Category Archives: Publishing

Discussions about the business of publishing.

So Who Wants to Know?

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The topic came up elsewhere and got me thinking of the infamous Author Bio-Blurb. You see it in books, sure, but those of us who write short stories as well, or even primarily, have to deal with it too and a lot more often. I know. It’s really a sort of “high-class worry” to people who haven’t sold at all or barely. “Writing author blurbs is hard? My heart frickin’ bleeds for your anguish.” I’ll grant you, the first few are kinda fun. Then you’re selling maybe five or six stories or more every year, year after year, and it’s become a chore. 

“Again, my heart frickin’ bleeds—“ Continue reading →

The Ferris Wheel and the Werewolf, or How to Annoy Pretty Much Everybody

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 The pitfalls of self-promotion is–unfortunately–a subject I’ve been forced to think about lately, so when author Jim Hines wrote a parody song that explains the nature of this particular animal, it rather crystallized some notions that I’d been turning over myself. First, to set the mood, I think it would be a good idea to sing along with Jim on this, so go here first and then come on back. I’ll wait.

Right, then. Some of  you may remember an animated TV show from the 90’s called The Critic, starring Jon Lovitz as the voice of “Jay Sherman,” the movie critic of the title. In one episode a book tour goes horribly wrong because Jay’s publisher has an animatronic bookstore display of Jay holding his collection of movie columns and repeating “BUY MY BOOK!” on an endless loop. It not only kept the customers away, but at least one of the store managers was alleged to have committed suicide. Of course it was a exaggeration, a parody of the hard-sell, but not as far removed from reality as we’d like to think. Especially lately.

Now then. I’ll grant you, it’s possible to go too far the other way. In his introduction to Hereafter, and After, Andy Duncan quoted screenwriter Ben Hecht as describing a shameless publicity hound as “a cross between a Ferris Wheel and a werewolf,” to make the point that I wasn’t one. And it was true. I wasn’t. I pray I am still not, but what I was at the time was the other extreme—completely self-effacing (hard to believe, I know, but it’s true). I wrote the stories. I sent them out. They were published or not, but either way that was pretty much the end of it, so far as I was concerned. Then I published my first collection, then the fist novella chapbook, then the first novel, then my second and third collections, and somewhere along that line I finally copped to the obvious truth that hiding your light under a bushel is not a game plan.

Continue reading →

Following the Wrong Gods Home

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I was reading over an old blog post on the subject of short stories versus novels, and the thing that struck me about whatever I was ranting about was how dated the thing was. Irrelevant, even. I am constantly reminded that so many “truths” that I had internalized to the core of my being about the writing and publishing of sf/f just aren’t true anymore. Some were never true at all.

It’s something I should be used to by now. Back when I was struggling to “break in” at even an entry level, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted, and where I was trying to get to. The field had fairly clear parameters. I knew what magazines “counted” and what my targets were. For writers, I knew who the major players were. But a funny thing happened on my way to entering the field—by the time I got there, it wasn’t the same field. Remember the phrase, “There were giants in the earth in those days”? Well, there were. My first sale was to the venerable Amazing Stories, the absolute oldest of the magazines and arguably the first real sf magazine, period. By the time I sold my second story, to Asimov’s SF, Amazing was no more. My third story sale was to a magazine that didn’t even exist when I was targeting the first two, SF Age, now also gone. For the first fourteen years that I was selling stories my “go to” market was Realms of Fantasy, and now? Poof. Gone.

And it wasn’t just magazines. I had my heroes, writers who were almost like gods and goddesses to me. And by the time I felt somewhat part of the field, again, it wasn’t there anymore. Many of the old gods had died off or retired. New people, like me, were filling the niches. Some would go on to be major players, people I’d never even heard of in the preceding years. I was where I wanted to be, but it wasn’t where I thought it was. Continue reading →

The Devil Has His Due

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Sorry to bore you guys with this, but sometimes I get yelled at if I don’t mention these things, so this is just to point out that I have a new mini-collection out on the Kindle today, The Devil Has His Due. It contains a group of four stories about our least favorite place, a sort I sometimes do for fun because there’s no real market for them outside rolling your own, attested to by the fact that, of the four, three are original to the volume. There will be a Nook version too, it just takes longer.

When we try to be good, that’s plan A, but that route is harder than it looks. And when virtue just isn’t working for you, there’s always plan B—like it or not. The Devil Has His Due contains four stories about dealing with the consequences when plan A doesn’t quite come together.

“Closing Time” – Maybe the worst part of Hell isn’t being there. It’s remembering why.

“One Blissful Night at the Inferno Lounge” – The night life in Hell. Care to dance?

“Boiling the Frog” – Appearances can deceive, the Devil does deceive, but neither as well as we can do ourselves.

“Subversion Clause” – Down through the ages there have been mortals who thought they could beat the Devil at his own game. So. Doesn’t the Law of Averages suggest that at least one of them might be right?

Four stories for $.99, it just doesn’t get any better than that. At least, not when I’m doing it.

Edited to add: The Nook version is now live.