I woke up this morning to the surprising news that Weird Tales has been sold – and Ann Vandermeer, the editor who has done so much to restore and revive the reputation of that publication as a home for excellent contemporary dark fantasy, has been elbowed out. The new owner, Marvin Kaye, plans to edit the magazine himself.

As a regular reader and reviewer of short fiction, I’ve taken this blow quite hard! It’s always awful to see a brilliant editor lose their platform, but I’m particularly disappointed because Weird Tales had become one of the few print magazines that still actively excites and surprises me with its contents. Also, I have to say, some of the best cover art I’ve seen recent years.

Ann and her (all-female!) team developed a vibe that was modern, diverse and utterly cool, which is no mean feat for a magazine that has been around since 1923. Apparently the new editor is planning a Cthulu-themed issue. Well, then. That’s something for us all to look forward to.

Bah.

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UPDATE: some responses to the news:
Warren Ellis bids goodnight to Weird Tales
Jason Sanford on Weird Tales and editorial vision
Matthew Cheney on Changes at Weird Tales
Lavie Tidhar at the World SF blog

A friend has been working steadily away on his fantasy novel. When he finished, he called me up and asked me, “What do I do next?”

My advice was to write Book 2. While it might seem counter-intuitive to keep putting all your eggs into one basket, when it comes to fantasy you learn a lot more from getting to the end of your series than the end of the first volume. Also, you learn so much in writing Book 2 that you can then go back and look at Book 1 with new, jaded, experienced eyes, and rewrite accordingly.

But now he’s finished Book 2, and I feel like I should be able to give a more comprehensive answer.

Only… I’m not exactly an expert in getting published for the first time. None of us are, of course – there are many ways to get published for the first time, and most authors only experience ONE of those. In my case, though, it was a pretty atypical route (involving a competition that no longer exists) so giving advice on how to get to that point is a bit like… well, when friends ask for advice on coping with relationship breakups. (Um, I’ve never had one. Still on my first.) Possibly that is a bad example, because I am AWESOME at being a complete EXPERT on other people’s break ups.

But anyway.  My point is that people often look to published authors for advice, and while we can often share really fabulous advice about working methods and business plans and all the stuff we actually do, I’m not sure that we’re always that useful when it comes to helping new writers figure out how to get started.  Started was a long time ago for some of us…  And while getting published isn’t necessarily easy for us, and certainly isn’t something to be taken for granted, it’s still a whole different game trying to sell a book as someone who has a track record.

I’d like to be able to offer my friend something a bit more substantial than “Query agents first, don’t send the whole books unless they ask for it, don’t pay ‘reading fees,’ yes they REALLY expect a synopsis to be a page or so…”  And while I’d like to just send him away to listen to five years’ worth of Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing and Will Write for Wine podcasts, possibly he was hoping for a slightly more efficient answer.

So what I’m wondering is – where should I point my friend?  What blog posts, what communities, what research hubs?  Where are the nearly-published submitting-like-crazy writers hanging out in 2011?

If you had just finished your first fantasy novel, what would you do with it?

Maureen Johnson blogs brilliantly about James Frey horribly scamming newbie writers with dodgy contracts. She also quite rightly calls out creative writing programmes (specifically MFAs) for not including business advice along with artistic training:

“Look, MFA programs, stop being so snobbish. You’re not making your students better artists by sending them out into their fields with NO KNOWLEDGE of the business side of things. You’re leaving them vulnerable to bad deals, and putting them into a position where they can be taken advantage of. You set up the conditions in which your artists end up slaving away because they didn’t know any better than to sign on the dotted line. You make this James Frey situation possible. Devote a few weeks to teaching your students some survival skills. After all the money you’ve taken from them, they’re going to need to know how to make some more.”

Sarah Rees Brennan follows up with a very fun (but at the same time very wise) post about the seductive appeal and dreadful dangers of “shortcuts” to getting published, how to be selective about the advice you take, and how much hard work it actually takes to even get started on that road:

“I have heard people say in horror ‘You have to write a whole book?’ Yes, you do. Already-successful writers can sell on proposal (summaries of novels, can be 1 to 60 pages long, I’ve seen both) but the vast majority of new writers have to write a whole book. And then they have to throw out that whole book and start all over again, with no consolation but ‘Well – that’s one book closer to The One. Maybe THIS one will be The One!’ Like dating. Dating lots of different people you have made up in your brain.”

Another of the things she talks about is the importance of getting an agent:

“Sometimes people skip this step. They can if they like! If they are totally amazing at negotiating, then at contract language, then (if you haven’t sold your foreign rights to your publisher) at finding good foreign publishers. Then you negotiate with them, and fiddle with those contracts. Next step, to movies, and finding the right people and getting a good contract! Also if you think whenever problems arise (I hate my cover/My book’s publication date has been pushed back four years/My editor wants me to add Martians with probes in the middle of the love scene!) you will be able to deal with your publishers all by yourself and be perfectly cool, calm and collected in achieving your ends.

If all that is true, go ahead, and know you have my undying admiration. If it all sounds like it might be beyond your grasp or within your grasp but leave you with little time for actual writing, a literary agent is good to have.”

This is a piece of advice that I tend to be pretty evangelical about. I have sold novels through an agent, and not through an agent, and every single time I have sold a novel directly to a publisher without an agent, I have had regrets. Some niggly, resentful regrets, some major, career-implodey regrets. I know it’s hard. Finding an agent feels at times like being on one of those treasure hunts in a sandpit, only someone keeps driving the sandpit out of your reach. And that’s with a decent track record as a writer, let alone being a completely new name. We are lucky in Australia that there are several opportunities open to writers to be noticed by publishers without having an agent make that first introduction. However…

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My honey called me from work today to tell me he had bought my book again – in e-form, from the iBooks store.

“There are IBOOKS for sale in the IBOOKS store?” I repeated, very excited.

Because yes, having Power and Majesty as an e-book is super exciting, and not something I knew about in advance at all, but I’m almost as completely excited that after half a year sharing a house with an iPad, nearly a year owning an iPod Touch and about a month or so with my own iPhone (it’s kind of adorable, but my honey didn’t have a single Mac product when we first got together and now he practically hurls them into the household at superspeed) it was now, finally, possible to buy ebooks that didn’t come from Project Gutenberg.

Not that I’m knocking Project Gutenberg, I love me some free old books, but sometimes you want more than just the first two Agatha Christies, you know?

So yes. Apple is finally getting the ebook thing happening in Australia. And Power and Majesty is RIGHT THERE on the front line. This is kinda squeeworthy! I am a little disappointed in the layout and design of the iBooks store – it’s not nearly as tantalising and enticing as iTunes, and while the searchability is excellent, I like a bit more razzle dazzle when I’m browsing for purchases. But early days. I hope it will get shinier as more books and publishers get involved.

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Episode 12 is available for streaming here, downloading here, and can also be found on iTunes by searching for ‘Galactic Suburbia’

In which we talk about publishers behaving badly, authors self-publishing, the future of reading and the price of a short story. Also we talk about books. Shocking, isn’t it?

News

Night Shade apologises for any problems they’ve caused any of their authors

SFWA puts Night Shade Books on probation as a qualified SFWA market for a period of one year, effective immediately.

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I found out yesterday that Power and Majesty could be in the shops as early as 25 May, which threw me into a bit of a tizzy. June still sounded safely and longingly far off, but May arrives on Saturday, and really, I’m already getting an armchair in May, do I deserve a book too?

(the armchair will be my combined mothers day & birthday present and I am ridiculously excited by it, who needs surprises? I want a CHAIR)

There are many tough parts to being a writer. The long period of not getting published is pretty much agony, but believe me, it’s not as bad as a long period not getting published after actually getting published, because if there’s one thing getting published gives you, it’s the expectation that it will happen again.

Having your expectations punctured is compulsory, for a writer. Getting accepted for publication is not the Happy Ever After you may think it is – it’s page one.

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Hard to get used to the idea that the book is actually out there in the wild, even though I won’t be seeing a copy of it myself for at least a month (wow it is way closer to the beginning of June than I had allowed for).

But today brought the first official review, which has sparked much happiness and rejoicing. Stefen Brazulaitis, whom you might recall (if you remember such finicky details) said something so clever about Siren Beat that we put his quote on the cover, has done it again, this time with a lovely review in the upcoming May issue of Bookseller + Publisher Magazine, which I came across for the first time in my library a year ago, and is a beautifully detailed industry publication here in Australia. (it also has a great web presence including the ability to read every page – how awesome)

Stefen says:

Power and Majesty ticks all the boxes for great dark fantasy and a few more for good measure. Roberts evokes an exotic, renaissance-tinged city full of stylish and decadent characters. Charming, mysterious and occasionally grim, this is a silky and sophisticated new entry to Australian fantasy. I would recommend this to anyone who likes the darker end of the genre, particularly fans of Anne Bishop or Jacqueline Carey.

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I had a great chat tonight on Twitter with @JonathanStrahan, @charliejane, @charlesatan and others about fantasy and the way that publishers are reacting in different ways to the reader resistance phenomenon: readers turning their back on extended fantasy series, and in some cases refusing to start reading a series until it’s complete, so that they can happily get invested in the characters without worrying the author is going to drop dead, or make them wait.

Some of the techniques publishers are using include letting the author finish the whole series/trilogy so they can assure readers it’s all going to be there, and in many cases releasing the books much closer together, rather than the more traditional one volume a year. This is happening with my Creature Court trilogy, where the third book will be delivered around the time the first will be published, and they’ll be coming out six monthly. Meanwhile, Rowena Cory Daniells has a new trilogy coming out this year through Solaris at once a month! As Jonathan pointed out, this is a method the romance industry has been employing for years.

I get pretty angry about the most problematic method publishers use to overcome the reader resistence phenomenon: that is to say, fraud.

I still remember the fury I felt when I got to the end of Gwyneth Jones’ Bold as Love. There was no sign on the book that it was a continuous series, but ten pages from the end, I had suspected there was a lack of finality. Sure enough, “to be continued in Castles in the Sand.” There are other examples, quite a few of them documented across the web, of series which the publishers have, for whatever reason, chosen not to represent as a series from Book #1.

Here’s the thing: there are many things you can do to try to persuade readers that is going to be worth their while to pick up Book #1. But it’s not okay to pretend the book is something other than what it is. A reader who doesn’t want to read a lone Book #1 is going to be PARTICULARLY angry if they are tricked into buying a book under false pretences. They will tell their friends. And you know, if they don’t (as most readers don’t) know much about the industry and how it works, they’re not going to blame the publisher. They’re going to blame the author.

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It’s all kicking off again – many of you will remember the controversy over the cover of Justine Larbalestier’s US (Bloomsbury) Liar cover some months back, where the image of a white girl was chosen as the cover image for a book about a black girl. Justine herself spoke up about it, and the internet & media response was so (rightfully) fierce that the offending cover was replaced.

This time the book is written by a newbie author without Justine’s clout and support circle, and unlike Justine, she hasn’t said a word about it. The book is Magic under Glass, and once again the protagonist is dark-skinned, and the publisher – Bloomsbury, again – has chosen a cover depicting her as white.

This isn’t good enough. It really isn’t. Book covers are a form of advertising, yes, but that does not mean that moral choices should go out the window – especially when we are talking about products marketed at teenagers. There’s enough crap out there to make teenagers feel bad about themselves, without disguising the books for teens which do promote diversity in their text.

Deceitful book covers are never a good idea – whether it’s presenting a book as a fluffy chick lit when it’s actually a miserable ball of misery (thank you, Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing), misleading the prospective reader about genre (nothing worse than a publisher who is embarrassed about publishing science fiction), publishing the first book of a trilogy that deliberately withholds that kind of vital information on the cover, or publishing a book where the protagonist is pictured as a skinny white model when the whole point of the story is that she is not skinny, or white.

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