Nearly back on an even keel…

The last few weeks have been a bit intense, both work-wise and otherwise. Following the recent launch of the all-new PS Publishing webstore, as well as the Wordpress-enabled re-launch of John Berylne's Works of Tim Powers fan-site and the re-vamped version of Richard Morgan's homepage, Jo and I promptly jetted off on holiday for a week, to the quite fantastic Mediterranean island of Malta.

We had a fantastic time, but alas, we also received some sad news on our last day there; suffice to say that a family funeral ensued, which we both attended this week just gone. All of which has resulted in something of a backlog - as you'd imagine - although I think I'm pretty much back on top of things now. So much so that I managed to make time today to put together my new, personal blog site at www.darrenturpin.me.uk.

So from now on, that's where I'll be posting all my music, humour, movie and life etc. related posts, leaving The Genre Files free for more bookish material; like the pile of recommended reading that I want to post at some point. I'm also looking at my work schedule in order to free up more time to work on UKSFBN each day, which should result in more regular posts, or at least fewer content gaps. And of course, any work-related material will be posted to www.darrenturpin.co.uk.

Oh, and the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I've started signing posts as 'Darren' rather than 'Ariel', both here and over at UKSFBN. The reason? Well, 'Ariel' is an old nick-name from high school that stuck through University and my early days in bookselling. I always liked it, because it was quirky and memorable for folks on the other end of a phone; especially when I rang up busy publicists to blag review copies and author interviews for 'The Alien Has Landed'. But now I'm working freelance I think that using my given name is more professional. And something else happened recently to convince me that 'quirky' isn't always best.

My post on the Long Tail economics of genre fiction got a bit of blogosphere coverage; it was even picked up on by Lou Anders, a US-based editor whose work I have an enormous amount of respect for, which was naturally most gratifying... until Lou made the (not entirely unreasonable) assumption that I was a lady.

Not a problem, easily remedied, and indeed, Paul Cornell actually point out the gender-switch in the comment thread to Lou's post and Lou made the correction. But along the way, he replied to Paul's comment, saying: "next you'll be telling me Ariel doesn't have a tail and live under da sea..."

Ba-dum, tish!

You know what? When someone you respect - and whose opinion of you could potentially be quite important from a work-related point-of-view - makes 'Little Mermaid' jokes about your current nom-de-nick then that's probably a signal that it's time to stop being quite so quirky and focus on the professional instead.

So, 'Ariel' is being phased out, at least on anything that carries a public profile that could reflect on me professionally. Although of course I will still answer to my nick-name when talking to anyone that knows me (Jo won't call me anything else...), and I'll probably still sign emails as 'Ariel' from force of habit. But there you go. A lesson learned.

November 18, 2007 | Filed Under Miscellania | 8 Comments

Genre fiction marketing follow-up - Lou Anders and Mark Chadbourn

Sorry folks, another long, train-of-thought essay of exactly the sort I promised myself I wasn't going to get overly involved in any more. But then, there have been a couple of very interesting follow-up posts to my last post on George Mann's original thoughts about the apparently essential dilemma of marketing genre fiction to either the masses or the hardcore fans, which I felt I had to add to.

Firstly, 'The Big Book Cover Post: Wizards and Spaceships' from Lou Anders of Pyr Books; another specialist genre imprint that I have a huge amount of respect for.

Lou makes a number of good points, a couple of which I'd particularly like to comment on:

"Personally, I do not like the move away from illustration to design that I see coming out from a lot of houses (though it has its place for individual books - I'm talking about a general trend). I think to forgo illustration is to sacrifice one of the core strengths of SF&F and one of its unique selling points."

Generally, I prefer well-illustrated genre fiction book covers to ones that are produced with a strictly 'graphic design' aesthetic in mind. But that's just a personal preference, and doesn't hold true 100% of the time; I've seen some striking and well-designed 'graphic' covers as well. And as fantasy author Joe Abercrombie points out in the comments section of Lou's post: "I don't know that the wider audience ... are necessarily put off by genre covers, but they certainly are put off by REALLY BAD covers."

Absolutely right. It applies to hardcore genre fans and probably tenfold to the general reader. Genre fiction book covers ought to be a demonstration of self-confidence and celebration, yes. They should unashamedly wear their genre hearts on their sleeves, absolutely. If you're selling a book about dragons and want to attract the attention dragon-fans, then a dragon on the cover is a good idea? Just make sure it's a stylish, well-illustrated dragon that has a measure of genuine artistic merit in its own right, not some cartoonish, lumpen sketch, or even the dragon-fans might say no.

And what if the book has some genre elements, but has the potential to appeal to a wider audience - through the exceptional quality of the prose, or the range of themes, concepts and sub-texts the author explores, or the incredible catharsis inherent in the principle character's life story or situation, etc. - what if it's a whole lot more than a simple scion quest / space war adventure story? How do you strike the balance; ensure you don't cross that oh, so tricky invisible line? Lou Anders has an answer:

"...you do so neither by hiding / omitting your genre elements nor presenting them in an off-putting, garish manor, but by presenting them in a mature, intriguing, attractive, inclusive, compelling 21st century light."

Which, by the way, I think applies equally to everything from the cover blurb to the author photo on the inside sleeve to the content of the accompanying press release that's sent out with review copies, as much as it does to the cover art itself.

Returning to cover art, specifically, Lou also quotes from an off-thread conversation with illustrator / artist / designer John Picacio who sums up the reason why the genre really does need to give itself a shot in the arm when it comes to self-confidence and belief:

"The field must visually celebrate itself, rather than run away from itself ... When sf/fantasy publishing shows an insecurity about its visual strengths, that insecurity rubs off negatively not only on our audiences, but in the broader media, and we push ourselves backwards every time we do that."

If we, as genre readers and genre fans, stopped worrying so much about what the wider mainstream media thought about our books - taking it to the extreme: ignoring the mainstream media completely and focusing almost entirely on the specialist genre presses, blogs, webzines, print 'zines - then the mainstream media will soon get bored and leave us the hell alone to enjoy ourselves in peace, right?

Well, fantasy / horror author Mark Chadbourn thinks this could be a dangerous road to go down, and says so in 'Selling Fantasy by the Pound' on his JackofRavens.com blog.

Mark was a journalist for many years before he became a full-time fiction writer and also writes for TV here in the UK, so he's seen the impact of the aforementioned Long Tail economics on three media channels: music, print and television.

Mark's main argument against a policy of appealing to the core genre fiction fans centres on his experience of the music industry:

"...if it [the fan-focused approach] was applied to the whole industry I would have real problems. In the music industry, where I worked for a while, the marketeers have struggled. By focusing on the tribalist music fan that has emerged over the last twenty years, they have had trouble gaining breakout hits from genres. Attention shifted to marketing bland fare that would appeal to all tastes to gain those mainstream hits, and sales have fallen dramatically (yes, I know there are many other factors, but this is a core concern)."

Which brings in an earlier discussion on 'quality fantasy', which was actually sparked by another Chadbourn post, 'Are RPGs killing fantasy?', in which he called for fantasy writers to embrace their weird side and distance themselves from the clichÃ©s and standardised fantasy tropes made overly familiar by a plethora of fantasy-themed computer games.

Can you achieve all those aims at once? Can you write high-quality, literary genre fiction that's successfully marketed to a core audience of fans, yet still has enough break-out potential to escape the genre-ghetto and achieve mass-market sales?

Mark thinks you can:

"I love fantasy, science fiction and horror. I believe these three genres are appealing to mainstream tastes, if some way can be found to communicate their values to the casual browser. I'm afraid that an across-the-board retreat to the 'core fan model' will ghettoize them even further and lead to a long-term decline. The best way for the industry, I think is - to use music industry analogy - hardcore labels for the purist, and general labels to attract new users."

Well, surely this model already exists within the publishing industry, and has for years? If you'll excuse the lengthy aside and apologies to anyone not specifically mentioned by name:

At one extreme you have the very definite 'hardcore' independent presses - such as the UK's Tartarus Press, who cater for very specialist niches. Moving up the scale you find successful niche-indies like Pendragon (horror fiction in all its guises), Telos (TV guides and genre novellas) and Elastic (genre short fiction collections and anthologies). Then there are larger indies - PS Publishing in the UK, Subterranean Press, Cemetery Dance et. al. in the US - who produce a wider range of authors and formats across the whole spectrum of genres, and also larger specialists such as Titan (UK graphic novels).

Crossing to the 'corporate' ladder we start with smaller imprints, whose publication range may actually be narrower than the larger indies, but whose financial backing means they can usually spend more on advertising, marketing and online promotion and so reach a wider audience. Solaris are one such: self-declared as a midlist imprint, still relatively small but growing strongly and with the financial muscle of Games Workshop and the Black Library publishing operation behind them, backing up their online know-how.

Around about the same level are the genre titles that are published by major corporates who don't have a specific genre imprint - Penguin, Transworld, Hodder, Headline and co. all put out titles with varying degrees of blatant genre-ness as part of their overall fiction lists.

Finally, we get to the larger, longer-established, specific genre imprints of major corporate publishing houses, including HarperCollins' Voyager, Orion's Gollancz Books and Little Brown's Orbit. The latter, with the recent launch of Orbit US and Orbit Australia, now serves the three major English-speaking markets (four, including Canada via the US), giving it immense reach and influence. And they all bring a highly effective mix of established bestsellers and innovative new talent to the market.

Thanks to Gollancz and Orbit in particular, a number of new genre authors have been published for the first time in the past couple of years, and others who have established themselves in their local markets (Australian author Margo Lanagan) or via the independent presses (Joe Hill with his debut collection 20th Century Ghosts from PS, now a Gollancz author) have subsequently been introduced to a much wider audience; some of those authors even making national bestseller lists in the process (Trudi Canavan, for instance).

So surely, with that sort of established mix of 'hardcore' and 'general' labels, it's just a question of the writer deciding which audience their work is most likely to appeal to and then approaching a publisher who is geared towards publishing for that audience?

Well, of course it's nowhere near as simple as that, and Mark Chadbourn has a few further words of warning for the genre writer:

"But that is a fiendish and crippling trap for the writer. Once you establish yourself in one pool or the other it will be very hard to crossover and gain, on the one hand, the new readers and wider sales that sustain your career, and, on the other, credibility that is just as valuable a commodity in the internet-empowered world."

So it sounds like you can either - as a genre author - choose to write specialised, credibility-rich, literary fiction, knowing full well that you'll probably end up appealing to a much smaller pool of potential readers (writing for the Long Tail audience), or narrow your horizons; dumbing-down in the process, in order to appeal to the RPG-influenced, bland-fare consuming mass market and (hopefully) laugh all the way to the bank (moving your work away from the 'long tail' and into the 'short head', where the bestsellers feed).

Of course, you could try do both at the same time. Many authors do, either openly or - I'm sure - pseudonymously.

Or you could try to find another way: by helping the readership to raise its standards; to expect, to want, to demand much more from their genre fiction, and thereby move the mainstream audience closer to the credible, literary end of the spectrum. In other words, expanding the middle ground between 'long tail' and 'short head' (it would help if I had time to draw the graph, I'll try to add one at a later date) and creating greater potential for higher quality fiction to thrive.

If the readership demands richer, better quality genre fiction, and the readership then votes with its credit cards and buys more of it, then the publishers of the world will respond by publishing more of it. And I know for a fact that this would make a lot of genre fiction publishers immensely happy.

Anyhow, I'm going to go away and ruminate some more, see if I can pull a few thoughts together into something resembling a reasonably coherent framework. Or a polemic. Or another rambling essay (most likely). Won't happen for a while yet though... far too much interesting work happening right now, and an imminent and much-needed holiday to enjoy as well.

Feel free to comment away if the urge takes you. I'll try to keep track, but can't promise anything like a coherent response for a couple of weeks or so...

October 24, 2007 | Filed Under Miscellania | 4 Comments

Lou Anders' 'Most Significant SF' meme

Via Lou Anders of Pyr Books, writing on his (always worth reading) Bowing to the Future blog, a list-meme based on the Science Fiction Book Club's list of the fifty most significant science fiction / fantasy novels published between 1953 and 2002.

The Key:

Bold the ones you've read.
Strike-out the ones you hated.
Italicize those you started but never finished.
Put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien [*]
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett [*]
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. ~~The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson~~
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams [*]
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson [*]
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip JosÃ© Farmer

So I've read, what, fourteen of the top 50? Hated one of them - sorry, but Thomas Covenant just pushed all the wrong buttons, although I absolutely loved Donaldson's The Mirror of Her Dreams and A Man Rides Through - and yes, I also loved the (probably predictable) formative teenage-reads: LOTR, HHGTTG, The Colour of Magic... oh, and Snowcrash, which is the novel that switched me on to the idea of SF being about so much more than robots and spaceships... and perhaps that attitude is why I haven't been anywhere near some of the titles on the rest of the list.

And no, I didn't finish The Forever War; don't think I was in the right frame of mind at the time. But I have got a copy of the new Gollancz omnibus edition of Forever War, Forever Free and Forever Peace [Amazon], so at some point I'll sit down and read all three.

Also in my defence, the selection does have rather a US-flavoured slant to it, albeit as you'd expect from the US SF Book Club; and there are a few titles in there that have been out of print in the UK for years, so I can probably claim lack of exposure to quite a few of them (although as an excuse it's a pretty poor one; sf transcending mere geographical boundaries etc. and seeing as we have, like, the Interweb and stuff these days).

And I have read other stuff by Clarke, Moorcock, Dick, Matheson, Bradbury, Asmiov and Gibson. Oh, and I do have a copy of John Crowley's Little, Big [Amazon] on my 'to be read' shelf, in fact it's been there for the past six years (I know, I know, but I'm saving it for a special occasion and besides, the print in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks edition that I've got is really small...)

And of course it's tricky without knowing the original criteria for assessing their 'significance' (I did find the original list, but there's no mention of the process it's based on), so I'm obviously in danger of straying into the realms of purely subjective opinion, but there are a few titles that I'd argue were ripe for inclusion on the basis of their importance to the UK market, starting with:

Legend, David Gemmell [*]
Mythago Wood, Robert Holdstock [*]
Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks

And there would be more if I put my mind to it, I'm sure. But it's Monday morning, I've just spent most of the weekend decorating, and my head is full of paint fumes, dammit...

[edit December 4th-7th] And here they are...

Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks [nominated by Ed Ashby]
Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham [nominated by Joe Gordon]
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Alan Garner
Hyperion, Dan Simmons [nominated by Ed Ashby]
The Malazan Books of the Fallen, Steven Erikson [*]
Drowned World, J.G. Ballard [nominated by Brian Ruckley]
Swords and Deviltry, Fritz Leiber [nominated by Brian Ruckley, seconded and fact-checked by silvereel]

Feel free to make your own nominations in the comments there, folks.