Why I Hate Reprint-Only Anthologies
There’s something boring about the concept of a reprint only anthology. I know that every year publishers release “best of” collections and the like, but I rarely buy any of them, not because I think the stories in them are bad, but because it has nothing new to offer me except an editor’s opinion about what constitutes “the best” of the year (an opinion I can get just by looking at the table of contents). I like opinions, but the only reason to buy one of these “best of” anthologies, to me, is for the chance to read a lot of fiction that I might not have seen before (maybe because I don’t subscribe to the original publishing venue). Often times, I’ve already seen the stuff. But reprint-only anthologies in the English market are, to me, a good-intentioned cashing in scheme. Yes, authors get paid again for a story they sold for a crappy price before (even if they sold to a big market), and a publisher gets a great chance to sell a lot of copies of a book filled with stories by previously published authors, folks who have some degree of quality to be inherited. But beyond that, there’s no incentive for me as a consumer to buy a reprint-only anthology, and as a writer I find them rather off putting. Why can’t most reprint anthologies have some new and some old work, like a lot of Strahan’s anthologies? That way as a consumer I get something new, and as a writer I get an opportunity be alongside writers I respect? Then again, I guess reprint-only anthologies aren’t meant for people like me. I’m the kind of consumer that generally isn’t targeted by such things precisely because I’ve probably already read most of the stuff being reprinted. But, even so, every time I see a call for submissions and realize it’s only for reprints I get a sick feeling in my stomach. Maybe that’s because I don’t have a previously published story to send them; regardless, I rarely buy reprint anthologies for the two reasons alluded to here: 1) it has nothing new to offer me as a reader; and 2) I can’t submit to them. Does that make me a bad person?
A Few More Lies For the Ignorant (Part One)
So, having already spoken on the Harlequin mess, wasn’t I surprised to find this article over at Self-Publishing Review with a whole lot of nonsense for the price of zero (the post is a guest post, so I don’t know how well it reflects what the owners of the site wish to portray, since I am not a regular reader). I’m not going to do much to touch the author’s discussion of science publishing. Not only do we not know who the author is (it just says “guest post” and unless I missed something there is no author named), but he contradicts himself (or herself) in the post by pointing to links where people have done exactly what he/she has said isn’t happening (after all, Michio Kaku, one of the leading scientists in the world right now, has publicly denounced self-published science authors for producing nonsense). Where the author really falls off his or her rocker, is in regards to the backlash from Harlequin’s decision to create a vanity press. S/he goes through the four main complaints against Harlequin and says a lot of things that would sound like nonsense to anyone with a brain (or at least a brain that is flipped to the “on” position). First point: They are cashing in on their slush pile. The questions implicit in this is that the slush pile is of inherently less value than the accepted pile. There are plenty of reasons to believe this isn’t the case. Most novels have been in dozens of slush piles before they’ve been accepted. Does being in a slush pile mean a novel is inherently bad? Then nothing but Sarah Palin’s book would exist – hardly a ringing endorsement of editorial quality control over cynical marketing exploitation. First off, there are loads of reasons why book queries get rejected (too many for me to list them here, but you can look that up on your own). Some big reasons are: the book wasn’t right for the publisher (try someone else), the query was crap (get better at it), or the book was crap (write another one and try again). These aren’t universal, but they are common reasons, and you can’t assume that a publisher is wrong. Maybe your book really does suck, or maybe it just isn’t a good fit. Second, the fundamental problem with this point is that the slush pile isn’t the rejected pile. It’s the “to be read” pile. It is made up of manuscripts that haven’t yet been picked up by the editor and viewed. Being in the slush pile means you are just one of many trying to get published by a particular publisher. That’s it. Third, this is exactly what Harlequin is doing: cashing in on their slush pile. Instead of publishing that book legitimately, they want to recommend to authors they reject from their slush piles to head on over to their vanity press and pay Harlequin for the privilege of publication. They aren’t recommending the authors go to Lulu, which doesn’t require you to pay anything up front for a basic package. They are recommending authors that aren’t “good enough” for Harlequin’s traditional line spend thousands to get published by their vanity press line, with the fake hope that they might get snatched up by regular-Harlequin in the future if it turns out alright. If you don’t see something wrong with this, then maybe there’s something wrong with you. Second point: They’re exploiting naïve authors. Um, pardon me, but book publishers are expert at exploiting naïve authors. That’s why royalties tilt so harshly to publishers, why rights are exploited, why contracts are mind-numbing. Do you really think most publishers sit down with an author and works out a custom deal while patiently explaining the ins and outs, creating author-friendly options to ensure goodwill, and conceding contractual advantages willingly? How naïve do they think we are? Actually, royalties tilt heavily towards the publisher because the publisher puts a shitload of money into publishing an author’s book. See here for the breakdown for hardcover books. Royalty rates aren’t ideal, but books also are no longer the dominant mode of consumption these days, and publishers are forced by consumers to produce a lot of books in order to satiate the wandering tastes of consumers. But trying to say that authors get shafted by book publishers is hardly true of all publishers. If anything, booksellers are the ones getting shafted, since they often have to offer massive discounts just to sell the books at all, cutting into the large chunk they generally would keep at the end of the day. On the other side of things: this is why most authors recommend you get an agent. Agents are in the business to make you (the author) more money, because the more money you make, the more money they make. This is called mutual interest. Now, getting to the part about taking advantage of naive authors: publishers are hardly taking advantage. They don’t lie about anything (well, some of them have, but this is hardly normal of the business). They tell you straight up that you will be paid for your book (they don’t promise a particular rate at all) and that your book will be in bookstores. They hand you a contract that states exactly what you’re getting and some of them even recommend getting an agent. Vanity presses and a lot of self-publishing houses do the exact opposite. They paint a pretty picture of their print-model business so that unsuspecting authors will flock in and fork out their hard-earned dollars to print a book that a) will not be distributed in bookstores (though many of them say it will); and b) will likely not sell many copies or make you famous (another thing that many of them say is a good possibility). Lulu is one of the few honest self-publishing firms; they have gone on record to say that they want to sell few copies of millions of
Weak Prose and Boredom
I’m finding myself becoming more and more bored by the style of prose exemplified by the contemporary mainstream publishing model. Not all of it bores me, and I don’t think most of it is bad, per se, but there are times when I will read a book and find myself wondering why I’m reading it at all. I’ve always read to be entertained, but lately some of the books I’ve tried to read have failed on that mark. I lose interest in the prose, not the ideas being expressed (although sometimes the ideas cause me to roll my eyes, which is, perhaps, an unavoidable symptom of having “seen it before and in better form”). I suspect a lot of this has to do with a change in tastes. No, I’m not becoming a weird “literary” reader (though I like me some literary fiction in the SF/F vein), but I do like the novels I read to have prose that does more than just “get the job done.” I want the prose to say something to me, to show me things, rather than tell me they exist. Words like “intricate” or “stiff” are meaningless if I don’t understand the context, or see what it is the author is trying to say. I understand the impulse to have prose that isn’t flowery, but sometimes a little flare to one’s prose can make for a more enjoyable experience. The kind of prose I’m talking about here is weak prose. The author forgets that they’re not just telling a story, but showing one. It happens a lot, and for many readers, that’s good enough–for publishers too, because they sell a lot of books with weak prose. But, this sort of bare bones prose is, to me, a waste of paper. Stories deserve more. They deserve a little description, some clever uses of prose, or a little more than two-dimensional character development or plots. Liven things up a bit, folks. It’s okay, really. Readers will love you for it if you can make your writing a little more interesting. If they don’t, then hit them with a cumbersome object.
Payfail: The SF/F Pay Rate Fiasco
(I’d like to add that @maplemuse from Twitter has a blog post that actually takes a very level-headed approach to the Black Matrix problem. I agree with most of the assessments made there, to be honest. The distinction between 4theluv and profit is important to make in this case.) A lot has been said recently about pay rates and what’s wrong with them. Scalzi has chimed in by ripping into a particularly small pulp magazine paying what everyone agrees is a crappy rate, and has even gone after folks who defend lower rates. Others have added their opinions, but it is Scalzi that has had the most impact on it all. And, honestly, great, fine, that’s wonderful. Scalzi has every right to say whatever he likes, but there are few times when I actually disagree with the guy. In this case it’s not because he has the general idea wrong, but because his method of going after the problem is somewhat idiotic and I think it’s about time Scalzi took a step back and shut up. See, Scalzi has never had the same sort of career the rest of us writers have or are trying to have. He admits this. He is in a position in his career where he can get paid loads of money for his short stories; the notoriety of his name makes it possible. (Edit: Oh, and it should be said that the guy deserves it, because he writes good stuff.) But everyone else doesn’t have that luxury. Of course writers should get paid fair rates, but the reality is that there are no fair-paying short markets for SF/F anyway. Even the pros pay crap compared to the highest pay non-genre markets (and by crap, I really mean crap, because there are some literary fiction markets that pay dollars per word, rather than cents). Whether it’s five cents or three cents, it really doesn’t matter, because neither rate is a good one. If Scalzi is going to rip into Black Matrix, then he should probably rip into the whole of the genre short market for its dedication to paying next to nothing for a whole lot of work. If this were still 1930, five cents a word would be great, but it’s not. This is 2009 and even the highest paying, genre-specific pro market barely pays enough to allow a writer to live remotely comfortably for a month in this country. (Clarkesworld, for example, pays 10 cents a word with a 4,000-word limit. That amounts to $400, which is well short of being able to pay my rent, and I live in a fairly cheap area. That’s not to say they’re a terrible mag–there’s a reason they can’t pay $10 a word–just that even the highest paying SF/F short fiction markets don’t pay all that well at all.) On the other side of this, however, are arguments that, to me, make little sense. Some folks out there actually think that pay rate determines the quality of the fiction published; at the same time, though, these same folks acknowledge that, hey, even big name genre writers will submit to a low-paying market for a variety of reasons. Don’t they see the hypocrisy? Let’s dig into the truth: yes, a lot of low-paying markets also print a lot of not-so-great work. But, hell, so do the pro-paying markets. There’s a reason I don’t subscribe to a lot of the big boys, and why their numbers of falling. But some of the lower paying markets also print a lot of excellent work. What about places like Lone Star Stories, Abyss & Apex, GUD, Ideomancer, Electric Velocipede, Shimmer, etc. All these markets pay lower rates than the big boys (and in some cases significantly lower rates), yet are also known for printing great stories. Some of the aforementioned magazines have been nominated for awards or have had stories they’ve published printed in “Best of” anthologies. Such things are indicators of quality. So the idea that pay rate has something to do with quality clearly is not true of all publications (though probably true of many of them). I can’t help feeling that all of this discussion is doing the SF/F community no good whatsoever. It’s another attempt to create a divide over petty nonsense (i.e. pay). I’d love it if every magazine could afford to pay at least pro rate, but the only way that will work is if the market is big enough to accommodate the increased rate. It’s not, and most of the pro markets are fairly specific in the kinds of work they publish. Not all of us write that stuff, leaving smaller, lower paying markets for more unusual or niche short stories. Now, maybe Black Matrix, the market Scalzi has torn to shreds, is one of those crap-paying, crap-producing markets. Maybe. Or maybe it’s another one of those markets that has the potential to be great, that is just now getting its sea legs, and might become something better in the future. I don’t know. I’m not trying to say that pay rate isn’t important. I submit a lot of work to the higher paying markets specifically because they tend to have larger readership, but I submit to smaller, lower paying markets too, some of which have fairly large readerships. Mostly what I care about is getting my work out there, but in markets that seem to matter. What do you all think about all that has been going on? Do you care about rate?
Why is font size so important to a good book?
Something I am starting to get really irritated about these days are books with ridiculously small font. I can understand the need to use small font for particularly large books, but I cannot for the life of me get through books with fonts so small I have to wear my glasses in order to see the words (I’m near sighted, so this is particularly bad). Yet, publishers keep doing it, and I’m finding myself more and more incapable of even bothering to pick up books with tiny fonts. There’s another reason too, and that has to do with my interest levels in books. When I read, I like to feel like I’ve accomplished something in a half hour of reading. I’m not a fast reader, so when I spend time reading, it’s nice to know that I’ve gone farther than five pages in a ten minute span of time. If it takes me an hour to get through a relatively small chapter, then I start losing interest in the reading. There is a book I currently have on my review shelf that suffers from this, and the result is that I’m no longer reading it. I might try again in the future, but for now, I can’t be bothered with it. It’s a 6×9 trade paperback with font this size. Or maybe smaller. I don’t now. How big does that little bit look on the screen? On the other side of things, though, there are books with font size that is too big. For children’s books, this is perfectly acceptable, since kids really can’t be bothered to read normal-people font anyway. For adult books, however, large font is kind of cumbersome. I don’t think I’ve ever dropped a book that had large font, but it can still make you a little irritated when you bought a 300-page novel only to find out that it’s actually 150 in more traditional font sizes. So, to anyone publishing books out there, please use a reasonable font size. I know you want to save paper and all, but what is more important: a book that becomes a nice door stop, or a book that gets read all the way through and enjoyed for what it is, rather than hated for how it was put together? What other pet peeves do you all have about the design of books? Let me know in the comments!
Why Almost Everyone Is Pissed About Harlequin
It seems there’s some confusion about why just about everyone in the professional world of writing is up in arms about Harlequin’s decision to create a vanity press imprint (Harlequin Horizons). I thought the reasons were fairly clearly spelled out by the RWA (Romance Writers Association), the MWA (Mystery Writers Association), and the SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association). Seems I was wrong (a lot of really idiotic, ignorant stuff is being said in support of Harlequin right now, which will shock most people with a conscience). So, I’m going to spell it out for you to make it damned clear, with a few curse words for effect. The ScamFirst off, Harlequin is starting what is called vanity publishing, which is even worse than self-publishing because it gets the whole production model wrong: the author pays someone else to put together and print their work, then the printer keeps a part of the profits. There’s a reason why vanity publishers are so hated by almost everyone except the naive and the stupid. They are perpetual liars on a scale that most politicians would be astonished by, and they have to be, because they essentially are selling services to people that don’t need them, and fucking people out of their hard-earned money. Likewise, vanity presses often can’t meet the quality that professional third parties or traditional publishers put out. So they lie. A lot. They flower up everything they say about their services and wannabe-writers flock in and drop off their money to be handed a mediocre product that they can’t even sell enough of to make back what they put into it. This is what Harlequin is doing, right down to the lying and flowering bits. Does it seem logical why the RWA, MWA, SWFA, authors, et. al. are pissed off? Here we have a major publisher joining in on the author scamming, and thinking that somehow it’s right. The Lie and the Corporate MindfuckHarlequin has really sold themselves on the idea that they’re doing something wonderful. After all, publishing is changing, right? All them blasted writers organizations who are there to make sure authors don’t get fucked over by scam agents, etc. are just part of some out-of-date old people’s cling to the past, right? Wrong. They exist to protect writers on numerous levels. But Harlequin thinks otherwise. They think that vanity publishing is the wave of the future. That’s right. They think something that has been around longer than POD, that has been scamming and fucking people over for decades is the wave of the future. Something sound fishy? It should, because we’ve heard similar BS before. The difference between what Lulu does and what Harlequin is going to do is that Lulu doesn’t lie to you. It tells you right up front: you’re self-publishing, and you can do it for free, or buy some of our packages, and we keep a little cut (a real little cut, actually). Harlequin is saying this: you’ll pay us shitloads of money and we’ll print your book, and, oh, by the way, maybe we’ll pick it up for the regular imprints too (we won’t really), the ones that get in bookstores and sell lots of books, oh, and you’ll have the Harlequin brand on it (but it will be worth crap), so it’ll be worth moneys, and, oh, we won’t tell you that your book won’t be edited by our professional editors (because it probably won’t), so we’ll just let you pretend it does. To be fair, they changed one of those, now, since the new imprint won’t say Harlequin in the name, but that’s really irrelevant at this point. Harlequin is doing everything they can to paint this whole thing up like it’s the golden beacon of publishing wonders, when it isn’t. The closest you can get to that are POD services like Lulu or Createspace, who do a damned good job not pretending to be what they are: places that profit off selling a few copies of a lot of different books, while still giving you a cut and not charging you up the ass for services. Lulu and Createspace have latched onto a brilliant method of printing books that traditionally publishers (with exception to many small presses) have yet to see value in. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about… The SFWA and friends are pissed about this because it’s damn obvious what’s going on: Harlequin is trying to make a profit off of its slush pile at the expense of a whole lot of innocent authors who don’t know any better, all while doing very little to make clear what all of that entails. Which is this:–You’ll pay a lot to get it printed.–It won’t be in bookstores.–It won’t sell many copies.–Unless you’re the luckiest damned person alive, it won’t get picked up by a major publisher because most, if not all, publishers won’t touch it with a 200 mile pole.–You’ll be broke.–Nobody will actually edit your work, and if someone does, it won’t be edited very well. –You’ll be raped by the stigma associated with self-publishing in general, and more specifically the kind attached to vanity publishing (a much less lovable version of the anti-self-publishing vitriol). Harlequin is literally like healthcare companies who profit off of sick people, making the whole thing super shiny with a nice bow and a whole lot of B.S. to sell it to the masses. The SFWA and friends have rightly called them out for it. They’re pissed because they believe that authors should be paid, and not the other way around. And it’s a good thing to be pissed about. They don’t like seeing authors getting screwed any more than the rest of us. Harlequin’s attempts to do everything it can to screw authors is getting everything it deserves for it. These are the reasons why the SFWA, RWA, MWA, and most anyone with a conscience are pissed off. It’s not because Harlequin is cashing in