Tag: writing

Pink SF vs Blue SF

A few people have asked me what I mean by differentiating between Pink SF and Blue SF.  Pink SF is the dominant form of science fiction today. Or rather, more properly, the currently dominant form of SyFy. It is necrobestial love triangles. It is using the superficial trappings of science fiction or fantasy or war fiction to tell exactly the same sort of goopy, narcissistic female-oriented story that has already been told in ten thousand Harlequin novels and children’s tales and Hollywood comeuppance fantasies.

Pink SF primarily concerns a) choosing between two lovers, b) being true to yourself, or c) enacting ex post facto revenge upon the badthinkers and meanies who made the author feel bad about herself at school. Pink SF is about feelings rather than ideas or actions.

Pink SF is an invasion. Pink SF is a cancer. Pink SF is a parasitical perversion. Pink SF is the little death that kills every literary subgenre. And Pink SF isn’t limited to SF; there is a very good reason the Sports Guy’s meme “Women Ruin Everything” applies so perfectly to most forms of literature. The one exception is the One True Female Genre, which is the Pillow Book. Read Murasaki Shikibu or Sei Shonagon; women have been writing the same thing over and over for more than 1,000 years now and very, very few do it as well as the Lady Murasaki did. Pink SF is the girls coming to play in the boys’ sandbox and then shitting in it like cats.

Consider the way Pink SF has now invaded even that most masculine of subgenres, War Fiction. Books 1, 3, and 5 on Amazon’s War Fiction Top 100 free list are not genuine “war fiction” any more than Pink SF is actual science fiction. It’s WereSEAL porn. It’s 50 Shades of Sexy Soldiers.

So what, in contrast, is Blue SF? Blue SF is a return to the manly adventure fiction of the past. Blue SF says “fuck that” to strong independent female protagonists who ride rainbow-farting unicorns and flex their nonexistent muscles when they aren’t being mounted by corpses and canids.  Blue SF says “fuck that” to sexual equality, salutes la difference, and doesn’t deign to throw bones to women who might feelbad that their oh-so-tender feelingses isn’t being gently massaged. And Blue SF says “fuck off” to every idiot of either sex who whines about it being too this or not enough that.

Blue SF does not apologize for being male, for being insufficiently inclusive, or for refusing to fall in line with the dynamic demand for character quotas concerning sex, race, religion, and sexual preferences. Unlike Pink SF, Blue SF is sufficiently confident to be what it is rather than deceptively market itself as what it manifestly is not. Can you even imagine genuine science fiction trying to sneak into the romance market and pretending that it’s all proper romance when actually there is little more than action and technology and ideas under a very thin and superficial veil of romantic intrigue and self-centered drama?

At the Baen Bar, a retired airborne infantry master sergeant left a comment about QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted that perhaps is not irrelevant in this regard: “I read it and enjoyed it greatly. Baen might want to talk to the authors because they would fit right in. These guys like guns and prefer big guns. Guns that leave big body counts and lots of wreckage. They like hand-carried particle beams, lasers, slug throwers and vehicle-mounted missiles, cannons and chain guns. MCID would fit right in with Monster Hunters International only with better weapons. But the attitude is there. The simple arrest in the park is an all-time classic. I’ll buy the sequels.”

That’s right. Quantum Mortis actually outgunned Larry Correia. And that, in a nutshell, is what Blue SF is all about. Masculine ideas. Masculine challenges. Masculine action. Masculine energy. And, of course, masculine competition.

Pink SF, on the other hand, is the female equivalent of writing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and somehow failing to realize that it is a parody.

Saving SF from Strong Female Characters V

The fifth part of the ongoing series, in which John Wright makes it clear that the Strong Female Character in SF/F is nothing less than the written feminist version of Soviet Realism:

Now, I do not mean to sound cynical, so I will ask rather than speak my opinion. Is there any strong woman character which meets with the approval of the Politically Correct who also happens to be, as the characters in Lewis and Tolkien, reflect a Christian worldview, or, as happens in Burroughs or E.E. Smith, to reflect what one might call the traditional heroic worldview, a worldview reminiscent of the Stoic and Military virtues of the ancient Romans and Greeks?

I have heard some Leftists praise the female characters of Robert Heinlein, who, with one exception, I myself find to be somewhat demeaning to women. (The one exceptions is  Cynthia Randall in ‘The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag’, perhaps the only honest portrayal of a woman throughout his whole oeuvre.) Others despise his portrayals.

My cynical question is this: when they ask for ‘strong’ female characters, are they actually honestly asking for strong female characters, Deborah from the Bible, Antigone from myth, Britomart from poetry, or are they only asking for Leftist female characters, poster children for Leftist causes?

If so, what they are asking for is Political Correctness, which means, substituting true narratives about the real glories and sorrows of the human condition for a false narrative, an advertisement for Leftwing political causes, which tell lies about the glories and man, bemoan with crocodile tears only the sorrows of their particular mascots and special causes, and make false promises about the cure for the world’s pain.

If so, they are giving up art for an ad.

Myself, I want to see women writers not because they are women, but because I would like to have the genius of distaff half the human race writing new and brilliant science fiction stories for us to enjoy. But, as far as I can tell, this is akin to the complaint that Science Fiction is meant for juvenile audiences. That has not been true during my lifetime. I have not seen even the slightest trace of the all-boy club mentality ever, neither in any writer nor in any editor nor in any reader.

I have seen plenty of people like me, who are annoyed with the cheerless preachy monotony of Political Correctness and would like the dullards to stop ruining good stories with their sucker punches and pauses for their political advertisements, but, hey, the PC types answer any criticism of PC  by calling the complainer a sexist, or saying he is paranoid, or saying that PC does not exist. Any lie will do, just so long as it is an accusation.

To tell the truth about what they are doing, which is informal censorship, that is, thought policework, is the one thing they fear.

As I said before, they think they are fooling us into thinking they are honest and compassionate people, and we know they are not, and they know they are not, but they do not know we know, so when one of us mentions, for the umpteenth time, that the Emperor has No Clothes, they react with exaggerated fear and fury. Because they are afraid of anyone, no matter how humble or obscure, who punctures their little daydream of make-believe, their land of colored cloud where they are the saints and the saviors of the world.

The fact of the matter is that those who demand Strong Female Characters don’t actually want genuinely strong women possessed of the feminine virtues. They simply want to substitute a nominal woman for a man and claim the masculine virtues for their Mary Sues in order to make themselves feel better about themselves.

Remember, most Pink SF is written in order to let the gamma male or shambling shoggoth author retroactively triumph over his persecutors from junior high and high school. Hence the lack of credible action and the interminable focus on “witty” dialogue that always allows the author stand-in to come out on top. To say nothing of the inevitable love triangles focused on the Mary Sue. It is wish-fulfillment of a very different kind than the adventurous fantasy of Blue SF.

Now, few Pink SF writers go so far in their wish-fulfillment as McRapey, who in addition to having male infantry soldiers swapping blow jobs as currency has now apparently paralyzed his female characters in his next novel. (A subconscious confession due to the weight of all that Rohypnol plaguing a guilty conscience?) The two primary focuses of the fantasy in Pink SF are the sexual desirability of the author/Mary Sue and the belated revenge of the author on his real-life enemies. These take the place of the Blue SF triumph of the protagonist over the environment, his fictional enemies, and himself.

Knowing themselves weak in life, the writers of Pink SF stride confidently through their fantasies as the demigods they wish themselves to be. And anyone who dares to observe that those fantasies bear no resemblance to reality is not merely mean, but indubitably evil.

Saving SF from Strong Female Characters IV

The fourth installment in John C. Wright’s detailed explication of one of Pink SF’s barbaric ills and the various ideological and religious reasons that underlie it:

My objection is to falseness, insincerity, propaganda, bad drama, bad art, and treason against the muses.  My objection is to using art for propaganda purposes. My objection is to Politically Correct piety. My objection is to the Thought Police.

My objection is to the spirit of totalitarianism.

For about ten years now, I have been writing and posting essays and articles on my electronic journal, and in all that time, I have been subjected to the Leftist mob tactics of mass hatred once and once only. It was the time I mocked the Sci-Fi Channel for kowtowing to Political Correctness. My motive for objecting was perfectly clear to everyone: I would like to write without censorship, formal or informal, based on political considerations. Formal censorship is state enforced; informal is enforced by organized mob-tactics, minority pressure groups, yelling, screaming, boycotts, hysteria mob-tactics and general bullying.

Because I would like to write without informal censorship interfering with my livelihood, I objected to Sci-Fi channel, or anyone in my field, surrendering to the minority pressure groups screaming and yelling and mob-tactics and bullying. So I mocked the Sci-Fi channel for encouraging the bullies by bowing in the knee to them.

And in return the mob tried to bully me, of all people. As if I give a tinker’s damn for the opinions of these yowling halfwits. (There was exactly one person of the seven hundred or so who wrote in to me who seemed sincerely offended, and to him I apologized. To remaining six hundred and ninety-nine or so, I offered defiance in public, and in private prayed for their fool souls, hoping despite all appearances they were not damned fools.)

This taught me a lesson, but not the one the mob organizers wanted to teach. It taught me what they were afraid of. Not of me: no one can be afraid of a fat and balding nearsighted science fiction writer with a dull swordcane.

Nor were they offended by calling sodomites sexual perverts, which I have done frequently before and since, never eliciting a single angry comment in reply, or attracting the slightest notice.

Since my legions of drug-maddened terror troops are all stranded on Salusa Secondus, the third planet of Gamma Piscium, 138 lightyears away, surely they are not afraid of any physical force I can bring to bear. Neither am I in a position to deny any man any economic opportunities, nor am I influential enough to provoke public opinion or create any controversy. I doubt I could even do as much myself against them as they have done to me, such as hack a Wikipedia page or send around an open letter and expect it to be published and reprinted.

To explain what they are afraid of, I am afraid I have to explain something of the pathology of Leftism.

They actually think they are fooling us.

Pink SF/F is a crystal-clear picture of Dunning-Kruger effect in action. Which is ironic, considering that the pinkshirts love to cite that effect, almost always inappropriately.  As Wright wryly notes:

“They think they are smarter than us. These undereducated boobs who cannot follow a syllogism of three
steps, who do not speak a word of Greek or Latin, who do not know the
difference between Arianism and Aryanism, who have never read ORIGIN OF
SPECIES or DAS KAPITAL or THE REPUBLIC and who do not even know the
intellectual parentage of all their ideas, these vaunting cretins whose
arguments consist of nothing but tiresome talking points recited by rote
and flaccid ad hominem, whose opinions are based on fashion, they, of
all people, think they are smarter than the rest of the world.”

Because degrees. Never mind that these magic credentials primarily consist of being willing to go into debt in order to obediently listen to serial monologues by poorly-read academics with no experience of the real world.


I don’t think I’ll ever forget being called “parochial” by a fan of a monolingual Canadian who grew up in the sticks of Western Ontario, graduated with an MA from the University of Western Ontario, and now lives in Canada’s 15th largest municipality, which happens to be located in southwestern Ontario. That, more than anything, made it obvious that Pink SF not only has no interest in reality, but can’t recognize it even when it is standing right in front of them, poking them in the nose.

John Scalzi is a “bourgeois pudding”

Inverarity considers the wisdom of boycotting authors of whom one disapproves:

Case in point: many of you are probably aware of the infamous “feud” that’s been going for a couple of years now between John Scalzi and Theodore Beale, aka “Vox Day.” John Scalzi is the bourgeois pudding of SF – nice, inoffensive, always triangulating for the “rational middle” of a political argument, writes decent if unexciting sci-fi.

Vox Day is… well, indescribable. Though there is a gulf between what he’s been accused of saying and what he has actually said, he’s way, way out there, and if he doesn’t make your head explode, his commenters will. Orson Scott Card and John C. Wright are mild gentlemen of moderate views compared to VD.

VD has written several novels, largely self-published. I am sure the thought of contributing money to him, or even adding to his download count, fills many with reflexive horror. But I am filled with a certain perverse curiosity (and a bit of defiance after the ridiculous spectacle of the SFWA booting him from the organization), and I downloaded a few of his novellas when they were available for free on Amazon. (Reviews forthcoming. If I ever get around to them.)

Would I pay money for one of his books? Probably not. Do I think I have an obligation to not support him in any way, shape or form by reading, downloading, reviewing, or giving him publicity? That is where I get off the Right-Thinking People Train.

This is a reasonable perspective and it is unfortunate that it is no longer the norm in the professional writing community. It’s also hard to disagree with the gentleman’s characterization of Mr. Scalzi’s fiction, although he omitted the phrase “derivative”, which is absolutely necessary to describe the genre’s great rip-off artist. In fact, I am given to understand that the award-winning McRapey is very nearly done with a new novel, which makes one wonder what the subject matter will be:

While I can’t disagree with Inverarity’s assertion of my immoderate views, I do have to correct the erroneous characterization of my novels as “largely self-published”.  [This has now been corrected – VD] While I do intend to “self-publish” through First Sword, precisely none of my books to date are self-published. It would certainly surprise Simon & Schuster to learn that they belong to me and I have no interest in Marcher Lord Press beyond the fact that I am one of their authors. The fact that I have been permitted a considerable amount of leeway by publishers from Pocket Books to Marcher Lord is of no more significance than the fact that Stephen King is similarly afforded a great deal of independence by his publishers.

I’m not one of the leading authors of SF/F… but my publishers, past and present, aren’t the only ones in the industry who harbor the suspicions I have the potential to become one. That probably wouldn’t have been possible under the old system, but now the gatekeepers are crumbling….

I tend to agree with Inverarity concerning the foolishness of limiting your reading to those with whom you agree, or at least do not disagree too greatly. Among other things, a refusal to familiarize myself with Marxism and the correct terminology utilized in two of its forms would have simplified the plot of QUANTUM MORTIS and severely crippled one character who is portrayed as neither a villain nor a cardboard cutout. That being said, I do think it is important to recognize that there is a cultural war being waged, that the Left is the only one actually fighting it, and the people of the Right will not see its views respected, much less held up in an exemplary manner, if it continues to support the artists seeking to destroy it at the expense of the artists seeking to uphold them.

I neither expect nor require support from the other side. I expect to be attacked, belittled, ignored, and lied about. I have been reliably informed by a recent SF convention-goer that I am the most-hated author in science fiction today. Good! Whether I am wrong or whether I am right, I am simply exercising my right to speak what I perceive to be the undeniable and demonstrable truth. If those who are openly attempting to spread lies and left-wing propaganda disapprove of me, I suggest that merely shows there is some substance, or at the very least, some rhetorical plausibility to what I am saying.  For years, they said I was irrelevant. Then they said I was ridiculous. Now they say I am too extreme and dangerous… and I’m sure every reader here is well-aware of Gandhi’s Progression.

I hope those of you on the Right who are interested in the genre will continue to support the efforts of me and other writers of the Right. Try Kratman. Try Correia. Try Wright. Try Walker and Williamson. If you haven’t yet, try Card. Preorder QUANTUM MORTIS as a Christmas gift and get the ebook free for yourself. I am confident most of you will not be disappointed, particularly if John Scalzi is your idea of “decent if unexciting sci-fi”. And I also hope those of you on the Left will consider extending the same courtesy to us that we have extended to you for decades, and judge our work on the basis of its merits and its demerits rather than the ideological views of the writer.

After all, do you really think your support for abortion, feminism, multiculturalism, and global dictatorship by a technocratic UN is any less offensive to me than my views are to you? In summary, I don’t avoid reading any author due to his views; I would quite happily read McRapey’s novels if they weren’t tedious works of derivative mediocrity. The Android’s Dream and Ghost Brigades were enough to cause me to lose interest in them years before the so-called feud began.

In any event, I am happy to offer Inverarity copies of QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted and QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills. If he is interested, I would be happy to send him the pair of ebooks so as to save his conscience the burden of inadvertently supporting me financially. And who knows, perhaps he might even find it to be indecent, but exciting SF.

As a bonus, the link features our favorite literary troll, Andrew Marston of the New England Wildlife Center, attacking Larry Correia, Tom Kratman, and Dan Simmons in the comments.

Saving Science Fiction part 2

John C. Wright continues his series on saving science fiction from the barbaric scourge of Strong Female Characters:

What has the attempt to produce strong female characters produced?

On the one hand, I would be the first to say that the Miyasaki characters Nausicaa and Kushinada, the heroine and the villainess respectively of VALLEY OF THE WIND are the exemplar of perfectly strong and perfectly feminine women. Being in leadership roles does not strike me as unfeminine, not when we are dealing with princesses and war leaders. Nonetheless, the particular masculine characteristic of touchy pride, the desire to slit throats, machismo, vulgarity, roguishness, and the other one-dimensional stereotype writers who don’t know any real men use when trying to make their females more masculine are utterly absent.

Again, throughout the film (and manga) Nausicaa shows more concern for
the suffering of enemies, including horrid insect monsters and
radioactive biotech god-soldiers, than a man would. Her attitude toward
war is hardly the same as that of a Lancelot or Achilles….

I am calling such behavior feminine because I hold that femininity is more concerned with the doer than with the deed. Masculine approach is to be businesslike and curt, and not concerned with your emotions, only with our performance. This approach is useful both on the battlefield and in the marketplace. It is results oriented. It is concerned with duty, outward actions, not with inner motives.

Typical masculine thinking: I do not care why you salute just as long as you do salute. You are not saluting the man, you are saluting the uniform. It is impersonal.

The feminine approach, since females are biologically more suited to bearing and nursing children than males, and since females are given the infinitely important task of domesticating the male barbarian of her husband as well as taming and training the children, must be more concerned with the doer than the deed, because the women must train the children to volunteer to do the right thing, so that as adults, when she is gone, they do the right thing. It is character oriented. This is the more useful approach in peacetime and in cooperative rather than competitive situations. It is not concerned with duty, but with inner motives.

Does anyone serious, honestly think that a goals-oriented approach is always superior to the personality-oriented approach? Does anyone seriously think that we can treat squadmates like children or children like squadmates?

This part is considerably less coherent than the previous one, and I think the tangent into Catholic family-planning was ill-considered, but in addition to underlining the important distinction between the masculine and feminine approaches, Wright manages to successfully demonstrate that the more things have changed with regards to Strong Female Characters in the media, the more they have stayed the same.

Mailvox: SF/F’s transideological malaise

It appears it is not only right-wing conservatives, libertarian extremists and Bible-thumping god-botherers who are thoroughly sick of the meatless, mindless, scalzified SF/F that is being pushed on them by the genre publishers:

I am on the opposite end of the political spectrum from you. I am a Marxist and an atheist, but I didn’t come here to debate politics or religion. Anyway, last year I started writing seriously and I thought I should get out there on the web and see what the “scene” is about right now, sci/fi and fantasy writers and markets and new fiction, especially short fiction. I constantly read sci/fi and fanstasy, but mostly from my collection of old paperbacks, Vance, Herbert, Howard, etc… I read just as much non-fiction from my local library. So I put my finger on the pulse. The experience was disheartening. New short fiction seems to place innovation over all other qualities possible in a particular piece, which means my desire to read a good story is likely to go unsatisfied. Also, the “scene” is completely preoccupied with identity.

And of course, I happened upon the Scalzi/Vox feud. I checked out both blogs. The verdict: Scalzi – rather dull and typical upper middle class views, Vox – incendiary but rigorous, consistent, and most importantly, often funny. As a Marxist I can’t resist good polemic, even from the other side.  I lurk about once a month.

Let me backtrack with a little explanation. Some people out there, perhaps not you, may confuse my radical leftism with the stuff going on out there. They would be wrong. As a Marxist, for me it is class, class, class. Class trumps race, gender, everything. Its all about wealth. The fact that “old white men” are holding alot of it is due to historical forces, not from their “whiteness”. In the 60’s and 70’s, the leftist preoccupation with class was replaced with race and gender issues, to the detriment of all concerned.  Old news, just spelling it out here for clarity’s sake.

So we get to now, and race and gender obsessed “liberal progressives” are such a harmful force in society that I, an actual socialist revolutionary, can enjoy you tormenting them on your blog, even though your political perspective is rooted in basic assumptions that are opposite my own. Strange days indeed. For liberal progressives, this would indicate I am a sexist racist, but as a white male I am already on their shitlist so whatever. I am a Marxist. I believe I am fighting the good fight. I am not going to get on my knees and lick boot, hoping for “ally” status. Eff that. The whole thing is a bizarre repackaging of original sin.

So when you put The Last Witchking out there for free, I thought why not and downloaded it. When it came up in the queue I dived in and I was floored. The stories were excellent. They entertained me. What else can I say? Opera Vita was incredible. There was a poignancy there I was not expecting. Suffused throughout is a certain ephemeral beauty, stately and linked with mortality. The subtlety belies tropes about limitations of the “male perspective” that are bandied about when the writing community weighs in on gender.  I haven’t seen religion done so convincingly and movingly in the genre since Herbert. I went ahead and read Magic Broken and enjoyed it thoroughly and then pulled the trigger on Throne for five bucks and now I am enjoying that.

It is really remarkable that your apparent congenital disorder, the inability to shut up or even tone it down, has disbarred you from the typical path to success as a writer.  I guess there is hope. I found your work via your soapbox. Despite my predilections toward the radical, I never let politics get in the way of personal relationships and now I have to add that it can’t dissuade me from enjoying fiction I like. Thanks for the books. I am hooked on Selenoth now, the antidote for my genre malaise. Please make it your goal to churn out volumes of the stuff for readers like me trying to survive this long winter.

That an avowed Marxist would enjoy my fiction is less surprising than it might sound. I am, after all, a radical, merely one with very different assumptions and objectives. And I’ve always gotten along much better with the hard left than with the soft, squishy, bourgeois progressive left; one of my independent studies was done under a hardcore Canadian socialist who regarded McDonalds as the capitalist devil incarnate.

Of course, this may be because the hard left is about the only group that hates the progressive left more than I do. One of the great satisfactions about being on the right-wing is the knowledge that even if we lose and the revolution finally arrives in its fullness, the useful idiots are going to be the first ones lined up against the wall and shot. And who can look at the way Wall Street has been raping the country and not feel the urge to raise a revolutionary flag; if that is capitalism, then I don’t want any part of it and I’m a libertarian!

But besides our obvious ideological and religious differences, I have to take some issue with the writer’s idea that it is my unwillingness to cower before the PC gods of publishing that have prevented me from following the conventional path. While my notoriety would presumably have made it easier for them to decline to publish me – which is theoretical anyhow because I do not have an agent and I have never submitted my work for publication to any of the various genre publishing houses – this actually has the situation backwards.

One reason that I have been so uncompromising and so unwilling to play along with the progressives is because I have known from the start that the substance of my fiction would prevent the mainstream publishers from publishing it. And I also knew I had no interest in writing the sort of tedious political crap they wanted to publish. So, there was no reason to muzzle myself because I knew there was no chance that they would publish books like The Chronicles of King David or Summa Elvetica no matter what I did or did not say. I can’t pose as either a hero or a victim because I never had anything to lose in that regard.

In fact, I consider myself incredibly lucky to not only have such strong support from intelligent readers across religious and ideological lines, but to be writing at a time when the gatekeepers are so impotent. All of us who write should be deeply grateful, whether it is to God or to History and the class struggle, to be alive at such a fascinating time! To be able to write exactly what one wants and be able to make it readily available to those who are potentially interested in it is all that any writer can really ask for. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake.

Women Destroy SF

I must confess that I am rather enjoying the way in which my original assertion from 2005 has now become an established meme in the science fiction community.  Sure, they intend it in an ironic way, but the publication will almost certainly provide additional supporting evidence for my hypothesis that women have destroyed the SF/F literary subgenre by feminizing it.

Women Destroy SF — Special Issue

September 5, 2013 — It could be said that women invented science fiction; after all, Mary Shelley wrote what is considered by many to be the first science fiction novel (Frankenstein). Yet some readers seem to have this funny idea that women don’t–or can’t–write science fiction. Some have even gone so far as to accuse women of destroying science fiction with their girl cooties.

So to help prove how silly that notion is, Lightspeed is proud to announce that in 2014 we’ll be publishing a “Women Destroy SF” special issue, with a guest editor at the helm. More details to come soon, so watch this space!

I tend to suspect it is going to confirm the notion rather than prove how silly it is, but we shall await the evidence before judging it. I would also point out that the problem isn’t the girl cooties per se, but rather, the strong female preference for writing thinly disguised romance that is then sold as science fiction to men who are perfectly aware of the bait-and-switch. It’s not that women can’t write excellent fiction. They can, they have, and they do. But most women who are sufficiently solitary-minded to write are too didactic, too self-obsessed, too bitter about their low SMV value, and too little interested in science or any other intellectual concepts to successfully write in a literary format that is first and foremost driven by ideas.

As it happens, the publishing situation is actually much more dire and the destruction caused by women is considerably more widespread than many people imagine.

Consider this: as of 10 November, I have sold or given away 26,092 Selenoth books on
Amazon alone in the last 11 months. Those are books that women at not
one, but two, mainstream publishers were instrumental in declining to
publish, and as a result, those books have not appeared in a single
bookstore anywhere in the world.

Now, think about the
multiplier effect of a major publisher’s distribution channel compared
to that of a small independent, electronic-only publisher?  Even if it
is only 5x, that likely would have been enough to put A Throne of Bones in the top 5 percent of best-selling fantasy.  (This may be why the bestselling author who wrote to me said:
“I very much found myself wondering what would have happened had it
been
published by a large house with a marketing campaign behind it.”) And
all the time spent reading those 26 thousand books, which was not
inconsiderable, is time that was obviously not spent reading the various offerings of the mainstream publishers.

More
importantly, the money that would have been spent on the nonexistent
“multiplier books” was mostly not spent on other science fiction and
fantasy novels, but was instead spent on the wide variety of other
non-literary options available to the sort of men who make up the books’
primary market. And I am far from the only male-oriented writer who was shut out by the SF/F gatekeepers in favor of the scalzified material. This means that there a very good case to be made that
women have not only destroyed science fiction, but have also contributed significantly to the lower profits of the publishing industry as well as the ongoing collapse of the chain and local bookstores.

Falling prices, failing publishers

As I demonstrated previously, falling ebook prices means additional pressure on mainstream publisher profits:

The average price of a best-selling ebook hit a new low last week but ticked up this week for the first time in a month. This week, the average price of a best-selling ebook is $5.81, up $0.40 from last week’s all-time low of $5.41. For the past four weeks, the average price of a best-selling ebook has been below $6.50.

A confluence of factors have been driving ebook prices down: Discounting by retailers; success of lower-priced self-published titles; and experimentation by publishers.

This is really remarkable.  Back in July, I noted the probable result of Apple being found guilty of collusion concerning ebook prices: “The good news is that ebook prices should continue to fall to more
economically sensible levels.  And the power of the gatekeepers is going
to continue to dwindle as their revenues and profit margins continue to
fall in response to the greater competition they are facing from
independent publishers and self-publishers.”

But I never imagined that prices would fall so far, so fast. Not only have prices fallen below the $9.99 point that the colluding publishers were attempting to raise to $14.99, but only one of the top 50-sellers has a price in the $8.00 to $9.99 range.  And since October 1, 2012, the average price of an ebook bestseller has been cut nearly in half, falling from $11.37 to $5.81.

You may recall that the clueless president of the SFWA was very excited about the idea that publishers should pay the same $4.20 in ebook royalties to the author that they were paying on hardcover royalties.  How, one wonders, are they going to do that when at an average price of $5.61, (taking the average of the two most recent prices), they are dealing with a gross revenue per ebook of $3.93 after Amazon takes its 30 percent cut.

Assuming the conventional 25 percent ebook royalty, this means the author is going to make $1.40 per ebook and the publisher is going to make $2.53.  So, just to tread water, a mainstream publisher has to sell 2.24 ebooks to make the same $5.67 profit per book it was making previously. This is why the publishers fought so hard, and were even willing to break federal antitrust law, to get the price up to 12.99; at that price, they were making $6.82 per ebook, which was an actual improvement on hardcovers.(1)

Very few businesses can survive their profit-per-unit being cut in half. Don’t be surprised to see layoffs at the major publishers, contracts being cancelled, and imprints being closed. If you’re an independent, this is great news as the gatekeepers are dying and you’ll be able to compete on increasingly even ground.  But if you’re still hoping to break into conventional publishing, forget it. It’s all rapidly going the way of Random Houses’s Hydra, which is nothing more than an imitation of all the independent publishers, with zero advances and 50-50 royalty splits.

The guy responsible for it is my old editor at Pocket, who gave me my break into the business and was one of the first to recognize the potential in video-game tie-in novels. He’s a smart guy who is always ahead of the curve, and the fact that Random House is moving to this model means that all the other major publishers will soon be following suit. And I very much doubt he’s doing it because he wants to do so, but because it is the only way they can expect to stay in business.

(1) There is a trivial omission in this calculation which I left in for the sake of simplicity and means that the situation isn’t quite as bad as these numbers make it appear. But the consequences of it are fairly minor and don’t change my point in the slightest. Bragging rights to the first person to correctly identify it.

Showcase #7

The OC explains how he got here from there:

Things change. I’ve been getting a heavy dose of this lately, not because of the health issues, but because last month was the 30th anniversary of the release of MIDI 1.0—the industry-standard Musical Instrument Digital Interface—and my inbox has been filling up with related email. Some messages are from old friends I haven’t talked to in years, wanting to reminisce about the glory days. Others are from reporters or grad students, hoping to cadge an interview.

Did I mention that thirty-some years ago, I was on the design team that developed MIDI?

There are many things I don’t talk about but perhaps should, because they helped lay the foundation upon which Rampant Loon Press and Stupefying Stories are built. For example, I didn’t set out to become a writer. I intended to make my mark on the world as a musician, and for many years worked very seriously at it. Before I started writing this editorial I went out to Wikipedia and took a deep dive into the section on Contemporary classical music, intending to write a proper article that puts it all into historical perspective.

But, no. Some other day. The editorial I started to write quickly deteriorated into a series of shout-outs and name-checks. Yep. Knew him. Knew her. Worked with him. Was there. Did that. Did that, too, but would rather not admit it.

I wish I could say there was some epiphany, some brilliant and unforgettable moment when the skies parted and the Minor Gods of Creativity thundered in antiphonal chorus, “No, thou shalt not be a musician! Thou wast meant for a greater calling! Thou shalt become…a science fiction writer!” It would make for a more dramatic column if I could describe that moment.

If it had happened, I would, but it never did. Instead there were only years of slop and overlap, spent in hard work on projects that went off in six different directions simultaneously and therefore never really went much of anywhere, with many tiny points of change that taken together still don’t add up to even one decent low-budget epiphany. Somewhere in there I discovered I was not cut out to sell my soul for rock ‘n’ roll, and that watching my friends who were made to live that lifestyle self-destruct and die young wasn’t much fun. Somewhere else in there I discovered that while I really did like theater (and if you’re at risk of taking me too seriously, you may take a moment now to imagine me in full pancake makeup and period costume, singing and dancing in the chorus line of a production of Mame), I wasn’t cut out for that lifestyle either, and watching my friends who were cut out for it self-destruct and die from AIDS wasn’t any better fun. Somewhere in there I learned to play the arts grants and commissions game well enough to succeed at it, but in the process lost most of my respect for the game itself. Somewhere else in there it became clear to me that my hopes of getting into major recording studio and soundtrack work were about as realistic as my chances of becoming a starting center in the NBA, and eventually—

Check out the stories too.  I thought there was something vaguely Poeish about Anatoly Belilovsky’s “In Vino Veritas”.

Mailvox: the changing writer’s market

NA writes about his perception of the current hole in the fantasy market:

Part of the reason I bought your books, along with Stephen King’s Dark
Tower series, was that I got burned by the last two fantasy series I
bought.  By which I mean Raymond Feist and George R. R. Martin.  I’ve
been looking for a good fantasy series to read and so far yours does not
disappoint. Another reason is that I want to write my own.  I figured I should get acquainted with others’ work before I get started.

Since I’ve last been a part of this hobby, there was no such thing as
e-books.  I’m way out of touch with the market and where it’s headed, as
far as it would concern a writer.  I’m also not aiming to become the
Next Big Thing in fantasy, but I’d still like to get published. I know it’s kind of an open ended question, but is
there anything I can do to help myself before I start putting words on
the screen?  

A lot of people like Martin’s
work, though I can barely understand why, so I know there’s a market out
there for fantasy.  In fact, if A Game of Thrones is considered some of
the best right now, then that market still has a gaping hole in it.
 People are hungry for fantasy fiction, but as far as I can tell they’re
willing to settle for McDonald’s because there’s no Cheesecake Factory
in sight. 

If you have a minute, I appreciate your insight.

My primary feeling is that the SF/F market is at a fascinating technologically imposed crossroads.  On the one hand, we have a narrow spectrum professionally published market that is shrinking, where the average advances are considerably smaller than they were, where the stakes are increasingly winner-takes-all, and books such as Redshirts and A Dance with Dragons represent the very best it has to offer.

And on the other, we have the rise of a broad spectrum independent digital scene where books are of wildly varying quality, the prices are better and many of them are free, there are no gatekeepers, distribution is limited, and it is very difficult for the average author to even let the average reader know his book exists.

Let’s put some basic facts before the reader. John Scalzi reported that Redshirts, the eventual Hugo Award winner written by the industry’s foremost self-promoter and pushed heavily by the biggest publisher in SF/F, sold 35,667 ebooks in its first eight months of release.  That represented 45 percent of the 79,279 sales-to-that-date; the rest were hardcover (34 percent) and audiobook (21 percent).  That’s pretty much the high water mark these days for anyone whose name does not begin with JK, EL, or GRR.  McRapey’s post is uncharacteristically understated, as that is not the state of A genre title, but in terms of 2013, THE genre title.

A Throne of Bones and its satellites, on the other hand, sold 3,865 ebooks in their first eight months of release.  Not bad for a book that has never seen the inside of a bookstore, on the other hand, at barely more than 10 percent of Redshirts ebook sales, it is a comparatively minor blip that is of no possible concern to the mainstream publishers, right?  Well, here is the problem for the publishers.  On a grand total of 13 free Kindle Select days, another 20,274 copies were downloaded from Amazon.

Now, there isn’t a lot of overlap between the SF reader interested in Redshirts and the EF reader interested in A Throne of Bones.  They are two fairly different markets. But there are probably 10 independent books that are to Redshirts what ATOB is to A Dance with Dragons.  The problem isn’t that the independents are necessarily a threat to the established bestsellers, but that they are standing in the way of the midlist writers as well as the mainstream writers of tomorrow.  And, of course, they are absolutely devastating the average margins.

If you simply run the numbers, it becomes apparent that the only thing keeping the mainstream publishers alive these days is the fact that Amazon now voluntarily limits its Kindle Select program to five free days per quarter. Readers are readers, after all, their ability to consume books is not infinite, and due to the relative price-elasticity of books, ATOB and its satellites are now reaching one-third as many readers as Redshirts without any marketing, without any press, and without any bookstore distribution.  In fact, were it not for Amazon’s Kindle Select limits, Selenoth could quite reasonably have reached 378,154 readers in the first eight months, nearly five times MORE than Redshirts did.

This is a game-changer.

Now, you can certainly point out that I have made considerably less money on my 24,139 copies sold/downloaded than McRapey did on his 79,279 copies sold in the first eight months. But that’s irrelevant and those are just today’s profits anyhow; as Facebook and Twitter have shown, there is considerable value in free users.  The point is that if you’re just getting into the writing game, there is virtually no reason in trying to work within the mainstream publishing model.

Consider: I did literally nothing to market my book except for publishing the Selenoth satellites. No ads. No billboards. No push from Audible. You can’t buy them anywhere but Amazon. The audiobook doesn’t even exist yet and there will never be a paperback. And yet, all it would take is an easily changed policy on the part of Amazon to permit me to reach more readers than the most relentlessly marketed writer in SF/F today. To cite a concept from Nassim Taleb’s excellent Antifragile, the mainstream publishing industry is EXCEEDINGLY fragile and is totally dependent upon the willingness of Amazon to avoid inadvertently wiping them out. Unless one is already tied to the world of professional publishing for contractual reasons, I see no reason whatsoever to waste any time or effort attempting to enter it.  For all practical intents and purposes, it may not even be there in a few years, so don’t be caught up in thought processes that were last valid three years ago.

As for the hole in the fantasy market, don’t be misled.  That is an artificial one caused primarily by the ideological biases of the professional publishing gatekeepers and it is being rapidly filled by the independents. In my opinion, NA’s best strategy is to publish as an independent and become a part of that process.  Remember, this is the situation today and future changes look to favor the independents, not the mainstream publishers.