to get off of it.
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Yes, but now posit that anyone can get food from any restaurant in the world. They just invented, say, a gadget that allows you to teleport food to one’s computer (OMG, some of us would never get away from the desk.)
That restaurant you like? Might not be a bestseller in the sense that it outsells the others, but will those people be making money hand over fist? Oh, my, yes. Well, that’s where we are with books. And I’ll admit my foray into romance reading has been facilitated by ebooks. I started exploring it when I found that about half my fans for DST are romance readers, not SF readers, primarily. I wanted to see what this field was like, if I was attracting its devotees. BUT I might never have done it, if required to troll about the countryside with pictures of bursting stays and hot males, all of it in compromising compromise. People DO look at you like you’re an idiot when you’re reading a romance, particularly a regency romance. I know this because I’ve been on a tear through used romances — buy them at $1 a piece at thrift store. Trade them four for one at used book store. When they disappear, return to thrift store. Lather, rinse, repeat. They are what I read when I’m not awake enough to read mysteries or sf. Regencies in particular, once you know the tropes, can be appreciated on their own terms WITHOUT worrying about world building. And most of them — just threw one against the wall that is the exception. In fact, it’s p*ssed me so much I might make an exception and do a fisking — don’t have political message beyond the obligatory female liberation for a paragraph or two. HOWEVER visiting handymen, neighbors, in summer when I read on the stoop, etc, immediately treat me like I”m mentally handicapped when reading them. (Yes, they’re popcorn books. Yes, they have tropes. But you know, a lot of them are as good or better — as far as well realized characters and interest in these characters’ lives — as many sf and mystery books, and almost all are better than the cr*p they make my kids read in school.) BUT when we go on the plane, if I’m in the mood for a romance, I read it on my kindle. (And those of you who are fans of are Pride and Prejudice in the A & E version will know what I mean when I add with glee “Lady Catherine will NEVER know.”)
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Have you noticed the upsurge in Geek culture? And all the infinite varieties of geek? Whovians, Trekkers, Star Wars, Anime, MLP, etc? It’s endless.
It turns out that we like the things we like and we are experiencing something of a preference cascade right now. When people are allowed to choose for themselves, they choose for themselves strangely enough.
I used to think, as a visual historian, that the current conceptual gimmicky trend in elite art would change and that the pendulum would swing back to naturalism eventually. Postmodernism couldn’t go on forever. It’s deadly boring anyway. I thought naturalism and classicism would come roaring back. I no longer believe that. In fact I think the pendulum has been sawed off and crashed to the floor, broken into a thousand pieces and that they came to life and started wriggling for all the cracks in the room. There is more art and more variety than ever before and many of the artists are doing just fine without the approval or money of the upper east side crowd or their accomplices in academia and couldn’t care less. Heck, they don’t even know who they are and respond with a “Steven Levine Who?” when you ask!
The old paradigms haven’t just crashed and burned and been replaced; the whole notion of “paradigms” themselves has been destroyed. We don’t even have new metaphors for the new situation as my pendulum thing above demonstrates. It’s brand new.
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“Yes, but now posit that anyone can get food from any restaurant in the world. They just invented, say, a gadget that allows you to teleport food to one’s computer (OMG, some of us would never get away from the desk.)”
We could get almost all the way to that with current tech. Take a fridge, somewhere between dorm and small appartment sized but with a microwave between the top and bottom compartments. Fill one with frozen pizza and TV dinner; the second with mountain dew.
Then replace your standard wheelie chair base with a toilet using flexible plumbing connections; a foot of freedom in any direction from the center should be good enough. Replace the standard ornamental seat cover with high grade chair padding. The only problem I see with this is that unless they put the seat down after doing their business guys would find thier butts falling asleep in short order. This could be a deal breaker for half the potential market. :-/
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“Popcorn books”? Sounds like what my household calls chewing gum for the eyes: all the reading of actual novels but no nutritional value. Of course, as they are at least somewhat ingested the more apt analog might be eye gummi bears?
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For anyone into “hot” and spicy food, you really should try Liberian.
If Mexican is a foot off the floor, and Thai is at about 20 ft, on that same scale, Liberian is beyond the orbit of the moon.
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I shouldn’t read when I’m still asleep. I thought you said “Librarian” and had an image of a furious orangutang pummeling you and Sarah into submission.
Wayne
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To quote Beloved Spouse’s comment upon hearing this read:
According to Kate Paulk’s ConVent, out from Naked Reader, Librarian is Dave Freer’s alter ego in that universe. :) Ah, yes, and cookies if you find out WHO my alter ego is… :-P (Not hard, actually.)
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LOL, I could so see you as Nanny Ogg…. I do so want to grow up to be her.
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Brilliant comment RES.
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Two gift-related thoughts occur.
One, I wonder whether gift-giving is a thing that some cultures are better at than others. Japanese, for example, consider the wrapping and presentation of a gift as at least as important as choosing the gift. Anthropologists recognize that gift exchange serves significant cultural purposes far beyond the value of the gift given.
Second, I vaguely recall a character or characters with a knack for gift-giving. Perhaps Galadriel is the model for this, perhaps elsewhere – who knows, I may have even thought of it myself. I am thinking of a person who is able to give a gift that seems perfectly useless: Oh, a ball of string. How … lovely. Of course, the recipient later finds himself dropped into the middle of a labyrinth … Yeah, easy for a writer to retcon such devices, but potentially amusing, esp. once the reader is in on the gag and is playing along trying to figure out how any given gift will prove useful.
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So Analog’s ‘sf for geeks’? I guess that explains why when I started reading magazines on the kindle after having not read them for a couple of decades analog had about an 80% hit rate for me, and asimovs was sufficiently low that after a year I canceled it. Recently added F&SF, and their hit rate is fairly close to analog for me after 2 issues.
The whole ‘following trends’ thing actually drove me away from SF reading i the early 90s – everything was cyberpunk wannabe, and most of it was really, really bad to me, and I assume to anyone who knew much of anything about technology. I ended up switching almost overnight from reading SF, to reading the backlist of epic fantasy that I hadn’t read yet. It wasn’t until I discovered the Baen free library during a period of unemployment during the early oughts that I actually got back to reading it.
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YES on the nineties. One thing that puzzled people is why techies read fantasy. I know why. Because SF made them want to kick things.
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Kick? You mean use thermonuclear weapons on.
Wayne
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I want to say something smart comparing publishing to markets in general where everyone believes they can control the output but they really can’t. I want to say that the new system is organic and unfettered when compared to the top down approach of the publishing cartel while throwing in a reference to Hayek’s “pretense of knowledge” as well, but I’m not that clever.
Instead, let’s just say objections to the “Tsunami of crap” are as rational as the objections to a truly free market. It’s not the Tsunami of crap they fear. They are already up to their hip waders in raw sewage, it’s the tsunami of freedom.
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Travis,
your yet weirder icon notwithstanding (yes, I’m picking on you! Moose, now?) I’m cheering your sentiment.
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Thanks!
Oh, and on the icon. My brother ran his scooter into an overstuffed chair that was bizarrely parked in the middle of the road late at night. Short trip to the ER. He’s fine. The scooter is not so lucky. So I had to photoshop the above sign into the Google Street View for his benefit.
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oh. It’s a chair. Um… you’re an artist, right?
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Art historian…actually.
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Sapient dinos, eh? I’m guessing you read Far-seer and sequels? ( http://www.lunch.com/Reviews/d/Farseer_Trilogy_by_Robert_J_Sawyer-1666164.html if you didn’t.)
Me, I’m a sucker for non-human viewpoint characters in general…
But the more typos/grammaros in a work, the better the plot has to be at pushing my buttons for me to keep reading, and the more price-sensitive I become.
PS: Have you seen Pride, Prejudice, and World of Warcraft? It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single tank in possession of a good GearScore, must be in want of a raid team. Mind, if you don’t play MMORPGs (probably wise), it may not make much sense.
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My wife is trying to get me to write a Dino-version of Watership Down. Been doing sketches on it. Not sapient dinos exactly, at least not anymore than bunnies, but a way to try to think how these animals might think, what their gods would be like, etc.
Trying to get into the head of a long extinct animal and try to create a believable world for them has been pretty hard.
She had only one condition: NO extinction/survival stories. Dinos ruled the earth for 300 million years yet we only concentrate on the last part for some reason.
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When you put the sketches up, give me the link. In another universe, I’m probably digging up dinos…
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http://www.amazon.com/Raptor-Red-Robert-T-Bakker/dp/0553575619/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1323793816&sr=1-1
Read this when it first came out. It’s written in the style of wild horse books.
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If I may, there is a point that might be missing in the discussion. Book publishing is (at least theoretically) a for-profit business. They (the publishers) have the goal of making the most amount of money possible from the least amount of investment. One of their big problems with this model (and there are many) is that the individuals who work for publishers are as good at predicting the market as anyone else is. Which is to say, not at all. So they are stuck in a difficult position; they need to invest in stories, but they haven’t a clue as to which ones will offer a good ROI, and which ones will not.
Ah, but you see they do have a little help from market statistics. There are measurable trends in the book market which if carefully exploited can, if not guarantee success, can at least minimize failure. (And no, I do not even want to begin to discuss whether publishers cause these trends, or they are reacting to them. From the publishers POV, it doesn’t matter).
Hence the wonderful “Push” list. This is not a strategy for success, it is a strategy to minimize risk. Frankly its not a bad strategy in terms of profit/loss, its just not a good way to cover every base (and it happens to treat authors like crap). Book plots randomly pulled from a hat might be equally successful in terms of finding “best sellers”, but this strategy would also offer more risk. And all large businesses spend most of their time trying to minimize risk.
The movie industry does the same thing. This is why you see the same actors used over and over (and why they get paid in monopoly money) on movies which cost a lot to make, and why you see all the “interesting” risky stuff being done on movies with little or no budget. Money is risk adverse, which makes it often at odds with us creative types who actually “need” risk to provide sufficient dramatic tension.
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Actually it goes further than that. Yeah, they have “statistics” but none of them GETS it. Comparing my book to say George RR Martin’s would only make sense if they were pushing my books to the same extent, even before the mini-series. Seriously, cover, placement, etc. my first book wasn’t even on most shelves. People who were looking for it — I was young and advertised, like an idiot — couldn’t find it. So saying “we printed 8 k and sold 5k doesn’t tell you anything. They’d need laydown. They’d need cover. They’d need the fact that the cover doesn’t say “fiction” and therefore when it was shelved it was MISSHELVED everywhere from biography to art. Statistics as they’re using them aren’t even d*mn lies, much less a strategy to minimize risk. They’re most a strategy to justify what they WANT to do, anyway, and reflect no market known to man.
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This sounds more like garden variety incompetence that any thing else. I see this kind of thing a lot in my in work. For instance, all day today I’ll be working on art for a television show which was supposed to go out to the printer last Friday. I doubt it will get approved by this Friday. Even though the entire cause of the delay is the client’s inability to manage their work flow, I guarantee you come this Friday they are going to ask if it is too late to get it to the printer. Two months of work, hundreds of emails starting with, “Uh, guys. Your deadline is approaching…” and they still don’t get it.
And don’t get me started on how they approve the art, and what art they pick. An old industry joke goes like this: In a room full of people, how do you know you’re taking to the client? A: Because they will be the one who consistently picks the worst art every time.
Probably the worst thing about incompetence is when it is coupled with youthful arrogance. And by youthful arrogance I don’t mean you have to be young. We know for a fact that no one knows which novel will sell, and which one will not. Heck, the industry is designed to deal exactly with this problem. That’s why they produce far more books than will sell in any given year. They intentionally saturate the market in hopes that something will stick. (which is why your publisher doesn’t want more than one novel from you, unless you are a Big Name Author) But the people who work for publishers also want to keep their jobs so they rationalize their decisions all based on hindsight. Edit 100 novels, get them printed, and if one of them sells well then you are a “prophet”. No one asks about the other 99 novels that missed. What’s the saying, “even a stopped watch is right twice a day.” Well if you play the numbers game long enough, even if you are grossly incompetent, you’re bound to get a hit. So we get editors who think they “know” which novel is going to be the next big hit based solely upon their shotgun approach to sales.
Oh, Bog.
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Try garden variety incompetence squared to the cube of five thousand and you’ll be close.
Wayne
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Of course, sometimes one sees an item and knows the only possible barrier to its being a perfect gift is that the intended recipient might buy it themselves, before the gift can be presented, e.g.:
I’d say OMG, got to have it, but short of putting it on wishlist on Amazon, doubt it will happen this year. I just blew my book budget on books about WWI and just before, just after, and I’m not even sure WHY. I just feel a need to read them. (Sigh. I’m sad.) Ah well, it will come. Fortunately books don’t spoil. Which reminds me, I should take a break from edits and go surf on over to Amazon and download free history books, if they have any. That way I can read them during the week’s vacation I always (well, last year and this year) take between xmas and new year’s.
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You do write them off, right?
My book habit is, well, large. Although it might be small by the standards here. But every book, movie, DVD, CD, is a write off. So while I pay, I don’t necessarily pay 100% the value, when it all gets worked out.
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