Tag: writing

POLL: Who is the Greatest Living SF Writer?

  1. Larry Niven, 222 votes, 21 percent
  2. Neal Stephenson, 193 votes, 18 percent
  3. Jerry Pournelle, 172 votes, 16 percent
  4. Orson Scott Card, 167 votes, 16 percent
  5. Gene Wolfe, 92 votes, 9 percent
  6. John C. Wright, 63 votes, 6 percent
  7. Robert Silverberg, 61 votes, 6 percent
  8. Lois McMaster Bujold, 60 votes, 6 percent
  9. China Mieville, 32 votes, 3 percent
  10. Michael Flynn, 12 votes, 1 percent

1,075 votes total. Larry Niven is the winner.

Congratulations to Larry Niven, who was voted the Greatest Living SF Writer by more than half as many people who vote for the Hugo awards and more than vote for the Nebulas. I’m a little shocked that China Mieville garnered so few votes, as I thought he was a fairly serious candidate; in retrospect, William Gibson should have been on the list rather than Michael Flynn.

I was somewhat bewildered by some of the writers suggested by people who missed out on the original discussion. David Weber? He is certainly a best-selling author and his books are indubitably entertaining but greatness is not measured in Mary Sues. Connie Willis? Well, she’s won a lot of awards, but literally zero people even brought her up in the nominations. Kim Stanley Robinson? A one-trick pony and the trick grew old several books ago, to say nothing of the fact that no one even mentioned him.

It was a surprising credible showing by Lois McMaster Bujold and somewhat disappointing by Robert Silverberg. I think Silverberg and Wolfe are probably not read as much by my generation and the following one. Card and Wright were about where I expected them to be; I wouldn’t be surprised if they switched places in another ten years. And it showed that Neal Stephenson is the best of the coming generation of SF elders.

The Greatest Living SF Author

Philip K. Dick is dead, alas. As are Frank Herbert and Isaac Asimov. (And, apparently, Arthur C. Clarke.) So, who would you nominate for a poll on this subject? Here are my nominees, in no particular order:

Neal Stephenson
China Mieville
John C. Wright

Orson Scott Card looked like a contender early on, but he did his best work first, in my opinion. Good, to be sure, but not great. Charles Stross has declined from his breathtaking Accelerando days; I enjoy his Laundry novels but while they are fun, they are not the stuff from which greatness is made. Lois Bujold is very good, but not on the level of the three men listed above. Once the Fourth of the original Big Three, Arthur C. Clarke is overrated and hasn’t written anything worth reading in years, presumably because he is still dead. William Gibson isn’t so much in the limelight these days, but he continues to write interesting books. Tanith Lee is a fabulous stylist, but she has faded from the Secret Books of Paradys days and she wrote fantasy, not science fiction, anyhow.

Perhaps the New Heinlein, Mr. John Scalzi? A mere jest, in more ways than one. Anyhow, if we can narrow the list to 10, then I will post a poll tomorrow and we can sort out everyone’s opinion on the matter. If you have a potential nominee, please make the case here.

Three possible nominees from three recognizable authors who shall remain nameless unless they wish to identify themselves: Gene Wolfe, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle. A fourth author seconds the nominations for Niven and Pournelle, and, (rather dubiously in my opinion), throws David Weber’s name into the hat. I say this as one who has recently revisited the Honorverse.

A model comparison

A few weeks ago, I pointed out how the former president of the SFWA declared that no-advance deals were “wrong”, “a Shitty Deal”, and possibly “worse than no deal at all”. Other traditionally published writers have even described them as “unethical”.  The former president also asserted: “Advances are typically all authors make from a book.” This is important to keep in mind when one considers what SFWA presently considers to be a professional payment as per its membership requirements.

  1. Word rate: $0.05 per word, increasing to $0.06 later this year
  2. One Paid Sale of a prose fiction book for which the author has been paid $2000 or more.

As it happens, Castalia House had just released two books, one by Mr. Kratman and one by me, which allows us to compare the real world results of the traditional professional model and the no-advance model which various authors have criticized so vociferously. Mr. Kratman has generously permitted us to use his book as a general example. Let’s look at the word rate model first.

1) At 20,000 words, Big Boys Don’t Cry would have commanded a flat-fee payment of $1,000.00.  Depending upon the publisher and the publication, Mr. Kratman would have received the payment between two and eight weeks from the time he delivered the manuscript. He delivered the manuscript on February 21st, so he would have received $1,000 sometime between 1 March and 12 April. He would not have received anything more than that.

2) If he received an advance of $2,500, that would have been against a royalty of 25 percent. He would have received $1,250 about a month after signing, then another $1,250 sometime between 21 March and 21 November 21. (Having been signed to Pocket Books, I am well aware that the check is seldom delivered promptly upon delivery and approval of the manuscript.) This is actually a conservative estimate, as increasingly payments are being divided into three parts, signing, delivery, and publication.

The performance of Mr. Kratman’s book is spelled out in comparison to the traditional model on the Castalia House blog. Due to the speed with which Castalia publishes and pays royalties, Mr. Kratman can expect to receive his first payment by 18 March, 23 days after publication. And he can also reasonably expect to receive more than $2,500 in royalties several weeks BEFORE he would have been likely to receive the second part of a theoretical “advance payment”. Moreover, once the $2,500 figure has been surpassed, he will continue receiving TWICE the royalties he would have under the traditional model.

Now, publishers are not stupid. They will not continue to publish authors who regularly underperform their advances. So, logic dictates that the only advantage of advance payments is to provide a small measure of very short-term security to authors who are unsure of their ability to sell their books and are willing to give away half their future earnings in exchange for that security. Nor have book advances been the historical norm, as the New York Times noted in 2009.

“In the old days,” the novelist Henry Bech, John Updike’s fictional alter ego, once said, “a respectable author never asked for an advance; that was strictly for the no-talents starving down in the Village.”

Both math and history make it obvious. Advances are for no-talents and the no-advance model is materially beneficial to the author. So, if you are an talented author who is confident in his ability to sell books and therefore interested in working with Castalia, have a look at our Concepts page, as there are certain books we would like to publish that none of our current authors are writing.

UPDATE: Since we have had a few inquiries, please note the following submission requirements for Concept-based submissions: “While we normally require completed drafts for submissions, in the case
of Castalia Concept-based submissions, we are willing to review
five-chapter novel submissions so long as they are accompanied by a
complete and detailed outline of the book or series. Novella submissions should still consist
of complete drafts.”

A theory of mediocrity

Sarah Hoyt ties the ongoing series of SF/F debacles to the coddling of the Millennials:

Anyway – the most important influx of these writers, who got doors thrown open for them because they were the right age/gender/upbringing – most of whom were very young and female – was about ten years ago.  Young women just out of college were getting huge offers for books that were what young women just out of college and with no life experience would write (and no, I’m not committing the error above.  This wave of what I call “red carpet acceptances” was targeted at young, just out of college and parroting the right “truths” – no life experience or rational thought wanted, or, in fact, accepted.) – very derivative, with a lot of sex and, in mystery, a lot of shoe and fashion shopping.  (I read Manolo shoe blogger, but look, there are limits to how much I care about shoes.)

Which brings us to now.  These young people, often very protected, were taken in and told they were the next best thing.  Not because of what they did, but because of what they WERE.  Success was their right and inevitable.  Like the poor kid who wrote the essay I linked, they were told they were so smart and brave and stuff for exactly parroting what they’d been taught.  And by and large – with a couple of exceptions – their stuff didn’t sell all that well, though they’ve won awards and been fetted and told how wonderfulglittery they are.

And even the ones who were successful are now shaky, because all they ever did was enter into traditional publishing and be massively supported and do fairly well within that framework.

I don’t even know if the smartest ones know all the breaks they got.  I doubt it.  First of all, because in publishing this stuff is all hidden and it’s hard to realize how much support you had, or even that other people didn’t get it.  (Unless you don’t get it, in which case you start wondering how the process broke down, then find out this is standard.)   Second because it’s human to take credit for our own success, no matter how helped.

So, you see, in their eyes, they think everyone else got this sort of magic carpet ride.

I think this may be a factor, but I think a more important one is the ideological element. As Tom Kratman and others have observed, leftist infiltrators always make a priority of bringing more of their own kind into an organization with the aim of taking it over. Talent and performance are tertiary at best, as both ideological correctness and “diversity” are deemed more important.

Add onto this the intense discomfort that the mediocre have when forced to compare themselves with their superiors and it is only a matter of time before an infiltrated organization is filled with soft, nasty, small-minded and petty mediocrities.

For illustrative purposes, compare John Campbell with Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Or contrast Louis L’Amour with John Scalzi. One doesn’t even need to read a single word, simply looking at pictures of the two individuals being compared is enough to tell you what sort of fiction they are going to publish and write.

The mediocrities brought in the clueless young women because they were the only sort of writers around whom they felt comfortable. Men writing masculine tales of technological competence and bravery? That not only made them feel uncomfortable and inferior, it wasn’t something to which they could even understand, let alone relate.

Of orcs and orc talk

John C. Wright points out that the orcs, aka the Insect Army, really mean what they say:

Upon hearing the orcs talking in their orc-talk about ruining the writing field, making the writing field worse, driving good books away and shoving bad books into their shelf space in the name of fair play, and, in short, talking about heaping the writing field high with warm filth and stinking ordure, flies and rivulets and urine,  the sane people react with a blankness of mind akin to shutting one’s eyes at too great a shock. We cannot believe the orcs are serious. We assume they cannot mean that.

You want J.K. Rowlings, the most celebrated writer of our age, to write LESS? The mind reels, we think the orcs do not mean it, we do nothing to shut them down or shut them up, and then the orcs carry out their program, while we scratch our heads, puzzled that no one told us that this was exactly what they meant all alone.

But it is what they mean.

Yes, dear reader, the orcs mean exactly that. They want less talent, less books you like, and more dross and spit and entrails.

It’s hard for those who aren’t pigs to understand that pigs really do enjoy rolling around in the fetid muck. And it’s hard for those who aren’t orcs to understand that orcs really want to destroy human literature and replace it with their own obscene, subhuman schlock. But it’s true. They see themselves in a fundamentally different way than those of us who consider ourselves to be creatures of God, blessed with souls and created for a higher purpose than the momentary gratification of our animal instincts. They are the self-appointed wicked, the haters of God and the good, and the enemies of every noble virtue. They revile the beautiful, they elevate the ugly, they glory in desecration, and they constantly seek to drag others down to their level.

It is illustrative to compare the protagonist Machine in Tom Kratman’s work to the protagonist Man in John Scalzi’s best-known work. Which character better demonstrates the concepts of conscience and honor and sacrifice? Which character speaks more truly of the realities of the human condition?  And which is the human literature and which is the mere grunting of orcs?

Publisher’s Weekly on the indie revolt

It’s not looking good for the traditional publishing industry:

For decades, aspiring authors were taught to bow before the altar of Big Publishing. Writers were taught that publishers alone possessed the wisdom to determine if a writer deserved passage through the pearly gates of author heaven. Writers were taught that publishers had an inalienable right to this power, and that this power was for the common good of readers. They were taught rejection made them stronger. They were taught that without a publisher’s blessing, they were a failed writer.

And it was true. Without a publisher, the writer was doomed to failure, because without a publisher the writer couldn’t reach readers. Six years ago publishers controlled the three essential legs of the professional publishing stool: the printing press, the access to retail distribution, and the knowledge of professional publishing best practices. It was a print-centric world where e-books were but an inconsequential glimmer in the eyes of a few delusional hippies, me included. A writer could self-publish in print, but without retail distribution these writers were destined to fill their garages with unsold printed books, all the while lining the pockets of vanity presses who exploited their dreams of authorship….

Today, the myth of traditional publishing is unraveling. The stigma of traditional publishing is on the rise.

The author community is growing increasingly disenchanted by Big Publishing’s hard line on 25% net e-book royalties, high e-book prices, slow payouts, and insistence on DRM copy protection. The recent news of major publishers touting record e-book-powered earnings only adds insult to authors’ perceived injury.

Authors are also disappointed by Big Publishing’s misguided foray into vanity publishing with Pearson/Penguin’s 2012 acquisition of Author Solutions, a company known for selling over-priced publishing packages to unsuspecting writers. Multiple publishers have formed sock puppet imprints powered by ASI: Simon & Schuster’s Archway, Penguin Random House’s Partridge Publishing in India, HarperCollins’ Westbow, Hay House’s Balboa Press, Writer’s Digests’ Abbott Press, and Harlequin’s Dellarte Press. These deals with the devil confirmed the worst fears held by indie authors who already questioned if publishers viewed writers as partners or as chattel.

Now, one could try to dismiss this because it is written by Mark Coker, who is betting big time on the indie publishing revolution with Smashwords. (Full disclosure, five of my books are available there.) But aside from the fact that he is in an ideal position to see what is taking place and sharp enough to have anticipated events, the significant fact is that Publisher’s Weekly obviously sees the writing on the wall.

The publication of this piece indicates that they have no intention of going down with the traditional publishing ship. Now, there is still a need for publishers; having been through all the headaches of getting set up for distribution, finding the right people with whom to work, and so forth, I would estimate that at least two-thirds of the traditionally published will have zero desire to become self-publishers if they can get a fair deal from independent publishers.

But publishers can’t continue to grab up to 93 percent of the revenue any longer. Publishers can’t live on the fat overhead they have traditionally demanded at the expense of the writers who were never presented with the choice between much smaller advances and significantly larger royalties. As Coker writes: “The solution is for publishers to realize that they are service providers to authors.”

That’s exactly what we’re doing at CH. We provide editing, superior covers, multiple foreign language editions within weeks of first publication, a boosted signal, reasonable rights-reversion terms, and the author receives an equal share of the royalties at worst. We know what authors want and need because we share their concerns and our business model is built on partnering with them, not systematically exploiting them.

An effluvious bouquet

I have to admit, I’ve never heard of an entire movie devoted to fart-sniffing before. I can’t confess to harboring any interest in it myself, but I’m sure there are some fetish freaks that should find this “biopic” to be fascinating, if not outright porn:

 The actor Jason Segel will play David Foster Wallace in a forthcoming biopic of the author entitled The End of the Tour. Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, was one of the most talented writers of his generation. The film will be based on an article in Rolling Stone in which journalist David Lipsky (to be played by Jesse Eisenberg) followed Foster Wallace on his book tour round America promoting Infinite Jest, his 1,100-page novel from 1996.

Lipsky’s account was turned into a book in 2010 entitled Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: a Road Trip With David Foster Wallace. The film is scripted by Pulitzer-winning playwright Donald Margulies, and the director is James Ponsoldt.

Actually, David Foster Wallace wasn’t one of the most talented writers of my generation. He was one of the most promising writers of it. He was one of the most ballyhooed writers of it. He was one of the most talked-about writers of it. But he never actually realized any of that promise, and never managed to produce anything more than an inferior John Irving novel writ larger and less coherent.

I am absolutely convinced that the fart-sniffers of New York literary society bear more than a little responsibility for Wallace’s suicide. If they hadn’t put him on such a pedestal so early and undeservedly, he might not have felt like such a failure. Because he was a failure, a complete failure, despite writing a big novel that didn’t completely suck. But it also wasn’t the masterpiece it was expected to be, it wasn’t the masterpiece that some still pretend it to be, and Wallace knew that better than anyone.

Was Robert Heinlein ripped off?

By his traditional publishers, I mean to say. We already know beyond any shadow of a doubt that he was ripped off by the Bernie Madoff of science fiction. At Castalia House, a review of the traditional publishing model, based in part on records from the Heinlein estate, shows that an author with a traditional publisher has to sell at least 12.5 times more copies just to break even with the shared risk/reward independent publisher.

By the way, his advance from Putnam for Stranger in a Strange Land? $3,000. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
UPDATE: I think I figured out what happened. In March 1967, Putnam sold the exclusive
paperback rights to Berkeley for $1. This permitted Putnam to reduce the
royalties that came in from Berkeley with Heinlein. As it happened,
Putnam had bought Berkeley two years before.

So, by selling Heinlein’s paperback rights to themselves for $1, they managed to cut his royalty from 12 percent to 6 percent. An examination of the Berkeley reports and a comparison of them with the pricing of their books over the years shows that from 1968 to 1978, Berkeley sold 2,281,668 paperbacks for $3,234,147.40 in retail revenue. Heinlein received  $223,756.29 in royalties for a royalty rate of 6.9 percent. On a contract that called for him to receive 15 percent for sales over 10,000 units.

Traditional publishing for the win! Unless, of course, you’re the author.

Mailvox: compare and contrast

  1. Josh observed: “It looks to me like the prestige of being published by a traditional
    publisher is a commodity paid for by allowing them to rape you on the
    royalties.”
  2. McRapey defended Tor: “I actually like my publishers, and they add value to my work and don’t rip me off in the process. Please don’t consider them evil (at least in their involvement with me), or try to cut them out of the pay loop. Thank you.”
  3. Jerry Pournelle cited history: “As to conceding 30% to Amazon, I’m damned happy to do it, since publishers take 90%, and back in the bad old days hardbound publishers got 50% of the 5% we got from paperbacks as well. And tried to grab half the movie rights.”

I suggest a look at the facts are in order. Here are the specific terms from a Big Five publisher on a one-book contract offer with a $40,000 advance. Except for the retension of multimedia rights and the unusually high ebook royalties I negotiated, the terms are very similar to contracts with both larger and smaller advances from fellow Big Five publishers.

  • full term of copyright
  • Hardcover: 10 percent of catalog retail price on first 10,000 copies, 12.5 percent on the next 5,000 copies, and 15 percent on 15,000+ copies.
  • Trade Paperback: 6 percent of catalog retail price on the first 20,000 copies and 7.5 percent on 20,000+ copies.
  • Mass Market Paperback: 9 percent on first 150,000 copies and 10 percent on 150,000+.
  • Ebook: 50 percent of revenues received.(1)
  • Foreign language: 25 percent of proceeds from foreign publisher. Which, if similar to these terms, means 2.5 percent on hardcover and 6.25 percent on ebook.
  • All multimedia rights to games, films, and so forth were retained by the author.(2)

Now, keep in mind that this was considerably better than the boilerplate (see points 1 and 2 below). And there are certainly some authors who are able to command better terms than that, Hugh Howey being the prime example of an ideal model to follow. But before you dismiss me as someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about or blithely accepts bad contracts, how many authors do you know receive bigger advances than 8x the median SF first novel advance in 2005, (and I’ve heard they’re down to around $3,000 now, in which case 13.3x), while not giving up any film or game rights and receiving twice the standard ebook royalty?

Keep in mind that Jerry and I are not the horror stories. We’re simply pointing out how bad traditional publishing contracts have been even though we are both relative success stories! Bruce Bethke, on the other hand, wasn’t so fortunate. Consider the fate of Cyberpunk: “Initially written as a series of short stories in 1980, the novel was purchased by a publisher via an exclusive contract which
forbade Bethke to sell the novel to any other publisher. The publisher
decided not to release the novel, causing several years of legal battles
over the rights to the book.”

So, while Tor may not be ripping off McRapey, who happily accepts making less money per unit in return for primary author status at the largest SF publisher, they are most certainly taking advantage of their lesser auhors. Compare who the names of the writers they published 10-15 years ago to the names being published now. What you will see, and what you will see if you look at any major publisher’s list of authors published over time is a regular new author churn, with low-cost authors providing 1-3 new books before being dropped and replaced when they fail to achieve sufficient sales velocity. It’s a constant churning process, and sometimes the publisher gets it wrong, such as when Pocket Books dropped Dan Brown prior to him writing The Da Vinci Code, which is a sequel to the Pocket-published Angels and Demons.

As one of the people involved in that decision once told me: “Nobody knows what they’re doing in this industry. We act like we do, but we really don’t.”

For the most part, publishers don’t really care who makes it and who doesn’t, because there are always new replacement writers to pour into the publishing mill. And there is nothing wrong with this process at face value, after all, publishers can’t afford to keep publishing authors who don’t sell in sufficient numbers. The problem is that the winners and losers are, to a large part, predetermined by the gatekeepers within the publishing house due to print runs and decisions to reprint books that have sold through their print runs or not. In my experience, these decisions are seldom based in ideology or malice, but are mostly rooted in happenstance and bureaucratic inertia.

Also, I should correct a previous statement. John Scalzi did not denigrate “self-publishers” when he went on his anti-Random House rampage in his swan song as SFWA president. He explicitly denigrated independent publishers operating on the no-advances model.

So why are so many eBook-only publishers attempting to run with the “no advances” business model? If I had to guess, I would say because many of these then-erstwhile publishers assumed that publishing electronically had a low financial threshold of entry (not true, if you’re serious about it) and they fancied being publishers, so they started their businesses undercapitalized, and are now currently in the process of passing the consequences of that undercapitalization unto the authors they would like to work with. Alternately, as appears to be the case with Random House, they’re looking for a way to pass as much of the initial cost of publishing onto the author as possible, and one of the best ways to bring down those initial costs is to avoid paying the author anything up front. Both of these are bad business models, although one is more maliciously so, and both are to be avoided. Just because someone has stupidly or maliciously planned their business, doesn’t mean you’re obliged to sign a contract with them.

There is nothing stupid or malicious about a shared risk/shared reward model. Only a rabbit who is afraid of risk could possibly suggest that there is. I leave it to the reader to compare the royalty terms of the traditional publishers shown above to the 25 to 65 percent royalties on revenues received offered by independent publishers utilizing the “no advances” shared-risk model, and to decide whose business model is disadvantageous to the author and which sort of contracts are therefore best avoided.

(1) With the Big Five these are now a standard 25 percent.
(2) I have a copy of the contract with the boilerplate struck out. They actually tried to grab 100 percent of the net proceeds from British Commonwealth rights, foreign language translation rights, motion picture and television rights, and commercial merchandising rights.

Question

I find it a little hard to summon any massive outrage on this basis:

The last time I blogged about the Author Solutions subsidiary iUniverse, I highlighted a typical marketing move. Just before Christmas last year, iUniverse mailed their existing customers with a very special “deal” where they offered to turn their print books into e-books and upload them to the various retailers for free. The catch was that customers would then have to fork over 50% of their royalties from every single sale to iUniverse. Needless to say, formatting and uploading is a trivial task. For those unable to do it themselves, that service can be purchased for a nominal up-front fee, leaving a writer’s royalties intact.

50 percent of their sales? Hmmm. Looking back at my original Simon and Schuster contract, it appears that they took 93 percent of my sales in mass market paperback. While I don’t use any Author Solutions services and never have, I fail to see how their overpriced services are any more abusive than the way conventional publishers have been treating the vast majority of their authors for decades.

Most of the publishing industry is set up specifically to exploit writers. That’s the stone cold reality. Castalia House isn’t, but then, as the shambling shoggoths will readily testify, we are extremists very far outside the pale of the mainstream publishing industry.