(1) CONTEST KERFUFFLE. The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition has announced that one of its judging teams – unnamed in their statement, but it’s Team EPIC – will no longer be participating.
Kris, who reviews on YouTube as A Fictional Escapist, and formerly at EPIC Indie, said they found something on EPIC’s “About” page that led them to leave the SPSFC’s Team EPIC. They gave this explanation on X.com. And followed with a screencap of the offending rules.
Team EPIC leader Matthew Olney published a statement on X.com:
Some of the exchanges have been taken down. Other parts can still be traced starting with this tweet by JCM Berne.
(2) MEDICAL UPDATE. [By Lisa Hertel.] I visited Erwin Strauss at Steere House in Providence, R.I. today. He is in good spirits and resting comfortably, and would love visitors, cards, or phone calls; he has his mobile. (Obviously use his real name when you are at reception or talking to the switchboard.) If he doesn’t answer the phone, try again later. He expects to be in Providence through mid-January.
(3) 400-YEAR-OLD AUTHOR AND SCIENTIST. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4’s Front Row devotes its first third of the programme to Margaret Cavendish, the British scientist and SF author who was born 400 years ago and known for her novel The Blazing World (1666), which of course pre-dates Frankenstein 1818. In The Blazing World there is a parallel Earth which can be accessed via the North Pole as the barrier between the two Earths is weakest there….
Margaret Cavendish was born exactly 400 years ago, and her many achievements include writing The Blazing World, arguably the first ever sci-fi novel. Novelist Siri Hustvedt and biographer Francesca Peacock discuss the enduring legacy of this pioneering woman.
You can hear the programme here.
(4) PICKING UP THE BRUSH. “Dream of Talking to Vincent van Gogh? A.I. Tries to Resurrect the Artist.” The New York Times tells how it’s being done. Doesn’t seem quite as cheerful as in that Doctor Who episode.
…His paintings have featured in major museum exhibitions this year. Immersive theaters in cities like Miami and Milan bloom with projections of his swirling landscapes. His designs now appear on everything from sneakers to doormats, and a recent collaboration with the Pokémon gaming franchise was so popular that buyers stampeded at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, forcing it to suspend selling the trading cards in the gift shop.
But one of the boldest attempts at championing van Gogh’s legacy yet is at the Musée D’Orsay in Paris, where a lifelike doppelgänger of the Dutch artist chats with visitors, offering insights into his own life and death (replete with machine-learning flubs).
“Bonjour Vincent,” intended to represent the painter’s humanity, was assembled by engineers using artificial intelligence to parse through some 900 letters that the artist wrote during the 1800s, as well as early biographies written about him. However the algorithm still needed some human guidance on how to answer the touchiest questions from visitors, who converse with van Gogh’s replica on a digital screen, through a microphone. The most popular one: Why did van Gogh kill himself? (The painter died in July 1890 after shooting himself in a wheat field near Auvers.)
Visitors can chat with the A.I. Vincent van Gogh through a microphone. In this video, A.I. van Gogh responds to questions about his paintings.Video via Jumbo Mana
Hundreds of visitors have asked that morbid question, museum officials said, explaining that the algorithm is constantly refining its answers, depending on how the question is phrased. A.I. developers have learned to gently steer the conversation on sensitive topics like suicide to messages of resilience.
“I would implore this: cling to life, for even in the bleakest of moments, there is always beauty and hope,” said the A.I. van Gogh during an interview.
The program has some less oblique responses. “Ah, my dear visitor, the topic of my suicide is a heavy burden to bear. In my darkest moments, I believed that ending my life was the only escape from the torment that plagued my mind,” van Gogh said in another moment, adding, “I saw no other way to find peace.”…
(5) LOCAL SFF WORKSHOP. The organization that hosts The Tomorrow Prize and the Green Feather Award will hold a workshop at a library in Pasadena (CA) next week.
My name is Valentina Gomez and I am very excited to introduce myself as the new Literary Arts Coordinator for the Omega Sci-Fi Project! I am reaching out to invite your participation in this season’s short science fiction story writing program, both through creative writing workshops and student story submissions.
Join our upcoming creative writing workshop at the Jefferson branch of the Pasadena Public Library on 12/19, catered to young creative writers and open to all ages! Please share with the high-school students in your life!
(6) YOU’LL KEEP HEARING THIS. Former Google and Apple executive Kim Scott asks “Will Books Survive Spotify?” in a New York Times opinion piece.
Spotify may have made it easier than ever for us to listen to an enormous trove of music, but it extracted so much money in doing so that it impoverished musicians. Now the company is turning its attention to books with a new offering. It will do the same thing to writers, whose audiobooks Spotify has begun streaming in a new and more damaging way.
We’ve read this story before. Tech platforms and their algorithms have a tendency to reward high-performing creators — the more users they get, the more likely they are to attract more. In Spotify’s case, that meant that in 2020, 90 percent of the royalties it paid out went to the top 0.8 percent of artists, according to an analysis by Rolling Stone.
That leaves the vast majority — including many within even that small group — struggling to earn a living. The promise of the business strategy laid out in the book “The Long Tail” was that a slew of niche creators would prosper on the internet. That has proved illusory for most content creators. It’s a winner-takes-all game; too often the tech platforms aggregating the content and the blockbusters win it all, starving the vast majority of creators. The result is a gradual deterioration of our culture, our understanding of ourselves and our collective memories.
This is why regulation is so crucial. Before writing books, I worked at Google, leading three large sales and operations teams and before that, I was a senior policy adviser at the Federal Communications Commission. What I learned is that today’s tech platforms are different from the kind of monopolies of an earlier era that inspired our regulatory framework. Their networks can have powerful positive or negative impacts. We don’t want to regulate away the value they can create, but the damage they can cause is devastating. We need a regulatory framework that can distinguish between them….
(7) DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF. The Hollywood Reporter cues up the “Civil War Trailer: Kirsten Dunst Stars in Politically Charged Movie”.
Alex Garland‘s mysterious Civil War is coming into focus with its politically charged first trailer.
As the trailer reveals, Kirsten Dunst stars as a journalist living in a near future in which 19 states have seceded from the Union, with Western Forces (including California and Texas) and the Florida Alliance among those in the conflict. Meanwhile, the three-term President of the United States, played by Nick Offerman, has ordered air strikes on U.S. soil against these forces.
“Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home: don’t do this,” Dunst’s character says as she attempts to reach Washington, even as forces close in on the city….
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge from a selection by Mike Glyer.]
1962 — A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess is a work that I saw and read but once in both cases but is still inedible upon my mind’s eye.
The novel was published first by William Heinemann Ltd., in 1962 and I read in University in a literature class taught by professor who very obviously thought SF was cool as Le Guin and Bradbury were also included. I won’t say I like it but then I’m not into novels involving sexual violence. Very really not.
Now the film was fascinating the way encountering a cobra was — Stanley Kubrick captured the dangerous of the characters in the book all too well. Still didn’t want to see it again, like not encountering a cobra again, but it was worth seeing once.
So here’s our beginning.
What’s it going to be then, eh?
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, o my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg.Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this evening I’m starting off the story with.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born December 13, 1954 — Emma Bull, 69. Damn, I can’t believe Emma Bull is sixty nine! My mind’s image of her is fixed upon her being the imperious sidhe queen in the War for the Oaks trailer shot way back in Will thinks 1994 according him just now in an email.
Her first novel. War for The Oaks was published in paperback by Ace Books thirty-six years ago. And then that publisher promptly tied up the rights so that it would be fourteen years before Tor Books could release another edition. Yeah Emma wasn’t happy.
It, along with Bone Dance which would be nominated for a Hugo at MagiCon, and Finder: A Novel of The Borderlands show, I believe, a remarkably great writer of genre fiction.
I’m pleased to say that I have personally signed copies of all of them. Two of them for Oaks, one not long after she broke both forearms at a Minneapolis RenFaire and another after they’d moved to Bisbee, Arizona and she’d healed up quite a bit.
(I absolutely love Finder: A Novel of The Borderlands love which is along with the two novel written by Wills are the only novel in Terri Windling’s Bordertown universe. I still, sort of spoiler alert, makes me sniff every time I read it.)
(Not to say I that I don’t love War for the Oaks and Bone Dance as I do. I cannot count how many times I’ve read each one of them.)
Now about that trailer. It was financed by Will at his own expense from money originally intended first and run first the governorship of Minnesota. Emma as I said is the sidhe Queen here and I know any of you that were active in Minnesota fandom back then will no doubt be able to tell me who many of the performers are here as Will tells me that many of them came from local fandom.
(I really do need to do an in-depth interview with him about this sometime.)
The music is by Flash Girls and Cats Laughing. Emma was in both, and some of the music the latter played is referred to in the novel as being played by Eddi and the Fey. (Cats Laughing didn’t form until after the novel.) Lorraine Garland, Gaiman’s administrative assistant at that time, was the other half of the Flash Girls.
Lorraine went to found another group, Folk Underground, whose tasteful black t-shirt of, one moment while I look, three skeleton musicians (violinist, guitarist, accordionist) in coffins I have twenty years in remarkably good shape.
Oh, the screenplay did later get published. It’s an interesting read.
So what else? There’s Liavek, a most excellent fantasy trade city akin to one Aspirin did. She and Will edited the many volumes of them on Ace with, and I think this a complete listing, Gene Wolfe, Steven Brust, Jane Yolen, Patricia Wrede, Emma Bull, Nancy Kress, Kara Dalkey, Pamela Dean, Megan Lindholm, Barry Longyear and Will Shetterly. Generally speaking, they’re all fine reading, lighter in tone that Thieves’ World is.
Finally there’s the Shadow Unit series which created by her and Elizabeth Bear. If you like X-Files, you’ll love this series as it’s obvious that both of them are deep lovers of that series and their FBI unit, the Anomalous Crimes Task Force, could well exist in the same universe.
Well there’s one more that reflect their deep love of the Deadwood video series, her Territory novel. This is certainly one of the more unique tellings of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, the Clantons and what happened there. I particularly like the dialogue heron, some of the best I’ve seen anywhere.
And no, this doesn’t by any means cover everything as she wrote some truly great short fiction set in the Borderlands universe, not to mention the novel she wrote with Stephen Brust, Freedom & Necessity which I could write an entire essay on. Wait I did, didn’t I? She even did space opera of sorts in Falcon. And there’s a wonderful children’s book that she sent Green Man to review, The Princess and the Lord of Night.
(10) LOOKS GREEN TO HIM. For what it’s worth, someone is reporting “’Dune: Messiah’ Greenlit by Warner Bros, 2027 Release Date Eyed” says World of Reel.
…As for “Dune: Messiah,” the trilogy capper, we have an update on that project, and it seems to be picking up some major steam. At this point, its future making is turning into an inevitability. Here’s Jeff Sneider, via his newsletter:
“I’m already hearing rumblings that WB is so bullish on Villeneuve’s vision for Dune that ‘Part Three’ has already been greenlit with a 2027 release date in mind. WB sees Part Two as a home run, and internally, I’m hearing the studio is already projecting an opening north of $100 million. That may be optimistic, but given the trailer above, hardly out of the question….”
(11) ODD NOGGIN. [Item by Steven French.] Shirley this can’t be true?! (Sorry – channeling Airplane! there …) Gastro Obscura introduces readers to the “Head of the Egopantis”. “The head of a legendary creature allegedly killed during colonial times is now on display at a local restaurant.” Unlike Bigfoot and Nessie, this one supposedly has left remains.
… According to legend, the Egopantis was a mighty and terrifying creature that once roamed the woods behind the tavern instilling fear among the locals. One evening, a Captain named Nathaniel Smith spotted the creature wading through the Mulpus Brook and took aim with his musket. He fired mortally wounding the creature which charged across the brook before succumbing to its injuries. The colossal Egopantis had been felled with its head and the musket both on display ever since….
(12) IT’S A SMALL WORLD. “Researchers Develop Tiny Cute VR Goggles For Mice With Big Implications” at HotHardware. Daniel Dern quips, “Raptors seldom strafe passes/at meeces with VR glasses.”
Virtual reality can be an immersive way to play games, experience new environments, or consume and learn new content for anyone of any age. With that philosophy in mind, scientists have expanded the use cases of VR to rodents to enable new pathways and possibilities in neuroscience with tiny mouse-sized VR goggles that simulate environments better than ever before.
Earlier this week, researchers from Northwestern University published research outlining a new mouse VR goggle system called Miniature Rodent Stereo Illumination VR, or iMRSIV system….
(13) SUPERCONDENSATION. From 10 years ago, “Superman 75th Anniversary Animated Short”.
From the creative minds of Zack Snyder (Man of Steel) and Bruce Timm (Superman: The Animated Series) and produced by Warner Bros. Animation, this short follows Superman through the years, from his first appearance on the cover of Action Comics #1 to Henry Cavill in this year’s Man of Steel…all in two minutes!
(14) NIHILISTIC ALIENS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur spent his monthly Sci-Fi Sunday looking at nihilistic aliens.
Many doubt whether existence has any purpose or meaning, but could entirely civilizations become nihilistic. Would this spell their doom? And if not, what would they be like?
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Ersatz Culture, Andrew Porter, Steven French, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
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Ok, I’ll claim first in hopes that a certain agent will decide to send out notifications.
7) Even if you think a second civil war is possible in the U.S. future: California and Texas allied? Ain’t gonna happen.
(1) “Grimlark”? Like PTerry with swearing and gore, No, thanks.
(2) Anyone calling him, tell him the Silverdragon says ‘hi’, and wishes him out, soon.
(3) I have never heard of her. Thanks!
(4) Talking to Van Gogh. Right. I am instantly reminded of long ago:
Me: Eliza, I’d like to know if you’re self-aware.
Computer: “What if you never found out if I was self-aware?”
(6) I don’t like listening to audiobooks – I can’t say ‘What?!’, and turn back a page. Besides, I like sitting and reading. I’m not working, I don’t have to be multitasking all the time. And if spotify is screwing over the artists that badly….
(7) Ok, nope. That makes no sense. California and Texas, allies, against the US? I point you to the current government and courts of Texas, and California. My suspenders of disbelief snapped, painfully.
(13) Nope. My movie Superman ends with Chris Reeve. Saw the one from maybe five years ago, and nope.
(14) How about considering aliens that are not a human in a rubber suit?
Glad to see that Filthy Pierre is in good hands.
4). I think the AI programmers should show how serious are by cutting their ear off.
(1) I’ve been following this chaos. I’ve heard of The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition — but I wasn’t following them before this. (I’m already pushing my follow limit.)
I hadn’t heard of EPIC Indie before, and that About page didn’t make me want to seek it out. It’s a good thing they’ve changed it, but how long was that up? There is so much wrong with it. Then, there was a who kept jumping into discussions — before he went on a block party. (He also had a post about the Welsh and British colonialism that was really weird…)
Like Mark, I am not a fan of the term “grimlark.” There is plenty of grimdark with humorous overtones, so there’s no need for yet another term.
(6) Hasn’t Scribd been doing something along these lines for years? I stayed on for a couple of months but didn’t like reading (or listening) in yet another darn app.
Did anyone else not get the “Confirm your subscription to new comments” e-mail after subscribing? Did I break it?
Can we lock Jetpack in a closet on an Emergency Dispatch Ship on the way to Woden, please?
Anne Marble: This is the second year of the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition. You will be surprised to hear there was a Team File 770 judging team in Year One. I didn’t choose to continue for a number of reasons: too many entries were weak books — so no fun to read, the structure of the competition was being constantly revised — though some of that was needed, and the founder, Hugh Howey, did very little to support it.
@Mike Glyer
This might be where I heard about it…
Anne, there’s multiple listening apps out there and I know of three without even looking then up — Audible which I use which is owned by Amazon, the audiobooks aspect of Apple Books and Libro.fm which I get emails from.
I stick with Audible for the same reason I stick with using Apple Books and only Apple Books —I like having a single collection of my material as I really don’t like having to figure out where something is.
Another thought for AI van Gogh: anyone ever hear the Austin Lounge Lizards’ “Grandpa’s Hologram”? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLv4t7HWJ28
Once again I am not offered the option of signing up for notifications of new comments. I’ll have to actually check for self.
(1) That sounds obnoxious, and the defense of it by Matthew whose last name I’m not bothering to scroll up to check, just sounds like “We’re changing the phrasing but we really meant every word of it and nothing except the phrasing will change.”
(7) Piling on here, that makes no sense at all.
(8) I remember my parents going out to a movie one night, they both has not enjoyed A Clockwork Orange. It was my dad who said why: Pain and sex should not be connected like that. That’s the memory that frames it for me. The very observant may note that this may be related to my own attitudes on the general theme of “No, you just don’t do that to people, especially not for entertainment.”
Which does not mean it’s the only right way to approach fiction, but does mean I’m not likely to change.
Here endeth your daily dose of “What is Lis on about, and how did she get off on that tangent.”
I didn’t change anything but lovely Jetpack somehow turned off the button that allows signing up for comment notifications. Which I have now turned back on.
(4) We Can Build You
(6) I tend to fall asleep while listening to audiobooks. I fall asleep while reading, too, but it’s easier to find my place again.
One of my horror books was in the SPSFC and actually got a nice write up on Goodreads from one of the judges. Which really lifted my spirits, in these days of review bombing and general negativity. Oh well, so much for that! Back to the drawing board.
Clockwork Orange was extremely popular in my high school, and most of the bookish kids struggled through it at least once. I wasn’t that put off by the sexual violence, it was in practically every science fiction book back then, and at least Alex didn’t go around feeding his exes to his dog like the dude in that Harlan Ellison story. The nadsat helped lay down a layer of insulation. I was ambivalent about the movie at first, then I watched it with a pack of rough edged weirdos who were laughing at it for being an over-the-top parody of juvenile delinquent stories like Rebel Without A Cause, and became a fan. And then there was Malcolm McDowell, who has definitely been in worse movies, and some better ones too, with that sneering delivery that you just know Kubrick forced him to re-take hundreds of times. Plus that Wendy Carlos synth classics soundtrack has held up a lot better than many soundtracks from that era.
(3) There seems to be a good deal of interest in Margaret Cavendish at the moment. The History of England podcast has episodes on her. I first heard about her from Virginia Woolf, in The Common Reader.
(7) Not only CA & TX but also a 3-term President? Not if the Constitution holds, which looks dicey sometimes …
On a more serious note, about a recent event: https://hrf.org/worldconned-how-china-co-opted-sci-fis-crown-jewel-amidst-the-uyghur-genocide/?fbclid=IwAR3vD2HOQaAYjWXGV9fUMMM8pcDHNHcDW5Wp8e0Xs1NrZBhpraKWflDzzA0
(1) The fun thing is the “Self-Published Science Fiction Competition” in itself – having a competition about books that never made it out of the slushpile at real publishers… I mean, there really is a point having real editors, real agents, real publishers, real bookstores – and real authors…
GRRM has posted about the fact that his science fiction pilot, DOORWAYS, is now on Amazon Prime (at least in the US): https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2023/12/13/a-blast-from-my-past/
I gather it was very little seen outside of convention screenings back in the day. George writes a bunch about the experience, including its connection to one of his short stories, “The Lonely Songs of Laren Dor”.
Good to hear that Erwin/Pierre is getting better. More perhaps when I’m wider awake.
Jan-Erik Zandersson: The “Worldconned” article has been linked in recent Scrolls twice. First, soon after it was published, second when Amazing ran an interview with its author a few days ago.
@Jan-Erik Zandersson – re: 1) Your comment is an uncharitable take on self-publishing. Many self-published authors decided from the start to go it on their own. That doesn’t mean the authors failed at being traditionally published.
The distribution of “good” and “bad” books in the self-publishing world closely matches their traditionally-published counterparts, with arguably more variety in genre variations, as they don’t need to worry about conforming to market silos.
Self-published authors DO have “real” editors, often the same editors who work for traditional publishers.
To dismiss indie/self-published authors as failed “real” authors is obnoxious.
Dude, if I’m not real then you need a boatload of therapy for hallucinating me, and possibly some extra-strength meds. I would be solid midlist if you put me in a time machine; here in 2023 I have a choice between sucking up to industry standards that aren’t favorably disposed to outsider artists like me to begin with (see Exhibit A, your F’d up mean-spirited comment) and staying in self pub land where I can be comfortably weird while searching for the other members of my weird niche. Plus I can get into stupid exchanges in public, like this one, without bringing shame to my publishing house. I’ll stop wasting your time with my self-pubbed comment now, so you can get back to reading professionally crafted fiction like DragonGrabber 19: The Elf’s Revenge or whatever.
I just read on Bluesky that Amazon has officially announced a greenlight for season 3 of Good Omens. Welcome news!
@Jan-Erik Zandersson
The attitude of “eww, self-published” should be getting dated now. I know self-published authors who skipped the slushpile because they saw what was going on in their genre and decided to self-publish. There are also hybrid authors who self-publish some books but publish others through traditional publishers. Self-publishing isn’t for everyone — because it’s hard work to do it right. But we should stop shaming authors for self-publishing — especially in a business atmosphere when publishing options are shrinking and when international conglomerates are buying up publishers.
@ John Winkelman
Also, some of the widely respected editors who work for traditional publishers have had to go freelance because they were laid off by beancounters in traditional publishing. 😐
1.) One side effect of this kerfuffle is that there are some of us in the competition who are now questioning if our work even has a chance, given the type of protagonists we’re writing (in my case, mixed-race couples and secondary LGBTQIA+ characters).
I’ve spoken out on this issue, with the full understanding that I’ve nuked my future possibility of getting anywhere in this contest. Not that I consider it to be a big loss. My reviews, when I get them, generally talk about the work being well-written, a different take on the subject, BUT…and then assorted excuses as to why they aren’t advancing the work. Given Mike’s comments about the books his team saw, and feedback from my editors, I’m skeptical about my work being judged on its merits in this competition, anyway. I certainly haven’t seen much of a boost in sales from contest entries so it’s not much of a loss (although one reviewer claims they sold copies of my work through Amazon Affiliate links in the last week, my dashboard is stubbornly at zero for that time period. And I can account for earlier sales through promotions I was running).
There were also other minor issues that have me side-eying these contests, anyway, including some problematic promotion suggestions that thankfully never got anywhere. At this point, I’d say this is a contest more for debuts and not for established selfpub writers.
Another note. Those who want to sneer about self-publishing being the refuge of poor writers who couldn’t cut it in tradpub…well, I have my fair share of “love your voice, love your work, can’t sell it” rejects. I know enough midlist former tradpub writers to realize that if my timing and luck had been different I’d be in that rank. I’m currently beta reading a lovely work right now that is going to selfpub. It’s well-written but–tradpub wouldn’t come within a mile of it, in part due to length, in part due to subject matter.
I’m not looking to tradpub for myself, because it’s pretty clear that tradpub isn’t interested in old white women “debut” authors (now bracing myself for the swarm of citations of fifty-something women debut authors, with the occasional eighty-something outlier, but ignoring the prior credentials of said debuts. Or the surfeit of male debut authors who are older…). And yes, I’d be classified as a debut in spite of multiple books to my name.
Thank you for Title Credit.
BTW, “Murderbot” is coming to Apple TV+!
https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2023/12/apple-tv-lands-murderbot-with-emmy-award-winner-alexander-skarsgrd-set-to-star-in-and-executive-produce-new-series-from-academy-award-nominees-chris-and-paul-weitz
(That above sentence would have made no sense to a reader from 100 years ago.)
OT: Sad because Essra Mohawk has passed on. I’ve been reading all the tribute posts on Facebook, and managed to comment on a few.
In 2000 Tanith Lee wrote on her blog (link to archived PDF):
This from a British Fantasy Award winner and two-time World Fantasy Award winner, plus a World Fantasy Award Life Achievement Award. It’s not always about the quality of the writing.
Ok, I understand why the format of the birthday listings changed, but I cannot let the Dec 13th birthdays of authors R. A. MacAvoy, Tamora Pierce, and Amal El-Mohtar go completely unremarked! 🙂
Indie comics and indie music are some of the best things in those media, why anybody would expect indie books to be any different is beyond me.
I will not self-publish. As Charlie Stross puts it, the world-wide slush pile. Yes, there are good writers out there self-publishing. However, some were published by majors, which gives them an oomph. Others, not so… the trouble is, most of the self-published are not edited, or copy-edited, because a) that cost real money, and b) they don’t know you can hire someone to do that.
I would happily sign a contract with a major – Baen flirted with me, after Eric’s Ring of Fire Press shut down when he died – and I had an agent lined up if they had. My take is that if I have a publisher, it guarantees that a professional editor looked at it, and said “I want to sell this story”. They also do a lot more, as opposed to a friend who beta read my first novel. He told me he’d published a book in ’15, and I read it. Not bad, no sentence fragments, no screwed up tenses. But he sold 3 or 4 copies – “marketing? advertising?” It’s on Amazon.
I’ll take each book on its own merits. But trying to be found, amidst the zillions published (and Amazon will “only” accept three novels what, a week? A day?).
@Mike Glyer–Yes, I took it for granted Jetpack was misbehaving.
There are self-published authors who think they’re avoiding the Nefarious, Oppressive Control of publishers, meaning such meanie practices as editing, copy editing, not allowing the author sole control of the cover.
There are self-published authors who have been or still are also tradpubbed. They’ve learned the importance of paying pros for those services rather than relying solely on their best buddies “helping out.”
And then there are the unicorns, who were never tradpubbed, but approached publishing their own books like running a real small business. They’ve researched what’s necessary to do it properly. I love those.
I hate to say it, but every self published novel I’ve ever read has been in desperate need of editors and proofreaders.
@ja You’re aware that half of Ursula Vernon/T Kingfisher’s work is self-pub, right?
It was also good enough to get her a tradpub contract with Tor.
Sigh. Of course now it appears it is time for Hating On Self-Published Authors.
I will also note that I have been encountering ebooks from traditionally published outlets that are in serious need of not just proofreading, but a decent layout program.
@Joyce Reynolds-Ward
E-books that are, or were converted from, PDF/scans and not poorfwrote. (I have a small cookbook where the original has a recipe for carrot-apple salad…and it doesn’t include the apples.
I’ve used Calibre to fix some of them, but the ones that are still image files can’t be fixed.
@rochrist
Have never read her.
I’m sure there are plenty of great self published works, I’ve just been unfortunate enough to hit some bad ones (which turns me off of trying any more).
@P J Evans…unfortunately I’ve seen problematic ebook layouts in recently released novels from traditional publishers. I’ll give books published before the mid-teens a break because the software wasn’t necessarily present. However, these days, there’s no excuse. As a self-published writer, I have access to software (Vellum) that generates not just all ebook formats but a nice-looking PDF for print.
I have a hard time believing that traditional publishers don’t have access to similar software and must convert from PDF to epub for recent releases.
Ja: T Kingfisher just won the HUGO for best novel. And frankly, the self-pubbed novel I just finished of hers might have been the better work (Though it’s mid-series and it all depends how she sticks the series landing).
Sure, I’ve run into some bad self-pub, and some that was… fine, but not exciting. It’s why I don’t try self-pub without some recommendations, or from hybrid authors. But those recommendations aren’t that hard to come by, and it’s not like it’s hard to come up with trad-published works which also aren’t worth my time.
I still want to trad-pub because there are things I do not want to do on my own, but the current meltdown that a lot of publishing seems to be having where the midlist keeps getting smaller and smaller and the opportunities and lasting careers fewer and fewer are making me a bit afraid of how that route will look in the next few years.
@Lenora Rose
The diminishing midlist is why I went to selfpub. I saw the writing on the wall about twelve years ago, as I watched midlist friends with good sales records struggle to place books. Several of them had multi-book contracts cancelled. At that point, I went “hmm, this does not look promising.” Yeah, I was right.
@Lenora Rose If you”re talking about the Saint of Steel series, it’s now trad-pubbed (at least in the UK) – including the new fourth book.
@Paul King In the US, it’s published by Red Wombat Studios. I think we all know who that is. Still being edited by K.B. Spangler too.
My only issue with self-pub is not that there’s anything inherently wrong with it, but that without the filters normally found in tradpub, Sturgeon’s Law becomes hopelessly optimistic! With tradpub, I was often willing to randomly sample things. A brief skim at the bookshop was often enough to eliminate the worst crud, leaving me with about two-in-five that were at least mildly entertaining crud, and one-in-five that was actually decent. Not terrible odds!
With self-pub, though, random sampling basically becomes raw slush-pile reading. And I don’t really want to be an unpaid slush-pile reader! So I have to stick to names I know or recommendations from people I trust. And I liked random sampling! It gives me pleasure to “discover” a good new author on my own. But not enough to offset the pain of digging through large piles of dreck.
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