This week’s theme seems to be about the state of publishing in the digital age, so I figure now’s a good time to post something I’ve been meaning to for a while now (and as we learn more and more each day how large publishers are suffering in this global meltdown maybe this is the right time for something hopeful…)

So I’d like to draw your attention to authonomy.com.

Despite the bad news this week from HarperCollins, authonomy.com is their attempt to leverage the social networking capabilities of Web 2.0 with the “wisdom of crowds” effect to do a lot of the heavy-lifting of slush reading and perhaps reduce some of the risk inherent in publishing books by new authors.

As described on the authonomy. com website:

authonomyTM is a brand new community site for writers, readers and publishers, conceived and developed by book editors at HarperCollins. We want to flush out the brightest, freshest new literature around – we’re glad you stopped by.

If you’re a writer, authonomy is the place to show your face – and show off your work on the web. Whether you’re unpublished, self-published or just getting started, all you need is a few chapters to start building your profile online, and start connecting with the authonomy community.

And if you’re a reader, blogger publisher or agent, authonomy is for you too. The book world is kept alive by those who search out, digest and spread the word about the best new books – authonomy invites you to join our community, champion the best new writing and build a personal profile that really reflects your tastes, opinions and talent-spotting skills.

The publishing world is changing. One thing’s for sure: whether you’re a reader, writer, agent or publisher, this is an exciting time for books. In our corner of HarperCollins we’ve been given a chance to do something a little different.

We’d really love your help.

And from their FAQ some more details:

…we firmly believe that writers should be judged on the quality of the work they produce, not on their ability to pitch, market or publicize themselves. Personal recommendations are by far the most effective way of building support for a book, and writers on authonomy stand to gain the support of a community of readers who are really motivated to spread the word about the best new writing…

…Once a month we’ll be pulling out the top five books from the Editor’s Desk Chart, and passing them on to our Editorial Board. HC editors will read from the first 10,000 words of each manuscript, and will feed back their comments to the appropriate authors, who will be able to decide whether or not to make these comments available to the community at large…

Hmmm…Interesting.

There’s also some insight into why HarperCollins set up this site from Victoria Barnsley, the chief executive of HarperCollins UK, in a speech she delivered as part of the London School of Economics’ series of public lectures on November 4, 2008 (like I said–I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while…):

The old model whereby a publisher commissioned a work and then went through a series of steps to deliver it to a retailer, who delivered it to an unknown reader, isn’t enough. The interactivity of the Web allows readers to play a part in the process, to engage with authors and each other and in some instances, become authors themselves. The old linear model is becoming circular. For 500 years, the consumption of books was largely a private affair but the Internet has socialised that experience. If publishers are canny, they will see this as an opportunity to add more value and to create new revenue streams.

I’m not saying all readers will want to take part in this socialising. For many, the joy of reading will remain its intensely private escapism. However, a whole new generation has grown up online, who do use text to socialise and do want to engage with each other around texts. So, as publishers, we need to expand our business models to cater for this new dialogue.

Going forward, we need to operate two models: – the existing model, whereby we add value by selecting, nurturing, marketing and finally selling content to the consumer – in whatever form they demand and a second model whereby we create value in the experiences around that content where we facilitate the dialogue between writers and readers. Publishers need to broaden their brief, to take advantage of the connectivity that the digital age offers and demands.

To that end HC, and some other publishers, have begun experimenting in this social space. We’re in the process of launching a number of digital initiatives, well beyond our ebook programmes. I thought I’d finish tonight, by giving you a glimpse of this work in progress, to illustrate my point. I hope, it will give you a flavour, of the ways in which publishers will be seeking to expand and develop, their businesses, and revenue streams, in the next decade. I can’t think of a better place to start, than with last year’s Nobel Laureate, Doris Lessing.

In this case, we’ve partnered with the Institute of the Future of the Book, to create an on-line, annotated version, of The Golden Notebook. A number of writers and academics will read the text together, online, and will offer their comments as marginalia. Readers in turn, will then be able to read Doris’s text, and the annotations, and offer their own feedback, creating a rich, on-line dialogue, around this seminal text.

This project is a purely marketing exercise aimed at increasing the continued relevance of Doris’s work to new generations but it also illustrates the kind of value, that can be added, by a publisher, to the experience of consuming a text. Connecting readers, writers, scholars, reviewers and bloggers, is all part of a publisher’s new mandate and with this project, we’re doing just that.

But as publishers turn to face readers directly, we need to understand, that in today’s interconnected world, many of our readers are also writers and they have specific needs and desires we can meet and if we don’t someone else will. To that end, at HarperCollins, we’re tapping into that same community of reader-writers, with a new website that we’ve just launched – authonomy.com.

What we’ve done, is create a site, where unpublished writers and readers can gather
to share their work, comment on each other’s work in progress, rate what they’ve read and ultimately have their work reviewed by editors and agents. We’re using the “wisdom of crowds” principle, to select the top 5 rated manuscripts, each month, for review.

The interesting thing about authonomy is that by putting us at the centre of a hub of interactivity, between readers and would-be writers it provides us with a new business model. In addition to being a new pool for talent spotting, we’ve also created a community of people who love reading and writing. It’s growing at such a rate – over 2m page impressions in just 6 weeks – that we’ll soon be able to start generating advertising income. And shortly, we’ll add a print-on-demand capability -so that any of these would-be writers will be able to see their work in print. So, in a rather neat, reverse way, a purely digital proposition will end up spawning lots of printed books – and not just digital files.

They also have a blog associated with the site, which includes posts about writing, editing and editors, and even updates on those lucky few who have actually sold their manuscripts to HarperCollins via participation on authonomy.com–so it seems it can be done, at least sometimes. There are also posts specifically dealing with HC’s sci-fi and fantasy line of books.

This sounds to me like trying to replicate and formalize the process by which John Scalzi’s first novel Old Man’s War was published. That book first debuted online when Scalzi serialized his novel on his web site in December 2002, which resulted in an offer for the book by Tor Books Senior Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. The hardcover edition of the book was published in January, 2005. Old Man’s War was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in March 2006.

So check out the site, maybe sign up and see what they’re offering for a good read. I, for one, think I’ll take advantage of authonomy.com when my novel is finished later this year…

– S.

I’m tempted to say that I read a disturbing article in this weekend’s Globe & Mail about the state of promotion (or lack thereof) in today’s Canadian publishing industry. And having worked in the Canadian publishing business I can attest personally that everything in this article is accurate.

But instead what I’m going to point out as more disturbing is that even knowing all this already and having read the article, well, I’m still not dissuaded from writing and trying to publish a novel (or ten).

Thinking that there’s something wrong with me? You’re correct: it’s called being a writer 🙂

I include the article below, as the Globe & Mail for some reason (unlike other papers like the New York Times) still restricts access to their archive after a few days.

– S.

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Publish, and your book will probably perish
You did your part, you wrote the book. So why are Canadian publishers getting worse at their part – selling it? James Adams reports

JAMES ADAMS
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
February 7, 2009 at 8:14 AM EST

It’s not known who the first author was who complained that his publisher wasn’t doing enough for his book.

Maybe it was Pope Callistus III moaning to Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century that he had printed too few copies of His Holiness’s collected homilies. Maybe it was Daniel Defoe in 1720, griping that his London publisher, William Taylor, was too skimpy with proceeds from the sale of Robinson Crusoe, or failed to recompense him for taking the carriage to Bath for a reading.

But while such friction has been a staple of the book business through the centuries, with this year’s dismal overall economic outlook unlikely to spare publishers, the bleats from writers are only likely to get louder. Already, Canadian authors say they’ve been asked to bear more and more costs (including those for indexes, picture research, and permission clearances for non-fiction works), at the same time as book “promotion” has become largely “self-promotion” via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogging and the registration of domain names on the Internet.

Joked Margaret Atwood during a recent interview: “The term ‘relentless self-promoter’ used to be an insult in publishing circles. Now it will be a necessity.”

For the many writers who lack “a little Barnum” in their bones, what they see as an abdication of responsibility by publishers is not good news. In the words of one veteran non-fiction author: “The publisher now seems to feel his duty to the writer is fulfilled when the writer has his book in hand. After that, the book must find its way in the world, like the seed off a poplar tree blowing in the wind.” Another, a novelist, sees a “steady erosion of [publishers’] services toward creators. … [They] no longer edit or proofread as they once did, buy advertising, employ a sales force … and tour authors as they once did” – and this at a time when the books they publish have climbed in price to “the edge of affordability for most readers.”

Tellingly, both writers made their comments on condition of anonymity. One has a book out this year, the other is finishing one. Neither wishes to be seen as biting the hand that might still semi-feed them.

This isn’t to diminish their concerns, which, as Atwood notes, are being voiced at a time when “everything is shaking down in publishing.” Fifteen or 20 years ago, in the analog era, Canadian book publishing seemed relatively straightforward – “a relatively genteel activity,” in the words of House of Anansi publisher Sarah MacLachlan. Books were physical objects, piled in warehouses and shipped to a mix of independent retailers and chains with family-sounding names like Smithbooks and Coles. Publicists sent advance copies of these books to The Globe and Mail for that all-important review while pestering CBC Radio’s Morningside for that equally all-important chat with Peter Gzowski.

A book’s promotion was also, remembers Toronto-based fiction writer Andrew Pyper, about “sharing rides in Hondas to readings in church basements in small towns” – a phenomenon, after having published four books in the last 12 years, he still deems “the core of the thing.” Indeed, Atwood – who once, early in her career, did a book signing in the men’s socks and underwear section of an Edmonton department store (“I think it was because it was near the escalator”) – continues to call publishing “an art and craft with a business component.”

“But now,” adds Pyper, “there’s this additional virtual [promotion] apparatus of sites and blogs and whatever. … Do these things actually work? Nobody seems to know.”

Of course, as Geoffrey Taylor, director of Toronto’s International Festival of Authors, observes: “If everybody knew what the magical marketing tools were, that’s all they’d do, to a certain extent.” Word of mouth, even in the digital age, “is still by far the largest way of getting books out there. What everyone wants to figure out is how to spark it.”

Certainly “the 32-city author tour,” as Atwood calls it, is pretty much defunct, as is the publisher-paid wine-and-cheese book-launch party.

If a tour is booked, it’s more likely to be quite circumscribed, dovetailing with an event or a series of events like the Vancouver International Writers Festival or Edmonton’s LitFest – and if there’s government or corporate grants to defray costs, so much the better.

Sometimes the tour is “virtual” – Debby de Groot, who resigned as publicity director for Penguin Group (Canada) in 2006 and now heads her own public-relations firm, likes to set up interviews where, in the case of an athlete’s story, for example, the hosts of radio sports shows will call into the author’s home. If the client is a New Yorker or in London, she may send him to a satellite-linked studio at ABC or BBC and patch him to Canadian interviewers.

If a launch happens, it’s mostly at the urging (and because of the ingenuity) of the writer. Last fall, for example, for the kickoff of her debut book, All About Colour, Toronto designer Janice Lindsay got Pittsburgh Paints to pay for an event at the city’s trendy Gladstone Hotel. Her publisher, McClelland & Stewart, sent out invitations and got a local bookseller to bring in 79 copies of Colour, all of which sold for the full list price of $34.99. Pittsburgh, in the meantime, has agreed to buy 1,000 copies of Lindsay’s book to sell in its fancier stores and to pay the author’s travel expenses for a six-city tour this spring.

Also, “straight-up advertising doesn’t work any more,” says Anansi’s MacLachlan, meaning print ads in newspapers and magazines. “Viral marketing” on the Internet is a big buzzword, and the book video (which can be posted on YouTube) is the hot idea, although at this point these promotional trailers for books often amount to little more than glorified home movies.

Other challenges of what de Groot calls the current “fractured landscape” of publishing include print-on-demand technologies, the rise of new competition from on-line ordering sites like Amazon.ca and AbeBooks.com, at the same time as e-books such the Sony Reader and Kindle are even dematerializing the notion of the physical book.

THE INDIGO ELEPHANT

Of course, not everything has vaporized into the electronic ether. Having swallowed the Chapters chain in 2001, Indigo Books & Music stands unchallenged as the country’s pre-eminent bricks-and-mortar book retailer. With 240-plus outlets, it accounts by some estimates for more than 65 per cent of all retail book sales in Canada. Says one publisher: “You inevitably have to look at [Indigo] as the central place where you’ll get your biggest buy or number of books out. Every book we publish, we will sell to Indigo.”

But selling to Indigo has its costs. Not only does the chain seek an aggressive volume discount, it has a welter of fees it often charges to publishers to place their wares at various locations within the Indigo footprint – what one publishing sales director calls “the grocery-store model of book selling.”

Say you’re a publisher who’s printed 10,000 copies of a title. Half are earmarked for deposit into Indigo’s 70 or so large-format stores. Since it’s fall and the crucial pre-Christmas buying season is imminent, you and Indigo are talking about racking that order in what Indigo calls its “front-of-store new-release alcoves.” To do that November through December, the publisher faces a potential fee of almost $11,000. Or, say Indigo has bought 2,000 copies of a title, and the publisher would like those books placed throughout November and December in end-of-aisle displays in the stores. The fee according to Indigo’s rate card? Close to $6,000.

These are substantial levies in an industry where profit margins of 2 to 5 per cent are common and the average annual salary of a publicist, according to industry watchdog Quill & Quire, is $37,100 (for a publicity assistant, it’s less than $30,000).

DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB

If there’s one major piece of advice that professionals on the publishing and promotion side would give to the majority of writers, it’s probably: “Don’t quit your day job.”

As a writer, “you’re doing it for some reason other than making a living,” MacLachlan says. It’s great if the money follows, but “your publisher can’t assure you of that. The market can’t assure you of that. All we can do is try.” And, Lindsay points out, laughing, by not trying to earn your living by the pen, you “can have the luxury of being disappointed and incredulous at the abilities of your publisher.”

Katherine Ashenburg put this down in black and white last year in a paper sponsored by the Banff Centre’s literary journalism program. A former editor at The Globe and Mail, Ashenburg laid out her income, including advances and grants from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council, and expenditures involved in the four years she dedicated to the research and writing of The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, a 2007 title published in Canada, the United States and Britain as well as Brazil, Poland, Japan and now Italy. Comparing her net earnings as an author with what she would have earned over four years as a salaried newspaper editor, Ashenburg discovered that her after-tax cost of writing The Dirt on Clean was almost $280,000.

Today, she says, she’ll “never write another research-heavy non-fiction book.”

‘LIKE BUYING LOTTERY TICKETS’

Friction or at least ambivalence is likely always going to be part of the author-publisher relationship, according to Geoffrey Taylor. “The author can spend anywhere from six months to 10 years writing his book. And even when the manuscript’s finished, usually there’s a year or two to go before the book hits the bookstore.

“From the author’s point of view, it’s taken forever to get to that delivery date. There’s emotion involved. For the publisher, it’s like buying lottery tickets: They’re hoping the book catches on.

“So when a writer asks, ‘Why aren’t they selling my book?’ well, it’s because the publisher has other books, too” – sometimes many dozen books for which it’s paid wildly varying sums, divided among “a handful of publicists,” as Pyper notes. “The fact is, the ‘machine’ isn’t as big as some writers might think.”

Another fact, at least to Taylor’s eyes, is that “the window of opportunity for books, especially new fiction,” is becoming narrower. It used to be a year, then it became six months. Now that window of opportunity is more like three months.” Books, in fact, are “like films,” he said. “They can collapse right after release.”

But this scenario apparently doesn’t entirely discourage writers. As one first-time author said recently, “I did it because I knew I couldn’t not write a book. It came out. It made me happy. I sold the film rights. I feel proud of the book. … Overall, the experience has been fantastic.”

And guess what? She has another book in the works.

Self-publishing is known as “vanity publishing” within the industry and is perhaps the dirtiest word and most cruel invective you can hurl at someone in the business.

But accord to the New York Times the glory days of self-publishing might just be ahead of us.

Booksellers, hobbled by the economic crisis, are struggling to lure readers. Almost all of the New York publishing houses are laying off editors and pinching pennies (just this month major SF imprint Del Rey has begun laying off staff). What few small bookstores survived the rise of the big box bookstore in the 1990s are now closing. Even the big chains are laying people off or exploring bankruptcy.

But things are looking up for self-publishing, especially in this era of easy digital print-on-demand technology. Gone are the days when self-publishing meant paying a printer to produce hundreds of copies that then languished in a garage. Companies that charge writers and photographers to publish are growing rapidly at a time when many mainstream publishers are losing ground.

As traditional publishers look to prune their booklists and rely increasingly on blockbuster best sellers, self-publishing companies are ramping up their title counts and making money on books that sell as few as five copies, in part because the author, rather than the publisher, pays for things like cover design and printing costs.

To be sure, self-publishing is still a fraction of the wider publishing industry. Author Solutions, for example, sold a total of 2.5 million copies last year. Little, Brown sold more than that many copies of Twilight by Stephenie Meyer just in the last two months of 2008.

But in an era when anyone can create a blog or post musings on Facebook or MySpace, people still seem to want the tangible validation of a printed book.

Now, for as little as $3, an author can upload a manuscript or collection of photos to a Web site, and order a printed book within an hour. Many books will appear for sale on Amazon.com or the Web site of Barnes & Noble; others are sold through the self-publishing companies’ Web sites. Authors and readers order subsequent copies as needed.

The self-publishing companies generally make their money either by charging author fees — which can range from $99 to $100,000 for a variety of services, including custom cover design and marketing and distribution to online retailers, or by taking a portion of book sales, or both.

For some authors, the appeal of self-publishing is that they can put their books on the market much faster than through traditional publishers.

Of course, authors who take this route also give up a lot. Not only do they receive no advance payments, but they also often must pay out of their own pockets before seeing a dime. They do not have the benefit of the marketing acumen of traditional publishers, and have diminished access to the vast bookstore distribution pipeline that big publishers can provide.

Still, many self-publishing companies allow authors to take more than the traditional royalty of 15 percent of the cover price on hardcovers and 10 percent or less on paperbacks.

For many self-published authors, the niche for their book is very small. Mr. Weiss of Author Solutions estimates that the average number of copies sold of titles published through one of its brands is just 150.

Indeed, said Robert Young, chief executive of Lulu Enterprises, based in Raleigh, N.C., a majority of the company’s titles are of little interest to anybody other than the authors and their families. “We have easily published the largest collection of bad poetry in the history of mankind,” Mr. Young said.

Still, the dream of many self-published authors is that they will be discovered by a mainstream publishing house — and it does happen, however rarely.

When Lisa Genova, a former consultant to pharmaceutical companies, wrote her first novel, “Still Alice,” a story about a woman with Alzheimer’s disease, she was turned down or ignored by 100 literary agents.

Ms. Genova paid $450 to iUniverse to publish the book and sold copies to independent bookstores. A fellow author discovered the book and introduced Ms. Genova to an agent, and she eventually sold “Still Alice” for a mid-six-figure advance to Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which released a new edition this month. It had its debut on the New York Times trade paperback fiction best-seller list on Sunday, at No. 5.

Ms. Genova likened her experience to that of young bands or filmmakers using MySpace or YouTube to attract a following. “It’s really tough to break into the traditional model of doing things,” she said.

But keep this in mind: people like Lisa Genova are not only the exception, but their real success comes only after they are able to tap in to that existing, traditional publishing market. The reason Genova suddenly debuted on best-seller lists was not solely because of the quality of her work: it was due in part to a massive publicity, sales, and distribution machine at the control of Simon & Schuster. You’re never going to get that from a vanity publisher because they (by their own admission) don’t care about quality. They care about you paying them to produce a product for you. They care about volume of titles not the volume of those title’s sales.

Louise Burke, publisher of Pocket Books, said publishers now trawl for new material by looking at reader comments about self-published books sold online.

(Blogger’s aside: now, keep that point in mind. Later this week I’ll be posting about about a new venture that a publisher has engaged in to trawl the group-mind for that very thing…)

Diamonds in the rough, though, remain the outliers. “For every thousand titles that get self-published, maybe there’s two that should have been published,” said Cathy Langer, lead buyer for the Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, who said she had been inundated by requests from self-published authors to sell their books. “People think that just because they’ve written something, there’s a market for it. It’s not true.”

I dunno. For me, this is all still vanity. Now, don’t get me wrong–there’s a certain necessary amount of vanity and hubris a writer needs to possess or else they wouldn’t be a writer. Remember, we get up every morning and believe that not only do we have something to say but that everyone is entitled to our opinion 🙂 But for me the real ‘validation’ of writing comes when you realize that other people who are utterly objective, who aren’t compelled or required by law, love, or friendship to pat you on the head and say how much they like what you wrote, and who are driven by that most unforgiving taskmaster–money–say they like your work.

A publisher who takes a financial risk on your work wouldn’t do so unless he believed it would sell. A reader won’t part with hard-earned money unless she believed she’d be entertained and moved by your work.

Of course I like what I write. I wouldn’t write it if I didn’t. But it’s a big step from me liking what I do and paying someone to print it for me, to someone else liking what I do and paying me for the privilege of publishing it.

I’ve worked in publishing as an acquisitions editor so I know first-hand how many submissions are received versus how many are actually published. I know how tough it is out there and all indications are that it’s getting tougher. But I still want to try. I think I can do it; I certainly hope that I can. But there’s no guarantee. I could very well spend the rest of my days a frustrated writer, toiling in obscurity, my friends sadder and sadder for me that I’m wasting my life chasing a dream (most writers wake up with this feeling, too, I think).

But vanity publishing? To soothe my own ego because I couldn’t hack it in the Big Leagues? I think I’d consider that a bigger failure.

– S.

One of the things I love about science fiction is the ability to explore the unintended consequences of technology, from when things go awry to the ways people apply technology that the designers never intended. Look at the Internet, for example. When its tubes were originally put together nobody ever expected people to download whole movies or watch live streaming video from far-flung corners of the globe.

And now we have another example in the Amazon.com e-book reader, the Kindle.

I’ve not yet had the chance to use a Kindle myself and perhaps other e-book readers have similar functionality (if so, please let me know) but just the other day I discovered this post on the Quill & Quire blog.

It seems some enterprising tech blogger decided to use his Kindle to search for an over-used phrase–“his heart in his mouth”–in Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth and found seventeen instances. If you visit his blog you can find a screen-capture of the search results with the phrase repeated over and over…

Now this fellow, Mark Hurst, probably isn’t the first to do a search like this with an e-book reader to find what an author’s pet clichés are. But his post got me wondering about the unintended consequences of e-books for writers.

I’m not the kind of person who believes that the classic dead-tree variety of book will ever go out of fashion. But I do think that e-books will find a bigger and bigger portion of the book-market sooner rather than later, especially if devices like the Kindle, the iPhone, and people’s everyday PDAs or cell phones begin to really go after e-book functionality. And surely these devices will all have some kind of search function; it is, after all, a pretty basic command.

And will that then mean multitudes of readers begin searching for a writer’s over-used words, phrases, or punctuation? If so, surely those grammar gaffs and word woes will find their way to some forum on the internet–what is the internet for, after all, but making people looking bad anonymously?

Now, this sort of text search already goes on, to some degree. My good friend Patrick McBrine, one of the world’s future foremost Anglo-Saxonists, already uses computerized searches of Old English and Latin texts for words and word-forms to prove his point about poetic intent in the English inheritance of Biblical verse in the medieval period. But that’s literature a thousand or more years old–should we expect scholars of more modern works to begin doing the same thing? Will some enterprising English lit student begin doing keyword searches in an e-book version of Wuthering Heights? I suppose it’s already possible to do just that with the entire catalog of books in the Project Gutenberg archive.

But why would an author care, you might ask? Well, part of being a writer means loving language and desiring to express yourself as accurately and as artfully as possible. Robert J. Sawyer includes on his site an article about the word processor tricks he uses in order search for unnecessary or over-used words, phrases, and punctuation in his own work. I do something similar before I send work out to a market and I bet a lot of other writers do, too.

Fundamentally, none of us want to look stupid. Writers work hard to get their books just right before the public get to read them and nobody likes having it pointed out to them when they’ve fallen short of that goal.

If Ken Follett got wind of this guy’s post I bet he went a bit red in the face and in future work will be very careful not to use “his heart in his mouth” more than one or two times in a book, if at all. And remember this book went through numerous drafts, got past the eyes of an agent, an acquisitions editor, at least one copy-editor, a typesetter, page proofs, and still “his heart in his mouth” repeats seventeen times. But it is not surprising it was missed: Pillars of the Earth is 400 000 words long, four times as long as the typical novel.

But what text search enables is a collapsing of the book down into, say, 85 words that make the author look silly. It’s a technological trick that highlights an inescapable truth: every author has crutch-phrases they overuse. We try to know what we rely too heavily on, avoid them, edit them out, but they’re bound to creep in. They’re a bit like a syntactical fingerprint, which is why sophisticated computer programs can deduce the author of a given work based on their word use and sentence structure in prior works.

Everyone puts words together in their own idiosyncratic way. When you’re committing several hundred thousand words to paper it’s inevitable that you’re going to repeat certain phrases or structures. Once upon a time, in the age of Homer and Virgil, such repetition of stock phrases–epithets–acted as a mnemonic device, a way of ensuring proper poetic meter, and an important, expected element of poetry. Ever read The Odyssey? Count how many times the phrase “the rosy-fingered dawn” appears. After all, any one person only thinks of so many ways of putting words together.

And few people care about this kind of repetition, anyway. Probably it’s only writers and a very small fraction of readers who’d notice or care. Pillars of the Earth still sells 100 000 copies a year some twenty years after its first publication. But the brave new word of keyword searches in e-books is something authors need to consider and one more thing for writers to have hang-ups about as they write and revise.

As for myself, I know that I overuse the em-dash (–) in my writing and do my best to take it out when I revise, using the ‘Find’ command in Word to seek and destroy. Had I bothered to do a keyword search on this blog post, for instance, I would have discovered that I overuse “But”, “And”, and “Now” as the beginnings of sentences in blog posts…

– S.

So here’s the toy version of the new USS Enterprise from the forthcoming JJ Abrams’ re-imagining of the STAR TREK franchise. Like much else from this re-imagining it’s a bit sleeker and a bit sexier than the original 🙂

Now, I remain skeptical of this whole endeavor, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere. And seeing the latest trailer–while visually impressive–didn’t do much to alleviate my concerns (Why does Kirk drive 20th Century cars and motorcycles when the robot cop has a hover cycle? Oh yeah and, ROBOT COP?? They’re building the Enterprise on the surface of the planet? Do you have any idea the lift costs associated with getting it into orbit? And that’s assuming its structure can even support itself inside an atmosphere… Spock going ape$#%@ on Kirk? Scotty sounding like Scrooge McDuck? Where’s the “She canna take it no more, Ciptin!”? And is that Kirk and Uhura gettin’ it on?)

BUT…But…I reserve judgment until I see the thing. I’ll give it a fair chance. But I also reserve the right to hate it, too 🙂

Thanks to Robert J. Sawyer for the heads-up on the toy line.

– S.

Hello all –

Only one month left to nominate for the Hugos and for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, for which yours truly is eligible.

The John W. Campbell Award is given to the best new science fiction or fantasy writer whose first work was published in a professional publication in the previous two years. For the 2009 award, the qualifying work must have been published in 2007 or 2008–and you may recall I’ve had three publications in that window. You can see my Campbell eligibility profile over at Writertopia.

The award will be presented, along with the 2009 Hugo Awards, at Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, held in Montréal, Quebec, at the Palais des congrès de Montréal from August 6th – 10th, 2009.

The Campbell Award uses the same nomination and voting mechanism as the Hugo, though the Campbell Award is not a Hugo. The award is sponsored by Dell Magazines and administered on their behalf by the World Science Fiction Society.

To be able to nominate a writer for the 2009 award, you must have either been an attending member of the 2008 Worldcon in Denver or be a supporting or attending member of the 2009 Worldcon in Montreal.

Nomination ballots must be received by March 1, 2009. Please see the official nomination ballot (in PDF) on the Anticipation website.

Thanks for your consideration!

– S.

Confirmation came from fellow WOTFian Tony Pi that Writers of the Future XXIII will be on the curriculum this summer for the University of Toronto’s Department of English course “Science Fiction” [ENG237H1].

Woohoo!

The course description from the U of T website:

This course explores speculative fiction that invents or extrapolates an inner or outer cosmology from the physical, life, social, and human sciences. Typical subjects include AI, alternative histories, cyberpunk, evolution, future and dying worlds, genetics, space/time travel, strange species, theories of everything, utopias, and dystopias.

The class will be studying selected short stories from the anthology, including my story! Sweet! The stories slated for study are:

“The Stone Cipher” by Tony Pi
“Saturn in G Minor” by Stephen Kotowych
“The Frozen Sky” by Jeff Carlson
“Primetime” by Douglas Texter
“The Sun God at Dawn, Rising From A Lotus Blossom” by Andrea Kail
“Ripping Carovella” by Kim Zimring

This is very, very cool news! The course schedule is still preliminary, but the class will run in the May 11-June 19 section of the summer schedule. Anyone interested in more details (or in signing up to study my story!) should visit the University of Toronto Arts & Science homepage here.

– S.

I just saw the press release for the 2008 Philip K. Dick Awards and I’m THRILLED to report that my friend and fellow WOTFian, Jeff Carlson, has been nominated for his amazing book Plague War.

Woohoo! Well done Jeff!

The nominees are:

EMISSARIES FROM THE DEAD by Adam-Troy Castro (Eos Books)
FAST FORWARD 2 edited by Lou Anders (Pyr)
JUDGE by Karen Traviss (Eos Books)
PLAGUE WAR by Jeff Carlson (Ace Books)
TERMINAL MIND by David Walton (Meadowhawk Press)
TIME MACHINES REPAIRED WHILE-U-WAIT by K. A. Bedford (EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing)

The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. The award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust and the award ceremony is sponsored by the NorthWest Science Fiction Society. The 2008 judges are Tobias Buckell, M. M. Buckner (chair), Walter Hunt, Rosemary Kirstein, and William Senior.

First prize and any special citations will be announced on Friday, April 10, 2009 at Norwescon 32 at the Doubletree Seattle Airport Hotel, SeaTac, Washington.

Good luck to all the nominees…ah, who am I kidding? Good luck to Jeff! 🙂

Best,

– S.

PS: In a weird way Jeff’s nomination convinces me I’m psychic. After being so forgetful and not lauding Plague War since it’s publication in July 2008 I finally prepare a blog entry about it two days ago set to auto-post today…the same day Jeff happens to get the PDK Award nomination, which I had no inkling of until I saw the press release. Weird.

Egads! After my post the other day, I realized that I hadn’t yet heralded my friend and fellow WOTFian’s latest book, Plague War.

Plague War is the fantastic sequel to Jeff’s debut novel, Plague Year (which he was signing copies of when we were at events for WOTF 23–you can imagine how impressed we all were that one of us had already “made it” in publishing).

And as I mentioned the other day, he has a fabulous trailer up at his website here. If you can, be sure to watch the hi-def version of the video: it’s set high in the mountains and is just gorgeous.

While I enjoyed the book from cover to cover, if I had to pick out a favorite chapter it would be Chapter 5 when a certain Private Kotowych makes his first appearance… 😉

– S.

Bad news today from the wonderful SF Scope: Realms of Fantasy magazine is closing up shop after the next issue (April 2009).

The reasons given for the closure was plummeting newsstand sales. “Subscriptions are good, and advertising, until very recently, was fine,” said Managing Editor Laura Cleveland. She blamed the economic downturn and newsstand distribution for the closure. Apparently, the speed of the magazine’s collapse means that the editor, Shawna McCarthy (currently on vacation in Italy), hadn’t been informed yet. One of the downsides, I would think, of the speed of the internet in breaking news…

This news comes shortly after The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction announced they would be moving to bi-monthly publication as a cost-saving measure.

Economic times are hard, for certain. But these magazines have also faced declining newsstand sales and subscriptions for a decade or more. These tough times coupled with the recent US Postal Service price changes mean that the cost of doing business for many small press magazines (which all SF mags are) is just getting too high.

Expect to see more of your favorite SF magazines move to on-line only or risk folding all together.

See the full SF Scope article here.

– S.