Futurismic

Paul recently accused me of being too modest to promote myself here on Futurismic, but this should prove him wrong!

My latest science fiction novel, Terra Insegura, is out from DAW Books tomorrow, and to promote it, I’m running a month-long giveaway at my blog (details here). You’re welcome to enter over there, but as I did last year for Marseguro, I’m also offering a special for Futurismic readers only.

Email me at edward(at)edwardwillett.com and put “Futurismic contest” in the subject line, and I’ll enter you in a Futurismic-only draw. The first name drawn receives a copy of Terra Insegura, and the second name drawn a copy of last year’s Aurora Award-nominated Marseguro. (I’ll only ask for mailing information from the winners after they win, and don’t worry: I’ll ship anywhere in the world.)

I’ll keep this draw open for two weeks, closing it at midnight GMT on Sunday, May 17.

And just a reminder: you can read the first two chapters of the book and/or listen to me read them on my website.

We now return you to your regular Futurismic programming.

(Image: Cover art by Stephan Martiniere.)

[tags]Edward Willett,science fiction, books, novels, contests[/tags]

Damien G Walter has been thinking about self-publishing, reassessing the established wisdom that self-publication is de facto a bad thing.

To date, self publishing has been a bad idea. People without the necessary skills and experience full prey to vanity publishers. Writers with some talent but who are still learning can expose their work too soon. Excellent writing can find itself swamped among the dross that is self published every year and no one bothers to go looking for it. The general wisdom on self publishing for anyone who aspires to become a professional author has been… don’t.

Walter goes on to point out that the landscape has changed somewhat in recent years, with rising stars such as John Scalzi and Kelly Link owing some portion of their success to self-publication of one stripe or another, and with the publishing industry suffering at the hands of market forces.

The main argument against self-publication is that it usually results in work that will harm the author’s reputation: rip-off vanity press jobs, or simply work that isn’t ready for publication which would have benefited from more revision and/or editorial input. These problems apply more to the beginning author, though; the point has been made before that an author with the stature of Stephen King could probably self-publish with a great deal of success (not to mention a bigger profit margin). But the principle appeal of self-publishing for a new author with genuine skill is the opportunity to start building an audience and having readers engage with the work… and that’s not so easy a benefit to dismiss.

Walter concludes:

If the general wisdom about self publishing has been ‘don’t', its likely that wisdom may change to ‘do – but with great caution’. There has always been a role for self publishing, but as that role grows, the provisos that accompany self publishing will grow all the more important. Authors will need to be aware that self publishing means more than just having a book printed. It means being an editor, a distributor and a marketer of your own work. It means investing in yourself in exactly the way a good publisher invests in their authors, whilst taking the risks a good publisher also takes. It means understanding the arc of your own career as a writer in the same depth that good editors and agents do. And most of all it means having an honest and accurate understanding of the quality of your own writing, maybe the hardest thing of all.

For most self publishing will continue to be a mistake, but for writers with enough talent and determination it is already becoming an important part of building a readership, one that for many writers it will be a mistake to simply dismiss.

For what it’s worth, my work as a music reviewer has exposed me to a similar evolution in the music business; it’s easier than it has ever been for a band or soloist to record their work and make it available to anyone. As with writing, many of them jump the gun and release before their work is up to a standard where it can survive against product recorded and promoted by the established labels… but there are the occasional success stories, be they out-of-nowhere newcomers or established acts turning their backs on an exploitative  system.

This contrasts with our recent post on comics self-publishing, where Jim Munroe pointed out that the stigma against self-published works in the comics field is minimal by comparison to the literary field, and suggests that it may be because it’s easier to discern the quality of comics ‘at a glance’.

Will we see a change in attitude toward self-publishing in years to come? I think it’s inevitable, though it will take time… and the sheer mass of terrible self-published work (much of which Futurismic receives email about on a daily basis, I might add) will do much to slow it.

But economics may provide an accelerating force; all bets are off on how things will look in five years’ time. So, writers in the audience – published or otherwise – have you self-published, or considered doing so? And what factors influenced your decision?

… you’ve got to make the moment last. Or so says Ian McDonald over at the Pyr blog, confessing that he’s a slow reader and proud of it:

What interests me here is not so much the dwindling of attention spans, as what I call ‘nuggeting’ – scanning only for the important points, the catching points where the eye and the brain latch on to information – a point of change or transition or a contrast. Nugget to nugget, getting the eye-kicks in at the required bpm. I wonder if that’s what the commentariat mean when they say ‘the storyline did not engage me’ –the nuggets, the changes, the beats didn’t come fast enough. I think it’s a sad and bad thing. If we’re exposed to only what stimulates, it deadens the response. Reading isn’t only about finding out what happens next. Why hurry to the end? Take your time. There’s plenty to enjoy on the way.

I half-agree with McDonald here - certain books demand to be read more slowly, either because they are richer in ‘nuggets’ or because the prose itself is satisfying to linger over (or because they’re not written very well, though I tend to give up on bad books these days, as life’s too short already).

But equally there are books that demand to be read quickly, and are all the more fun for that. And most of all, I think there are big risks in making general statements about how and why people should read for pleasure; McDonald naturally has a creator’s concern about his work being appreciated as he intended it, but I know I’d be a resentful of being told how I should best enjoy a book by anything other than the book itself. [via SF Signal; image by takomabibelot]

What about you – is it fast-moving page-turners that you’re after, or do you prefer books that you can lose yourself in for a week or two?

According to a recent report in Japan Today, ten of Japan’s print bestsellers in 2007–selling about 400,000 copies apiece–were based on cell phone novels, or “keitai shousetu.” The genre was born in 2002 when an author named Yoshi wrote Deep Love: Ayu’s Story for the cell phone. It was enormously popular and now lots of Japanese authors are writing short  intended to be read on cell phones. (Via GalleyCat.)

From the Japan Today story, which notes that according to a recent survey, 86% of high school, 75% of middle school and 23% of grade school girls in Japan read cell phone novels:

The way it works is this: novels are posted by members of cell phone community sites to be downloaded for free and read on other cell phones. Reading often takes place in crowded trains during long commutes. The works are published in 70-word installments, or abbreviated chapters that are the ideal length to be read between shorter train stops. This means that, despite small cell phone screens, lots of white space is left for ease of reading. Multiple short lines of compressed sentences, mostly composed of fragmentary dialogue, are strung together with lots of cell phone-only symbols. The resulting works are emotional, fast-paced and highly visual, with an impact not unlike manga.

Of course, you’re probably thinking “if they can write novels in 70-word instalments for cell phones, I could probably write a novel in 140-character installments on Twitter!”

You wouldn’t be the first. A post at ReadWriteWeb lists some attempts in that direction.

The future of reading, apparently, may lie with those with short attention spans, and the future of writing with the terse.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]reading,novels,fiction,cell phones,Japan[/tags]

Are there hidden messages and subtexts in stories and novels that help reinforce and strengthen the values our society holds? A group of evolutionary psychologists researching Victorian-era fiction suggests that the classics of the time…

… not only reflect the values of Victorian society, they also shaped them. Archetypal novels from the period extolled the virtues of an egalitarian society and pitted cooperation and affability against individuals’ hunger for power and dominance.

[...]

The researchers believe that novels have the same effect on society as oral cautionary tales of old. “Just as hunter-gatherers talk of cheating and bullying as a way of staying keyed to the goal that bad guys must not win, novels key us to the same issues… “

The idea of culture as societal regulation valve is nothing new, I suppose, but it seems the researchers were focusing on the canonical literature of the era rather than what would have been considered popular by the man on the street. What about the Victorian precursors of the pulp magazines, for example, or their oft-unmentioned love of porn and erotica? There was a very different set of values embedded in those, I think we can assume…

That said, I think there’s probably a nugget of truth in the assertion that art contains coded value systems from the society that produced it. So what does that mean for us 21st Century types? We have somewhat different values nowadays, and we no longer have such a dominant monoculture as the Victorians. [image by k4chii]

Looking back on the science fiction novels we’re reading today, what would an anthropologist or evolutionary psychologist from a century in the future make of our values?