genre fiction

Reality 301 With @heidicullinan

by

This post by Heidi Cullinan originally appeared on her blog on 5/15/13.

Tonight Twitterverse roared with outrage over Kendall Grey’s post on Authors for Life where she bemoans the fact that sometimes, publishing is hard. Grey spent four years writing and a great deal of money and effort promoting an urban fantasy trilogy; it tanked. She wrote an erotic novel she describes as a “piece of trash” in two months, spent much less in promotion and gave it much less effort, and that book made some decent money. She’s angry that she wasn’t rewarded for her “beautiful, artistic” book and that by selling out she made money. Grey writes:

I know it’s depressing to hear that in order to find success, you may have to compromise your principles. I’ve come to grips with the fact that in the current market, trashy smut sells, and urban fantasy does not. Tough shit for me. If you want to sell books, you have to feed the market what it craves.

Grey goes on to state that

once you’ve done your part to feed the reader machine, and you get paid ridiculous amounts of money for publicly shaming yourself and lowering your standards, you’ll be armed with the power to write what you want.

I think the best place to start in response is to take a moment to acknowledge where this kind of selfish, angry thinking comes from, and like most things gone awry, it starts from something well-meaning. We could build several acres of affordable housing out of the stacks and stacks of books, blogs, and inspirational memes urging writers to write from the heart, to follow your vision, to let your voice ring out and be heard. The problem is that almost always after that advice comes the promise that should a writer (or any artist, really) follow this path of purity, success and happiness will unquestionably follow.

It’s not that this promise isn’t true, exactly. It’s that for far, far too many writers “success and happiness” gets equated with “lots of money and fame.” Here’s the reality of making art: the brass ring is BRASS, not gold. To believe even for a moment that simply producing the work of one’s heart means one will now be a bestseller is beyond naive. To proceed as if commercial success is due because of one’s effort or expenditure is embarrassingly foolhardy. But most of all, publicly ridiculing readers, especially one’s own, is a hanging offense, and anyone who commits it will very quickly feel the cinch of a brutal noose.

 

Read the full post on Heidi Cullinan’s blog. Note that it contains strong language.

 

People Are Not Reading The e-Books They Buy Anymore

by

This post by Michael Kozlowski originally appeared on Good E Reader on 9/20/15.

Are people reading the e-books they purchase from companies such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble or Kobo? There is growing research data that is supporting the notion that people are not reading the digital titles they buy online and for the most part, they are never even opened.

At Book Expo America last April, Kobo dived deep into global reading behavior and analyzed the data.  They found that 60% of e-books that are purchased from their complete line of apps, e-readers, tablets and via the web are never opened. Interestingly, the more expensive the book was, the more likely the reader would at least start it.

There are other companies that are also checking out reading behavior and providing some very interesting data. Jellybooks is a young startup and they have developed e-book tracking software that users opt into getting their reading habits tracked in exchange for free or discounted items. Over 100 publishers are now using their API for their own e-book library, including Harlequin, which uses the code for free romance novels from their new loyalty program.

 

Read the full post on Good E Reader.

 

How The Sad Puppies Won — By Losing

by

This post by Tasha Robinson originally appeared on NPR on 8/26/15.

“We smacked the Sad Puppies with a rolled-up newspaper,” said a woman on the shuttle bus between hotels at WorldCon in Spokane, Wash., on Sunday night. “It’s the only way to teach them.”

The presentation for the 2015 Hugo Awards had ended an hour earlier, and this was the mood in public areas at the convention: ebullient, relieved and more than a little smug. 2015 was the year science-fiction fandom’s most prestigious award was dominated by a voting bloc calling themselves the Sad Puppies, and a more extreme offshoot, the Rabid Puppies. The Puppies claim the Hugos have been taken over by affirmative-action-driven voters pushing a diversity agenda by nominating women and non-white writers, regardless of the quality of their work. For 2015, they organized their own corrective slates, consisting largely of conservative, straight white males — including themselves.

Sunday night’s ceremony revealed that the Hugo voters turned out in inflated numbers to reject the Puppy candidates. According to the awards’ official site, nearly 6,000 of the 11,635 eligible WorldCon members voted this year, up from 3,587 in 2014.

 

Read the full post on NPR.

 

Science Fiction Is Really, Really White

by

This post by Jennings Brown originally appeared on Vocativ on 8/21/15.

The Hugo Awards, science fiction’s most prestigious prize, are just around the corner. A Vocativ analysis of the nominees and winners shows it’s almost all white people

The 2015 Hugo Awards, celebrating the year’s best works of science fiction and fantasy, will be held this weekend amid a giant squabble about diversity in the genre. A group of white writers who believe that the voting process has been manipulated to include too many minorities are fighting to steer votes towards authors that are truer to the genre.

But if you crunch the numbers, it’s pretty hard to argue that white writers are being squeezed out at the Hugos. Vocativ tabulated every writer, editor and artist associated with the 65 works nominated this year in all 13 professional categories (there are four categories for fan work). Out of nearly 100 people responsible for those 65 works (some works had multiple authors), only three were non white.

 

Read the full post and chart on Vocativ.

On Changing Book Titles And Covers: My Own Experience And How You Can Do It Too

by

This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn site on 4/28/15.

I’ve just been through a massive rebranding process: re-titling and re-covering the first 3 books in my ARKANE series, and updating the back matter for all the other books.

A hefty amount of work!

Here’s why and how, just in case you want to go through this sometime. It’s quite a long, confessional style of post. I’m ‘fessing up to my mistakes, so be gentle with your comments!

First up, here are the awesome new covers: Stone of Fire (previously Pentecost), Crypt of Bone (previously Prophecy) and Ark of Blood (previously Exodus), designed by the wonderful JD Smith Design.

New ARKANE covers

So, why change my fiction book titles anyway?

Basically, none of us know what the hell we’re doing when we start writing  🙂

Here’s how my first book title journey went.

In November 2009, I joined NaNoWriMo in an attempt to write something fictional. Amusingly, I videoed the process – here’s Day 1, and you can follow the whole journey here. The working title for the book on Day 1 was Morgan – and Morgan Sierra is still the name of my main character and alter-ego, so that hasn’t changed.

 

Read the full post on The Creative Penn.

 

How to Create a Believable Fictional Universe

by

This post by Georgina Roy originally appeared on e-Books India on 6/11/15.

A fictional universe is the world where your story takes place. Your story can happen anywhere from prehistoric Earth, to a futuristic world filled with flying cars and funny colored aliens. Even if you decide to set up your story in modern day Earth, it is still a version of Earth that will exist only in your imagination. However, sometimes we can get carried away when creating our stories and come up with worlds that are so extravagant and extraordinary they cross the line of logic and become unbelievable. This is why there are some things that you, as the writer, have to think of when you’re creating your world.

 

1. Decide on a theme

What kind of a world do your characters inhabit? Modern day Earth, a fantasy world, or do they live in the distant future or outer space? This is important because not only do you have to find the way your world figures into the plot of your novel, but it will also determine your target audience and the genre of your book. The crucial thing to remember is that you have to stick with the theme throughout your book. The world building is always a mark of a great book, and that means that the theme has to be consistent on every page of your novel.

 

Read the full post, which includes four additional specific steps, on e-Books India.

 

How Indie Authors Can Make Two Categories Count On Amazon

by

This post by Cate Baum originally appeared on Self-Publishing Review on 5/20/15.

Amazon made a decision sometime in the last two months or so to cut off new indie books to the five plus two categories allowed to all indie/self-published authors who had both paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon. Why could this decision have been made, and how can authors make the most of the measly two categories now allowed when publishing on Kindle?

Spoiling It For The Rest Of Us

What happened? Maybe the mounting problems for authors who had trad-published, or had genre books in the last couple of years with categories forced a change. Publishing companies and indie authors on imprints and small presses with money riding on book campaigns were being drowned in self-publishers categorizing their books too loosely in ways to get seen – especially in the erotica genre. I talked about this as being a problem I foresaw Amazon reacting to, and was only two pitchforks from being burned at the stake for mentioning anything that could cause a vibration through the “freedom for writers everywhere” faction.

But hey, it happened as predicted, and very quietly, too.

While some authors were releasing up to eight books of erotica at the same time to flood book charts with their ‘brand,’ and categorized them as “Westerns” when their lover boy rode a horse, or “Crime Fiction” when the book featured a gangster type doing the bedding, Amazon was flooded with books that used to stay in their own little (adult) area – it became nigh impossible to even enter the YA Sci-Fi section of Amazon without a bevvy of bare chests and chiffoned thighs gracing the listing pages.

So the greedy few seemed to have spoiled it for the rest of us. Well done, kids!

 

Finding “The Two”

 

Read the full post on Self-Publishing Review.

 

“Let's Talk About Genre”: Neil Gaiman And Kazuo Ishiguro In Conversation

by

This conversation between Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro originally appeared on New Statesman on 6/4/15.

The two literary heavyweights talk about the politics of storytelling, the art of the swordfight and why dragons are good for the economy.

Neil Gaiman’s New York Times review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel began a debate about the borders between fantasy and literary fiction. For a special issue guest-edited by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer​, the New Statesman brought the pair together to discuss genre snobbery and the evolution of stories.

Neil Gaiman Let’s talk about genre. Why does it matter? Your book The Buried Giant – which was published not as a fantasy novel, although it contains an awful lot of elements that would be familiar to readers of fantasy – seemed to stir people up from both sides of the literary divide. The fantasy people, in the shape of Ursula Le Guin (although she later retracted it) said, “This is fantasy, and your refusal to put on the mantle of fantasy is evidence of an author slumming it.” And then Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times reviewed it with utter bafflement. Meanwhile, readers and a lot of reviewers had no trouble figuring out what kind of book it is and enjoyed it hugely.

Kazuo Ishiguro I felt like I’d stepped into some larger discussion that had been going on for some time. I expected some of my usual readers to say, “What’s this? There are ogres in it . . .” but I didn’t anticipate this bigger debate. Why are people so preoccupied? What is genre in the first place? Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?

NG I think if you were a novelist writing in 1920 or 1930, you would simply be perceived as having written another novel. When Dickens published A Christmas Carol nobody went, “Ah, this respectable social novelist has suddenly become a fantasy novelist: look, there are ghosts and magic.”

 

Read the full conversation on New Statesman.

 

A Study of Reading Habits in the Age of Aquarius, or, The Novel as Time Machine

by

This post by Greg Olear originally appeared on The Weeklings on 3/4/15.

i.

IN MARCH OF 2011, I was on a panel with three other novelists at the Quais du Polar literary festival in Lyon, France. We were there, if memory serves, to talk about strong female protagonists in crime fiction, but the discussion wound up encompassing much more than that. At one point, we were asked about the utility of the novel. In a century of smart phones and dumb tweets, with attention spans shorter than ever, what possible purpose could such an analog medium serve?

I had no ready answer for such an existential question. Fortunately, the French novelist Sylvie Granotier was prepared. It is exactly the analog nature of the form that makes the novel so necessary, she said. In a world of ADHD, she explained—in English as fluent as my French was not—the novel, alone among the art forms, demanded more, not less, attention from its readers. Only the novel could combat the erosion of our collective ability to focus. And it did this by insisting that its readers move at the deliberate pace set by the novelist.

“The power of the novel,” she said, “lies in its ability to stop time.”

 

ii.

In his column in The Believer some years ago, Nick Hornby wrote in praise of the short novel—the work of fiction that, as he put it, if you start reading when the plane taxis along the runway at LAX, you will be just wrapping up as the wheels hit the tarmac at JFK. His novels all meet this criteria. So do mine. Indeed, the lion’s share of fiction churned out by the big publishing houses seems to be written with the sole purpose of amusing the bored business traveler.

 

Read the full post on The Weeklings.

 

Science Fiction Is for Slackers

by

This post by Jacob Brogan originally appeared on Slate on 5/26/15.

It would be a mistake to say that science fiction as such is “about” laziness—no genre reducible to such a singular point of significance can flower long—but it is uncommonly good at animating fantasies about avoiding labor.

On a desert planet baked by two suns, a young man contemplates the sky, dreaming of a life beyond the workaday tedium of his family farm. He imagines that the robots his aunt and uncle have recently purchased—apparently sentient beings that work without compensation—will take on his burdens. You know his name as well as I do, and you know as well as I do that he will spend the weeks and month ahead on the run, fleeing this world of tasks and troubles as much or more as the evil empire that chases him.

Science fiction is a genre of dreams, and Luke Skywalker may be the most emblematic of all its dreamers, emblematic not because he longs for the stars, but because of what those stars represent. Above all else, Luke is a slacker, and when he looks to the heavens, he imagines release from the obligations that bind him to the surface of Tatooine.

Luke is not alone in his aversion to work: As a rule, science fiction may be the laziest of all genres, not because the stories themselves are too facile—they can be just as sophisticated and challenging as those of any other genre—but because they often revel in easy solutions: Why walk when you can warp? Why talk when you’re a telepath? Technology in such stories typically has more to do with workarounds than it does with work.

 

Read the full post on Slate.

 

On The Length Of A Story

by

This post by Alan Baxter originally appeared on his Warrior Scribe site on 5/22/15. Warning: strong language.

There’s been a bit of to and fro via The Guardian recently about fantasy novels and short stories. Firstly Damien Walter wrote this pile of bollocks about how publishers need to stop encouraging big fat fantasy multi-book series. Then Natasha Pulley responded with this bullshit about how fantasy just can’t be done in short books, and especially not in short stories. I do wish people would stop trying to proscribe what the rest of us like to read and write.

You know what? A good story is exactly as long as it needs to be or it’s not a good story. Simple as that. If that means a fat book trilogy, or a ten book mega-series, or one thin novel or novella, or a short story, it doesn’t matter. A good story is good because it’s told in the right amount of space it needs. A really good story is made from great ideas, wonderfully written, using exactly the time and space required.

Sure there are plenty of rubbish, bloated books out there and loads of short stories that fall flat. But even the shite stuff has found its niche if its successful, because people are reading and enjoying it. If people are reading and enjoying something, get the fuck off your high horse trying to tell those people that they should be reading and enjoying something else.

 

Read the full post on Warrior Scribe.

 

BuzzFeed Books Won’t Kill Literary Criticism — But Book Snobbery Might

by

This post by Michelle Dean originally appeared on Flavorwire on 11/8/13.

So here’s the thing: yesterday BuzzFeed Books named its new editor, a sometime friend of mine named Isaac Fitzgerald. I knew Isaac as the Managing Editor of a literary site known as The Rumpus, where I was a weekend editor for several months in 2012. 

Yesterday, he gave the following quote to a media reporting site:

BuzzFeed will do book reviews, Fitzgerald said, but he hasn’t figured out yet what form they’ll take. It won’t do negative reviews: “Why waste breath talking smack about something?” he said. “You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.” Fitzgerald said people in the online books community “understand that about books, that it is something that people have worked incredibly hard on, and they respect that. The overwhelming online books community is a positive place.”

It’s likely that you, dear readers, have not have been following the latest scintillating round of slapfighting in book critic circles about the “state of criticism.” It’s always a subject of dubious interest to the general population, I think, but let me explain briefly anyway, because the debate is crashing into the perennial concern about the declining popularity of books in our culture, and we all care about books here at Flavorwire, so.

 

Read the full post on Flavorwire.

 

A Reply to Larry Correia [from George RR Martin]

by

This post by George R.R. Martin originally appeared on his blog on 4/13/15.

I am just about blogged out on the whole Puppygate thing, having devoted half a dozen posts and thousands of words to it over the past few days. However, Larry Correia responded to some of those posts on his own blog, MONSTER HUNTER NATION, as several dozen of his followers immediately emailed me to point out, and I promised to reply in turn. So here it is.

My original posts were long, and Mr. Correia’s reply was long, and if quoted them all, and then piled more on top of it, all of Live Journal might sink beneath the weight. So I am going to cut out the stuff by me that Correia quotes, since the originals are all available upstream, and edit down his own reply to just the point I want to answer.

To make it clear who is speaking, I will set off Correia’s statements with brackets and try to italicize them… though for some reason the italics on LJ have not been working well of late. We’ll see if they work here.

Here goes.

[[CORREIA: When one of the most successful authors on the planet takes the time to talk about something you did, I figure that deserves an in depth response. I’ve got no direct line to Mr. Martin, but I am hoping that this will get back to him.]]

It did. Through several sources. I would have responded earlier, but as you can see, I have been busy posting about other aspects of this thing. But I do appreciate the response, andeven more so, the courtesy you have shown. It’s my hope and belief that people on different sides of an issue can disagree, even heatedly, without it turning into rancor and namecalling. We are, after all, fighting about a literary award.

[[CORREIA: When I started this the Hugo Awards were not portrayed as the awards that belonged to WorldCon. They were portrayed as the awards that represented the best of all of fandom. After my first experience seeing how the sausage was made, I publically said the same thing you said there, that the Hugo Awards don’t represent all of fandom, they represent one tiny part of fandom. I was called a liar.]]

 

Read the full post on George R.R. Martin’s blog.

 

Sordid, Unprofitable, Unrewarding: On ‘New Grub Street’ and Cynical Literature

by

This essay by Sam Allingham originally appeared on The Millions on 4/7/15.

In today’s publishing world, it pays to be a doomsayer. We have an inexhaustible appetite for reports of literature’s demise. Go ahead, dust off that article on how the novel is dead for the thousandth time — only make sure you add that the whole industry is dying with it. Are you a publisher, the sort of person who purports to sell books? Give interviews with leading periodicals in which you admit that publishing is “at a crossroads,” and that we have lost the necessary magic to accomplish the nearly 600-year-old trick of turning printed matter into gold. Bring on the articles by journalists that remind us how journalism as we know it is passing away! Algorithms write our articles, videos replace text as the primary medium of communication, and soon all media will consist of an endless feed of indistinguishable information, which our children will scroll through lazily while they suck a ground-up mixture of kale and insects through a straw.

There’s something flattering about all this hand-wringing. It provides us with a sense of self-importance, to imagine we live in unprecedented times. One nice part about the apocalypse is the way it soothes one’s existential crisis. People who write, publish, and criticize literature have never been a particularly self-confident bunch, and the current climate — in which more than 300,000 books are published in America every year, not counting self-published titles — can encourage feelings of irrelevancy. Why write yet another review of yet another novel, when you can proclaim the absolute end of literature? Better to be a prophet than a drudge. Even authors can take comfort in the idea of a post-literary age, where the fact that all the great novels have already been written relieves us of the responsibility of writing our own.

 

Read the full essay on The Millions.

 

Fifty Shades of Lit.

by

This post by Andrew J McKiernan originally appeared as a guest post on Alan Baxter’s Warrior Scribe on 3/17/15.

It has been almost six months since Alan asked me to write him a guest blog post. He knows I’m fairly passionate and opinionated about the “Literary vs. Genre” debate, and that’s what he suggested I write about. That’ll be easy enough, I thought. So I agreed.

Turns out, it wasn’t so easy after all. So, instead of trying to create some kind of logical argument — as I was originally intending to do — I’m just going to wing it. Trust my instincts, follow my heart, and just lay it all on the table.

First, let me paste two comments I recently found accompanying articles re: the Literature vs Genre debate. They demonstrate why I get a bit angry when the topic comes up:

EXHIBIT A: User comment on article on whether Crime Fiction is real Literature [see Note 6 below]

“crime fiction has more in common with the crossword puzzle than with literature”

EXHIBIT B: User comment seen on Facebook:

“To me, literary fiction is just another genre, and today it means ‘realistic fiction written by professors, for professors.’”

[I can’t remember who said this, but I think the position is common enough amongst Genre readers and writers that the specifics aren’t important.]

Now, I’m not a professor and I ain’t had no fancy learnin’, but that sounds like crazy talk to me. Both comments based on a misguided and narrow view of what Literature and Genre might actually mean. And, though there’s been a lot of great work in breaking this ridiculously false barrier down, both sides still maintain a strong core of stubbornness and, to me, it seems a horrible prejudice.

 

Read the full post on Warrior Scribe.