Showing posts with label business of publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label business of publishing. Show all posts

Thursday, March 02, 2023

The Fates of Magazines

Arley Sorg's "By the Numbers" column in the March-April 2023 MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION is titled "The Lifespan of a Magazine." After rereading the LOCUS "Magazine Summary" for the year 1989, he decided to explore statistics that might answer the question implied in the title. "Do magazines just pop up and die out all the time, or does it only feel that way?" Of the professional magazines discussed in that LOCUS issue, only the big three—ANALOG, ASIMOV'S, and FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION—survive today. FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION holds the distinction of having published continuously for over seventy years, a bona fide "miracle," as Sorg says. He summarizes the rise and fall of a variety of notable periodicals, print and electronic, professional and semi-pro. As a criterion for "notability," he cites the Hugos and other prestigious awards won or finaled for by the magazines or stories they published.

Some of his conclusions: Notability is no guarantee of longevity. Neither, it seems from his numbers, is the involvement of a big-name editor or the payment of high per-word rates to authors. Financial problems, although a frequent cause of death for magazines, aren't the only reason. Interpersonal conflicts have destroyed some. On the other hand, changes in editorship or ownership don't necessarily mean a periodical is doomed to a short life. And both print and electronic venues are vulnerable.

I was surprised not to see any mention of CEMETERY DANCE, which has published stories by many distinguished authors. Although it hasn't released a new issue in a couple of years, it thrived for a long time, its website remains live (with back issues for sale), and the company regularly publishes limited-edition books.

This topic raises the question of what qualifies as continuity. WEIRD TALES, as mentioned in the article, opened and closed several times under different ownership and even had a hiatus of almost two decades. At one point the "magazine" consisted of a few paperback anthologies edited by Lin Carter. (No relation. He accepted a story from me for his incarnation of WEIRD TALES but died before he got around to printing it; it was later published in an anthology called THE SHUB-NIGGURATH CYCLE.) Yet the current WEIRD TALES claims continuity with the vintage pulp magazine founded in 1923. In what sense can the present-day publication be considered the "same" periodical, other than sharing the name?

Sorg's final message: "Support the magazines and authors you love. It just might help them stick around."

This issue of FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION will stay on newstands until April 24, so if you want to read about the lifespans of periodicals in meticulous detail, you have time to pick up a copy.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, November 10, 2022

Corporate Bullies and Copyright

Cory Doctorow's article for the November 2022 LOCUS discusses the ever-increasing reach of monopolies that prey on the work of writers and other content creators, in terms of a parable about bullies stealing lunch money. If the victims get more lunch money, they don't get more food; the bullies get more money. No matter how much artistic creators produce and theoretically earn, the greed of the rights-grabbers will never be sated:

Structural Adjustment

Doctorow reminds us that only five (maybe, soon, four) major publishing conglomerates exist and that the realms of physical bookselling, online retailing and e-book sales, book distribution, and music production are each dominated by one mega-corporation. "Publishing and other 'creative industries' generate more money than ever — and yet, despite all this copyright and all the money that sloshes around as a result of it, the share of the income from creative work that goes to creators has only declined." In book publishing, unless an author chooses to self-publish (or go with small independent presses, which he doesn't mention in this article), "Contracts demand more — ebook rights, graphic novel rights, TV and film rights, worldwide English rights — and pay less." And of course the major online retailers exercise their dominance over self-publishers' access to markets.

He summarizes in terms of his parable, "We’re the hungry school kids. The cartels that control access to our audiences are the bullies. The lunch-money is copyright."

Asserting, "Cartels and monopolies have enacted chokepoints between creators and audiences," Doctorow recommends a book, CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM: HOW BIG TECH AND BIG CONTENT CAPTURED CREATIVE LABOR MARKETS AND HOW WE'LL WIN THEM BACK, and gives an example of one of the strategies recommended in it.

While I understand his points and recognize the dangers he often cites in his articles, as a reader (and online consumer in general) I would have trouble getting along without Amazon. It's a great boon to be able to find almost any book, no matter how obscure and long out of print. I value being able to acquire the complete backlist of almost any author I'm interested in. I enjoy having purchases delivered to our doorstep, since the older I get, the less I want to go out searching for items —- especially given the not-unlikely frustration of not finding what I want in stock locally. And I trust Amazon to fill orders reliably and handle credit information securely, rather than my taking the risk of buying from websites unknown to me. As an author, if I decide to self-publish a work, I like being able to upload it for free on the most popular e-book seller's site, plus other retailers through Draft2Digital. At the same time, I realize Doctorow isn't wrong that by embracing convenience and economy, we put ourselves at the mercy of the provider's whims. For one thing, buying a product in electronic form (e-book, music file, movie, etc.) means the seller can make it evaporate from the consumer's hard drive or tablet anytime. So what's the ideal solution? I don't know.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, March 24, 2022

2022 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts

This year's ICFA, our first live conference since 2019, had lower attendance than usual (down from the 500s to around 300), but the difference didn't appear obvious at a glance in most of the gatherings. The opening panel on Wednesday afternoon did look more sparsely attended than in previous years. On the other hand, there were, surprisingly, a lot of people attending the con for the first time. It was encouraging to see so many newcomers, especially considering the current situation.

The theme was "Fantastic Communities." The phrase could refer either to communities of creators, fans, and critics involved with the fantastic in all its media and genres or to the imaginary communities writers and filmmakers create in their works. Panels and papers enthusiastically embraced both approaches. The author guest of honor, Nisi Shawl (who uses "they" pronouns), delivered an engaging speech at the Thursday luncheon, "The Bird in the Bush: Semipermeable Selfhood," structured around the phases of their own life with focus on their various identities and the communities they identify with. Why is a bird in the hand worth more than two in the bush? Aren't two birds better than one, especially with a bush thrown in? Or does an object have value only if possessed and controlled? And how do we define the boundaries of the self? For instance, implanted artificial lenses become part of the subject's body. Are glasses a part of the self, too? Shawl entertained us by singing a risque folk song called "The Bird in the Bush." They concluded their talk by leading the audience in the song "What the World Needs Now Is Love, Sweet Love."

Scholar Guest of Honor Farah Mendlesohn, author of the groundbreaking RHETORICS OF FANTASY as well as many other important works of criticism including a book on the career and works of Robert Heinlein, spoke at the Friday luncheon about "Science Fiction Communities in the Rainbow Age." She surveyed the changes in the demographics of the speculative fiction field over recent decades in areas such as awards, contents of anthologies, etc., supplying lots of substantive data that I found fascinating. Diversity of representation in gender and ethnicity has evolved, of course, but it's still nowhere near equitable.

I participated in two events, a panel on vampire communities in fiction and a "Words and Worlds" session in which several writers read short excerpts from our works. There was lots of time for discussion in the latter. I read from my dark paranormal romance AGAINST THE DARK DEVOURER, which I think went well, and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the other panelists, two poets and a prose fiction author.

Afrofuturist fiction, BIPOC representation, and gender issues held a prominent place in this year's programming. I especially enjoyed a paper session on animation; shows discussed included one anime series, TERROR IN RESONANCE, with a focus on mental illness, and four Western cartoons, OWL HOUSE, STEVEN UNIVERSE, SHE-RA, and ADVENTURE TIME, analyzing nonbinary characters in those works. I attended several lively, informative discussion panels about the business of marketing fiction. At the Saturday banquet, the president of our vampire and revenant division, the Lord Ruthven Assembly, announced this year's awards: Fiction, THE NIGHT LIBRARY OF STERNENDACH: A VAMPIRE OPERA IN VERSE, by Jessica Levai. Nonfiction (tie), THE TRANSMEDIA VAMPIRE, by Simon Bacon, and THE VAMPIRE IN POPULAR CULTURE: LOVE AT FIRST BITE, by Violet Fenn. Other media, MIDNIGHT MASS (Netflix).

Food at the two lunches and the banquet was excellent, as usual, although the hotel (under new management) miscalculated and ran out of some items on Thursday. Meals in the hotel restaurant were good but astonishingly high-priced. Except that my return flight took off half an hour late, the plane trips went pretty smoothly. When I got home, daffodils had suddenly started blooming.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, September 16, 2021

Advice on "Breaking In" to Publishing

Cory Doctorow's newest LOCUS column discusses the beginning writer's obsessive quest for tips from pros on how to get started in publishing. In particular, we love to read about how successful authors landed their first sales:

Breaking In

The major premise of this article: The publishing field changes so fast that a veteran author's story of how he or she first got accepted for professional publication isn't likely to be of any practical help today. As Doctorow puts it with reference to his own early experiences, "While I still have an encylopedic knowledge of the editorial peccadilloes of dozens of publications, most of them no longer exist, and the ones that do have been radically transformed in the intervening decades." What Doctorow supplies instead is "meta-advice," advice on where to find the best advice. According to him, novice writers can get optimal assistance by pooling their knowledge of current publishing practices and trends with other novice writers, sharing what they've discovered through researching markets and submitting to editors. "Just as a writers’ critiquing circle should consist of writers of similar ability, so too should a writers’ professional support circle consist of writers at similar places in their careers."

He does offer some general guidelines applicable to everyone, a more specific, pragmatic version of Heinlein's well-known "rules." Doctorow also narrates his own "breaking in" story with mention of several publishing veterans who assisted him, including Judith Merril. He declares that an established author's most "powerful tool for helping out new writers" is encouragement.

My first adventure in professional publication (my only previous published work being limited to short pieces in our high-school newspaper), in the late 1960s when I was just over twenty years old, certainly has little if any practical application for writers today. I didn't have the benefit of mentors or networking of any kind. I knew nothing about submitting manuscripts except that they had to be double-spaced on only one side of the paper and had to include a SASE (self-addressed, stamped envelope, for those who've never submitted a paper manuscript). My sole source of information about the industry came from the annual WRITERS' MARKET reference volume in the public library. Today's novice writers are so fortunate to have the resources of the internet. I assembled a collection of stories for a vampire anthology, wrote an introduction, and sent the package to Fawcett in New York. After a year of silence, I mailed them a humorous "haven't heard from you" greeting card. Now that I know better, I'd never think of doing such a thing. Yet they responded promptly, apologized for the long wait, and offered me a contract. In view of my total ignorance, the editor had to explain to me how anthology payments worked and how to arrange for reprint permissions. That proposal became my first book, CURSE OF THE UNDEAD, a mass market paperback.

My first professional fiction sale came about in a more conventional manner that still applies to today's markets, other than the shift from snail mail to e-mail submissions and communications. I received a call for submissions to Marion Zimmer Bradley's second Darkover anthology, FREE AMAZONS OF DARKOVER, probably because the rudimentary fan activities I'd started doing had somehow gotten me on Bradley's mailing list. The zip code on the envelope, however, was wrong, and the letter had reached me barely in time to meet the deadline, if I worked very quickly (for me—I wasn't quite as slow then as now, but I haven't been a truly fast writer since my teens). So this sale had an element of luck, too; the submission invitation could have been lost completely. Without much hope of success, I wrote a story and mailed it just in time. To my surprise, it was accepted. After that, I had stories included in numerous later Darkover anthologies. They stayed in print for many years and, for a long time, supplied my most reliable (although modest in amount) source of royalty income.

Doctorow's "advice" for beginners may be broadly summarized in the eloquent statement, "Writers blaze their own trails, finding mentors or not, getting lucky or not, agonizing and working and reworking, finding peers and lifting each other up."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, March 11, 2021

Problems with Monopolies

Cory Doctorow's LOCUS article for this month delves into a lot of background about markets and monopolies that's new to me:

Free Markets

He begins by explaining that the classic threat to the free market wasn't considered to be government control, but corporate monopoly. Adam Smith in THE WEALTH OF NATIONS warns of the power of rentiers, which Doctorow defines as follows: "A rentier is someone who derives their income from 'economic rents': revenues derived from merely owning something" -- for example, a landlord. Doctorow extends this concept to companies such as Amazon and Google, "Big Tech" in general, with the power to control "access to the marketplace." A monopolist, in this view, isn't simply a corporate monolith with limited competition; it's an entity "who can set prices without regard to the market"

The primary example Doctorow focuses on is, not surprisingly, DRM. In addition to the alleged purpose of preventing copyright infringement (at which he maintains DRM utterly fails), the relevant law "felonizes removing or tampering with or bypassing DRM, even when no copyright infringement takes place." Therefore, a buyer of an e-book (such as a Kindle novel) can't read it on any device not authorized by the seller. As a result, Big Tech, not the author who owns the copyright, gets "permanent veto over how my books can be used: which devices can display them, and on what terms." However, since all e-book platforms (so far) make DRM optional, Doctorow and his publisher have the power to sell his work DRM-free.

He discusses at length the very different status of audiobooks. Amazon requires all audiobooks released through its Audible program, whether produced by Amazon itself or some other publisher, to be "wrapped in its proprietary lockware." That's something I didn't know, since I don't have any audiobooks on the market and never buy books in that medium. In response to that policy, Doctorow turned to Kickstarter to release his books in audio format, and he analyzes in detail how that project worked out. He also explains how much more complicated it is to download and play an audiobook with an independent app than to buy it through Audible. I previously had little or no awareness of the hard line the Big Tech companies take toward "noncompliant apps."

I have an ambivalent reaction toward Doctorow's stance on Amazon. In principle, I acknowledge that dominance of a market by one company isn't desirable. In practice, as a reader I love knowing I can find almost any book I've ever heard of on a single website. It's a vanishingly rare occurence when I can't find a book listed there, no matter how long out of print. I also turn to Amazon first for many items other than books, music, and visual media. I like buying from it because of its reliable, usually fast delivery and because it already has our credit card on file, so I don't have to enter the information on unfamiliar sites. As a writer, for my "orphaned" works I like the ease of self-publishing through Kindle and the fact that the vast majority of e-book buyers are likely to read the Kindle format. At least one of my publishers feels the same way, having pulled their products from all other outlets because those sales were negligible compared to Amazon sales. Yet I do understand having qualms about being at the mercy of one powerful commercial entity's whims.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, February 18, 2021

Survival in the World of Publishing

Kameron Hurley's new LOCUS essay reflects on her first ten years as a published author:

How to Survive a Decade in Publishing

Her first series went through three publishers, the last of which folded when one of the owners allegedly absconded with the royalties that were owed. She notes that "publishing is weird," a conclusion supported by her examples from her own career and those of some other writers. Knowing "the one thing we can control in this wild business is the words on the page" (and not always even that, where the finished product released to the market is concerned), we have to accept that the "glorious highs" and "very low lows" of a writer's life depend heavily on many outside factors, including luck.

Her remark that all her adventures as an author since then have been "measured against that first foray into the publishing world" resonates with me. I had two very different publishing experiences at the start of my career. My first two books were mass-market paperback anthologies, CURSE OF THE UNDEAD and DEMON LOVERS AND STRANGE SEDUCTIONS. The sale of anthologies edited by someone with no prior writing or editing experience to a major publisher was an amazing stroke of luck then and would be impossible now. At the time, I thought I would thereafter (1) make lots of money and (2) sell everything I wrote. It is to laugh. The advances did constitute more money than we'd ever received in one lump before, although they were probably modest even by early 1970s standard. One of them did provide the down payment on our first house. Neither book earned out its advance, though, and the publisher didn't buy anything further from me.

As for the second expectation, my next publication was the first full-length book I wrote myself, a nonfiction work of literary criticism on vampirism in literature. After a couple of years of floundering around, still not very knowledgable about the industry, I contracted it with a small press that proved to be disastrous. They printed the book by offset from my typed manuscript, long before word processing, so the thing looked sadly unprofessional. It had a small print run, as typical for academic-oriented works, and it was exorbitantly overpriced. It cost something like $29.00 in 1975, when the average paperback went for $1.25 and most hardcovers for under $10.00. (I checked those figures by glancing at books from that decade on my shelf.) It's a wonder any copies ever sold. Moreover, after the first year or two the publisher stopped communicating with me, and I eventually resorted to a lawyer's letter to get them to disgorge a meager royalty payment. Years went by before my first professional fiction sale, to one of the early Darkover anthologies, and well over a decade between that monograph and my first novel, to a startup small horror press—which treated its authors well and even paid an advance. So, not forgetting that aforementioned ghastly vampire monograph experience, with later publishers I felt good about the deal when they actually answered mail and disbursed royalties on time.

Hurley reminds us that at every stage of a writing career, rejection will happen, and she recommends an attitude of "grim optimism." For surviving in this industry, she advises writers to "create a strong support network. Get a good agent. Understand that everything changes."

I've read that something like 90% of published authors don't live off their writing, but have another source of income such as a day job, a pension, or a well-employed spouse. Of the other 10%, few support themselves by writing fiction; most depend on occupations such as journalism or technical writing. Anyone whose principal goal in becoming an author is to get rich or even affluent is probably doomed to disappointment. To survive the highs and lows described in Hurley's essay, one has to write for its own sake. As Marion Zimmer Bradley famously said, nobody told you not to be a plumber.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Shadow of the Beast

My first published novel, SHADOW OF THE BEAST, a werewolf urban fantasy with romantic elements, is back in print after a few years of dormancy, being recently re-released by Writers Exchange E-Publishing:

Shadow of the Beast

This wasn't the first novel I completed. That was the true book of my heart, vampire romantic urban fantasy DARK CHANGELING, first published not long after SHADOW OF THE BEAST and currently available in an e-book duology called TWILIGHT'S CHANGELINGS:

Twilight's Changelings

And as a Kindle e-book here:

Amazon Page

SHADOW OF THE BEAST was originally published by a small horror press that produced numerous attractive trade paperbacks for several years before closing down. My novel was later picked up by Amber Quill Press, which had a fairly long run before it, too, went out of business. I was lucky to find Writers Exchange, which sells its products in both electronic and trade paperback formats, to adopt most of my Amber Quill books. (It's somewhat disheartening to contemplate how many of my works have been "orphaned" by the disappearances of publishers over the years. Fortunately, we now have self-publishing as an alternative in case switching to a new publisher doesn't work out.)

I lightly revised SHADOW OF THE BEAST before the Amber Quill edition was published. The text of this latest version hasn't changed from that one; only the cover is different. The story follows the template of one of my favorite tropes, the Ugly Duckling. The heroine discovers she isn't what she always believed herself to be, and traits that first seem like flaws turn out to be gifts. I've retold that basic story multiple times over the years. My first professionally published work of fiction, "Her Own Blood" in FREE AMAZONS OF DARKOVER, fits that pattern, as does DARK CHANGELING.

Because SHADOW OF THE BEAST retains the text from the previous edition, it features technology that has become obsolete. Since only one scene is affected (where the characters use a VHS camcorder and tape player), the editor decided it wouldn't be a problem and didn't need a disclaimer at the beginning. As far as the plot goes, SHADOW OF THE BEAST has some undeniable flaws. The editing for Amber Quill corrected some of the original version's problems but didn't amount to a major rewrite. The "because line" is weak in places; back then, I didn't realize I was sometimes making characters do things for my convenience as author, rather than from solidly established motives. I've learned better since then, I hope!

What's your philosophy on rewriting older books for re-release or leaving them alone?"

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Series Binge Reading

The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION carries a regular column called "Plumage from Pegasus," by Paul Di Filippo, satirizing aspects of the writing life and the publishing industry. The article in the May-June 2020 issue, "Faster, Publisher! Binge! Binge!", imagines a near future in which the federal government has "outlawed serial fiction in all media, in response to its obvious debilitating effects." One exception, the trilogy (a "one tolkien" unit) is still legal, but that can't make a dent in the addictive cravings of the narrator, a self-confessed hopeless "codex-head." Piers Anthony's Xanth series lasts him only three weeks. He takes longer to get through the nearly 100 Perry Mason mysteries, but they don't last forever, nor do Enid Blyton's approximately 700 books. In desperation, he subjects himself to the ultimate hardcore aversion therapy regimen—reading the entire Perry Rhodan franchise in the original German.

All dedicated bookaholics probably identify with the thrill of discovering a new favorite author who has dozens or scores of books to read through. Some series can be read in any order, while others don't make sense that way. When I first got into the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, I didn't realize that, while many of the novels can be picked up at any point, the ones featuring Harriet Vane have a definite story arc. I read BUSMAN'S HONEYMOON (which begins with the marriage of Peter and Harriet) before the earlier books in the arc and was bewildered for the first chapter or so, because I had no idea who Harriet was. I read many of J. D. Robb's Eve Dallas futuristic mysteries out of order (until I caught up and began buying them upon release), which works for most of the books, although one gets more out of them by following the recurring characters from one story to the next. However, the first three novels, in which Eve meets and marries Roarke, really do need to be read first for optimal appreciation and just to avoid confusion. Fans of the Narnia novels disagree on whether they should be approached in internal chronological order or original publication order. Encountering Narnia for the first time in THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE offers an experience of discovery that's lost if one starts with the chronologically earlier THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW. Although the systematic side of my mind favors chronological order, I have to agree that for a first reading, publication order works best. In subsequent readings, I would start with THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW and insert THE HORSE AND HIS BOY in its proper place right after THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE.

The aforementioned Perry Mason books, from what I know of them, seem to stand alone in any order. So do the books in Agatha Christie's voluminous mystery canon, except that I'd advise postponing the final adventures of, respectively, Tommy and Tuppence, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple until you've become acquainted with those detective characters in a few earlier novels. After Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "A Study in Scarlet," which introduces Holmes and Watson, you can enjoy the Sherlock Holmes mysteries in any order, aside from the tales dealing with his "death" and return. As far as I can tell from memories of reading a few of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, those series can be dipped into at random, being written by ghostwriters under house pseudonyms and lacking any story arcs or character growth. On the other hand, the far better and undeservedly obscure Judy Bolton mysteries, by Margaret Sutton (a real person, who based the settings on the area in Pennsylvania where she lived), has characters who age from one installment to the next, graduate from school, and get married.

I recently decided to reread C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series. Discovering we didn't own all the novels, I ordered the missing volumes in secondhand copies. Then I had to wait for some of the gaps to be filled, because I want to read the books in internal chronological order. Like the Narnia series, however, they weren't published that way. The original Hornblower trilogy is set at the peak of his career, when he's captain of a ship of the line. The author later filled in the hero's life story with numerous prequels and sequels.

And then there's the frustration of discovering a publisher has allowed some earlier books in a series to go out of print. Thank goodness we now have easy access to out-of-print materials on the internet. How do you approach rereading a series? Do you follow it from start to finish or pick out favorite stories to savor?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, April 09, 2020

The "Catch" in Author's Monopoly

Cory Doctorow's March LOCUS column asserts, "A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick":

Lever Without a Fulcrum

The "lever" here is copyright law, the "author's monopoly." The article focuses on some ways the common practices of major publishers can use this "lever" as a "stick" to beat creators. According to Doctorow, broad copyright protections designed in theory to safeguard the rights of authors often don't accomplish that goal in practice if publishers' contracts demand control over the exercise of those provisions. Authors, particularly novice writers, usually can't negotiate changes in standard publishing deals; they face "take it or leave it" offers. E-book and audio rights, for example, are seldom left under the creator's control. This situation effectively strips the "author's monopoly" of much of its power. "The fact that the company can’t reproduce your book without your permission doesn’t mean much if the only way to get your book into the public’s hands is through that company, or one of a small handful of companies with identical negotiating positions."

Doctorow analyzes phenomena such as music sampling, record contracts, Audible (the audiobook provider), video streaming, and DRM in relation to the general problem that, "Market concentration at every part of the supply chain is conspiring to make life harder for artists." His proposed solutions involve rights reversion clauses, changes in licensing rules, and unionization, among other possibilities.

I might suggest that authors deal with small presses (both print and e-book) rather than the Big Five. Small publishers can provide a personal touch and, often, more flexible contractual terms. But, of course, the mammoth corporations offer bookstore exposure and high-volume sales; the latter are almost impossible to achieve online without strong marketing skills. Also, an author who feels she lacks the expertise, resources, or time to exploit subsidiary rights effectively might prefer to leave those outlets in the hands of a publisher with the connections and experience to do so for her. It's a puzzlement.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, March 05, 2020

Giving Self-Publishing a Bad Name

If you live in or near Maryland, you'll have heard about the scandal and criminal charges surrounding Baltimore ex-mayor Catherine Pugh's self-published series, "Healthy Holly." The books are intended to teach children about health issues such as nutrition, exercise, etc. Pugh sold $500,000 worth of them to the University of Maryland Medical System while serving on its board. She has also been accused of pre-selling books that were ultimately never printed and of sometimes selling the same hypothetical copies more than once to different customers, then not fulfilling the orders. UMMS donated its share of the books to the Baltimore City school system, which has stated that it didn't use any of them in the curriculum. Most of those copies have been warehoused rather than given to children. (In addition to the publishing-related charges, Pugh has also been convicted of fraud and tax evasion.)

Here's a timeline of the major events in the developing case, with a photo of a few of the book covers:

Healthy Holly Book Scandal

The books have been described as "clumsily" and "sloppily" written and produced. They're said to "contain grammatical and spelling errors, such as a main character’s name being spelled two different ways and the word 'vegetable' appearing as 'vegetale'." It strikes me as sad that many people may get their sole impression of self-publishing from this case.

This article goes into more detail about the series and what was done with the copies:

Just How Many "Healthy Holly" Books?

Only two of the books are listed on Amazon, as far as I could see, and neither has a "look inside" feature, so I couldn't evaluate the quality of the writing. Secondhand copies are priced at absurd levels, up to five figures. The reviews of the single book that has any (HEALTHY HOLLY: EXERCISING IS FUN) discuss the author's illegal actions, not the texts of the stories themselves. They all rate it one star except for a two-sentence five-star review, which I think is pretty funny: "I bought 50 of these and finally my rooftop deck permit got approved. 10/10 would buy again."

I'm willing to believe Pugh originally wrote and published the series with good intentions. Yet apparently the temptation of leveraging her political career to promote and sell her work overwhelmed her. Note to self: "Never use official connections to pressure readers into buying books"—not that most of us are ever likely to face such a temptation on that scale.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, September 19, 2019

Digital Media Bait-and-Switch

Cory Doctorow's latest column targets DRM but touches upon the abusive business practices of digital marketing in general:

DRM Broke Its Promise

The philosophy behind restricted access to the media we "buy" begins with the premise, "The problem with markets is that selling things is inefficient. There are so many people who don’t need the thing, just a momentary use of the thing." So the promise of DRM was, "Thanks to a technology called 'Digital Rights Management,' sellers and buyers could negotiate a subset of rights and a reduced payment for same.. . .In other words, we were told that we must reject the promise of unfet­tered digital in favor of locked-down digital, and in return, we would enter a vibrant marketplace where sellers offered exactly the uses we needed, at a price that was reduced to reflect the fact that we were getting a limited product." As Doctorow sardonically summarizes, "In the futuristic digital realm, no one would own things, we would only license them, and thus be relieved of the terrible burden of ownership." The actual outcome: "We got the limited product, all right—just not the discount." For example, the DRM-protected books from publishers who use that technology cost no less than Tor's unrestricted e-books. The promise of "flexibility and bargains" gave way to the reality of "price-gouging and brittleness."

Doctorow discusses several limitations and abuses arising from the fact that we don't own the digital media products we thought we were purchasing. Without warning or recourse, customers can suddenly lose access to books, music, or video content (e.g., Microsoft's e-book store). Libraries pay more for e-books than print books and have restrictions on the number of times a book can be borrowed. Streaming services control how consumers can use the content they rent or "buy" (e.g., inability to skip commercials). College textbooks are a particularly egregious example. Electronic texts should be cheaper than hardcovers, but that's not necessarily so. Moreover, the login codes for mandatory online supplements have to be purchased afresh every year. Having finished my terminal degree well before e-textbooks, I had no idea of this catch before reading the article. I have a personal gripe with academic publishers (those that publish scholarly works rather than college textbooks): When they started producing electronic as well as print editions of their exorbitantly overpriced books—clearly marketed with libraries, not individual scholars, in mind—the e-book versions should have been cheaper. Much cheaper, within reach of individual would-be readers. Instead, they're typically priced only a few dollars lower than the hardcover editions. A $90 book discounted to $80, to pick a typical pair of figures at random, is still too expensive for the average unemployed or under-employed academic to justify buying. Granted, producing an e-book requires paid labor, just as a print book does. But in the case of an electronic edition of an existing print book, most of that work (editing, proofreading, etc.) has already been done. I often mentally rage, "Don't those people WANT anybody to read their books?" Some of us who would like to do so don't have access to a university library.

In an electronic media market where consumers have little or no choice but to spend "more for less," Doctorow summarizes the state of affairs thus: "DRM never delivered a world of flexible consumer choice, but it was never supposed to. Instead, twenty years on, DRM is revealed to be exactly what we feared: an oligarchic gambit to end property ownership for the people, who become tenants in the fields of greedy, confiscatory tech and media companies." Don't hold back, Mr. Doctorow; what do you REALLY think? :)

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, July 11, 2019

When Publishers Fold

Recently, author Delilah Devlin hosted me on her blog, where I wrote about what to do with books and stories "orphaned" by the closing of a publisher:

Rescuing Orphaned Works

In re-releasing the fiction mentioned in this post, I had the advantage that those novels, novellas, and short stories had been thoroughly edited before their original publication. Therefore, I could have confidence that professional editors had already deemed them to be publishable. Still, I welcomed the opportunity to comb through them again. It's a rare piece of writing that gets into print with no typos, not to mention examples of minor stylistic awkwardness that need a bit of polishing. Also, one of the publishers that closed, Ellora's Cave, seemed to have an irrational aversion to commas. I'm delighted to be able to put the punctuation in those stories back where it belongs. As an English degree holder and former professional proofreader, I cringed to imagine that some readers would think I didn't know the right way to punctuate a sentence.

As you may know, the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust is publishing its final installments of the Darkover and "Sword and Sorceress" anthologies this year. I'm sure lots of other readers and writers will miss those books as much as I will. The Trust has also decided to let many earlier volumes go out of print. That was disappointing news, because I'd expected my stories in the older anthologies to remain available in perpetuity. Thanks to the Internet, e-books, and self-publishing, I was able to collect my "Sword and Sorceress" contributions in a Kindle collection. (The MZB estate gave Darkover contributors permission to reprint those out-of-print stories, too, but unfortunately I didn't realize until too late that the files were no longer on my hard drive. Luckily, Amazon has many used copies of the Darkover volumes for sale, so the books and their contents haven't faded into nonexistence.)

In addition to minor edits and corrections, another decision to face in re-issuing older works is whether to update the settings into the contemporary era. With my first vampire novel, DARK CHANGELING, I had a definite in-universe reason for the year of its action, because of when it made sense for the protagonist to have been born. Therefore, I didn't change the time period, with the result that the date of the direct sequel, CHILD OF TWILIGHT, explicitly set thirteen to fourteen years later, couldn't change either. That's one difficulty I could avoid with several of my fantasy stories; the culture of "fairy-tale realm" or "vaguely Dark Ages England" remains unaffected by advances in computer or cell-phone technology.

In a way, it's a pleasure to have control over the presentation of some of my older fiction. On the down side, a self-published author also bears the full burden of marketing and promotion. How does one stimulate fresh interest in books and stories that readers have already been exposed to in earlier releases?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, May 24, 2018

YA Genre Fiction

Michael Cart, author of YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE: FROM ROMANCE TO REALISM, had an article on this past Sunday's editorial page of the Baltimore SUN proclaiming that YA literature is an American invention. The essay summarizes the highlights of the history of twentieth-century fiction for teens and the emergence of novels written specifically for them as a distinct marketing category:

YA Literature

Since this author is clearly an expert in the field, and the Amazon blurb for his book's third edition mentions that it covers horror, SF, and dystopian novels, it strikes me as particularly puzzling and annoying that he dismisses all fiction for teenagers before the late 1960s with remarks such as these:

Quoting S. E. Hinton, author of the classic THE OUTSIDERS: "The world is changing, yet the authors of books for teenagers are still 15 years behind the times. In the fiction they write, romance is still the most popular theme with a horse and the girl who loved it coming in a close second."

And Cart's own summary of the pre-1960s literary landscape: "Before these two novels [THE OUTSIDERS and Robert Lipsyte's THE CONTENDER], literature for 12 to 18 year olds was about as realistic as a Norman Rockwell painting — almost universally set in small-town, white America and featuring teenagers whose biggest problem was finding a date for the senior prom." Cart praises novels such as THE OUTSIDERS, THE CONTENDER, and those that followed them as "hard-hitting, truth-telling fiction" that "embraced real world considerations like abortion and homosexuality." Not that there's anything wrong with that. Doubtless nobody denies that novels reflecting life as experienced by their target audience and grappling with contemporary problems are a Good Thing. But not all children and teenagers want to read about characters like themselves who face problems similar to the ones they have to cope with every day, nor should they be obligated to. (See the topic of "escape," discussed here recently.)

Can Cart possibly be unaware of the early "juveniles" by Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein, in which young adults venture out into the world (in their cases, the universe), take on jobs of real importance, and accomplish meaningful contributions to their societies? Does he think for some reason that these books don't count in the history of teen literature? This ignoring or dismissal of an entire genre reminds me of an article I once saw lamenting the death of the short story. So, for that author, the short story was dying or dead? He or she had never read ANALOG, ASIMOV'S, THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, CEMETERY DANCE, or WEIRD TALES (to name a few genre magazines flourishing at that time, before online publications)? Had never suspected the existence of the many original short-fiction anthologies published annually in fantasy, horror, and SF? That mourner of the short story's death looked for thriving markets in the wrong places. Likewise, judging from that one editorial article, Michael Cart is looking for pre-1960s YA fiction more "realistic" than "a Norman Rockwell painting" (not that there's always necessarily anything "unrealistic" about that, either; some of us DID live in lily-white suburbs in the 1950s and 60s) in the wrong place.

For a more comprehensive viewpoint: Speculative fiction scholar Farah Mendlesohn has published two books about the history of fantasy and SF for children and adolescents, THE INTER-GALACTIC PLAYGROUND and CHILDREN'S FANTASY LITERATURE: AN INTRODUCTION. Both are great reads, lively and informative. Although THE INTER-GALACTIC PLAYGROUND unfortunately has no reasonably priced edition (by my frugal standards; I read a library copy some time ago), the book on fantasy is affordable and well worth delving into.

On a completely different subject, have you been watching the PBS series NOVA WONDERS on Wednesdays? They've covered topics such as the microbiome inside us, AI, creating life, and the search for extraterrestrial life. Check it out if you can.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, May 03, 2018

Surviving the Gold Rush as a Writer

The latest issue of RWR (the members' magazine of Romance Writers of America) includes an article titled "The Key to a Lifelong Career" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, whose online articles on the business of writing can be found here:

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Her essay in the May RWR focuses on how to avoid burnout but ranges over a number of related topics—handling success (some writers try to replicate the process that led to their success without really understanding it and end up "working harder" without working "smarter"), reasons for burnout (e.g., pushing oneself to churn out too many books in a year), diminishing returns in income, what it means to find oneself in a mature market instead of a new one that's expanding at an exponential rate, overextending oneself in terms of expenses and how to reduce them, and switching one's writing business from a "manufacturing model" to an "artisanal model."

One section of this article is headed "Surviving the Gold Rush." The "gold rush" designates the exponentially expanding phase of a new market when it seems easy to get into the field and make bushels of money. Rusch writes in insightful detail about the rise of e-books and the early boom in independent publishing, followed by the leveling-off phase. She discusses the three stages in the typical way "markets develop over time": (1) The gold rush, when growth doubles, quadruples, or more each year. (2) The plateau, with large but not exponential growth. (3) The mature market, when growth still occurs, but it's slow and steady.

Personally, I never experienced the gold rush, at least nowhere near the extent Rusch describes. The closest I came to it happened in the early years with Ellora's Cave (now closed), when e-books were still an exciting novelty and EC was, although not the only game in town for that subgenre, the highest-profile and biggest-selling publisher of erotic romance for women. I was lucky enough to get in at a stage when, by publishing with EC regularly, I could count on a nice check each month. But the levels of success Rusch writes about—authors who earned royalties in the tens of thousands of dollars per month at the height of the "gold rush"—boggle my mind. Likewise, the allusions to authors becoming discouraged because their incomes dropped to half of that—still more per month than I made annually in my best years. In that respect, the indie superstars inhabit a different world from mine!

The priorities she recommends for hard-working writers concerned about potential burnout, however, apply to everyone. In order of descending importance, they are: self-care; spending time with loved ones; writing new words; publishing new words; whatever keeps you healthy and happy. While I can't point you to this particular article because it's in a members-only publication, you can find lots of related useful information and counsel in Rusch's posts at the link cited above. She provides plenty of specific details and hard facts, with numbers.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, January 18, 2018

An Author's Obligation to Readers?

With the TV series GAME OF THRONES having outrun the books on which it's based, there have been speculations that George R. R. Martin may never finish the "Song of Ice and Fire" multi-volume epic. On the other hand, in July 1917 Martin assured the public that he's actively working on WINDS OF WINTER, which might even be released sometime in 2018. (We've heard that sort of claim before, haven't we? :) ) I'm reminded of Neil Gaiman's well-known blog post admonishing fans that George Martin does not work for us:

Entitlement Issues

Gaiman maintains that writing the first book in a series does not constitute a "contract" on the part of the author to write sequels, much less finish the series. He justifiably points out that writers, even bestselling ones, aren't "machines" and have a right to private lives. And I have to concede that readers aren't "entitled" to any and all books they want to read. Still, I don't completely agree with Gaiman's position.

I'm not talking about open-ended series—for example, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover universe and most detective series. These could in theory go on forever, if the author were immortal or, as with Bradley, Tom Clancy, and many others, bequeathed his or her fictional universe to literary heirs. A series like this doesn't tell a single, unified narrative building toward a conclusion without which it would be incomplete. (It's worth mentioning, however, that in her prime Agatha Christie thoughtfully wrote "final case" novels for both Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, to be published after Christie's death.) Works along the line of Stephen King's Dark Tower epic, Gabaldon's Outlander series, and, yes, "A Song of Ice and Fire" do fit the second pattern.

Not that I condone harassing an author about not writing fast enough. Some fans apparently complained when Diana Gabaldon published novellas and novels in the Outlander spinoff series featuring Lord John Grey, on the grounds that she should have been working on the next mainline Outlander book instead! Gabaldon patiently explained that her process doesn't function that way, and the Lord John stories had no effect on the progress of the "big novels." I do believe, however, that when an author starts a series that comprises a unified story, he or she makes an implicit promise to finish the story. A multi-volume narrative, in that sense, is no different in principle from the serialized novels popular in the nineteenth century. While public nagging and angry demands are unacceptable, there's nothing wrong with what we might call "reasonable expectations."

Speaking of which, while I don't begrudge J. K. Rowling THE CASUAL VACANCY and the mystery novels, what happened to that Harry Potter encyclopedia she as good as promised us? She even forced a fan project to shut down because she intended to produce such a guide. All we've gotten, so far, is Pottermore, a flashy website that delivers world and character background material in sporadic chunks and seems more geared to interactivity than information. No, writers don't work for readers, but we can legitimately feel disappointed when we get "teased" with promised books that never materialize. While Gabaldon (for example) goes a long time between release dates of her "big novels," she transparently keeps readers updated about the current work in progress to forestall cries of "when will it be out?"

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, October 13, 2016

A Writer's Mission?

Kameron Hurley's latest LOCUS column begins with the declaration, "Most writers quit." Having grabbed our attention with that statement, she goes on to explore why many authors become discouraged and realize a writing career isn't what they actually want. She discusses the dissonance between writing as an art and publishing as a business:

The Mission-Driven Writing Career

Some writers decide early on that they don't want to be "career writers." Some may "quit" at a later stage when they've accomplished what they originally set out to do, e.g. publish a story or a book. Hurley devotes most of her essay to writers who get discouraged at mid-career, "having books published and paid for, and staring ahead into a grinding future of deadlines and release dates, working toward a breakout book." She asks, "What drives you, then, when you have reached the goal of selling work, and perhaps making a little money doing it? What drives you when you have finally achieved the financial freedom afforded by your writing career?"

This question has some current relevance for me, having seen the two publishers that released most of my works closing within a single year. That's definitely discouraging (even though a new publisher, happily, has picked up the reverted books from one of the two).

Hurley's answer: Writing should fulfill a "personal mission." She defines her own as to "inspire change by imagining a different world." I must admit I've never conceived of my writing as the expression of a mission. My goal is to give readers harmless entertainment in the form of characters and situations that depart from mundane existence as we know it. Offering people temporary escape from the tedium and stress of everyday life is a legitimate vocation—even my idol C. S. Lewis says so. In the process, I try to create believable, sympathetic characters and convey authentic emotions. Of course, my writing inevitably foregrounds certain recurring themes and tropes; the core ones, I've discovered, are the Ugly Duckling archetype (an overlooked or abused character whose apparent flaws turn out to be valuable gifts) and the idea that no matter how different you are or feel, you can find someone to love and a place to belong. But I've never thought of my writing as a mission. The weight of that word sounds daunting. I do, however, agree with Hurley "that storytelling is how we make sense of the world."

Tomorrow we have a guest blog by award-winning, multi-genre author Karen Wiesner.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, August 11, 2016

The Shifting Landscape of Publishing

Here are links to two blog posts related to the challenges of flourishing as an author in today's publishing environment.

Horror writer Brian Keene on how maintaining a balance between traditional releases from mainstream publishers and newer methods and formats helps an author hang onto long-time readers:

Missing in Action

He discusses the advantages of digital publishing and online distribution but also recounts his experience of the downside of having no traditionally published books in physical bookstores. Many of his older readers didn't follow him online because they didn't realize he was still writing new material. The article reminds us that not everybody is cutting-edge computer-savvy or in the habit of seeking online first (or at all) for products they want, including books. Having books stocked in stores offers another advantage he barely touches on—the chance to sell to impulse purchasers who otherwise wouldn't know the author exists.

Kameron Hurley on when to quit your day job:

When to Quit Your Day Job

The surprise in this essay is that, unlike most people giving advice on this topic, Hurley doesn't focus on strategies for leaving the "day job" as soon as feasible. Instead, she recommends sticking with it as long as you can (provided it's not a soul-sucking ordeal) for the financial security of salary and benefits. How long can an individual live (much less support a family) on a $100,000 advance, which looks like a fortune at first glance? The portion left after taxes and the agent's percentage will last at most two or three years, depending on the cost of living in a particular city. And how many aspiring authors will ever receive a windfall of that magnitude? An advance that size WOULD be a functional fortune for me, because my husband and I are already living perfectly well on our combined retirement-income streams. That fact, however, supports Hurley's recommendations, because one of her points mentions quitting the day job if one has a reliable income such as the salary of a steadily employed spouse.

Selling a book for a huge advance is in that way a bit like winning a million dollars in the lottery. If a young winner thinks, "Wow, I'm a millionaire," and starts spending like one, he'll soon go broke. If he decides to quit his job and exist on his windfall with a modest lifestyle, he'll get at most twenty years or so of leisure before he has to find a job again. On the other hand, a million dollars really would make the winner rich if he or she were already at or near retirement.

My personal fantasy of writing as a get-rich scheme involves film options. Since the books are already written and published, that income would be free money, similar to winning a lottery (and, from what I've heard, not much more likely).

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Who You Know

An essay by Kameron Hurley about why relationships matter in the publishing business:

Hard Publishing Truths

She describes how a multi-layered network of personal connections led to the publication of her first book. The most brilliant novel ever written won't get published if it never gets seen by the right editor.

Other things being equal—a choice between two stories of similar quality when there isn't room for both, for instance—it makes sense for an editor to choose the one by an author whose name recognition will attract readers. Many academic journals practice blind reading of submissions, with the author's name unknown to the acquiring editor until the decision is made. While I understand the sound reasons for this custom, I don't think blind reading is always appropriate. Sometimes the identity of the author IS an important factor in the decision whether or not to publish. Given two equally good articles on a certain work of literature, for example, wouldn't the one by a recognized authority on that work be legitimately of more interest to the journal's readers than one by a novice critic?

I've had my own peculiar experience with blind reading by a fiction publisher. After I sent the sequel to one of my vampire novels (which had won an EPPIE Award) to the publisher, it languished unread in the slush pile for months, because the company had adopted the policy of stripping author names from submissions. When I finally queried about the sequel's status, and the chief editor realized what had happened, they quickly accepted the book (and dropped the blind-reading procedure).

My first published novel, SHADOW OF THE BEAST, got into print partly because of a personal connection. The head of a commercial design company, a devoted horror fan, decided to start a small press publishing horror novels. Some years earlier, he had edited a high-quality vampire fanzine, which printed a couple of my stories. Therefore, when I submitted my werewolf novel to his new venture, he knew me and was predisposed to favor my book.

Odd circumstances led to the inclusion of my story "Prey of the Goat" in THE SHUB-NIGGURATH CYCLE, a Lovecraftian anthology from Chaosium. The story had previously been tentatively accepted by Lin Carter (no relation) for his "Weird Tales" anthology series. The series ceased publication before it got around to my piece. After Lin Carter's death, the editor of THE SHUB-NIGGURATH CYCLE, who'd acquired copies of the unpubbed works from the Weird Tales anthologies, phoned me out of the blue to ask permission to include my tale. One moral of this incident: Be sure people can find and contact you.

Of course, such connections work only if the book or story itself measures up to expectations!

Still, Hurley makes very good points about the "meritocracy" illusion that if one writes a good book, the rest will automatically follow. "But writing a good book is no more a magical recipe for success than ‘working hard’ is a guarantee one will retain gainful employment. As in any industry, there are simply too many factors at play."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, June 02, 2016

E-Books and Libraries

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column:

Peace in Our Time

The "peace" in the title refers to the "e-book wars" that pit authors, publishers, and libraries against each other. Giant online booksellers such as Amazon come into the equation, too. I'm not sure I understand the practical details of Doctorow's plan for authors to retail their own books, but I definitely agree (judging from the numbers cited in this article) that publishers are currently ripping off libraries with exorbitant e-book prices. And I didn't know that the Overdrive system was imposed on libraries by publishers.

My personal experience of borrowing an e-book from our local library through Overdrive involved a monumental tome, PAUL AND THE FAITHFULNESS OF GOD, by N. T. Wright, my favorite New Testament scholar. Like most academic-level publications, the book is priced beyond the usual budget of a casual reader. To read it for free from the library, I had a long wait because our county system owns only one "copy" of this volume. Now I know the probable reason for this bottleneck—the library's cost of "buying" from the publisher the right to lend multiple "copies."

Doctorow's article contains lots of information new to me. Interesting discussion even if you don't completely agree with his proposals.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, May 26, 2016

The Death of the Midlist

A blog by horror author Brian Keene offering the most thorough explanation I've seen lately about the root causes of the death of the midlist:

How the Mid-List Died

In brief, he blames "corporate stupidity" and changes in publishing. His overview gives an interesting brief history of those changes. He doesn't mention one other source of the problem, alterations in tax laws that made it more expensive for publishers to store large inventories of backlist books.

He discusses the importance of an author's having books available through online sales, independent bookstores, and what's left of the nationwide chains (if possible). That said, he pessimistically expects Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million eventually to go extinct as Borders and Waldenbooks did.

Here's Keene's follow-up essay on the practical aspects of diversifying as an author:

Making a Living in a Post-Mid-List World

Again he emphasizes the need to avoid putting all one's creative eggs in the same publishing basket. No longer can a non-bestseller expect to earn a living wage by writing for one or two publishers, as Keene did at the beginning of his career.

He mentions that he started getting published twenty years ago; from this bit of data, I infer that he's younger than I am. When my first book was published (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth), I broke into the mass-market paperback realm by selling an anthology of vampire stories, CURSE OF THE UNDEAD (you can find cheap used copies on Amazon), to Fawcett. In my early twenties, with no professional publication or editing track record whatever, I got a contract to edit an anthology—a type of book nowadays considered a very hard sell—for a major genre publisher. Not only that, I received an advance (in 1970 dollars) almost half as large as the one Harlequin paid me (in 2005 dollars) for my only mass-market novel, vampire romance EMBRACING DARKNESS (still available as an e-book).

Verily, the past is a different country.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt