WFC pictures

This is a link. I didn't take any pictures. Well, until the con was over and I took pictures of the environs because of the shiny new idea in my head.

http://www.midamericon.org/photoarchive/05wfc01.htm

For those who are insatiably curious, this page includes me. Second to last picture, I'm the one in the background with the white shirt with gold trim, gray pants -- not the woman in the black dress. I can also pick out my back in the first picture, but that's more because I know where we were sitting -- or getting ready to sit, anyway.

WFC: State of Fantasy and Horror

Thursday, 5 p.m. Panelists were David Hartwell (moderator; editor at Tor), Stephen Jones (from England), James Minz (Del Rey), and Barbara Roden (Ashtree Press, from Canada) These are notes, not necessarily direct quotes, though I do attribute them to individual speakers.

There is more separation between fantasy and horror in the US. In the UK, publishing is publishing. (I didn't note who made this pithy comment.)

Stephen Jones: A few years ago, horror was coming out of a black hole, small presses were coming to the UK, but that all went away. It's reduced to 3 or 4 companies, owned by the Germans and the French. Now all are competing for the same market, and it's harder for mid-list authors to get published. Fewer editors specialize in the area.

There are no publicity budgets. No time, energy, or money to specialize. They concentrate on books that will make a profit for the company.

Barbara Roden: I can't really talk about fantasy. I'll focus on supernatural, primarily short stories. Short stories don't get recognition. A small press can publish books of short stories. For horror, the pendulum goes back and forth.

The Canadian market is based on what happens in England or the US. You can't get momentum with Canadian authors unless they can be a big seller in the US or UK as well. Small presses can be a stepping stone to larger things for authors. Everyone's looking for The Next Big Thing, and you won't get the push unless they think that's you. There are only one or two at the top of the heap, and everyone else is scrambling.

Stephen Jones: Everything for Canada also holds true for Australia. [me: I'll post notes for the panel on Australian fantasy later this week, so that will have more details, I think.]

James Minz: Australians have problems getting distribution.

David Hartwell: No mainstream publisher in Canada has ever been interested in developing genre; Australia had Harper.

Barbara Roden: Hutchison did a series a few years back, but it lost what it had.

David Hartwell: Canada has no law as the US does about monopolies. The second-largest Canadian bookstore chain bought out the largest, then went bankrupt, which collapsed distributors and half the publishers in Canada. Recovery has been coming in bits and pieces.

Stephen Jones: WH Smith set themselves up as main chain and distributor in England. They insisted on books being marketed as they chose, with covers of their design. They started to lose money. Everything they told everyone was wrong. They became too powerful and destroyed the industry.

James Minz: Symptom of the times, of society as a whole--fractionation of the market. You see it with cable and satellite TV. There are hundreds of choices but few main markets, and even they are getting divided. Everyone is fighting for smaller pieces of the pie, which is why small presses can do well.

David Hartwell: There's a difference between getting known and getting paid.

James Minz: It's easier to start big because it's hard to fight mid-list history as an author. There's no industrial memory, no institutional history.

Barbara Roden: Ramsey Campbell's discussion board. What makes "dark horror"? Not doing anyone a favor by subdividing what's already a small genre.

Stephen Jones: It started with trying to use "dark fantasy" to market horror.

James Minz: Publishers do make marketing decisions, but they also need a product to sell.

Stephen Jones and David Hartwell both agreed that it's got to be product.

David Hartwell: Historically, publishing and books do well versus other entertainment in economic down times. Probably heading for good times for the industry.

James Minz: But it costs more to ship books than CDs or DVDs.

David Hartwell: There are 10 major and 3 minor publishers of genre in the US--still a large segment; haven't had the kind of collapse that happened in the UK, France, and a lot of the west in the 80s and 90s. Trade publishing was preserved. A lot was sold to German conglomerates, which is good for Germany because in tough times they can take money from the US and UK to Germany.

Superficial--lot of money to buy books from big name authors. It's set up to use money rather than expertise to succeed. Multinationals don't do fiction; they prefer fact, nonfiction. Trying to make nonfiction sell bigger, with some success. They don't care if I know the field, only if I've used their money to buy another best seller. Twice, I was told they don't care if my division is making money because they aren't interested in publishing that kind of material, and I was fired. Now I'm at Tor, and I plan to stay.

If we cultivate talent, we might get the next best seller. Not really trying to make money from a book if not giving big advances.

Stephen Jones: This is one market that still exists and is rather healthy. Selling American publishers world rights. Very difficult to make a living by being a writer. Advances are often $500-$1,000. [me: Compare this with Tobias Buckell's survey, previously linked from this blog.] Short stories are even harder. People can't afford to do it. Make less money now than did ten years ago, and it's difficult without a second job.

The same is true with a small press. The money you'll get for something that will sell 500 copies if you're lucky will only keep you going a couple of weeks. But you get stuck in the cycle."

Barbara Roden: "You're a small press writer, and that's all you'll ever be." It's the minor leagues in baseball. Can't make it sell, even if it's good.

Stephen Jones: That's one good thing about year's best anthologies; they pull work out to a larger audience. And, once a writer becomes big, they can go back to small press to do projects that they want to.

David Hartwell: There's a 150 year horror short fiction tradition. Not true for fantasy, which was more or less invented in 70s by Del Rey, who were trying to reproduce the effect of Tolkien's trilogy. People who read fantasy novels much less frequently read short fiction.

James Minz: There are two rough paradigms. There's the pet project, something different, that can get the industry excited. Then there's the big book like other previous best sellers.

Barbara Roden: Look back to pulp magazines, how many markets were available for writers to hone their craft, get their name out there and known. There's nowhere for writers to get their name out there and known now.

Stephen Jones: There aren't that many fantasy magazines--Realms of Fantasy, and Fantasy & Science Fiction, which has a bit of everything.

James Minz: Horror is at its best short, science fiction is also very good, but fantasy isn't necessarily at its best.

audience question: Market bubbles: why do they continue? Do any companies make enough money to go through crash afterward?

To keep the competition from getting a crushing share of the market. Everyone tears off a piece to keep someone else from making tons of money off it. Just meet expectations for this fall, make the bottom line look good NOW, even if it means putting out money to ride a trend, even if you know it's going to burst because you need the support of the people paying the salaries.

audience question: Given the general older age of readers, is anything being done to pull younger readers to the field?

Harry Potter phenomenon. YA books in fantasy and horror are easy to sell.

Halo books (SF) are doing well.

Make more money, sell more copies. But no evidence of cross-over to nonseries books.

Barbara Roden: Even if it's a fraction crossing over--1 in 100 or 1 in 1,000--it's better than 0.

audience question: Are genres mixing and merging? (SF/F/H)

There's so much out there, people can discriminate, and the buy just what they want.

About cross-genre stuff: Have to know what section of the bookstore to shelve books, or they won't get picked up by a publisher.

WFC: Working on Your Craft--Evolving as a Writer (1)

Thursday, 7 p.m. Panelists were Holly Black, Joe Haldeman, Naomi Kritzer (moderator), L.E. Modesitt Jr., and Sarah Zettel. Again, not generally direct quotes, but rather paraphrases of what each one said.

Naomi Kritzer: How do you know if you're improving? Are there useful measurements of quality?

Sarah Zettel: You stop having to pay attention to some things.

Joe Haldeman: Need to develop an input filter so don't listen to people saying you should be writing the same thing you did X years ago.

Sarah Zettel: Authors are like parrots--they're highly intelligent, have short attention spans, and will take things apart when your back is turned.

Naomi Kritzer: What about external feedback? Is it useful?

L.E. Modesitt: It can be. I'm not using as many sound effects now, or writing as much about food. You also learn how to and when to trust your subconscious.

Holly Black: A hand-picked group of readers helps--someone you can believe, someone you trust to tell you it sucks or is good.

Joe Haldeman: I don't ask my wife for criticism, but I do ask her for input. When I stop, I'll ask her, but what I write is mine. Nine times out of ten, I end up telling her why her idea won't work. The only input I care about is from the editor. "If you're a serious writer, you write for yourself."

L.E. Modesitt: No one sees what I've written before Dave Hartwell (my editor), except for parts with music, which my wife looks at. Editors are great at seeing symptoms but not so good at cause. If they say there's a problem, there is, but it may not be what the editor thinks it is.

Sarah Zettel: Have to find what works for you as an author. I've been part of a writer's group since 1994.

L.E. Modesitt: Thing to remember about critics as that their criticism reflects more of them than of you.

Joe Haldeman: For a beginning writer, any criticism leads to the feeling "Oh my god, I'm a failure!" After a couple of years, criticism tends to lead to feeling "What an asshole!"

Naomi Kritzer: I find crit group feedback to be terribly helpful, but I can't stand feedback after something's in print.

(At this point, some discussion of solitary writers versus those who prefer crit groups and whether this is a generational difference. Older writers--at least from this given sample--are more likely to be solitary.)

Naomi Kritzer: I used to have a writers' book addiction. I was looking for the magic key, and found many books that say there is one true way.

Holly Black: Writers' porn.

Joe Haldeman: Some writers can't read their own work; some do it compulsively.

Holly Black: I'm afraid to read my own work; don't want to see what it is.

Naomi Kritzer: By the end, everything sucks.

Sarah Zettel: I have to get it away because I can't deal with it anymore.

Joe Haldeman: Sooner or later, you have to set it free.

Naomi Kritzer: Is there an area where you're stretching yourself now?

L.E. Modesitt: I ask what I can do that's different, that I haven't done before, that isn't familiar to me or the readers.

Joe Haldeman: You don't want to take the path of least resistance and satirize yourself.

L.E. Modesitt: It's a problem if you get to be known for something with only some idea (love story, man learns something, James Bond/mindless adventure). You have to be careful and work harder each time to do it differently.

Sarah Zettel: I'm researching new areas, new ways, working on areas I know next to nothing about.

audience question: Do you have any problem keeping your characters fresh?

Joe Haldeman: Characters generate the story. I don't use plot or theme. I use the same templates occasionally because my characters are somewhat autobiographical, as with most writers.

L.E. Modesitt: They always have a certain amount of determination, intelligence, persistence--what do you do beyond the basics?

Sarah Zettel: Characters need to be true to the environment they're set in. They'll be changed to be true te tho character, universe, story--they have to be different.

Joe Haldeman: A character doesn't have to be a hero, positive, to come out ahead. The character just has to be interesting enough to make the reader keep turning the pages until they get to the end--and then you've won.

Holly Black: The more comfortable we are with things as authors, the more we want to play with them, poke them, prod them. Sometimes, you may do something that's not in line with your readers.

Sarah Zettel: First you learn shading, lighting, brushstrokes on canvas--sublimated, now free to work with the subtler aspects. Sheer experience is one way to get better.

I never know what's coming next. Ideas are garnered from everywhere. When it comes, the idea will tell me how it needs to be written, and sometimes I don't feel up to it.

Joe Haldeman: Fitzgerald and Hemingway decided to become serious writers and went bankrupt.

L.E. Modesitt: I started out as a poet, then moved to SF for 20 years. So, yes, you can change.

question: Have you ever broken rules and decided "oh, it's there for a reason"?

L.E. Modesitt: The Spellsong series. It sold really well in romance, but in romance novel, you don't have an unhappy break.

Joe Haldeman: Every genre has a set of reading protocols that tell readers what to expect. The market is a reflection of what the readers have been trained to expect.

question: Is there more cross-genre stuff out there, more mainstream that would have previously been speculative? Is it easier to find now?

L.E. Modesitt: I never worried about it. The criteria I operate with are Is it good? Does it sell?

question: Can you speculate on writers whose work gets better as they go on as opposed to those who become self-parody?

Joe Haldeman: Don't say anything bad about other authors in public; my motives might be in question. Chip Delaney is smart, and you have to be smart to read him, so his audience has narrowed over time.

Sarah Zettel: It's critical to maintain a degree of uncertainty about yourself and your work. When you're certain, you stop being able to take criticism, make relationships in the outside world.

Robert Heinlein's early stuff is brilliant, full of questions and variety. Then he got sure of himself and his stories rationed down in quality.

Holly Black: It's important to remember the joy of being a reader.

Joe Haldeman: Robert Heinlein's quality went down when he became a best seller; you can defend anything when you're making money.

If critics consistintly see something wrong with your work, that's what's right with it because that's where you depart from their expectations. (Gertrude Stein, as quoted by Hemingway, as quoted by Haldeman.)

question: What would you do if you won the lottery?

Joe Haldeman: Isolate myself on a desert island for as long as I could and write.

Sarah Zettel: Hire a good nanny (and maybe a bodyguard) and travel with child, nanny, etc.

L.E. Modesitt: Bank the money and keep doing what I'm doing.

Holly Black: Retreat to a place in Greece with a friend for a month to write a novel.