Pixel Scroll 2/24/18 I Am Just A Pixel, Though My Story’s Seldom Scrolled

(1) HIGH CONCEPT. This quartet of movie posters for Solo features Han Solo, Qi’ra, Lando, and Chewie.

(2) WAIT A MINUTE. Mark Hamill is going to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. You mean he didn’t already have one? And this guy did? —

Trump was awarded a Walk of Fame star in 2007 for his role in reality series “The Apprentice.”

The official ceremony for Hamill’s star will take place on Mar. 8, according to Variety magazine. “Star Wars” creator George Lucas and Hamill’s costar, Harrison Ford, will assist in hosting the event.

(3) WORLDCON 76 PROGRESS REPORT 2. Available to read here [PDF file].

(4) MEXICANX INITIATIVE HITS 50. Worldcon 76 guest of honor John Picacio and supporters have reached a milestone:

WE DID IT. Thanks to my Mexicanx Initiative teammates, we have now reached our goal of 50(!!!) Sponsored Attending Memberships to Worldcon 76 in San Jose for deserving Mexicanx pros and fans. I had envisioned doing this since last August, but it was exactly one month ago that I was able to announce this endeavor. My good friend John Scalzi immediately joined in, and together with some amazing friends, here we are — ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED. My friends at ALAMO pushed us over the top with the final seven memberships! This was truly a team effort and you’re looking at everyone responsible for this win: John Scalzi Mary Robinette Kowal Chris Rose Fast Forward: Contemporary Science Fiction Ctein John O’Halloran Elizabeth McCarty Chris Brown Kate Elliott Kat Angeli Rina Elson Weisman Randall Shepherd Richard Flores IV Amazing Stories Worldcon 76 in San Jose Joanna Volpe, Ty Franck, Mur Lafferty, Christine O’ Halloran, BWAWA, and of course, Canadiense Anónima. Muchas gracias, all!

Picacio reveals there will be a follow-on fundraiser:

For those still wanting to contribute — ping me. I’ll share more on this tomorrow, but I’ve been building a secondary fund called ‘The Mexicanx Initiative Assistance Fund’, to assist with travel and food needs for Mexicanx facing an expensive journey to Worldcon 76 in San Jose. I’ve done this quietly, but it’s been building and it’s a complementary, but very separate fund from what we’ve achieved above. And yes, Worldcon’s treasury handles all the money. I never touch it. I just go get it.

(5) PROFESSIONAL DISCOURTESIES. John Picacio came back online later to chastize Terry Goodkind for belittling the artist of one of Goodkind’s book covers.

Heads up to everyone in the publishing industry: Authors, please take note, especially those new to the sf/f field — Pictured here is some of the most unprofessional behavior you will ever witness. This is a writer publicly throwing his cover artist under the bus, while embarrassing his publisher and their art director. This is the behavior of a child throwing a tantrum. It’s pathetic and it’s bush league. Never make the same mistake this guy just did. EVER. To Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme: Hold your head high. We’ve got your back.

And on Twitter they do have his back — lots of supportive tweets like these —

(6) NONFICTION FICTION. In “Why Adding Monsters and Fairies to a Memoir Can Make It Even More Real”, Matthew Cheney, Carmen Maria Machado, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, and Sofia Samatar discuss the speculative memoir.

Sofia Samatar: Since I am starting this adventure, let me tell you why I chose to bring this particular group together. Carmen has written some of my favorite short stories, and one time when we were sharing a hotel room at a conference, I told her I’d been thinking about the intersection of memoir and speculative fiction, and she said she was actually working on a speculative memoir at the moment. Matt’s a fiction writer, too, and I invited him because, also at a conference, at some reception in a dark room, we were standing around with our paper plates, and he told me he was writing a dissertation on the blurry space between fiction and nonfiction, looking at Virginia Woolf and J.M. Coetzee and Samuel R. Delany. Rosalind is a brilliant writer, whose story “Insect Dreams” I have read many times. Her work plays with history and the fantastic, and recently she told me her new book is about the idea of the female Adam, and described it as a “hybrid” and a “faux autobiography.”

I started thinking about the idea of “speculative memoir” because I was a fantasy and science fiction writer whose work was becoming more and more autobiographical. Of course, all writing draws from experience, but there’s a particularly weird energy to writing memoir, in a deliberate way, in a fantastic or uncanny mode. It seems to announce a certain relationship to memory, and to experience. I wonder if each of you could start by talking a bit about this in relation to your own work. What do you find compelling about the concept of speculative memoir?

(7) REALLY EVERYTHING. Jeb Kinnison’s after action report about Life, The Universe & Everything 2018 covers some dimensions not heard about in the earlier File 770 account.

The LibertyCon contingent was well-represented, with local writers Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen, and Sarah Hoyt in from Colorado. Baen did its roadshow and the infamous Lawdog attended. While I met Larry briefly at LibertyCon two years back, I saw a lot more of him and his charming wife Bridget this time. We had listened to the audiobook of “Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent” (written by Larry, read by Adam Baldwin) on the drive up. As Larry’s media empire has grown and the movie options for some of his worlds are pending, it’s kind of a thrill that he now knows who I am and lets me hug him (his excuse being his arm was injured and couldn’t take too many handshakes.)

(8) NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED. Allegedly. “PETA Hands Out Awards to ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Jumanji’ for Being Animal-Friendly”.

From Star Wars: The Last Jedi to Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals on Thursday revealed the Hollywood actors and movies it recognizes for animal-friendly achievements this year with its first-ever Oscats Awards.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi nabbed the prizes for best live-action movie and best original screenplay for positive storylines, like Finn and Rose liberating fathiers used for racing and Chewbacca choosing not to eat a porg.

Wait a minute, in the movie I saw, Chewie already killed and cooked one of the damn things! How does PETA square giving an award after that?

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • February 24, 1886Thomas Edison married Mina Miller. He wooed the 19-year-old woman via Morse code. Who says online dating is new?

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

  • Born February 24, 1786 — Wilhelm Karl Grimm, the younger of the two Brothers Grimm, is born in Hanau, Germany.
  • Born February 24, 1945Barry Bostwick (The Rocky Horror Picture Show)
  • Born February 24, 1947Edward James Olmos (Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner 2049)
  • Born February 24, 1961Kasi Lemmons (Candyman, Vampire’s Kiss)
  • Born February 24, 1966Billy Zane (The Phantom, Back to the Future II)
  • Born February 24, 1970Ungela Brockman (Starship Troopers, Mystery Men)

(11) RELENTLESS. Kameron Hurley isn’t willing to coast: “From Good to Great: Starting With ‘Why'”.

It’s easy to stay motivated when you’re crushing yourself against a system. I loved being a young, scrappy writer in my 20’s, speaking truth to “the establishment,” and coming up through the slings and arrows of SFF publishing to claim my space within it. But what happens when you become the establishment? Do you just head off to do the movie deals, to expand your work to a new audience? Do you spend your time mentoring new writers? Do you just blurb a lot of books?

Accepting that I was an established author has been a hard road, for me. There are young people coming into SFF now who don’t know of an SFF without me in it. I’ve been publishing novels for seven years, which feels like a blink compared to my hard road to get here, but plenty of readers have come of age during those seven years, and for some that’s half or a third or a quarter of their lives. I know I have a long way to go, still. A huge career ahead. But I need to find my passion again for why I’m doing this. I have to find the why, or the road just stops here.

And, you know, I realize this sounds like, “Wah, wah, I got everything I wanted!” but I’ve seen how many people get stuck at “good” on the way to great. And I don’t want to just be good. I want to be great. To get to great requires continuous learning, interrogation of what you want, and leveling up again and again. So while I may not have all the steps mapped out to get me to “great” yet… at least that seems to be the place I want to reach. I don’t want to stop at good. I’ve gotten to good.

(12) HI-TECH INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY POSSE. Fast Company profiles copyright violation search services in “Here Come The Copyright Bots For Hire, With Lawyers In Tow”.

“I climbed up 900 stairs on an island to take a photo of the whole island, and it was used on the cover of a local magazine out there,” she says.

[Photographer Christy] Turner might not have known about the photo theft if not for a pair of services called Copypants and Pixsy, which use algorithms to scour the internet for copies of photographers’ work and help them enforce their rights. They send stern letters to suspected infringers, demanding that their clients be compensated or that licensing fees be paid; in some cases, law firms that work with the companies will even initiate a lawsuit on their behalf. In Turner’s case, justice came in the form of $500 in damages.

(13) SIDE BY SIDE. Cat Eldridge says, “One of the firm memes of sf is that new technologies always replace existing technologies. Reality is far messier than that meme which is why shows like Firefly makes sense.” Fast Company contends “The CD Business Isn’t Dying—It’s Just Evolving”.

…“We felt like the culture dictated that people were going to buy vinyl, not CDs,” says Kevin Farzad, Sure Sure’s drummer and percussionist. “And we were kind of surprised that more CDs sold than not.”

The band could be forgiven for assuming CDs wouldn’t sell. From their peak of $13.2 billion in 2000, U.S. CD revenues have slid to just $1.2 billion in 2016, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. And as listeners flock to streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, the CD’s decline isn’t slowing down. Earlier this month, Billboard reported that Best Buy will stop selling CDs in stores this summer, and that Target only wants to pay distributors for the CDs it actually sells. Some observers saw the news as a death blow to a fading format.

Yet it’s hard to reconcile that gloomy outlook with what’s happening in the indie music world, where the CD is still thriving. Earlier this week, the online music store Bandcamp reported 18% year-over-year growth in CD sales for 2017, up from 14% growth in 2016. (Bandcamp declined to comment for this story.)

(14) JOBS APPLICATION. History on the block: “Steve Jobs’s 1973 job application going on sale” and is expected to fetch $50K.

It is not known what the application was for, nor whether Jobs was successful.

He wrote his name as “Steven jobs” and his address as “reed college”, the school he attended briefly in Portland, Oregon before dropping out.

On the form, Jobs responded “yes” to having a driving licence but when asked if he had access to a car he wrote “possible, but not probable”.

Next to “Phone” the creator of the iPhone wrote “none”.

(15) PROXY CANCERS. In-vitro repro of specific tumors lets oncologists test drug efficacy without testing patients: “‘Mini-tumours’ created to battle cancer”.

Scientists have been able to predict how cancer patients will respond to therapy by growing miniature versions of their tumours in the laboratory.

They say the groundbreaking work could lead to “smarter, kinder and more effective treatments”.

The study, in the journal Science, was 100% accurate at telling which drugs would fail and this could spare patients from unnecessary side-effects.

Mini-tumours could also be a powerful way of testing new drugs.

(16) BEST HORROR. The cover for Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Ten, has been revealed:

(17) MEDIA TIE-IN. In the Washington Post, DeNeen L. Brown interviews Jesse Holland, who wrote the Black Panther novelization while spending a semester as the distinguished visiting professor of the ethics of journalism at the University of Arkansas: “He loved ‘Black Panther’ comics as a kid. Then Marvel asked him to write a novel for the movie.”

Holland, who teaches nonfiction writing at Goucher College outside Baltimore, had already written four books, including “The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House,” when Marvel approached him.

They’d seen his companion novel for another blockbuster movie: “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” He’d written about Finn, a former First Order stormtrooper.

After “Finn’s Story” was published in 2016, an editor at Marvel called Holland. “She says, ‘We have this character, the Black Panther,’?” Holland recalled. “There’s never been a novel about the Black Panther.”

Marvel wanted to recount the origin of the Black Panther in novel form, update the story and introduce the superhero to new readers.

“Most of the world didn’t know the character until last year,” Holland said. “If you want a succinct origin story to tell you who he is, my novel is a good place to start. You’ll see a lot of characters in the movie in the novel. We are drawing from the same wellspring.”

(18) WAKANDA WEAR. Yahoo! Entertainment’s Gwynne Watkins, in “Behind ‘Black Panther’: The hidden meanings of those stunning Wakanda costumes”, looks at the costume designers for Black Panther and what statements they were trying to make in describing a country that had never been conquered by colonial powers.

Yahoo Entertainment: The concept of Wakanda as an African nation that was never colonized by the Dutch or British is so powerful. How did that inform your design choices?
Ruth Carter: 
I discovered so many things about Africa that I didn’t know — like, the cloth that we normally see in many African-inspired things, the wax cloth, was brought in from the Dutch. There are influences of the British; when you see a Nigerian wedding, you’ll see a Nigerian traditional drape and a guy with a top hat on. [laughs] So you have to dig deeper and go to the indigenous tribes of Africa. You’re not a real historian, you’re just kind of the temporary historian for the picture, so you’re looking at beadwork and you’re looking at carvings and you’re looking at masks. And you’re being inspired by patterns. There are a couple of patterns that I saw repeated throughout the continent: one is like a checkerboard, another one is a triangle.

And I looked at books on African ceremonies, since ceremonies reminded me of precolonization. So for example, the Dogon tribe were the first astronomers. They do a ceremony once a year where they adorn themselves in these brilliant raffia skirts and wood-carving masks that shoot up to the stars — they’re really tall. And they do these moves that sweep the earth….

(19) NOW BOARDING. Flying to Wakanda? Your connecting flight is ready in Atlanta.

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is getting into the Marvel movie spirit by jokingly offering flights to Wakanda — the fictional country from Black Panther.

The airport tweeted out a digitally altered image of gate T3 showing its destination as Wakanda, the kingdom ruled by King T’Challa, aka the Black Panther, in the eponymous super hero film.

 

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchcock, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories, Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]

69 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/24/18 I Am Just A Pixel, Though My Story’s Seldom Scrolled

  1. First!

    @5 I’m pretty sure the chicken that was no chicken but evil manifest made Goodkind such a churl.

  2. Second…

    5) Sure, an author can gripe to their friends about unhappiness with their cover, but this felt like Terry was really pissing in the Kung Pao, as it were.

    13) Cat has a good point. Technology lingers, things stick around. A co worker was trying to offload a CRT television that weighs a couple of hundred pounds the other day. It still works, but…

  3. 13) Don’t really understand why people are willing to spend all their money and entrust their investment in invisible digital goods to places like Amazon without the physical backup that a cd provides.

  4. @19: Wikipedia claims that T gates are used for domestic flights. Are they wrong, or is the airport trying to tell us something?

  5. (7) REALLY EVERYTHING. … the audiobook of “Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent” (written by Larry, read by Adam Baldwin)

    Because of course it was. 🙄

  6. (5) So, his understanding of how to behave is every bit as bad as his writing and his artistic judgment.

    An impressive hat trick.

    In 9284, no one not a survivor of the 21s t century has completely forgotten him.

    (8) People for the Extinction of Tame Animals pathetically attempting to latch onto someone else’s work and use it to promote themselves.

  7. Goodkind thinks his book is “good”, so his judgement is obviously flawed. If that cover had any other name on it I’d pick it up.

    Also: JJ, your favorite reply tweet has vanished 🙁

  8. (5)

    Here’s his FB page.
    https://www.facebook.com/terrygoodkind/?rc=p

    I’m glad to see Goodkind has apologized. Good on him.

    I realized, when reading his apology, that I have become so accustomed to certain factions in sf/f behaving very badly in public and then, when called on it, doubling down on the bad behavior and expanding their targets, rather than rethinking their bad behavior and apologizing for it, it has become a surprise–AND IT SHOULD NOT BE—to read an apology in such situations.

    The cover artist may (or may not) feel rather chilly toward him hereafter, given the initial announcement, but I think Goodkind’s apology makes a very good effort to clean up his mess. (His publisher and art director may be annoyed (or they may just think “oh, that’s just TG being TG”), but publishers are in business to make money, not friends. So they tend to overlook almost anything (certainly much more serious stuff than complaining in public about a book cover) when the writer is a bestseller who brings in a lot of money, which Goodkind is.)

  9. Also, writers do complain about covers. And in public. Cons have panels where we talk about good and bad (and really bad) covers. I’ve done articles about it, and so have others, We discuss it in interviews.

    I think humiliating an artist is wrong, and it’s easy to see why Picacio objected in this instance.

    But it’s not as if writers aren’t ever candid, privately and often in public, about problematic book covers. (Such as the still-famous romance cover which got reworked so much that when it was published, the hero had 3 arms… something no one had noticed until after shipping about 80,000 copies of the book.)

  10. I suspect that Goodkind’s publishers are going to have a great deal of trouble getting covers for him from professional artists in the future…

    I would guess that at worst, they’ll have to pay a little more. But cover artists like to be on bestsellers, even if the author’s a dick.

  11. On 5):

    @JJ that tweet link didn’t work for me, but I could get the author out of the URL and I very much hope it was this: https://twitter.com/druminor/status/967598291067265029 . A talent worthy of Catimothy House, if I ever saw one.

    The original cover is fantastic – if only it were attached to book by a better author! It’s the kind of thing that would draw me in for an impulse buy if I wasn’t already sure that Terry Goodkind is of zero interest.

  12. Title credit should go to Greg Hullender, My line was “I am just a poor scroll, my pixels seldom filed” which he improved. I used his line in my filk, because it was better.

    (5) That was a dick move.

  13. @Laura Resnick, you mentioned Picacio. Did he complain also? The artist in question was Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme.

    ETA: assuming I’m reading the tweets correctly. I’m open to correction.

  14. (2) I believe the “owner” of the star has to pay a non-negligible amount of money to get the star.

    (5) I think the issue isn’t so much complaining about a bad cover with concrete and valid reason, but complaining about a perfectly decent (if bland) cover, and inviting other people to mock it.

    There is also a difference between kvetching within a select or private group (and even doing a panel at a con about bad covers is a private group in this case) and doing so as part of publicity on Facebook or Twitter.

    (13) I think the Bandcamp example of increasing CD sales suffers from the mistake of only looking at a very small piece of the market. I have no doubt that the CD market is contracting as a whole, with lots of regular outlets disappearing, leaving the last sellers to becoming bigger fish in a smaller pond. Also, it’s easier and cheaper than ever for indie artists to produce and market their stuff.

    But in twenty or so years, I imagine the CD market will get the same niche as the vinyl market has today.

  15. Oh, thanks, JJ. It’s 5am here and my faculties are apparently a bit slow.

  16. Laura Resnick:

    Also, writers do complain about covers. And in public.

    Yes, I’ve seen similar complaints often enough that I’m a bit surprised at the vehemence of the responses to Goodkind. Granted, most other complaints I’ve seen specifically places blame at the publisher – “nice enough artwork, but not a scene in the book” – but while Goodkind doesn’t say that I think its the most obvious interpretation of his comment. It’s also what he intended, according to his apology: (Link in a comment above)

    The artist is obviously an exceptionally talented creative. The problem is with the publisher. I created the poll as a way to poke fun at the cover art, because it is a poor representation of characters within the book.

    So yeah, it was dumb of Goodkind to not be more specific in his original complaint, but it seems to me people have gone out of their way to interpret his comment in the most offensive way possible.

  17. you mentioned Picacio. Did he complain also? The artist in question was Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme.

    Re-read (5). Picacio is the person who wrote “Heads up to everyone,” the author is treating the artist badly, etc.

  18. (5) Well, yeah, inviting others to mock the cover was a terrible idea. And establishing a poll to mock the cover, the artist, the publisher, or the art director is a terrible idea. The author did indeed go a whole different direction than discussing problematic covers in an interview, article, or con panel. It’s good that he has apologized; that’s appropriate.

  19. @Johan P–

    “Yes, I’ve seen similar complaints often enough that I’m a bit surprised at the vehemence of the responses to Goodkind. Granted, most other complaints I’ve seen specifically places blame at the publisher – “nice enough artwork, but not a scene in the book” – but while Goodkind doesn’t say that I think its the most obvious interpretation of his comment. It’s also what he intended, according to his apology: (Link in a comment above)

    No, sorry, that’s not even a possible interpretation of what he originally said, particularly not accompanied by the poll and open invitation to his fans to mock the cover art.

    And that’s a perfectly fine piece of cover art, one that eould have me reaching for the book to take closer look, right up until the point at which I saw Goodkind’s name on it.

    It may or may not represent anything that happened in the book, but that’s not the complaint he expressed.

  20. Yay for Mexicanx!

    If this were taking place back in my formative fannish years, I’d be concerned about mundane hassling, not because it’s a good troupe of foreigners, but because something like that would give the mundanes an opportunity/excuse to once again beat up on the nerds, the geeks, those weirdo science fiction kids.
    Now, I have (mild) concerns, not because it’s a bunch of weirdo science fiction kids doing this, but because we’re bringing in a good troupe of foreigners.
    Expecially given today’s news that Mexico has just cancelled a meet up with the US over border wall BS (our BS, to be clear).
    I think Joe’s program is a great initiative – it’s why I jumped on the boat to support it – and maybe I’m being a mite too paranoid – but I’m thinking that someone connected to the con needs to be making contingency plans; my understanding of the administration’s mindset tells me that a convention of “intellectuals”, (already culturally defined as “freaks”) bringing in a group of Mexican guests, at a hotel and convention center (which are supposedly hot beds of employment for undocumented immigrants) makes for a very juicy target with potential juicy headlines.
    To put it in terms my younger fannish self might have used: “That’s a bummer of a head trip”…but I think it’s likely enough that someone ought to be thinking about it.

  21. 5) I have seen plenty of posts mocking bad or inaccurate covers – Smart Bitches, Trashy Books does it often (but then romance gets particularly many bad covers). However, the authors in question are usually more diplomatic and only complain in public about bad covers years later. Attacking the artist is out of the question. And while I have seem plenty of complaints about covers, I have never seen a complaint about the artist directly.

    Besides, that cover is actually pretty good and the artist is clearly talented.

    7) Since this con seems to be more focussed at writers and professional networking from what I can gather, maybe that’s why Correia and others were so confused that WorldCon wasn’t like that.

  22. But it’s not as if writers aren’t ever candid, privately and often in public, about problematic book covers.

    This was my thought when I saw Terry Goodkind catching so much hell. This is the kind of thing authors complain about all the time. He should have been more specific in his criticism and rightfully apologized to the artist, but I’m having trouble getting the outrage machine cranked up on this one.

  23. (5) I was somehow having a conversation with my friend Dave (who I’ve seen little of since the 70s) and it came out that I was slightly acquainted with an author, and Dave immediately asked me to please please please let him know that he had read the book he did the cover for, that this is the first thing he does when he gets an assignment, and he knew exactly how the spider should have looked, but was overruled by an Art Director who decreed that it should be the wrong size.

  24. I take Goodkind’s point on the art misrepresenting the book; some publishers do this from carelessness, some for active marketing reasons (IIUC, bleaching was once almost as common as non-white characters), and some because they’re trying to do too many books with too few people. However, Goodkind is a professional wordsmith; he shouldn’t get a pass for something he wrote being ambiguous. I don’t say he’s a good wordsmith (I’m also a member of the tribe of people who have felt no impetus to read him), but he’s paid (very well) to write. Yes, I understand the distinction between talespinning and expository writing; in a competent writer these are not orthogonal skills.

  25. “Not an accurate depiction of a scene from the book” is not a criticism of a cover at all.

    Covers are intended to sell the book, not illustrate it.

  26. @Johan P —

    it seems to me people have gone out of their way to interpret his comment in the most offensive way possible.

    Yeah, no.

    There’s a HUGE difference between “laughably bad cover” (Goodkind’s actual words) and “this cover does a lousy job of representing the actual characters” (what Goodkind would have us believe in his apology).

    As others have already noted, Goodkind is a professional writer. He should recognize the difference.

    Others have also noted that some professional artists will probably be willing to take a future job with him. But similar to the shenanigans that disgruntled waiters and cooks may get up to back in the kitchen if you are rude to them, I’m not sure I’d want to be in the position of depending on an angry artist to produce a high-quality cover for me.

    And finally — yes, sites like Smart Bitches often trash book covers. But they are not the AUTHORS of those books, and they are usually not new books. IMNSHO, Goodkind showed a complete lack of class — as well as a huge amount of idiocy — by attacking the cover of his own newly released book. Way to boost sales, guy!

  27. Covers are intended to sell the book, not illustrate it.

    When the cover is an illustration of a scene int he book, it should represent the scene fairly accurately, IMO.
    (I have books where the cover is a bad version of a scene, done by someone who’s supposed to be a good artist. But I’m not sure if said artist ever got the full description of the characters.)

    3:19 pm and the year 3691 – is the shoggoth back?

  28. Lis Carey:

    No, sorry, that’s not even a possible interpretation of what he originally said, particularly not accompanied by the poll and open invitation to his fans to mock the cover art.

    OK, I might be missing something, but as far as I can tell the phrase “cover art”, or the words “art” or “artist”, is nowhere in Goodkind’s original post. He criticizes the cover, not the art.

    This can be interpreted in different ways – roughly speaking either a) the art is bad, b) the main art is good but the text overlay is bad, c) the art is artistically good but doesn’t represent the book. And yes, it’s dumb of Goodkind to not be more specific about why he thought the cover was bad. Yeah, yeah, he’s a writer and should know how to express his opinion. But honestly: I think the people who immediately jumped to “he must be mocking the art” shows less respect for the artwork than Goodkind did.

  29. @Kip W–

    Must be he’s ticked with the kerning, those ligatures, and having part of the K obscured.

    Yes, clearly that’s it! What else could it be?

    Johan, the artist is greatly offended. Other artists are greatly offended. And art directors aren’t too pleased with him, either.

    Goodkind would have us believe he’s a great writer. Are we to believe he didn’t manage to say what he meant?

  30. 5) I can’t comment or like comments any more on Goodkind’s FB page.

    I used my husband’s FB account and can’t vote or comment or “like” using his account either.

    Guess he’s tired of the criticism, boohoo.

  31. Lis:

    Johan, the artist is greatly offended. Other artists are greatly offended.

    Sure. I have in no way or form questioned the fact that people are offended. What I’m saying is that I think they’re offended over a misinterpretation of what Goodkind said – and a rather non-obvious and uncharitable misinterpretation at that.

    What seems to be happening here is a dynamic I see all to often: Someone says something slightly ambiguous, someone else interpret it in a way that makes it offensive, and boom, almost everyone runs with that interpretation and no one goes back to double-check the original statement.

    Let’s be better than that.

    Are we to believe he didn’t manage to say what he meant?

    Do we have a choice? Goodkind called it “a very bad cover”, without saying what’s bad about it. Inserting the word “art” into his post also involves a belief that he didn’t manage to say exactly what he meant.

  32. Johan P: What seems to be happening here is a dynamic I see all to often: Someone says something slightly ambiguous, someone else interpret it as offensive, and boom, almost everyone runs with that interpretation and no one goes back to double-check the original statement.
    Let’s be better than that.

    There’s nothing “slightly ambiguous” about a poll to mock a cover.

    There’s even less ambiguity about the comment chain on his complaint, where he responds to people’s criticism of the artist’s composition etc. by agreeing with it. For example (not that links to FB comments usually work here….) —

    [MJ] It looks too generic, if I wasn’t already familiar with your books it would turn me away. I love how the two in the back are standing around though.

    [TG] That’s our worry too. We appreciate the fans that can look beyond the cover, but for new readers, this is a turn off.

    Also:

    [HD] I mean there is a lot going on here, I’d honestly give it a 3/5 mostly what I don’t like about it is composition, the content is mostly fine. The foreground focus and background are uninspired in their layout. But I like the expression on her face like the statue just kicked her puppy and the sense that the guys in the background seem super nervous.

    [TG] Well said.

    Stop sealioning and gaslighting. Be better than that.

  33. @Johan: He said “a great book with a bad cover. Laughable bad”
    What’s ambiguous about that?
    If by “Laughable bad” he meant “The artist is very talented but he did not get good instructions and hence I jst feel the book is slightly misrepresented” he should have clearified it somewhere in the original post.

    He then issued an apology (where I seem to miss the part where he is apologizing?) where he clarified things, but that should have been the original text. Or not do it at all. When he said he is poking fon at his own book, he is not doing that. He is poking fun at a part of his book, that was not done to his liking – by others.

  34. @Johan P–

    Sure. I have in no way or form questioned the fact that people are offended. What I’m saying is that I think they’re offended over a misinterpretation of what Goodkind said – and a rather non-obvious and uncharitable misinterpretation at that.

    So you’re the only one of all the people reacting to it that managed to extract the “obvious” meaning of what he said, rather than a strained, non-obvious, uncharitable meaning?

    But wait, no, you do have an explanation for that:

    What seems to be happening here is a dynamic I see all to often: Someone says something slightly ambiguous, someone else interpret it in a way that makes it offensive, and boom, almost everyone runs with that interpretation and no one goes back to double-check the original statement.

    You’re the only one with the honesty, integrity and personal discipline to go look at the post and its comment thread! That’s it!

    Except…No. I went to look at the post and its comment thread, and others here have made comments that clearly show that they have, too.

    And then there’s you, saying stuff not supported by the actual post and comment thread, but seemingly based on the assumption that Goodkind’s apology must accurately reflect his original post and its most obvious reading.

    Which is charitable towards him, but perhaps not toward anyone else.

  35. I’ve been worrying about the same thing @steve davidson mentioned with regard to the Mexicanx pros and fans attending Worldcon. Hate crimes are up, and people are more and more eager to show what side of the culture wars they’re on. Someone recently yelled at a woman I know to “Go back to Mexico!” — sort of funny, since she’s from Honduras, but really not.

    I hope people will be looking out for things like this at Worldcon, and trying to make these fans and pros feel welcomed and part of the family. And if I end up going I’ll try to overcome the introverted habits of a lifetime and do the same.

  36. Criticizing bad cover art is one thing, mocking your own cover art of an upcoming book and encouranging others to do so in a poll where you reward the winner for insulting it the best is something else completely.

    I mean even if he doesn’t like it everyone involved from art director to artist is trying to help it sell and the publisher is paying everyone all to get his work out there.

  37. I am, of course, reminded of the classic filk:

    “There’s a bimbo on the cover of my book.
    There’s a bimbo on the cover of my book.
    She is blonde and she is sexy
    And she’s nowhere in the text. She
    Is the Bimbo on the cover of my book.”

    Complaining about your covers, often semi-publicly within fandom/at conventions, is a fine old tradition. For the artists’ sake, I’m glad we’re starting to explore the limits of what sort of criticism is acceptable in this context, but the fact is that publishers do sometimes come up with execrable covers, and they’re not necessarily magical marketing geniuses.

    I’m happy to see this dialog started, but as far as I’m concerned, a lot of authors would still be justified in complaining about their covers. At least one major SF publisher still seems to have problems shelling out for artists with a basic grasp of human anatomy…

    But yeah, I don’t see the problems with this particular cover, which looks very nice to me.

  38. When the cover is an illustration of a scene int he book, it should represent the scene fairly accurately, IMO.

    AHAHAHAHAHAHA *incoherent sobbing* *reaches for wine bottle*

    Like, I have been the cover artist for my own books drawing scenes I knew were nowhere in the source material and my art director told me sweet, professional, incredibly tactful things that translated as “Marketing says STFU and deal.”

    And those books went on to sell upwards of fifty thousand copies each, so Marketing wins. Every time.

  39. @RedWombat,

    And those books went on to sell upwards of fifty thousand copies each, so Marketing wins. Every time.

    I strongly suspect you are underselling the quality of your writing. (I mean Marketing is important and all that, but without the content to back it up I don’t think it is powerful enough to get people to buy.)

  40. @RedWombat,

    And those books went on to sell upwards of fifty thousand copies each, so Marketing wins. Every time.

    Also underselling her artwork, which is plenty close to the story, unlike some covers I’ve seen.

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