I'd been thinking about the relationship between Sex and Romance for a couple of weeks before Heather Massey invited me to participate in "Parallel Universe 2011."
-----HEATHER MASSEY-------
Greetings from The Galaxy Express! Once again, it’s time for Parallel Universe, and I would love to have you aboard for my biggest science fiction romance event of the summer.
Parallel Universe 2011 will be the virtual SFR gathering for those unable to attend the Romance Writers of America’s 31th Annual National Conference. From Monday, June 28 until Saturday, July 2, The Galaxy Express will feature a series of guest posts from a variety of authors. Therefore, I’m inviting you to submit a post for it.
The theme of this year’s Parallel Universe is the craft of writing science fiction romance.
-------END QUOTE----------
So I wrote her a "short" entry titled
What's Wrong With So Much Pounding Sex?
Galaxy Express URL is
http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/ for the top of the site.
The Parallel Universe posting begins June 28, with a post in the morning and another one in the afternoon. At this writing I'm not sure when my post will go up, but you'll probably want to read whatever's up there.
And Heather wrote back something very interesting.
------- HEATHER MASSEY QUOTE ---
Your second to last paragraph reminded me of something I read in the latest Entertainment Weekly. A writer there reviewed Mieville's Embassytown and described it as "Big Idea Sci-Fi." That made me wonder what SFR was--"Big Love Sci-Fi"?
------ END QUOTE -----------
Yes, Heather admits she was a fan of the HBO series "Big Love."
Hence the title of this series on the way SFR and PNR currently handles graphic sex, how it was handled, maybe how it will be handled in the future -- and how all that very abstract philosophical ruminating relates directly to the writing craft techniques Heather's Parallel Universe postings highlight.
SIDEBAR: Watch your world for odd "coincidences" because they might not be all so random. For more on how random chance might not be random see my series on Tarot (hopefully soon to be released as e-books)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html is an index to my posts on Tarot.
As I'm sure someone on the Galaxy Express Parallel Universe series will point out, random coincidence has a place in novel plotting but it's very difficult to use properly. We'll have to study that in depth at some point, but meanwhile check out this neat calculator that makes a "cloud" of author's names. When you put "Jacqueline Lichtenberg" at the center, Mieville shows up on the right periphery! Or at least he did while I was writing this post.
http://www.literature-map.com/jacqueline+lichtenberg.html
END SIDEBAR
Most Romance readers, historically, don't read backlist, or at least they haven't until recently.
Here is a review of one of my novels, Dushau, on the Galaxy Express, by a reader who is finding treasures in backlist e-Books:
http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2011/04/on-jacqueline-lichtenbergs-dushau-by.html
I found the comments to that post especially interesting.
The publishing industry still believes modern readers of current novels won't read older novels.
Romance and Science Fiction/Fantasy genre publishers put a book out on the shelves for a couple of weeks and then trash it or abandon it. Stores don't restock these titles unless they're published at the "top of the list" (i.e. that in the publisher's catalog, that book is listed first, then stores stock it, and if it sells, they reorder. If it's not listed as the #1 title of the month, it does not get restocked when the 3 or 5 copies on the shelf sell. )
Amazon has changed that. Titles stay available sometimes for a couple of years or much more. But still I've found recently published Romance titles simply unavailable at Amazon after a few years.
So when a publisher is no longer "supporting" a title, the frustrated author and especially her fans, have no way to get the book.
In the science fiction venue, used books sell and resell, and there's a huge collector's market.
So Romance and other genre writers who have some best selling titles, and a list of awards to their names, started retrieving the rights to old titles and re-issuing them in e-book on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, etc etc.
Right on the heels of this several groups of writers got together on Facebook and Yahoo Groups and began communicating.
Out of that, Backlist e-Books was founded as a group of mass market and hardcover writers with backlist books they are posting and promoting themselves.
See the list of writers who are doing their own backlist titles here
http://backlistebooks.com/
I've pointed you to this Group here previously, and I'm tracking the significance of this trend as it develops.
"Backlist" means titles that have either gone out of print or been remaindered and forgotten. They aren't available from publisher's warehouses anymore, so stores and online outlets don't stock them. Used book dealers and E-bay might, or might not.
Now these books are at your fingertips on Kindle and so on, and they are very reasonably priced, too.
And a whole new world is emerging, driven by "marketing."
Reading these old titles is often (if the writer didn't update the text when re-issuing their own book) like watching old movies.
It's a glimpse into how the world worked before cell phones, texting, the web, social networking.
The change in how we live is significant, and so reading such titles is extremely educational. It's especially illuminating for younger people because the entire social attitude toward sexuality has changed.
There is a stark if not sharp dividing line in how sexuality is presented in Romance.
In one decade, the sex scenes (if there were any at all) were all handled in "go to black."
"Go to black" is the camera direction in screenwriting for inserting a black screen -- i.e. you know it's happening, but you don't see it.
In Romance genre, very often THE END was the point where they first kiss, and that kiss is chaste and tentative by today's standards.
Physical sexuality was implied, but you didn't see it. If you didn't know, nobody was going to instruct you in print or on screen.
These two fiction delivery channels have developed in parallel.
We see bloody violence on screen that would never have been accepted by audiences before a certain decade.
It's not that bloody violence or graphic sex wasn't "permitted," but that it wouldn't sell because people didn't want it. Nobody ever thought to prohibit such depictions in "art" because there was no market for it, at least not a mass market.
If they did want it, they went to side-venues, not major theaters or printed novels. (yeah, porn shops but such things were not spoken of in polite company)
As pornography pushed into larger markets, more obvious public places, a public out-cry caused laws to be made trying to get that trash out of view of the children. Times Square used to be a place where you'd take the kids and let them roam around by themselves -- nobody had to chase the porn shops away because there weren't any. The generation in charge of things didn't want private things shown in public. That generation died off, and things changed.
What would have been considered porn in those days is now available on WalMart's book shelves and video section.
"Sex sells" was the touchstone of publishing, theater, and film even in the 1940's. 1930's - well, forever actually.
It isn't that sexuality wasn't there in early Romance novels. Readers of those novels got just as much of a charge out of reading without explicit sex scenes as you do with them.
But society as a whole kept a border line between what we do and say in public and what we do and say in private. And privacy was private, not spoken of or depicted in public.
Today the entire concept of "privacy" is melting away, if it's not gone completely. Today women wearing dresses instead of tight pants must subject themselves to a stranger's hands sliding over private parts just for the privilege of traveling to see a grandchild. There was a time when anyone suggesting such a thing would have been lynched.
I'm not taking a political position here, but pointing out a cultural shift in BORDER, or perhaps a melting of the concept "border" between private and public.
Today candidates must "disclose" private financial information. Simply maintaining an "identity" to do business, online or offline, you must disclose information about yourself that was once considered inside the borders of privacy. Just filling out an application for a job requires disclosure of very private information and you have no idea whose eyes will see it.
Our current culture is speeding toward a situation where there is no such thing as "private" -- and government considers anything you want to keep private as something you are keeping secret from those who have authority over you in order to protect others from you.
Running parallel to these developments in our general society, there has been the trend toward ever more explicit sex scenes in Romance, Paranormal Romance (PNR) or Fantasy Romance, and even Science Fiction Romance and Science Fiction itself.
Today a typical PNR starts with a sex scene, usually violent and erotic.
Don't consider whether this is "good" or "bad" or a sign of moral corruption or anything like that. You'll just get too angry to think about what this all means, and you won't get to learn the writing technique involved here.
You might want to spend some time thinking about whether the art leads society or follows it. Or both.
But do think about how the art in the mass market genre fields reflects society as a whole.
You as a writer can't change this Romance market back by writing Romances that have no sex scenes. Publishers won't buy them, and if you self-publish them, you won't sell very many.
There's a thriving (and growing) side-market in Christian Romance that is much more chaste. You might sell some there, but if you're not writing with the specific faith angle, that venue won't publish your novel.
There are a number of (very good) Erotic Romance publishers online doing mostly e-book editions -- and that extreme erotica market is growing fast, too.
Those are the two ends of this Romance-spectrum market, but most readers are found in the middle.
The "Big Love" Romance, PNR or SFR, novel that will get the kinds of celebratory reviews that Mieville's Embassytown is garnering has to appeal to that central audience. So it has to depict the world the reader perceives around her/himself -- a world where there's no PRIVACY BORDER anymore, a world where the moment you meet someone who turns you on, you have sex with them.
There's a much-cited rule of thumb that defines where a girl stands with her self-esteem -- "No sex until the third date."
It's a little like "I don't drink until after 5PM."
Such rules beg to be broken in fiction, of course. And they lead to this whole controversy over what exactly constitutes a date, what counts as something that gets you closer to being allowed to have sex without loss of self-esteem?
The question of how much of your privacy you give up to a stranger leads to the questions what constitutes a stranger, and how do you define privacy?
Think about that. Is there anything left that our society acknowledges is PRIVATE? And is it on the chopping block?
Why do you think teenagers get into such trouble on Facebook?
Where are the borders in our world now?
The social borders are a writer's main source material for conflict, which is the essence of story.
There's a lot more to be said on the topic of BIG LOVE SCI-FI, exploring the sacred and the profane, the body and soul, the heart and mind, the normal and the paranormal, the private and the secret.
It's all about the mystery of life which is the substance of art.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Game-Playing Chimps
Chimpanzees can learn to play video games!
Chimpanzees and Human Awareness
The significant dimension of this achievement is that the chimps can distinguish which game characters they control, suggesting that they have a "sense of self" similar to human beings.
It's already known that chimps, along with a few other animals, recognize themselves in mirrors. As more evidence accumulates that these apes share self-awareness with us, one can't help feeling increased uneasiness about keeping them in zoos and labs.
On the other hand, some critics of popular culture might say playing video games isn't necessarily a sign of advanced intelligence. :)
Which leads back to the classic SF question: How can we be sure we'll recognize intelligence when we meet it on another planet?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Chimpanzees and Human Awareness
The significant dimension of this achievement is that the chimps can distinguish which game characters they control, suggesting that they have a "sense of self" similar to human beings.
It's already known that chimps, along with a few other animals, recognize themselves in mirrors. As more evidence accumulates that these apes share self-awareness with us, one can't help feeling increased uneasiness about keeping them in zoos and labs.
On the other hand, some critics of popular culture might say playing video games isn't necessarily a sign of advanced intelligence. :)
Which leads back to the classic SF question: How can we be sure we'll recognize intelligence when we meet it on another planet?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Genre: The Root Of All Decisions
Last week I responded to the confusion one reader of these posts who is also a writer expressed.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/06/genre-root-of-all-confusion.html
In the course of that post I said:
------
That's right - genre shapes the world of entertainment so that what you may may have access to, or may discover first, depends entirely on what others want rather than on what you want (or really need). So you learn to be satisfied with what others want - and in a way that's "good" because it allows you to "fit in" and to discuss what others know about. In another way, though, it sows confusion within you about "who" you really are, what your purpose in life is, and how that relates you to everyone else.
------
This situation (which is changing so fast it's confusing) has profound consequences for writers, readers, and probably human civilization.
Marketing is based these days on some mathematical principles I discussed in a previous post here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-change-perception-of-romance.html
One principle of marketing I didn't discuss in any depth is information overload.
Way back in the 1970's Alvin Toffler (a journalist) wrote a book titled FUTURE SHOCK, which I urge you to acquire and read. It's had many printings and you should be able to find it easily.
http://www.amazon.com/Future-Shock-Toffler-Summary-ebook/dp/B004XQVJB6/rereadablebooksr/
That is a link to a "study guide" to Future Shock -- on Kindle. That book is so important it's still being studied, and I think younger people probably need the "guide" because many of the then-contemporary references are now obscure after only 40 years.
In this book, Toffler pointed out to the general reading public something that only SF writers and readers, and some scientists, were discussing.
Remember the World Wide Web only began in 1990 with the creation of HTTP, hypertext, the code for web pages.
In the 1980's, there were Lists and Bulletin Boards proliferated, but only a few neighborhoods had dial-up services that allowed you to get your computer to read these Boards. Every Christmas, the access to the Boards would clog up and become impossible as the number of people with a modem increased 10-fold or more via gifts.
Through the 1990's fiber optic cables were laid at a frantic pace, all based on a lie deliberately told by a corporation head -- about the rate of increase of the amount of information being transmitted on "the web."
The lie led to the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000's.
Now, in 2011, we're seeing "slowdowns" again as data transmission maxes out what fiber was laid and lit. (also as corps fight government for control of traffic patterns and volumes)
All of this was foreseeable by Toffler in the 1970's.
The core of the issue, for Romance readers and writers anyway, has two nuclei.
A) The basic hardwired LIMIT of the human brain & emotions for decision making
B) The available strategies that attract the most people trying to deal with those hardwired limits being exceeded
Marketers (who invented genre and continually re-define it) know what neuroscientists discovered around the time Toffler was writing.
The human brain's wiring allows a human to make a certain number of decisions during a wake-period (i.e. per day).
Then you have to sleep.
Confusion sets in as that limit is reached.
Modern living (cell phones, texting, web-surfing via phone, at work, etc) has an increased number of decisions per day built into the infrastructure.
Agricultural living centuries ago didn't require any such pace of decision making, except maybe when being over-run by invaders.
And then there would be a few days of stark terror, followed by bare survival, followed by resuming the slow pace.
Google saw the opportunity in the information overload situation and has made good sorting information out, and sorting real information from noise (i.e. spam).
But now even Google brings up thousands of pages on almost any search terms. How do you sort the sort?
Also CNN made good by deploying camera/news crews all over the world, making them satellite broadcast capable, carrying their own batteries, able to report on anything anywhere at any time. That opened a flood of information sources that was simply overwhelming, in spite of very professional editing.
See my blogs on what is an editor. This one has a list of the previous ones in the series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html
The CNN you see today does not in any way resemble the CNN that dominated cable news for a decade.
There's more reason for that than merely political slant.
The reason, (from an SF writer/ futurologist point of view) is rooted in item B) above -- available strategies that attract people.
The influx of sheer information is causing a whole generation that is now in their 40's to fight back by ignoring information such as CNN specialized in providing.
In the 1990's, information (live visuals from around the world) was a novelty, and the events seemed "important" simply because we never would have known had CNN not had a crew on the spot.
20 years later, world events don't seem so important. They are on every TV channel -- hundreds of channels that didn't exist in 1990 -- and on the Web newsfeeds (which didn't exist then) -- and now in newspapers delivered to your iPad or Kindle.
What is common, what floods in with force and abundance, becomes "cheap" and therefore uninteresting.
But it's uninteresting for another reason. The human brain can accept just so much information in one day, and that's it.
As the limit is reached, each successive incoming item is less interesting. The nervous system can't respond to being jerked around like that (yes, this is relevant to Romance novels - very relevant).
Bombarded and stressed to actual, inherent, hardwired physical limits, people fight back by ignoring.
All of this flood of information has been added on top of what we are hardwired to prioritize -- child-care, getting money, food, shelter, and paying attention to those intimate individuals inside our lives more than the faceless strangers outside our lives.
So TV news has become soap opera, a hard-news story such as the tornados in the central USA in April/May gives a few facts then cuts away to quotes from victims giving personal "color" to the story, making it a story rather than an information dump.
Those who want to make headlines (politicians, ax grinders) start squabbles and sling insults at each other. So-and-so said such-and-such about whoever. Whoever answered by trashing So-and-so.
Since when is name-calling news?
And what has that to do with Romance?
Oh, it has everything to do with Romance.
Readers of novels seek out a novel to GET AWAY FROM the information dump, the stress of being required to learn stuff (yes, neuroscientists have measured the number of things a human brain can learn between sleeps, too, and it's a hardwired limit)
But what is the process of "seeking out a novel" these days?
Well, that process has changed markedly, and will change even more.
But here's one clue quantified by marketers.
As with the fight to be at the top of Google's search results page for your keyword, the fight for your attention pervades e-space.
Marketers have discovered that most people (probably not you, if you're over 40 and an SF reader) will CHOOSE FROM the first 3 to 5 items they come across.
A purchase will be made if there are 3 or 4 choices. If there are more than 5 choices offered, the customer will more likely wander off into confusion, unable to MAKE A DECISION.
There you are, 10 novels almost identical (all labeled Romance) -- choose one. Most people won't choose.
There you are facing 3 Romance novels. Pick. Flip-flip, oh, that's interesting, CLICK BUY NOW.
People act decisively when there are fewer things to compare.
That's hardwired into the basic human brain, and remember the fog of confusion that sets in when an individual is reaching a decision-limit for the day.
These days, with all the influx of information, the demand for decisions, the need to learn new procedures for doing things you always used to do without thinking -- (I have to discuss my adventures with my new iPod as a Kindle reader, but that's another topic, yet intimately related) -- each and every one of us is walking around maxed out by noon every day.
Yeah, by noon or halfway through your day whenever you started, you've pretty much learned as many things as you can for the day, made as many decisions as you can, and the "fog" begins to set in. By 3PM or the equivalent for you, forget it.
Now, I've been reading a whole lot of urban fantasy with contemporary settings, lots of fantasy (a few really good SF novels I have to talk about in my review column), and just lots of fiction.
I can't even scratch the surface. There are more books than ever on my to-read stack, and I can't DECIDE to discard unread ones!!! Too many decisions. What if I miss something important.
Yet no way can I read it all.
So I can't say my cross-section analysis is as good as it has ever been. I know I'm missing out on some things.
But -- I think I've found something that may exemplify a trend.
We all know the social analysts have compiled statistics on the changes sexual mores in the USA, maybe the world. These trends among readers show up in what editors demand of writers -- the way they promulgate a formula for a Romance line. That is, so many sex scenes of such and so length, such and so amount of graphic language, and various situations that must be there and others that must not.
Westerns used to have some of that kind of formula behind them, but that formulaic approach is one reason the Romance Genre as a whole does not acquire more respect.
But it's also one of the reasons Romance sells so much better than most other genres.
After the relentless pounding our nerves take in a day, when we're totally maxed out on learning and deciding, we want to read something that's predictable while fresh and new, and that soothes the nerves rather than challenges.
So what's the trend?
With Romance genre reading as a background, readers are venturing into other sub-genres such as Fantasy-Romance or SF-Romance, or Paranormal Romance (all of which I devour ravenously).
And what I'm seeing in the way writers are crafting the romance branch of the plot parallels what we see in everyday life, the way people conduct their "real" lives.
The trend I want to point out here is one about how writers depict Relationships forming in a Romance.
It must be 20 years now since the moral standard emerged that says serial monogamy is not "sleeping around."
The standard has become to test drive a boyfriend before getting really serious.
Triangle Situation Romances are bleeding into SF and Paranormal sub-genres with these assumptions firmly in place.
And of course the plot revolves around the woman making a choice between boyfriends.
Do you see where I'm going?
Information.
Test drive your guys until you find "the right one" -- the one who delivers the best sex, or the best sense of self-worth, or security, or sense of danger, or whatever you're looking for or need in a guy.
But our exterior, non-relationship, world floods us with more information than we can tolerate, and our defense is to ignore most and depend entirely on "editors" to select what we really need to know and present it in 90-second bytes called "news."
We have to ignore even those 90-second news items in order to have the capacity to evaluate all the information gathered on test-driven guys.
We test-drive so many guys, collect so much information about all of them, we end up not deciding.
I think the buy-decision research that shows offering a customer too many choices results in the customer wandering off without making a purchase explains the plethora of "ex's" littering so many people's lives.
The "arranged marriage" allows you only one choice.
"Playing the field" drowns you in too much information, resulting in no-decision.
Marrying your High School sweetheart or the boy-next-door may soon come back into fashion, simply because the number of choices are fewer and therefore a decision is made.
Now, what if misery results from a bad choice made too young in life?
That brings us back to what I said at the top here:
-----
So you learn to be satisfied with what others want - and in a way that's "good" because it allows you to "fit in" and to discuss what others know about. In another way, though, it sows confusion within you about "who" you really are, what your purpose in life is, and how that relates you to everyone else.
-----
"Learn to be satisfied with what others want" -- in choosing a guy, that means succumbing to the social pressure to be married and have kids (or adopt). You then have to make do with the husband you have, somehow making your peace with the flaws.
Perhaps the Romance genre will revive the scene of the neighborhood kaffee klatches where the mothers sit around minding the kids and bitching about their husbands -- learning thereby that everyone has something to bitch about and that's what binds us together.
In the 1970's, women's lib became the "what others want" that you had to be satisfied with, as it became the norm for married women to work for a living.
In the 1950's, prevailing opinion among working men was that a man ought to be paid more than a woman because a man had a family to support. If the man wasn't paid more for his work, his wife would have to work, and if she did that his children would not grow up to be happy, well adjusted human beings.
I kid thee not!!! That was indeed the rationale.
Today I don't know many families where both spouses don't have careers. These are people raising kids who were raised by two working parents.
OK, today many households have one or the other spouse out of work. Let's hope that's really temporary!
SFR premise though - suppose the current hard-recession, double-dip recession or mini-depression the USA is in leads to working spouses being paid double and the other spouse staying home to care for kids?
It might put daycare centers out of work, or shorten school hours depending on non-working parent to do the rest of the schooling.
That could reshape society again.
Since the real problem shaking the roots of our society is the Information Explosion Alvin Toffler discussed, sheltering one parent (doesn't matter which gender) from the pounding the workplace inflicts could produce the kind of excess decision-making-capacity in that non-working parent that is necessary to have patience with kids.
Now, what would that generation of kids grow up to be like? More like the adults of the 1980's, pre-web?
Do you suppose Road Rage is the result of Information Overload?
I saw a series of clips from YouTube focusing on fistfights, hair-pulling catfights, and one really horrid shooting the other day.
In most cases where images of violence between people having an argument over something petty have made it to the top of YouTube, the scene shows many other people just standing around. No help offered. No attempt to quell the hitting or bullying. No interference. NO DECISION.
We see the general public (via YouTube and handy phone-video) having turned indecisive if not indifferent or ignoring of new information such as "somebody might be hurt."
I can't believe this is because a majority of people just don't care about other people. I can't believe this is because violence against strangers or even family members in public is approved of. Yes, some of these videos might be staged, but why would anyone watch videos of people ignoring a fight in a public place? It's amusing because it illustrates how the viewer feels inside. Apathetic, foggy, due to information overload.
We're just maxed out on decision making all day every day, just as Toffler discussed.
Being maxed-out is affecting the way we choose a spouse, the way we raise our kids (letting the over-indulge in video games; using the TV as babysitter), and the way we interact with strangers in public (not getting involved because that could lead to even more decisions to make.)
And it affects how marketers market books at us -- limit choices in order to get a sale.
Take the marketer's thinking into account when you decide what genre to write in -- or to mix-n-match, or to invent a totally new genre and hope for your book to become a "market maker" like Harry Potter.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg Unlimited
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/06/genre-root-of-all-confusion.html
In the course of that post I said:
------
That's right - genre shapes the world of entertainment so that what you may may have access to, or may discover first, depends entirely on what others want rather than on what you want (or really need). So you learn to be satisfied with what others want - and in a way that's "good" because it allows you to "fit in" and to discuss what others know about. In another way, though, it sows confusion within you about "who" you really are, what your purpose in life is, and how that relates you to everyone else.
------
This situation (which is changing so fast it's confusing) has profound consequences for writers, readers, and probably human civilization.
Marketing is based these days on some mathematical principles I discussed in a previous post here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-change-perception-of-romance.html
One principle of marketing I didn't discuss in any depth is information overload.
Way back in the 1970's Alvin Toffler (a journalist) wrote a book titled FUTURE SHOCK, which I urge you to acquire and read. It's had many printings and you should be able to find it easily.
http://www.amazon.com/Future-Shock-Toffler-Summary-ebook/dp/B004XQVJB6/rereadablebooksr/
That is a link to a "study guide" to Future Shock -- on Kindle. That book is so important it's still being studied, and I think younger people probably need the "guide" because many of the then-contemporary references are now obscure after only 40 years.
In this book, Toffler pointed out to the general reading public something that only SF writers and readers, and some scientists, were discussing.
Remember the World Wide Web only began in 1990 with the creation of HTTP, hypertext, the code for web pages.
In the 1980's, there were Lists and Bulletin Boards proliferated, but only a few neighborhoods had dial-up services that allowed you to get your computer to read these Boards. Every Christmas, the access to the Boards would clog up and become impossible as the number of people with a modem increased 10-fold or more via gifts.
Through the 1990's fiber optic cables were laid at a frantic pace, all based on a lie deliberately told by a corporation head -- about the rate of increase of the amount of information being transmitted on "the web."
The lie led to the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000's.
Now, in 2011, we're seeing "slowdowns" again as data transmission maxes out what fiber was laid and lit. (also as corps fight government for control of traffic patterns and volumes)
All of this was foreseeable by Toffler in the 1970's.
The core of the issue, for Romance readers and writers anyway, has two nuclei.
A) The basic hardwired LIMIT of the human brain & emotions for decision making
B) The available strategies that attract the most people trying to deal with those hardwired limits being exceeded
Marketers (who invented genre and continually re-define it) know what neuroscientists discovered around the time Toffler was writing.
The human brain's wiring allows a human to make a certain number of decisions during a wake-period (i.e. per day).
Then you have to sleep.
Confusion sets in as that limit is reached.
Modern living (cell phones, texting, web-surfing via phone, at work, etc) has an increased number of decisions per day built into the infrastructure.
Agricultural living centuries ago didn't require any such pace of decision making, except maybe when being over-run by invaders.
And then there would be a few days of stark terror, followed by bare survival, followed by resuming the slow pace.
Google saw the opportunity in the information overload situation and has made good sorting information out, and sorting real information from noise (i.e. spam).
But now even Google brings up thousands of pages on almost any search terms. How do you sort the sort?
Also CNN made good by deploying camera/news crews all over the world, making them satellite broadcast capable, carrying their own batteries, able to report on anything anywhere at any time. That opened a flood of information sources that was simply overwhelming, in spite of very professional editing.
See my blogs on what is an editor. This one has a list of the previous ones in the series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html
The CNN you see today does not in any way resemble the CNN that dominated cable news for a decade.
There's more reason for that than merely political slant.
The reason, (from an SF writer/ futurologist point of view) is rooted in item B) above -- available strategies that attract people.
The influx of sheer information is causing a whole generation that is now in their 40's to fight back by ignoring information such as CNN specialized in providing.
In the 1990's, information (live visuals from around the world) was a novelty, and the events seemed "important" simply because we never would have known had CNN not had a crew on the spot.
20 years later, world events don't seem so important. They are on every TV channel -- hundreds of channels that didn't exist in 1990 -- and on the Web newsfeeds (which didn't exist then) -- and now in newspapers delivered to your iPad or Kindle.
What is common, what floods in with force and abundance, becomes "cheap" and therefore uninteresting.
But it's uninteresting for another reason. The human brain can accept just so much information in one day, and that's it.
As the limit is reached, each successive incoming item is less interesting. The nervous system can't respond to being jerked around like that (yes, this is relevant to Romance novels - very relevant).
Bombarded and stressed to actual, inherent, hardwired physical limits, people fight back by ignoring.
All of this flood of information has been added on top of what we are hardwired to prioritize -- child-care, getting money, food, shelter, and paying attention to those intimate individuals inside our lives more than the faceless strangers outside our lives.
So TV news has become soap opera, a hard-news story such as the tornados in the central USA in April/May gives a few facts then cuts away to quotes from victims giving personal "color" to the story, making it a story rather than an information dump.
Those who want to make headlines (politicians, ax grinders) start squabbles and sling insults at each other. So-and-so said such-and-such about whoever. Whoever answered by trashing So-and-so.
Since when is name-calling news?
And what has that to do with Romance?
Oh, it has everything to do with Romance.
Readers of novels seek out a novel to GET AWAY FROM the information dump, the stress of being required to learn stuff (yes, neuroscientists have measured the number of things a human brain can learn between sleeps, too, and it's a hardwired limit)
But what is the process of "seeking out a novel" these days?
Well, that process has changed markedly, and will change even more.
But here's one clue quantified by marketers.
As with the fight to be at the top of Google's search results page for your keyword, the fight for your attention pervades e-space.
Marketers have discovered that most people (probably not you, if you're over 40 and an SF reader) will CHOOSE FROM the first 3 to 5 items they come across.
A purchase will be made if there are 3 or 4 choices. If there are more than 5 choices offered, the customer will more likely wander off into confusion, unable to MAKE A DECISION.
There you are, 10 novels almost identical (all labeled Romance) -- choose one. Most people won't choose.
There you are facing 3 Romance novels. Pick. Flip-flip, oh, that's interesting, CLICK BUY NOW.
People act decisively when there are fewer things to compare.
That's hardwired into the basic human brain, and remember the fog of confusion that sets in when an individual is reaching a decision-limit for the day.
These days, with all the influx of information, the demand for decisions, the need to learn new procedures for doing things you always used to do without thinking -- (I have to discuss my adventures with my new iPod as a Kindle reader, but that's another topic, yet intimately related) -- each and every one of us is walking around maxed out by noon every day.
Yeah, by noon or halfway through your day whenever you started, you've pretty much learned as many things as you can for the day, made as many decisions as you can, and the "fog" begins to set in. By 3PM or the equivalent for you, forget it.
Now, I've been reading a whole lot of urban fantasy with contemporary settings, lots of fantasy (a few really good SF novels I have to talk about in my review column), and just lots of fiction.
I can't even scratch the surface. There are more books than ever on my to-read stack, and I can't DECIDE to discard unread ones!!! Too many decisions. What if I miss something important.
Yet no way can I read it all.
So I can't say my cross-section analysis is as good as it has ever been. I know I'm missing out on some things.
But -- I think I've found something that may exemplify a trend.
We all know the social analysts have compiled statistics on the changes sexual mores in the USA, maybe the world. These trends among readers show up in what editors demand of writers -- the way they promulgate a formula for a Romance line. That is, so many sex scenes of such and so length, such and so amount of graphic language, and various situations that must be there and others that must not.
Westerns used to have some of that kind of formula behind them, but that formulaic approach is one reason the Romance Genre as a whole does not acquire more respect.
But it's also one of the reasons Romance sells so much better than most other genres.
After the relentless pounding our nerves take in a day, when we're totally maxed out on learning and deciding, we want to read something that's predictable while fresh and new, and that soothes the nerves rather than challenges.
So what's the trend?
With Romance genre reading as a background, readers are venturing into other sub-genres such as Fantasy-Romance or SF-Romance, or Paranormal Romance (all of which I devour ravenously).
And what I'm seeing in the way writers are crafting the romance branch of the plot parallels what we see in everyday life, the way people conduct their "real" lives.
The trend I want to point out here is one about how writers depict Relationships forming in a Romance.
It must be 20 years now since the moral standard emerged that says serial monogamy is not "sleeping around."
The standard has become to test drive a boyfriend before getting really serious.
Triangle Situation Romances are bleeding into SF and Paranormal sub-genres with these assumptions firmly in place.
And of course the plot revolves around the woman making a choice between boyfriends.
Do you see where I'm going?
Information.
Test drive your guys until you find "the right one" -- the one who delivers the best sex, or the best sense of self-worth, or security, or sense of danger, or whatever you're looking for or need in a guy.
But our exterior, non-relationship, world floods us with more information than we can tolerate, and our defense is to ignore most and depend entirely on "editors" to select what we really need to know and present it in 90-second bytes called "news."
We have to ignore even those 90-second news items in order to have the capacity to evaluate all the information gathered on test-driven guys.
We test-drive so many guys, collect so much information about all of them, we end up not deciding.
I think the buy-decision research that shows offering a customer too many choices results in the customer wandering off without making a purchase explains the plethora of "ex's" littering so many people's lives.
The "arranged marriage" allows you only one choice.
"Playing the field" drowns you in too much information, resulting in no-decision.
Marrying your High School sweetheart or the boy-next-door may soon come back into fashion, simply because the number of choices are fewer and therefore a decision is made.
Now, what if misery results from a bad choice made too young in life?
That brings us back to what I said at the top here:
-----
So you learn to be satisfied with what others want - and in a way that's "good" because it allows you to "fit in" and to discuss what others know about. In another way, though, it sows confusion within you about "who" you really are, what your purpose in life is, and how that relates you to everyone else.
-----
"Learn to be satisfied with what others want" -- in choosing a guy, that means succumbing to the social pressure to be married and have kids (or adopt). You then have to make do with the husband you have, somehow making your peace with the flaws.
Perhaps the Romance genre will revive the scene of the neighborhood kaffee klatches where the mothers sit around minding the kids and bitching about their husbands -- learning thereby that everyone has something to bitch about and that's what binds us together.
In the 1970's, women's lib became the "what others want" that you had to be satisfied with, as it became the norm for married women to work for a living.
In the 1950's, prevailing opinion among working men was that a man ought to be paid more than a woman because a man had a family to support. If the man wasn't paid more for his work, his wife would have to work, and if she did that his children would not grow up to be happy, well adjusted human beings.
I kid thee not!!! That was indeed the rationale.
Today I don't know many families where both spouses don't have careers. These are people raising kids who were raised by two working parents.
OK, today many households have one or the other spouse out of work. Let's hope that's really temporary!
SFR premise though - suppose the current hard-recession, double-dip recession or mini-depression the USA is in leads to working spouses being paid double and the other spouse staying home to care for kids?
It might put daycare centers out of work, or shorten school hours depending on non-working parent to do the rest of the schooling.
That could reshape society again.
Since the real problem shaking the roots of our society is the Information Explosion Alvin Toffler discussed, sheltering one parent (doesn't matter which gender) from the pounding the workplace inflicts could produce the kind of excess decision-making-capacity in that non-working parent that is necessary to have patience with kids.
Now, what would that generation of kids grow up to be like? More like the adults of the 1980's, pre-web?
Do you suppose Road Rage is the result of Information Overload?
I saw a series of clips from YouTube focusing on fistfights, hair-pulling catfights, and one really horrid shooting the other day.
In most cases where images of violence between people having an argument over something petty have made it to the top of YouTube, the scene shows many other people just standing around. No help offered. No attempt to quell the hitting or bullying. No interference. NO DECISION.
We see the general public (via YouTube and handy phone-video) having turned indecisive if not indifferent or ignoring of new information such as "somebody might be hurt."
I can't believe this is because a majority of people just don't care about other people. I can't believe this is because violence against strangers or even family members in public is approved of. Yes, some of these videos might be staged, but why would anyone watch videos of people ignoring a fight in a public place? It's amusing because it illustrates how the viewer feels inside. Apathetic, foggy, due to information overload.
We're just maxed out on decision making all day every day, just as Toffler discussed.
Being maxed-out is affecting the way we choose a spouse, the way we raise our kids (letting the over-indulge in video games; using the TV as babysitter), and the way we interact with strangers in public (not getting involved because that could lead to even more decisions to make.)
And it affects how marketers market books at us -- limit choices in order to get a sale.
Take the marketer's thinking into account when you decide what genre to write in -- or to mix-n-match, or to invent a totally new genre and hope for your book to become a "market maker" like Harry Potter.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg Unlimited
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, June 12, 2011
The "Superhighway"
Americans and their illegal immigrants may well not be the world's worst drivers... but they are bad, and getting worse.
The same applies to the superhighway of the internet, if some of the supremely ignorant and selfish comments by law-breakers and renegades can be believed.
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/opinion/09thu1.html?sort=oldest
I wonder whether there is a connection?
Jacqueline Lichtenberg starts her world-building with the sun... "a sun", I should say. That's a very good place to start. However, one might start with roads and highways if one wishes to examine a society's descent into lawlessness and anarchy.
I'm reminded of the Max Max movies!
Next time you go driving, or are driven, take a look around you. See a car moving dangerously slowly? Chances are, the driver is texting. See a car weaving within the lane, or drifting out of the lane? The driver is driving with her thighs, while smoking/using the cell phone/eating/drinking. It is simply horrendous what people do, because they can and because they assume that they will never get caught.
In my opinion, which I concede may be wrong, the root of the problem (not everyone would think of it as a problem) is No-Fault Insurance, and a Highway Code riddled with loopholes. "Stop at a red light.... unless you think it is safe to turn right, or left, or across or into oncoming traffic." And then, there are the facilitators of law-breaking, who sell radar detectors, so a speed-limit-defying driver can know where the speed traps are, and special coatings to cover your license plate, so the police cannot identify the law-breakers. Google is probably one of many superhighway equivalents. In fact, every OSP and ISP that helps people remain anonymous on the internet is an enabler. One could stretch the similes almost to infinity.
So... if you are still with me... in your alien romance world, are there rules of the road or jet lanes or airways? How are they enforced? Who enforces them? Are there the alien, interstellar equivalents of transponders? Are their "weigh stations" as well as "way stations"? Are there toll booths? There could be. Perhaps there ought to be a toll booth and Customs at the entrance to every wormhole and event horizon and star gate. Would that slow the action? Or would one end up with interstellar Dukes Of Hazzard?
Linnea Sinclair's worlds are very well planned particularly in this respect. Remember the mollytrock scene?
Inevitably, I think, most sfr stories are most likely to deal with the regulations of ports and harbours, landings dockings and departures, quarantines and escapes.
In my Alien Djinn worlds, the Imperial Family owns the airspace. If you own the air, and are unscrupulous, there is no end to what you can do. (I'm tempted to offend grammarians and write "what you can conveniently do," so I will!)
For instance, why drop bombs? It would be so much simpler to do a Midwich Cuckoo job, gas everyone (with a humane and harmless gas), and then send in the boots to arrest the senseless undesirables. Or, do a Day Of The Triffids fireworks show and temporarily blind everyone (I know, the blinding was permanent in DOTT.)
In Knight's Fork, I had a lot of fun with air traffic control. I spent a couple of hours talking to pilots about jet streams and how transponders worked, and what air traffic controllers can do to control air traffic, and about the almost Regency Romance levels of barbs within excruciatingly polite, recorded verbal transmissions.
Basically, what happens in a world where their choices are rather binary: they can talk you down, or send someone to shoot you down? No midway twixt these extremes.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, I fantasize about what would happen if I were to use my horn (there don't seem to be too many observed rules about the use of the horn in America... one uses a double parp to satisfy oneself that one has, indeed, succeeded in locking the car doors, also one honks to inform persons within the house that one is waiting) to disrupt illegal use of a handheld cellphone that is apparently distracting a driver.
Sigh. Two wrongs don't make a right.
The same applies to the superhighway of the internet, if some of the supremely ignorant and selfish comments by law-breakers and renegades can be believed.
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/opinion/09thu1.html?sort=oldest
I wonder whether there is a connection?
Jacqueline Lichtenberg starts her world-building with the sun... "a sun", I should say. That's a very good place to start. However, one might start with roads and highways if one wishes to examine a society's descent into lawlessness and anarchy.
I'm reminded of the Max Max movies!
Next time you go driving, or are driven, take a look around you. See a car moving dangerously slowly? Chances are, the driver is texting. See a car weaving within the lane, or drifting out of the lane? The driver is driving with her thighs, while smoking/using the cell phone/eating/drinking. It is simply horrendous what people do, because they can and because they assume that they will never get caught.
In my opinion, which I concede may be wrong, the root of the problem (not everyone would think of it as a problem) is No-Fault Insurance, and a Highway Code riddled with loopholes. "Stop at a red light.... unless you think it is safe to turn right, or left, or across or into oncoming traffic." And then, there are the facilitators of law-breaking, who sell radar detectors, so a speed-limit-defying driver can know where the speed traps are, and special coatings to cover your license plate, so the police cannot identify the law-breakers. Google is probably one of many superhighway equivalents. In fact, every OSP and ISP that helps people remain anonymous on the internet is an enabler. One could stretch the similes almost to infinity.
So... if you are still with me... in your alien romance world, are there rules of the road or jet lanes or airways? How are they enforced? Who enforces them? Are there the alien, interstellar equivalents of transponders? Are their "weigh stations" as well as "way stations"? Are there toll booths? There could be. Perhaps there ought to be a toll booth and Customs at the entrance to every wormhole and event horizon and star gate. Would that slow the action? Or would one end up with interstellar Dukes Of Hazzard?
Linnea Sinclair's worlds are very well planned particularly in this respect. Remember the mollytrock scene?
Inevitably, I think, most sfr stories are most likely to deal with the regulations of ports and harbours, landings dockings and departures, quarantines and escapes.
In my Alien Djinn worlds, the Imperial Family owns the airspace. If you own the air, and are unscrupulous, there is no end to what you can do. (I'm tempted to offend grammarians and write "what you can conveniently do," so I will!)
For instance, why drop bombs? It would be so much simpler to do a Midwich Cuckoo job, gas everyone (with a humane and harmless gas), and then send in the boots to arrest the senseless undesirables. Or, do a Day Of The Triffids fireworks show and temporarily blind everyone (I know, the blinding was permanent in DOTT.)
In Knight's Fork, I had a lot of fun with air traffic control. I spent a couple of hours talking to pilots about jet streams and how transponders worked, and what air traffic controllers can do to control air traffic, and about the almost Regency Romance levels of barbs within excruciatingly polite, recorded verbal transmissions.
Basically, what happens in a world where their choices are rather binary: they can talk you down, or send someone to shoot you down? No midway twixt these extremes.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, I fantasize about what would happen if I were to use my horn (there don't seem to be too many observed rules about the use of the horn in America... one uses a double parp to satisfy oneself that one has, indeed, succeeded in locking the car doors, also one honks to inform persons within the house that one is waiting) to disrupt illegal use of a handheld cellphone that is apparently distracting a driver.
Sigh. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Thursday, June 09, 2011
Genderless Baby
I could hardly believe it when I read about these parents, who decided not to reveal the sex of their baby, Storm, to anyone outside the family. It's so—seventies:
Genderless Baby
The story immediately reminded me of the 1978 book X: A FABULOUS CHILD'S STORY, by Lois Gould (which that article mentions as an inspiration for Storm's parents). In that book, the toddler known only as X wears colorful overalls and a unisex haircut. He or she, portrayed as completely happy and healthy, opens the minds and hearts of his or her friends to the freedom of exploring the full range of our society's options for children, regardless of social gender.
Several professionals are quoted to the effect that bringing up Storm genderless will gravely confuse him or her. (That's a problem right there; since we don't live on the planet of LeGuin's LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, what do we do about pronouns? And even LeGuin had a problem, using "he" instead of choosing to create a sex-neutral personal pronoun, because her alien characters inevitably came across as masculine despite her best efforts.) Storm will supposedly have self-concept problems because our sexual identity is such an integral part of our personality. Lois Gould's picture book stated that X knew whether X was a boy or a girl, and by the time it mattered everybody else would know, too. Presumably Storm will be in the same situation as he or she grows up. I do wonder how long a real-world toddler will be able to keep from letting the secret slip out, though.
As SF readers and writers, we're presumably more used to thinking about gender and sexuality in multivalent, innovative terms than the general public. Do you think Storm's parents are being "unfair" to their child by making the baby the subject of this experiment? Does Storm's case have any light to throw on the situations of transgender or intersex people? I've read that intersex conditions are more common than generally realized, and most of the people born with such biological ambiguities are forced to choose one sex or the other, or often have a sex assigned to them in infancy long before they can make a choice.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Genderless Baby
The story immediately reminded me of the 1978 book X: A FABULOUS CHILD'S STORY, by Lois Gould (which that article mentions as an inspiration for Storm's parents). In that book, the toddler known only as X wears colorful overalls and a unisex haircut. He or she, portrayed as completely happy and healthy, opens the minds and hearts of his or her friends to the freedom of exploring the full range of our society's options for children, regardless of social gender.
Several professionals are quoted to the effect that bringing up Storm genderless will gravely confuse him or her. (That's a problem right there; since we don't live on the planet of LeGuin's LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, what do we do about pronouns? And even LeGuin had a problem, using "he" instead of choosing to create a sex-neutral personal pronoun, because her alien characters inevitably came across as masculine despite her best efforts.) Storm will supposedly have self-concept problems because our sexual identity is such an integral part of our personality. Lois Gould's picture book stated that X knew whether X was a boy or a girl, and by the time it mattered everybody else would know, too. Presumably Storm will be in the same situation as he or she grows up. I do wonder how long a real-world toddler will be able to keep from letting the secret slip out, though.
As SF readers and writers, we're presumably more used to thinking about gender and sexuality in multivalent, innovative terms than the general public. Do you think Storm's parents are being "unfair" to their child by making the baby the subject of this experiment? Does Storm's case have any light to throw on the situations of transgender or intersex people? I've read that intersex conditions are more common than generally realized, and most of the people born with such biological ambiguities are forced to choose one sex or the other, or often have a sex assigned to them in infancy long before they can make a choice.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Genre: The Root Of All Confusion
A while ago I did a post titled Genre: The Root Of All Evil.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/genre-root-of-all-evil.html
Since then the issue of defining genre has come up on many twitter chats, for example on #bookchat which is about marketing, and #scifichat which ranges all over the "fantastic" -- and where even the very erudite experts have a hard time classifying a work.
Recently, a comment emerged addressed to me via goodreads.com
in response to another blog post I did here on aliendjinnromances
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/social-networking-is-not-advertising.html
-------
MIRIAM wrote: JL, this is where I most recently 'caught up with you'. Usually I see you on Twitter and its been a while. I was humbled into submission about the SWFA membership pieces and am still baffled by the genre difference - lol, is that like gender difference?, between my first and second novels. The 2nd isn't even SF, but still feels like it 'should be' because 'I am' or something irrational but mysteriously truthful like that.
-------
Here's my reply substantially embroidered from what I wrote Miriam.
"Genre" is an invention mostly I think of "marketers" trying to figure out how to "account for taste" so that if you like one novel, they can then supply you an endless chain of novels "just like that only different."
Here are a couple of my blog entries on accounting for taste:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
And on "the same but different" (a Hollywood term)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/astrology-just-for-writers-part-8-beat.html
Astrology Part 8 is about "the beat sheet" and why it works commercially.
"Genre" is about selling (or marketing) professionally.
Art is totally different.
Art is about saying what you were born to say to the people you were born to talk to, to help, to scold, to enlighten, whatever. Art is about your purpose in life while making money is about staying alive long enough to complete that purpose.
Since Genre is in fact an artificial construct, its borders and definitions are subject to whimsical change without notice as public taste, and "markets" (i.e. groups of people who like one thing, like Harry Potter fandom) shift and change, influenced by successful marketing of another product.
That's right - genre shapes the world of entertainment so that what you may may have access to, or may discover first, depends entirely on what others want rather than on what you want (or really need). So you learn to be satisfied with what others want - and in a way that's "good" because it allows you to "fit in" and to discuss what others know about. In another way, though, it sows confusion within you about "who" you really are, what your purpose in life is, and how that relates you to everyone else.
The Internet, (interweb and other terms), Web 2.0 and above required, is changing all that too fast for marketers to catch up. They are seriously confused. especially where "social networking" is involved.
See my recent entries on the value of social networking:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/social-networking-is-not-advertising.html
And the following one posted May 3rd. Note my blogs on writing come out on Tuesdays. You may be able to sort them out by searching on Tuesday.
You will likely be successful now at mixing genres to make new ones, whereas in the past you would have failed -- because SF has bled into "mainstream" -- i.e. you see the motifs that originated in SF (like alternate universes) appear in general fiction meant for people who hate Science Fiction.
My personal theory about why people "hate" science fiction is that they were force-fed Ray Bradbury in High School under the label "science fiction" (but his stuff, while very literate, does not in any way shape or form resemble science fiction as I know it.) Oddly, "Romance" has pretty much escaped that fate so far.
On Twitter, I made a writer-friend who does historicals who asked which of my SF novels she should try reading since she dislikes SF. I pointed her to Molt Brother, and I don't know if she finished it but halfway through she liked it and intended to finish reading. Molt Brother is an interstellar, human/alien relationship (not romance, but deep intimate involvement) where the driving force of the plot is an archeological mystery.
And likewise on Twitter, I made another writer-friend who is an SF fan but writes contemporary mystery (with a bit of fantasy mixed in) who eventually decided to try reading one of my novels - chose House of Zeor, the earliest published Sime~Gen novel and to her astonishment liked it and said she could see why it had spawned a fandom that writes fanfic in that universe.
You can find all of these (in ebook and print) by clicking the tabs in this Amazon "store" (you can then dig up the books on your favorite supplier's website.)
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20
This genre definition confusion issue is extremely relevant to the brand new Sime~Gen novel, FARRIS CHANNEL, which I'm now working to finish.
In this new novel, which tells the story of the founding of the House of Zeor, and is a sequel to FIRST CHANNEL and CHANNEL'S DESTINY, I wildly mix genres until you can't figure out which is what, which is kinda like "reality" you know.
I've got to write more, and at considerable length, in this blog about Sime~Gen, not just because Margaret Carter asked in her post here where she discussed Jean Lorrah's Sime~Gen novel TO KISS OR TO KILL (which is a genuine SF-Romance with sociological romance overtones), but also because as I was re-re-reading these novels to proof for the new publisher, and to prepare the new novels, I discovered that the principles of worldbuilding I've been discussing here are illustrated precisely in these novels.
Here's a link to Margaret Carter's post on Sime~Gen:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/new-sime-gen-books.html
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
NEW RELEASES
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/genre-root-of-all-evil.html
Since then the issue of defining genre has come up on many twitter chats, for example on #bookchat which is about marketing, and #scifichat which ranges all over the "fantastic" -- and where even the very erudite experts have a hard time classifying a work.
Recently, a comment emerged addressed to me via goodreads.com
in response to another blog post I did here on aliendjinnromances
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/social-networking-is-not-advertising.html
-------
MIRIAM wrote: JL, this is where I most recently 'caught up with you'. Usually I see you on Twitter and its been a while. I was humbled into submission about the SWFA membership pieces and am still baffled by the genre difference - lol, is that like gender difference?, between my first and second novels. The 2nd isn't even SF, but still feels like it 'should be' because 'I am' or something irrational but mysteriously truthful like that.
-------
Here's my reply substantially embroidered from what I wrote Miriam.
"Genre" is an invention mostly I think of "marketers" trying to figure out how to "account for taste" so that if you like one novel, they can then supply you an endless chain of novels "just like that only different."
Here are a couple of my blog entries on accounting for taste:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
And on "the same but different" (a Hollywood term)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/astrology-just-for-writers-part-8-beat.html
Astrology Part 8 is about "the beat sheet" and why it works commercially.
"Genre" is about selling (or marketing) professionally.
Art is totally different.
Art is about saying what you were born to say to the people you were born to talk to, to help, to scold, to enlighten, whatever. Art is about your purpose in life while making money is about staying alive long enough to complete that purpose.
Since Genre is in fact an artificial construct, its borders and definitions are subject to whimsical change without notice as public taste, and "markets" (i.e. groups of people who like one thing, like Harry Potter fandom) shift and change, influenced by successful marketing of another product.
That's right - genre shapes the world of entertainment so that what you may may have access to, or may discover first, depends entirely on what others want rather than on what you want (or really need). So you learn to be satisfied with what others want - and in a way that's "good" because it allows you to "fit in" and to discuss what others know about. In another way, though, it sows confusion within you about "who" you really are, what your purpose in life is, and how that relates you to everyone else.
The Internet, (interweb and other terms), Web 2.0 and above required, is changing all that too fast for marketers to catch up. They are seriously confused. especially where "social networking" is involved.
See my recent entries on the value of social networking:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/social-networking-is-not-advertising.html
And the following one posted May 3rd. Note my blogs on writing come out on Tuesdays. You may be able to sort them out by searching on Tuesday.
You will likely be successful now at mixing genres to make new ones, whereas in the past you would have failed -- because SF has bled into "mainstream" -- i.e. you see the motifs that originated in SF (like alternate universes) appear in general fiction meant for people who hate Science Fiction.
My personal theory about why people "hate" science fiction is that they were force-fed Ray Bradbury in High School under the label "science fiction" (but his stuff, while very literate, does not in any way shape or form resemble science fiction as I know it.) Oddly, "Romance" has pretty much escaped that fate so far.
On Twitter, I made a writer-friend who does historicals who asked which of my SF novels she should try reading since she dislikes SF. I pointed her to Molt Brother, and I don't know if she finished it but halfway through she liked it and intended to finish reading. Molt Brother is an interstellar, human/alien relationship (not romance, but deep intimate involvement) where the driving force of the plot is an archeological mystery.
And likewise on Twitter, I made another writer-friend who is an SF fan but writes contemporary mystery (with a bit of fantasy mixed in) who eventually decided to try reading one of my novels - chose House of Zeor, the earliest published Sime~Gen novel and to her astonishment liked it and said she could see why it had spawned a fandom that writes fanfic in that universe.
You can find all of these (in ebook and print) by clicking the tabs in this Amazon "store" (you can then dig up the books on your favorite supplier's website.)
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20
This genre definition confusion issue is extremely relevant to the brand new Sime~Gen novel, FARRIS CHANNEL, which I'm now working to finish.
In this new novel, which tells the story of the founding of the House of Zeor, and is a sequel to FIRST CHANNEL and CHANNEL'S DESTINY, I wildly mix genres until you can't figure out which is what, which is kinda like "reality" you know.
I've got to write more, and at considerable length, in this blog about Sime~Gen, not just because Margaret Carter asked in her post here where she discussed Jean Lorrah's Sime~Gen novel TO KISS OR TO KILL (which is a genuine SF-Romance with sociological romance overtones), but also because as I was re-re-reading these novels to proof for the new publisher, and to prepare the new novels, I discovered that the principles of worldbuilding I've been discussing here are illustrated precisely in these novels.
Here's a link to Margaret Carter's post on Sime~Gen:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/new-sime-gen-books.html
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
NEW RELEASES
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20
Sunday, June 05, 2011
Alien Nations
Let me start with a disclaimer.
I write fiction, but I take inspiration from the world around me. It is never my intention to offend anyone*, and if I do so, it is not deliberate.
Have you ever remembered a time when we have been treated (if treated is the right word) to so many conspiracy theories and so much conflict? To so many ready-made plots for cyber-punk or alternate history or science fiction?
If Greece leaves the Eurozone, do you think Arizona or California might follow suit and secede from the USA? Might States with very large populations of immigrants who are not interested in integrating decide to become politically active and force a secession vote, perhaps to set up a new Hispanic homeland in this State, or a sovereign, Sharia-compliant State in that State.
It would be a case of American history repeating itself, but with the boot on the other leg.
Where undocumented immigrants are already here, and living unobtrusively, could they be compared to John Lithgow's "Third Rock" without the comedy? Or modern day Midwich Cuckoos without the hive mind?
Alien Nation dealt with the problems of integration, where America (I think it was America) struggled to assimilate homeless/exiled/asylum-seeking space aliens into society. I wonder what would have happened if that fictional America had simply donated a National Park so the friendly aliens could have a new homeland.
The recent talk about what a government shut down might mean (closing the National Parks) has me wondering what the cost is to the taxpayer of those glorious places, and what the return on investment is, and whether that prime real estate could be run equally well as a for-profit tourist attraction by someone or some nation other than the American government.
Homeland Security would have a fit, of course. But, what we prescribe as workable for others should work for us, too. No? Digressing for a moment, what's the deal with tearing down a perfectly good fence along a border because the agents would prefer to have it see-through? What's wrong with watch-towers? Besides, can you imagine the distress that someone with a mirror and a spray can could cause, if he wrote rude words or drew lewd cartoons on the Mexican side of the glass wall for Americans to see?
Since my thoughts have turned to the lowest of comedy, I will end here.
Rowena Cherry
*
That is, with the possible exception of unapologetic copyright infringers.
I write fiction, but I take inspiration from the world around me. It is never my intention to offend anyone*, and if I do so, it is not deliberate.
Have you ever remembered a time when we have been treated (if treated is the right word) to so many conspiracy theories and so much conflict? To so many ready-made plots for cyber-punk or alternate history or science fiction?
If Greece leaves the Eurozone, do you think Arizona or California might follow suit and secede from the USA? Might States with very large populations of immigrants who are not interested in integrating decide to become politically active and force a secession vote, perhaps to set up a new Hispanic homeland in this State, or a sovereign, Sharia-compliant State in that State.
It would be a case of American history repeating itself, but with the boot on the other leg.
Where undocumented immigrants are already here, and living unobtrusively, could they be compared to John Lithgow's "Third Rock" without the comedy? Or modern day Midwich Cuckoos without the hive mind?
Alien Nation dealt with the problems of integration, where America (I think it was America) struggled to assimilate homeless/exiled/asylum-seeking space aliens into society. I wonder what would have happened if that fictional America had simply donated a National Park so the friendly aliens could have a new homeland.
The recent talk about what a government shut down might mean (closing the National Parks) has me wondering what the cost is to the taxpayer of those glorious places, and what the return on investment is, and whether that prime real estate could be run equally well as a for-profit tourist attraction by someone or some nation other than the American government.
Homeland Security would have a fit, of course. But, what we prescribe as workable for others should work for us, too. No? Digressing for a moment, what's the deal with tearing down a perfectly good fence along a border because the agents would prefer to have it see-through? What's wrong with watch-towers? Besides, can you imagine the distress that someone with a mirror and a spray can could cause, if he wrote rude words or drew lewd cartoons on the Mexican side of the glass wall for Americans to see?
Since my thoughts have turned to the lowest of comedy, I will end here.
Rowena Cherry
*
That is, with the possible exception of unapologetic copyright infringers.
Thursday, June 02, 2011
Fantasy Goes Mainstream?
Here's an article—from the WALL STREET JOURNAL, believe it or not—about the recent boom in fantasy and horror tropes in bestselling fiction as the supernatural goes mainstream:
Season of the Supernatural
The article cites many examples of highly successful novels and series "blurring the lines between literary fiction and genres like science fiction and fantasy, overturning long-held assumptions in the literary world about what constitutes high and low art."
Fantasy and SF, the writer mentions, comprised 10% of adult fiction sales last year, compared to a 7% share for literary fiction. Mystery is glanced at, too, although its market share isn't stated. Michael Chabon, author of THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN'S UNION (an alternate history detective novel set in a Jewish nation in Alaska), says, "There is a critical sniffiness still toward stuff that smells too strongly of the mystery novel or the space opera." Romance, by the way, which outranks all the other genres in market share, isn't mentioned.
Lev Grossman, author of THE MAGICIANS (which has been accurately described as "Harry Potter discovers Narnia is real"—I found it riveting) and its forthcoming sequel THE MAGICIAN KING, declares, "We are the mainstream. Literary fiction is a subculture." About time somebody noticed!
It's pointed out that "the divide between popular and literary fiction was established relatively recently by the modernists, who favored hyperrealism over plot and narrative." Among the works of the great classical authors of the western canon, e.g. Homer, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens, and many others, supernatural elements are more commonly included than excluded. Since any literary historian could have told us that, it constantly baffles me when critics trained in the academic tradition disdain all novels that aren't purebred descendants of George Eliot and Henry James. (An attitude less dominant now than in the past, as demonstrated by an academic organization I belong to, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.)
This attitude splashes over into the general readership, too, as in the exasperating review presently at the top of the reader comments for THE MAGICIANS on Amazon. The commentator praises the book to the skies, while continually assuring us that it isn't fantasy. It's a Real Novel, with characterization, theme, and all that Important Stuff, also containing fantastic elements. An egregious example of the "it's good so it can't be SF" trope.
Happily, as even the WALL STREET JOURNAL acknowledges, "The pendulum may now be swinging back, with literature that can be both popular and literary, realistic and fantastical."
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Season of the Supernatural
The article cites many examples of highly successful novels and series "blurring the lines between literary fiction and genres like science fiction and fantasy, overturning long-held assumptions in the literary world about what constitutes high and low art."
Fantasy and SF, the writer mentions, comprised 10% of adult fiction sales last year, compared to a 7% share for literary fiction. Mystery is glanced at, too, although its market share isn't stated. Michael Chabon, author of THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN'S UNION (an alternate history detective novel set in a Jewish nation in Alaska), says, "There is a critical sniffiness still toward stuff that smells too strongly of the mystery novel or the space opera." Romance, by the way, which outranks all the other genres in market share, isn't mentioned.
Lev Grossman, author of THE MAGICIANS (which has been accurately described as "Harry Potter discovers Narnia is real"—I found it riveting) and its forthcoming sequel THE MAGICIAN KING, declares, "We are the mainstream. Literary fiction is a subculture." About time somebody noticed!
It's pointed out that "the divide between popular and literary fiction was established relatively recently by the modernists, who favored hyperrealism over plot and narrative." Among the works of the great classical authors of the western canon, e.g. Homer, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens, and many others, supernatural elements are more commonly included than excluded. Since any literary historian could have told us that, it constantly baffles me when critics trained in the academic tradition disdain all novels that aren't purebred descendants of George Eliot and Henry James. (An attitude less dominant now than in the past, as demonstrated by an academic organization I belong to, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.)
This attitude splashes over into the general readership, too, as in the exasperating review presently at the top of the reader comments for THE MAGICIANS on Amazon. The commentator praises the book to the skies, while continually assuring us that it isn't fantasy. It's a Real Novel, with characterization, theme, and all that Important Stuff, also containing fantastic elements. An egregious example of the "it's good so it can't be SF" trope.
Happily, as even the WALL STREET JOURNAL acknowledges, "The pendulum may now be swinging back, with literature that can be both popular and literary, realistic and fantastical."
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Carol Buchanan On Writing Tricks And Tips
On twitter #scifichat, we got to talking about worldbuilding and various (really good) writers gave tips and tricks describing the end result of what a new writer must accomplish in order to sell.
I kept asking infernal questions about exactly how you go about (inside your head) truly accomplishing this kind of projection of a 3-dimensional world using cold text. .
Carol Buchanan who has done a Guest post here after I raved about her historical novel, Gold Under Ice,... ....
See APRIL 12, 2011 and APRIL 19, 2011 Tuesday entries in this blog.
...has joined #scifichat from time to time because I convinced her that writing SF/F is pretty much like writing Historicals (which is her field).
Carol said in a tweet that you have to draw the reader into the story by drawing them into the character. So I asked her well, but HOW do you do that?
Most new writers believe they have accomplished it and proudly present their manuscripts to publishers, then explode in rage at the "gatekeepers" who won't buy their work. Your first rejection slips are bewildering, usually because they really lack an explanation of why.
Most editors (as I have noted in a blog series on editing)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html
really aren't trained or talented in explaining WHY and what to do to fix the problem becuase they're not writers and don't know where the problem comes from in the creative process.
So I asked, and Carol answered with a list of procedures that is actually the list that I learned years and years ago. (no wonder I like her work).
---------FROM CAROL BUCHANAN---------
I think of what I’d want to know when I’m reading a book.
1. Where are we? To me, that implies landscape, weather. I wouldn’t describe snow falling, but have something happening in the landscape, such as a man driving a team and wagon while a breeze blows away the stench of the frozen corpse in the wagon bed. (God’s Thunderbolt opening) Or the ice breaks (Gold Under Ice).
Carol Buchanan on Amazon
2. What’s happening? Plunk the reader down in the middle of the story: riding with the man driving the team, rescuing the man in the midst of thick broken ice, holding a glass when a stray bullet shatters it (new novel).
3. Introduce characters by what they do. William Palmer searches for someone who recognizes the corpse he found (God’s Thunderbolt); Dan Stark rescues the man in the creek (Gold Under Ice); Dan Stark holds the glass that shatters (new novel). [This is as far as the numbered list went.]
4. Always, always try to keep out of the story. Let it tell itself by what characters do (exterior POV), then think, feel, say (interior POV), one at a time and not too many of them. Stay in characters’ voices.
5. Don’t rush it. Worst thing too many writers do is to get in a hurry to get their books out there, as if the world will end before they publish that novel. It won’t. But a hurried novel destroys careers with poor writing. When I was a Spur judge I read some real dreck and some heartbreakers, that if they had gone one more draft or maybe two, they would have been so much better. (That year we didn’t award a Spur in that particular category.)
----END CAROL BUCHANAN------------
Print that out and put it up on the wall over your desk, stare at it while you're thinking.
Internalize it, do it. It works.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
I kept asking infernal questions about exactly how you go about (inside your head) truly accomplishing this kind of projection of a 3-dimensional world using cold text. .
Carol Buchanan who has done a Guest post here after I raved about her historical novel, Gold Under Ice,... ....
See APRIL 12, 2011 and APRIL 19, 2011 Tuesday entries in this blog.
...has joined #scifichat from time to time because I convinced her that writing SF/F is pretty much like writing Historicals (which is her field).
Carol said in a tweet that you have to draw the reader into the story by drawing them into the character. So I asked her well, but HOW do you do that?
Most new writers believe they have accomplished it and proudly present their manuscripts to publishers, then explode in rage at the "gatekeepers" who won't buy their work. Your first rejection slips are bewildering, usually because they really lack an explanation of why.
Most editors (as I have noted in a blog series on editing)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html
really aren't trained or talented in explaining WHY and what to do to fix the problem becuase they're not writers and don't know where the problem comes from in the creative process.
So I asked, and Carol answered with a list of procedures that is actually the list that I learned years and years ago. (no wonder I like her work).
---------FROM CAROL BUCHANAN---------
I think of what I’d want to know when I’m reading a book.
1. Where are we? To me, that implies landscape, weather. I wouldn’t describe snow falling, but have something happening in the landscape, such as a man driving a team and wagon while a breeze blows away the stench of the frozen corpse in the wagon bed. (God’s Thunderbolt opening) Or the ice breaks (Gold Under Ice).
Carol Buchanan on Amazon
2. What’s happening? Plunk the reader down in the middle of the story: riding with the man driving the team, rescuing the man in the midst of thick broken ice, holding a glass when a stray bullet shatters it (new novel).
3. Introduce characters by what they do. William Palmer searches for someone who recognizes the corpse he found (God’s Thunderbolt); Dan Stark rescues the man in the creek (Gold Under Ice); Dan Stark holds the glass that shatters (new novel). [This is as far as the numbered list went.]
4. Always, always try to keep out of the story. Let it tell itself by what characters do (exterior POV), then think, feel, say (interior POV), one at a time and not too many of them. Stay in characters’ voices.
5. Don’t rush it. Worst thing too many writers do is to get in a hurry to get their books out there, as if the world will end before they publish that novel. It won’t. But a hurried novel destroys careers with poor writing. When I was a Spur judge I read some real dreck and some heartbreakers, that if they had gone one more draft or maybe two, they would have been so much better. (That year we didn’t award a Spur in that particular category.)
Carol Buchanan
Author Gold Under Ice
Author Gold Under Ice
(Finalist, 2011 Spur Award for Long Novel &
Sequel to God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of MontanaWinner, 2009 Spur Award for Best First Novel)http://www.swanrange.com
http://www.swanrange.com/blog
Twitter: http://twitter.com/CarolBMTbooks
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Carol-Buchanan/54660179059
Print that out and put it up on the wall over your desk, stare at it while you're thinking.
Internalize it, do it. It works.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Memorial Day
Hoping that everyone stays safe today, no matter where you are or what (or whom) you are serving.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
DVD Copying Issues
Here's an article (slightly clipped) about the legal status of converting movies on DVD for viewing on devices such as iPads:
DVD Copy Protection
Apparently, although it has always been okay to convert music between formats for personal use, doing the same with DVDs is still illegal. Who knew?! Here we have another angle on the tricky interface between the buyer's right to free enjoyment of the content and the seller's copyright protection.
The article mentions Amazon's new Cloud Player, which supposedly allows more flexibility. Have any of you tried that system yet?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
DVD Copy Protection
Apparently, although it has always been okay to convert music between formats for personal use, doing the same with DVDs is still illegal. Who knew?! Here we have another angle on the tricky interface between the buyer's right to free enjoyment of the content and the seller's copyright protection.
The article mentions Amazon's new Cloud Player, which supposedly allows more flexibility. Have any of you tried that system yet?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Should You Make Up A Pen Name - Part II
Last week we looked at Sarah A. Hoyt and her multitude of bylines in various genres, a list that's still growing and not causing her much problem yet.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-i.html
This week, I have a note from a member of Backlist eBooks (http://backlistebooks.com which has an Amazon store which lists most of the members' titles http://astore.amazon.com/backlebook-20 ), Patricia Rosemoore, who is pondering a career with multiple bylines woven through a collaboration, a career that's still growing and branching out.
If you're just starting out in publishing, even if you are tossing out one or two trivial projects into the ebook market to make your bones, you really should ponder Patricia Rosemoore's point of view, make it your own, see what your career will look like in retrospect, before you type in a byline under the title of your first work.
Even if you've already started publishing, it might not be too late to re-think your overall business branding strategy for the body of work you intend to create and the audience you expect will discover that body of work amidst the flood of ebooks.
Patricia Rosemoor writes Dangerous Love; Kindle ebook "reprints": available from Amazon -- The McKenna Legacy:SEE ME IN YOUR DREAMS, TELL ME NO LIES, TOUCH ME IN THE DARK; from Harlequin Intrigue: BRAZEN; http://PatriciaRosemoor.com
-------QUOTE--------
My former writing partner and I are going to try to get rights back from Harper and Dell and maybe even from Silhouette. We wrote as Roslynn Patrick and Roslynn Griffith for Harper, Lynn Patrick for Dell (and for HQ) and Jeanne Rose for Silhouette. And I write as Patricia Rosemoor.
Here's my question--how would any of you who have multiple identities handle the backlist?
Should we pick one of the pseudonyms or use the originals? The only problem with using one pseudonym is that the books aren't all alike. Both Dell and HQ were Lynn Patrick -- some humor with our romance, a few with light suspense. But Silhouette Shadows were the precursor to Nocturne and the Harpers are really dark RS, three of the five being paranormal.
Whatever we choose to do, I'll probably want the cover to read something like (in small print) Patricia Rosemoor and Linda Sweeney writing as (and in big print) selected pseudonym. The idea is that since I have 60 some books as Patricia Rosemoor, and since I'm already backlisting a few Patricia Rosemoor books, it would probably generate more sales that way. For example if someone looks up Rosemoor on Amazon, they'll get those other pseudonyms.
Or is that too weird? What is anyone else doing?
Thanks,
Patricia
---END QUOTE---
So far I haven't seen more in depth discussion of this problem with definitive answers.
The problem is that most widely published writers have this problem in one form or another.
As discussed last week, bylines are often created at request or demand of Agents and/or Editors -- i.e. of marketers, not readers or writers.
And those bylines were created by Agents and Editors who never planned for the ebook world, or the self-republishing world, or Amazon's computers with tags, customer reviews, and so on.
How can you plan for what will be twenty years from now?
What will change and what will stay the same?
The only answer I have so far is that you can't.
My sometime collaborator on my Sime~Gen Universe novels didn't plan for Amazon, but their system is working out splendidly for us.
We put both our bylines on each of our collaborations, but followed the academic convention and put the originating author first. That is, when I first-drafted a novel that Jean collaborated on, my name came first. When she first drafted a novel that I collaborated on, her name came first. When we wrote independently in Sime~Gen, the byline was the single name.
The result drove bookstores totally nuts (the more they computerized, the nuttier it got), and we sold really well only at the science fiction and mystery specialty stories where the owner and clerks actually read the novels and recommended them to specific customers. We gathered a lot of librarians, teachers, bookstore managers and owners who became fans. .
Oddly, Amazon's method is now working wondrously well in just the way the indie bookstores did, recommending to those who would otherwise miss a title because of the odd bylines.
Jean Lorrah wrote a number of Star Trek novels for Pocket (which are all now in ebook, too) plus a series called Savage Empire, also being reissued by Wildside Press in ebook and paper.
I have a number of other titles, my Vampire Romances from St. Martin's Press, and others with complicated publishing histories including translations. And now, two collections of my short stories have been issued, Through The Moon Gate and Science Is Magic Spelled Backwards.
But the publisher, Wildside Press's Borgo imprint, is re-issuing the Sime~Gen novels in order of publication not in internal chronology order because numbered series in order of publication now sell better as ebooks! (they have the computer evidence to prove it!)
So here's how they bill the Sime~Gen Universe on the inside cover listing:
THE SIME~GEN SERIES from The Borgo Press
House of Zeor, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#1)
Unto Zeor, Forever, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#2)
First Channel, by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#3)
Mahogany Trinrose, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#4)
Channel’s Destiny, by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#5)
RenSime, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#6)
Ambrov Keon, by Jean Lorrah (#7)
Zelerod’s Doom, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah (#8)
AND THEN NEW ONES!
Personal Recognizance, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#9)
The Story Untold and Other Stories, by Jean Lorrah (#10)
To Kiss or to Kill, by Jean Lorrah (#11)
The Farris Channel, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#12)
Now, as most readers here know, Sime~Gen is not a "series" but a Universe.
It covers several thousand years of future-history, and only a few of the books revisit a given character's life. Most are set in different eras, to tell the story of the Universe through the intensely personal growth experiences of a given individual who lives in that time.
The Universe postulates (invisibly to the reader) that reincarnation is real, so many of the characters in later books are reincarnations of previous characters, Souls that have learned hard lessons in previous lives and now are free to go on to new lessons (harder ones).
The internal chronology is cast onto what we call the Unity Calendar, which actually has a Year Zero:
------------
- 533 Unity --First Channel by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg
- 518 Unity – Channel’s Destiny by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg
- 468 Unity – The Farris Channel by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
- 20 Unity – Ambrov Keon by Jean Lorrah
- 15 Unity – House of Zeor by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
0 Unity Calendar - Zelerod’s Doom by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah
1 Unity - To Kiss Or To Kill by Jean Lorrah
1 Unity - The Story Untold And Other Sime~Gen Stories by Jean Lorrah
132 Unity – Unto Zeor, Forever by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
152 Unity – Mahogany Trinrose by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
224 Unity – “Operation High Time” by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
232 Unity – RenSime by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
245 Unity – Personal Recognizance by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
---------------
So why am I belaboring this chronology issue in a blog about creating a pen name?
Because it all goes together, and needs to be considered if you're starting a series.
What's selling now, really well, is Series that are published in the internal chronological order. I've reviewed a large number of those. It's probably connected to the shift from the "anthology" TV series which had to be viewable in any order because of technical broadcast reasons, to the "story arc" TV series which is possible because of DVD's, On Demand, and Tivo.
But will it always be that way? Can the computerization of databases and google algorhytms make some other method work better for readers?
The Pen Name issue is all about letting the reader find what the reader wants at that particular moment. Kindle allows instant gratification by mail-order!
One of the methods we're using to help readers figure out buying Sime~Gen in Kindle and/or paper is the Amazon store approach.
We are making a store with the NEW Sime~Gen novels, along with a page for other titles by Jean Lorrah and by me.
Here's the URL:
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20
Consider - will you need an Amazon store? (or a "store" from some other outfit, like B&N?) or all of the above? What will you call it?
We're trying to keep our store as simple as possible, with more of the stories behind the various covers and editions explicated on the SimeGen Group on facebook.
The Amazon Store is a tool nobody would ever have predicted twenty years prior to its appearance.
What tools will you have to market your body of work? What flexibility can you build into your concept that will make that tool easy and natural to use?
Does byline matter? Does sub-title matter? Does order of publication matter? Does interval between new books matter? (i.e. should you write 10 novels before letting #1 come out?)
What is the best way to leverage today's marketing tools?
Here's a blog by a writer that I was pointed to by @victoriastrauss on twitter:
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2011/best-practices-for-amazon-ebook-sales/
That's today's Amazon - and if you read that blog, you'll see how "marketing; branding; byline" all fit into it.
So will tailoring your fiction to that method limit what you can do with tomorrow's tools?
How will social networking change the underlying principles of marketing and branding? And what comes after social networking?
What should you be preparing for?
Oh, we have a lot of work to do on this blog! And as we work, we may stumble on the key to that whole genre-prestige issue.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-i.html
This week, I have a note from a member of Backlist eBooks (http://backlistebooks.com which has an Amazon store which lists most of the members' titles http://astore.amazon.com/backlebook-20 ), Patricia Rosemoore, who is pondering a career with multiple bylines woven through a collaboration, a career that's still growing and branching out.
If you're just starting out in publishing, even if you are tossing out one or two trivial projects into the ebook market to make your bones, you really should ponder Patricia Rosemoore's point of view, make it your own, see what your career will look like in retrospect, before you type in a byline under the title of your first work.
Even if you've already started publishing, it might not be too late to re-think your overall business branding strategy for the body of work you intend to create and the audience you expect will discover that body of work amidst the flood of ebooks.
Patricia Rosemoor writes Dangerous Love; Kindle ebook "reprints": available from Amazon -- The McKenna Legacy:SEE ME IN YOUR DREAMS, TELL ME NO LIES, TOUCH ME IN THE DARK; from Harlequin Intrigue: BRAZEN; http://PatriciaRosemoor.com
-------QUOTE--------
My former writing partner and I are going to try to get rights back from Harper and Dell and maybe even from Silhouette. We wrote as Roslynn Patrick and Roslynn Griffith for Harper, Lynn Patrick for Dell (and for HQ) and Jeanne Rose for Silhouette. And I write as Patricia Rosemoor.
Here's my question--how would any of you who have multiple identities handle the backlist?
Should we pick one of the pseudonyms or use the originals? The only problem with using one pseudonym is that the books aren't all alike. Both Dell and HQ were Lynn Patrick -- some humor with our romance, a few with light suspense. But Silhouette Shadows were the precursor to Nocturne and the Harpers are really dark RS, three of the five being paranormal.
Whatever we choose to do, I'll probably want the cover to read something like (in small print) Patricia Rosemoor and Linda Sweeney writing as (and in big print) selected pseudonym. The idea is that since I have 60 some books as Patricia Rosemoor, and since I'm already backlisting a few Patricia Rosemoor books, it would probably generate more sales that way. For example if someone looks up Rosemoor on Amazon, they'll get those other pseudonyms.
Or is that too weird? What is anyone else doing?
Thanks,
Patricia
---END QUOTE---
So far I haven't seen more in depth discussion of this problem with definitive answers.
The problem is that most widely published writers have this problem in one form or another.
As discussed last week, bylines are often created at request or demand of Agents and/or Editors -- i.e. of marketers, not readers or writers.
And those bylines were created by Agents and Editors who never planned for the ebook world, or the self-republishing world, or Amazon's computers with tags, customer reviews, and so on.
How can you plan for what will be twenty years from now?
What will change and what will stay the same?
The only answer I have so far is that you can't.
My sometime collaborator on my Sime~Gen Universe novels didn't plan for Amazon, but their system is working out splendidly for us.
We put both our bylines on each of our collaborations, but followed the academic convention and put the originating author first. That is, when I first-drafted a novel that Jean collaborated on, my name came first. When she first drafted a novel that I collaborated on, her name came first. When we wrote independently in Sime~Gen, the byline was the single name.
The result drove bookstores totally nuts (the more they computerized, the nuttier it got), and we sold really well only at the science fiction and mystery specialty stories where the owner and clerks actually read the novels and recommended them to specific customers. We gathered a lot of librarians, teachers, bookstore managers and owners who became fans. .
Oddly, Amazon's method is now working wondrously well in just the way the indie bookstores did, recommending to those who would otherwise miss a title because of the odd bylines.
Jean Lorrah wrote a number of Star Trek novels for Pocket (which are all now in ebook, too) plus a series called Savage Empire, also being reissued by Wildside Press in ebook and paper.
I have a number of other titles, my Vampire Romances from St. Martin's Press, and others with complicated publishing histories including translations. And now, two collections of my short stories have been issued, Through The Moon Gate and Science Is Magic Spelled Backwards.
But the publisher, Wildside Press's Borgo imprint, is re-issuing the Sime~Gen novels in order of publication not in internal chronology order because numbered series in order of publication now sell better as ebooks! (they have the computer evidence to prove it!)
So here's how they bill the Sime~Gen Universe on the inside cover listing:
THE SIME~GEN SERIES from The Borgo Press
House of Zeor, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#1)
Unto Zeor, Forever, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#2)
First Channel, by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#3)
Mahogany Trinrose, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#4)
Channel’s Destiny, by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#5)
RenSime, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#6)
Ambrov Keon, by Jean Lorrah (#7)
Zelerod’s Doom, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah (#8)
AND THEN NEW ONES!
Personal Recognizance, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#9)
The Story Untold and Other Stories, by Jean Lorrah (#10)
To Kiss or to Kill, by Jean Lorrah (#11)
The Farris Channel, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#12)
Now, as most readers here know, Sime~Gen is not a "series" but a Universe.
It covers several thousand years of future-history, and only a few of the books revisit a given character's life. Most are set in different eras, to tell the story of the Universe through the intensely personal growth experiences of a given individual who lives in that time.
The Universe postulates (invisibly to the reader) that reincarnation is real, so many of the characters in later books are reincarnations of previous characters, Souls that have learned hard lessons in previous lives and now are free to go on to new lessons (harder ones).
The internal chronology is cast onto what we call the Unity Calendar, which actually has a Year Zero:
------------
- 533 Unity --First Channel by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg
- 518 Unity – Channel’s Destiny by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg
- 468 Unity – The Farris Channel by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
- 20 Unity – Ambrov Keon by Jean Lorrah
- 15 Unity – House of Zeor by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
0 Unity Calendar - Zelerod’s Doom by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah
1 Unity - To Kiss Or To Kill by Jean Lorrah
1 Unity - The Story Untold And Other Sime~Gen Stories by Jean Lorrah
132 Unity – Unto Zeor, Forever by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
152 Unity – Mahogany Trinrose by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
224 Unity – “Operation High Time” by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
232 Unity – RenSime by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
245 Unity – Personal Recognizance by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
---------------
So why am I belaboring this chronology issue in a blog about creating a pen name?
Because it all goes together, and needs to be considered if you're starting a series.
What's selling now, really well, is Series that are published in the internal chronological order. I've reviewed a large number of those. It's probably connected to the shift from the "anthology" TV series which had to be viewable in any order because of technical broadcast reasons, to the "story arc" TV series which is possible because of DVD's, On Demand, and Tivo.
But will it always be that way? Can the computerization of databases and google algorhytms make some other method work better for readers?
The Pen Name issue is all about letting the reader find what the reader wants at that particular moment. Kindle allows instant gratification by mail-order!
One of the methods we're using to help readers figure out buying Sime~Gen in Kindle and/or paper is the Amazon store approach.
We are making a store with the NEW Sime~Gen novels, along with a page for other titles by Jean Lorrah and by me.
Here's the URL:
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20
Consider - will you need an Amazon store? (or a "store" from some other outfit, like B&N?) or all of the above? What will you call it?
We're trying to keep our store as simple as possible, with more of the stories behind the various covers and editions explicated on the SimeGen Group on facebook.
The Amazon Store is a tool nobody would ever have predicted twenty years prior to its appearance.
What tools will you have to market your body of work? What flexibility can you build into your concept that will make that tool easy and natural to use?
Does byline matter? Does sub-title matter? Does order of publication matter? Does interval between new books matter? (i.e. should you write 10 novels before letting #1 come out?)
What is the best way to leverage today's marketing tools?
Here's a blog by a writer that I was pointed to by @victoriastrauss on twitter:
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2011/best-practices-for-amazon-ebook-sales/
That's today's Amazon - and if you read that blog, you'll see how "marketing; branding; byline" all fit into it.
So will tailoring your fiction to that method limit what you can do with tomorrow's tools?
How will social networking change the underlying principles of marketing and branding? And what comes after social networking?
What should you be preparing for?
Oh, we have a lot of work to do on this blog! And as we work, we may stumble on the key to that whole genre-prestige issue.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Big Brother Is Watching You
Google-Eye... in the sky
My "Google-Eye" byline is a reference to a song I recall from my youth which was about a big fish with ugly protruding eyes.
Google Eye lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
It's not just Google photographing your home from the street view. Microsoft may be claiming copyright over a low level aerial view of your home. Google or Bing your own home address, and be amazed at how much information about you and your finances is a matter of public record. These low level spies may well be responsible not only for any roof leaks you've suffered in the past couple of years (there's a date on the photo they took) but also from those baffling calls from "Card Services" urgently offering to improve on your mortgage rate of interest.
Talking of spies,
Eric Schmidt is alleged to have once said
"We know where you are," he once said during a discussion on privacy. "We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about."
Here we have the world's most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to U.S. intelligence.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/02/julian-assange-facebook-is-spy-machine_n_856313.html
And Facebook rebutted:
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange recently said in an interview that Facebook is "the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented." Alleging that the social network is vulnerable to "pressure" from U.S. Intelligence, Assange said that the government could potentially exploit user data stored on the network.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/03/facebook-julian-assange-_n_857197.html
Here's the irony, as I see it. Big Brother is most definitely watching you. Once your medical records go on line, some perverted hacker could probably watch your colonoscopy.... yet we cling to a cherished mirage of our rights to Privacy.
What privacy? Are we kidding? So, why do we cling to all the fake user names on various social sites?
Eric Schmidt is said to have said, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
I think he has a point, although quite possibly Mr Schmidt was not talking about copyright infringement online. Maybe, everyone who uploads --UP-loads-- anything should have to use their real name or their official dba.
If the author- or artist- name on the product does not match the uploader's name, the OSP or ISP should automatically flag the upload as potentially infringing, unless and until the uploader submits a counter-DMCA notice.
This would be the absolute reverse of the way things are done right now, where anyone can use an inscrutable identity, and is automatically presumed to be the copyright owner and in compliance with every legal site's TOU and TOS.
The way things are done now, the "uploader" enjoys the automatic presumption that he owns the copyright to ebooks and music no matter how preposterous that presumption might be, and it is the burden of the author or creator to prove otherwise.
The technology surely exists. Norton/IE auto flags new websites with those grey "unverified site" blobs. Why not automatically "blob" my imaginary "mizCopyrit3vi0lat3r" until she proves that she (or he) really and truly is Nora Roberts... and James Patterson. And JK Rowling.
I wonder whether the unintended consequences of that would be a rash of identity theft. Would it give a free pass to namesakes. There are, for instance, 25 Colleen Thompsons; 23 Paula Graveses; a couple at least of Mark Zuckerbergs.
Where am I going with this? I don't know. In the 1960s, Dystopian science fiction was on the curriculum. It's baaack (if it ever went away). The irony is, that it's not really fiction this time around. So, perhaps we have to twist it.
Perhaps we all need invisibility cloaks! Maybe we need roofs that use NFL field technology, with grids of heat tape running through pallets of grassy sod for environmental friendliness and the thwart the heat mappers in outer space.
PS
I don't appreciate why Microsoft, and Bing, and NAVTEQ, and Pictometry Birds Eye etc etc should feel that they are able to copyright a photo they took of my house (and my skylights have leaked ever since their helicopter flew over and its wash popped the rivets), so I will tell Mac owners how to snag the photo of their own roofs.
This is actually funny. Just try to copy their copyright wording, either onto an email, or into a .doc
Thursday, May 19, 2011
New Vampire Novella
I've just had a new erotic vampire romance, "Blood Hostage," published by Amber Quill:
Blood Hostage
A man from a long line of vampire hunters captures a female vampire in hopes that she'll help him rescue two young people from a homicidal rogue vampire. This is only my second vampire romance in which the woman constitutes the nonhuman half of the couple. (The other is "Night Flight" from Ellora's Cave.) Like the majority of paranormal romances, most of mine pair a human female with a nonhuman male. With vampires and werewolves in particular, the typical set-up in which the man plays the "alpha" role, stronger than the woman (at first glance, anyway), seems to fit the conventions of romance better when a human woman falls in love with a "monster." It all goes back to the "Beauty and the Beast" archetype. In "Night Flight" and "Blood Hostage," I had to reconcile the heroine's superhuman abilities with the need to keep the hero from looking weak by comparison.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Blood Hostage
A man from a long line of vampire hunters captures a female vampire in hopes that she'll help him rescue two young people from a homicidal rogue vampire. This is only my second vampire romance in which the woman constitutes the nonhuman half of the couple. (The other is "Night Flight" from Ellora's Cave.) Like the majority of paranormal romances, most of mine pair a human female with a nonhuman male. With vampires and werewolves in particular, the typical set-up in which the man plays the "alpha" role, stronger than the woman (at first glance, anyway), seems to fit the conventions of romance better when a human woman falls in love with a "monster." It all goes back to the "Beauty and the Beast" archetype. In "Night Flight" and "Blood Hostage," I had to reconcile the heroine's superhuman abilities with the need to keep the hero from looking weak by comparison.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Should You Make Up A Pen Name? Part I
Last week we talked more about changes in publishing, and how long established, famous writers are retrieving the rights to their own novels from the big publishers and issuing them as ebooks on their own.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/doranna-durgin-on-changes-in-publishing.html
The organization that Duranna Durgin (oh, you gotta read her books) founded is Backlist Ebooks, just for writers trying to learn the ropes of self-publishing. The dues are steep but worth it, as with any organization of professionals.
Yes, famous writers with big followings are self-publishing!
And in fact, some writers just now breaking into print are having a problem selling titles they post themselves, or titles published via indie or e-book-only publishers because the big publishers are now flooding the market with the newest books by big names, while the big names are posting their own backlist titles.
It's sometimes hard to tell the difference when shopping an ebook catalogue, so various entrepreneurs have launched various projects to re-engineer the fiction delivery system. Everything is changing so fast that new writers -- and even long established writers -- need to think carefully before wading into the chaos.
Not all members of Backlist eBooks are using Kindle. Some just post their novels on their own website. Some distribute to a lot of formats through smashwords, and hit Kindle that way.
Doing all this self-publishing work requires climbing a very steep learning curve, and takes a lot of time away from producing actual new novels.
Along with covers, and ISBN numbers, and formatting for this-and-that system, and other such mysteries, comes the decision of whether to republish a novel under the same byline it was originally published under.
Many writers have several bylines, or pen names, as they were called in the days of pens.
How does that happen? If you've never published anything yet, should you create a bunch of bylines? Do you have to do it? Should you stop doing it?
The name you put under the Title of your work is a "brand" -- as marketers are teaching writers to call it these days. Writers have to be branded as well as genre'd!
For example, my Agent decided I needed a different byline for my Military Science Fiction novels just when he read them. He decided to market them with the challenge to the editor, figure out who wrote this from the style. The editor who bought the two couldn't figure it, then decided I should pick a male byline for them.
They are Hero and Border Dispute, which came out as Ace Mass Market novels at the peak of the military SF boom under the byline Daniel R. Kerns (before Daniel Kerns made a name for himself - that Daniel is not me).
So because of the similar and confusing byline issue, when I reissued the two novels as an omnibus Kindle edition, I put my own byline on them even though they're not the usual science fiction romance I write. They are relationship driven, human/alien stories. The problem that drives the relationship is an interstellar war -- but not against an "enemy." That's the SF twist that's so Lichtenberg -- rethink the entire meaning of "war" and "action." Find them here.
Hero & Border Dispute
So that's an example of a science fiction byline bleeding over into a sub-genre, military science fiction. Many wouldn't consider military science fiction a "sub" genre at all since science fiction started as a male-action sub-genre. Do you need a new byline for a sub-genre?
Can one byline work over many genres, and for fiction and non-fiction as well -- for non-fiction in different areas (such as Biography vs. say, Tarot)?
This is an especially sensitive question for writers of SFR, Science Fiction Romance or PNR, Paranormal Romance, vs. plain contemporary Romance, vs. Historical Romance.
My main topic on this blog has been how to raise the level of respect for the various Romance Genres in the minds of the general public -- even people who don't like or read Romance should view the genre as a high precision, demanding genre that arouses the thirst for education in a wide variety of highly regarded professions. Today, though, a byline known in the Romance genres carries a stigma that is not honorable. So should you use your own legal name? Or make up a name for your byline?
Publishers have a "legacy wisdom" from the days of printing presses, that insists one byline famous for Romance simply will not sell to Mystery readers. A byline famous for Mystery might sell to Science Fiction (Asimov comes to mind as the exception that proves all these rules) but a byline famous for Science Fiction will never, ever make it in Westerns or Romance.
The more famous your byline in one area, the more resistant publishers are to using it in another.
Take Nora Roberts for a big example of how that legacy wisdom is not applicable any more.
She wanted to write a series of sort-of-SF-Romance novels set almost in the future, called the IN DEATH series (I really like that series a lot!) So the publisher and/or Agent, or someone, decided she needed to avoid sullying her prominent Nora Roberts brand name with that icky science-fiction crap.
I don't know if it was her idea or theirs, but they put the J. D. Robb byline on the In Death Series and hid the Nora Roberts attribution from most readers.
IN DEATH didn't sell well at all, even though it was Nora Roberts style and made it into most libraries in paperback.
That's an object lesson in marketing. Content doesn't matter to sales. Brand does.
So after a few In Death novels, they "came out of the closet" (rumors abounded online about "who" J. D. Robb really was) and put the Nora Roberts byline on the front covers.
And they sold. Are still selling, big time.
Isn't that interesting? Against all legacy wisdom of publishers, science fiction romance sold to an enthusiastic Romance readership -- not so much at all to the science fiction readers, and not to the fantasy readership.
Something changed, and I think it's an important something.
Now, I have to be a nasty critic here and state that the IN DEATH series is really crummy science fiction, if you judge it as SF. (I don't, so I actually like those novels!)
It's plain vanilla Nora Roberts romance, hitting the middle of the Romance market - nothing much to talk about except "I keep buying these things and I don't know why."
So is IN DEATH different enough to warrant another byline? Apparently not. And that was in 2004. Note IN DEATH #1 is now on Kindle, and has over 200 reviews on Amazon.
Here's Treachery in Death
Note the high price on the Kindle edition whereas many members of Backlist eBooks are posting their own novels for $2.99 (and many write as well or better than Nora Roberts in my not-so-humble opinion)..
Byline and branding is all marketing, not supply and demand. After all, ebooks come with unlimited supply. Stores don't run out of copies!
Now, about the byline problem.
Which brings us back to the stigma problem.
I think the major publishers have the computerized sales results to substantiate their insistence on separate bylines for separate genres, but especially for authors who sully their brand with SCIENCE FICTION.
So I'm going to talk about a friend of mine, Sarah A. Hoyt -- we're friends on facebook. She's been sending me review copies of some of her books for a while now. Her publishers don't understand why a reviewer for a New Age Magazine (me) would rave about murder mysteries, steampunk, historicals, etc etc. But I can find something esoteric in anything because the reality behind the art is all about Love Conquers All.
I reviewed some historical mysteries Sarah A. Hoyt wrote under a different byline Sarah D’Almeida about the Musketeers:
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2009/
and in 2010
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2010/
Death of a Musketeer by Sarah D’Almeida, Berkley Prime Crime Mystery, 2006
Dying By The Sword by Sarah D’Almeida, Berkeley Prime Crime Mystery, 2008
There are a couple more and Sarah expects to get them out as ebooks with new ones in that series. (see the problem? Sarah who?)
Here's a note from her about bylines:
----------
The mysteries are an open pen name. Also, the first musketeer's mystery has been re-released with a small press: http://nakedreader.com/
Amazon it should have this version up by now. If it does well, I will finish novel #6, The Musketeer's Confessor. I've just delivered A Fatal Stain (the third of the refinishing ones.) I'm now working on Darkship Renegade, which apparently will have a "sister book" that takes place on Earth with different characters. (I didn't know this. The character mugged me one fine morning... :/ so now I have to write him.)
-----
That's how writers keep up with each other's work -- notes on facebook.
And then there's a series of well, Steampunk-ish novels Sarah did that I loved -- more or less fantasy, maybe.
Heart of Light is one of the titles.
Here's a whole list of Hoyt titles:
Sarah A. Hoyt
I've just read DARKSHIP THIEVES by Sarah A. Hoyt, and it's REALLY GOOD SF-Romance in the Linnea Sinclair tradition -- a lot of running around in space ships and space stations, but no non-humans. This one is a break-off human colony with genetic modification issues. And a really good star-crossed lovers story.
FULL DISCLOSURE - you all know I'm a reviewer, and I get free copies. I don't review everything sent to me, only 5-star worthy items.
However, there's a bit of a brag on this one - there's a quote from me on the back cover of DARKSHIP THIEVES.
(Totally aside, in Amber Benson's new Ace Fantasy, Serpent's Storm (a Calliope Reaper-Jones novel), there's a quote from me on the front-inside-page with many other reviewer quotes, but that one only credits The Monthly Aspectarian, the magazine I review for. -- the point being reviewing is not an "objective" business. You can get my attention by quoting me and by giving me freebies. As far as I know Amber Benson doesn't have any other bylines. This is the actress/director/writer Amber Benson, a brand name in itself.
As Sarah A. Hoyt says above, she's working on a sequel for DARKSHIP, and that too would be for Baen.
Oh, and I'm not done with Sara yet. Hold your hat.
She's ALSO a mystery writer with byline Elise Hyatt!!! That's the reference to "refinishing" above. (and yes, this, too is great stuff you ought to read, and nevermind the genre label).
Elise Hyatt publishes with Berkley Prime Crime mass market paperback, two titles I've seen so far,
Dipped, Stripped and Dead,
and
French Polished Murder
The series, subtitled A DARING FINDS MYSTERY is contemporary setting, ho-hum yawn normality -- but the lead character is a woman who's divorced and raising a boy from her first marriage as she gets involved with a new boyfriend.
I think these 2 books made me a fan of "Cozy Mystery" -- there's nothing hard-edged, and a lot of character depth. The Relationships while dramatically charged, are more "normal" than I've been seeing lately.
Here's the thing - DARING FINDS is science fiction in disguise.
Why? Because this lead character, Candyce Dare, is living on subsistence income from refinishing furniture and selling it on the "antique" market. Her attitude is pure SF-Hero stuff.
Trust me, there's more than one science involved in her body of knowledge. It was a hobby she cultivated while married, and now is making a living from it, learning the hard way, gaining associates in this industry, and showering us with the science of it. This is the oldest, classic SF motif of a young person without format education in a subject becoming an expert with "outside the box" thinking.
Without the extraordinary skill at science fiction worldbuilding and information feed (topics I've discussed at length in these blogs -- you can find most of my blog entries on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com by searching for the tag Tuesday), these Elise Hyatt mysteries would be incredibly boring. Instead, DARING FINDS is a series with a luscious hook, and page-turning fascination, sizzling romance angle, and lots to learn.
The DARING FINDS mysteries is the very best science fiction romance with a mystery plot. Both books satisfy on every level.
OK, you don't get to the HEA because it's a series, but you know you will get there. The writer's hand is so firm and disciplined, it's like riding with a supremely accomplished rally driver.
Good grief, by now you're so confused you don't know which writer I'm talking about.
See?
Brand. Byline. Stigma.
Readers want to grab hold of a SYMBOL and know that anything sold under that symbol delivers what the other things under that symbol deliver. And that's the re-engineering of the fiction delivery system that Backlist eBooks is participating in. How can a reader navigate this avalanche of ebooks and find just what they want when they want it?
Publishers want to know which readership to spend money promoting a byline to -- mystery, SF, Fantasy, historical -- marketers see these as separate readerships. My contention is that this was true, but is less true with every passing year.
So here we have Sarah A. Hoyt, Sarah D’Almeida (also from Berkley Prime Crime, notice?) and Elise Hyatt, and there are other bylines of this author.
On the Elise Hyatt byline, she says:
-----------
I wanted to use Alice (my name pre-citizenship was spelled Alice, pronounced Elise, hence Elise Hyatt for Daring Finds, because I will answer when called that.) Alice Rye... because they asked for "white bread" -- I'm a horrible woman. Mind you my pre citizenship name was Alice Maria da Silva Marques De Almeida, (my grandfather spelled it D'Almeida) which means there is A LOT there to use. But... no. It had to be "white bread." Ugh.
-----------
But - (hold your head and groan) - she's starting yet another byline! Here's what she says about the new one:
----------
I've also just sold (but not announced yet) a series under Sarah Marques which also has the musketeers but very different musketeers than the mysteries (like alternate versions of them. Yes, it's weird to have both in my head, but no, it's not confusing) I don't have samples up, yet. The first book is called Sword And Blood.
SWORD AND BLOOD: the first in a series in which the Three Musketeers battle vampires in an alternate France where Cardinal Richelieu is one of the undead. In order to "save" France, a deal has been made to turn the churches and a good deal of the power over to the damned. Athos himself has been turned by the wife he thought he'd killed, who is in fact one of the vampires, and must fight his bloodlust while battling for his soul.
They'll come out under Sarah Marques simply because I think my Baen sf fans would choke if they picked that book up by accident. What do I mean choke? Well... it has a lot of sex. Woman-on-top (well, vampire on top) sex. Which hasn't been in my other books. Because of THAT I think it's fair to give fair warning. As it were. So I'll let people know it's mine and it's coming, but why it's under another name. THAT one was my choice. (The book also features a pagan priestess, the battle of evil having forced the good sides to unite, as it were, and forget their differences -- she's Madame Bonacieux and the religion is meticulously researched and reconstructed, not the least from the local workings I grew up with, which, while not in France, had a lot of the remains of Celtic religion [I come from a region known as Heights Of Maia -- Alto da Maia -- which was a Cultic center of the Celtic Common Wealth as well as the site of an annual bardic festival in pre and I presume early Roman times.] Although there's still humor in this book, it's quite different from the humor in the Musketeer Mysteries. One of my friends called this the "laughing in the teeth of H*ll" type of humor.
As for why I write so much? Heaven help me if I know. Rumor has it I'm compulsive. Of course, I never believe rumors.
-------------
This multi-byline author has also been discussing in public a Marlowe and Shakespear guy-on-guy thing she wants to write but doesn't think anyone would buy it. If it sells, though, that would likely need yet another byline.
Academics discussing this writer are going to have several Excedrin Headaches at once.
To help you track down some of these items, the author gives us a whole list of URLs with samples and descriptions:
----------
Here's a web page with her novels and she gives us a list of URLs with sample chapters.
----------------
http://sarahahoyt.com/novels.html
Samples of Darkship Thieves: http://darkship.sarahahoyt.com/dst-excerpt.html
Magical British Empire: http://empire.sarahahoyt.com/
Musketeer Mysteries: http://musketeers.sarahahoyt.com/
Daring Finds: http://daringfinds.sarahahoyt.com/
Shifters -- I have a third one due this year, and so far what I know for sure is that by the end of the book, Kyrie is pregnant (whee) -- http://shifters.sarahahoyt.com/
My career started with this, which now reads incredibly clumsy to me: http://shakespeare.sarahahoyt.com/
-------------
IT'S ALL GREAT STUFF YOU SHOULD READ!!!
Now, this byline musical chairs thing is a marketing ploy that the big guys have been very successful with.
This is very old traditional methodology, and there are times when it makes perfect sense if you understand byline as brand.
In fact, in the Science Fiction magazines of the 1930's and 1940's -- you'll see a table of contents with 4 or 6 bylines, and it's all by 2 people.
Pen Names are one of the oldest inventions in publishing, going back to hand-copied manuscripts.
Are they still a relevant marketing tool today, in the world of Amazon, Kindle, Nook, B&N, etc. etc.?
If you're starting a writing career, consider carefully.
Is it cheating your reader to change the book title and re-issue it? (believe me, that's an old tradition in science fiction publishing!) Is it cheating your reader to change the byline and reissue it? Will you have to do that at some point in the distant future?
Do you want to be known for doing that?
Will you ever want to tie your body of work together under one byline?
Asimov and Heinlein, and now C. J. Cherryh and some others write "future history" -- a single universe, many novels with different genre-signatures, but hidden underneath it all, a single vision, so they all need a single byline.
Sarah A. Hoyt admits she, too, has constructed a "future history" but only because she thought it was required.
How will your fans find and follow you?
And what happens if fiction delivery system technology changes in ways you can't anticipate now?
For more considerations and dilemmas of other writers forging the way ahead, see Part II next week.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/doranna-durgin-on-changes-in-publishing.html
The organization that Duranna Durgin (oh, you gotta read her books) founded is Backlist Ebooks, just for writers trying to learn the ropes of self-publishing. The dues are steep but worth it, as with any organization of professionals.
Yes, famous writers with big followings are self-publishing!
And in fact, some writers just now breaking into print are having a problem selling titles they post themselves, or titles published via indie or e-book-only publishers because the big publishers are now flooding the market with the newest books by big names, while the big names are posting their own backlist titles.
It's sometimes hard to tell the difference when shopping an ebook catalogue, so various entrepreneurs have launched various projects to re-engineer the fiction delivery system. Everything is changing so fast that new writers -- and even long established writers -- need to think carefully before wading into the chaos.
Not all members of Backlist eBooks are using Kindle. Some just post their novels on their own website. Some distribute to a lot of formats through smashwords, and hit Kindle that way.
Doing all this self-publishing work requires climbing a very steep learning curve, and takes a lot of time away from producing actual new novels.
Along with covers, and ISBN numbers, and formatting for this-and-that system, and other such mysteries, comes the decision of whether to republish a novel under the same byline it was originally published under.
Many writers have several bylines, or pen names, as they were called in the days of pens.
How does that happen? If you've never published anything yet, should you create a bunch of bylines? Do you have to do it? Should you stop doing it?
The name you put under the Title of your work is a "brand" -- as marketers are teaching writers to call it these days. Writers have to be branded as well as genre'd!
For example, my Agent decided I needed a different byline for my Military Science Fiction novels just when he read them. He decided to market them with the challenge to the editor, figure out who wrote this from the style. The editor who bought the two couldn't figure it, then decided I should pick a male byline for them.
They are Hero and Border Dispute, which came out as Ace Mass Market novels at the peak of the military SF boom under the byline Daniel R. Kerns (before Daniel Kerns made a name for himself - that Daniel is not me).
So because of the similar and confusing byline issue, when I reissued the two novels as an omnibus Kindle edition, I put my own byline on them even though they're not the usual science fiction romance I write. They are relationship driven, human/alien stories. The problem that drives the relationship is an interstellar war -- but not against an "enemy." That's the SF twist that's so Lichtenberg -- rethink the entire meaning of "war" and "action." Find them here.
Hero & Border Dispute
So that's an example of a science fiction byline bleeding over into a sub-genre, military science fiction. Many wouldn't consider military science fiction a "sub" genre at all since science fiction started as a male-action sub-genre. Do you need a new byline for a sub-genre?
Can one byline work over many genres, and for fiction and non-fiction as well -- for non-fiction in different areas (such as Biography vs. say, Tarot)?
This is an especially sensitive question for writers of SFR, Science Fiction Romance or PNR, Paranormal Romance, vs. plain contemporary Romance, vs. Historical Romance.
My main topic on this blog has been how to raise the level of respect for the various Romance Genres in the minds of the general public -- even people who don't like or read Romance should view the genre as a high precision, demanding genre that arouses the thirst for education in a wide variety of highly regarded professions. Today, though, a byline known in the Romance genres carries a stigma that is not honorable. So should you use your own legal name? Or make up a name for your byline?
Publishers have a "legacy wisdom" from the days of printing presses, that insists one byline famous for Romance simply will not sell to Mystery readers. A byline famous for Mystery might sell to Science Fiction (Asimov comes to mind as the exception that proves all these rules) but a byline famous for Science Fiction will never, ever make it in Westerns or Romance.
The more famous your byline in one area, the more resistant publishers are to using it in another.
Take Nora Roberts for a big example of how that legacy wisdom is not applicable any more.
She wanted to write a series of sort-of-SF-Romance novels set almost in the future, called the IN DEATH series (I really like that series a lot!) So the publisher and/or Agent, or someone, decided she needed to avoid sullying her prominent Nora Roberts brand name with that icky science-fiction crap.
I don't know if it was her idea or theirs, but they put the J. D. Robb byline on the In Death Series and hid the Nora Roberts attribution from most readers.
IN DEATH didn't sell well at all, even though it was Nora Roberts style and made it into most libraries in paperback.
That's an object lesson in marketing. Content doesn't matter to sales. Brand does.
So after a few In Death novels, they "came out of the closet" (rumors abounded online about "who" J. D. Robb really was) and put the Nora Roberts byline on the front covers.
And they sold. Are still selling, big time.
Isn't that interesting? Against all legacy wisdom of publishers, science fiction romance sold to an enthusiastic Romance readership -- not so much at all to the science fiction readers, and not to the fantasy readership.
Something changed, and I think it's an important something.
Now, I have to be a nasty critic here and state that the IN DEATH series is really crummy science fiction, if you judge it as SF. (I don't, so I actually like those novels!)
It's plain vanilla Nora Roberts romance, hitting the middle of the Romance market - nothing much to talk about except "I keep buying these things and I don't know why."
So is IN DEATH different enough to warrant another byline? Apparently not. And that was in 2004. Note IN DEATH #1 is now on Kindle, and has over 200 reviews on Amazon.
Here's Treachery in Death
Note the high price on the Kindle edition whereas many members of Backlist eBooks are posting their own novels for $2.99 (and many write as well or better than Nora Roberts in my not-so-humble opinion)..
Byline and branding is all marketing, not supply and demand. After all, ebooks come with unlimited supply. Stores don't run out of copies!
Now, about the byline problem.
Which brings us back to the stigma problem.
I think the major publishers have the computerized sales results to substantiate their insistence on separate bylines for separate genres, but especially for authors who sully their brand with SCIENCE FICTION.
So I'm going to talk about a friend of mine, Sarah A. Hoyt -- we're friends on facebook. She's been sending me review copies of some of her books for a while now. Her publishers don't understand why a reviewer for a New Age Magazine (me) would rave about murder mysteries, steampunk, historicals, etc etc. But I can find something esoteric in anything because the reality behind the art is all about Love Conquers All.
I reviewed some historical mysteries Sarah A. Hoyt wrote under a different byline Sarah D’Almeida about the Musketeers:
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2009/
and in 2010
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2010/
Death of a Musketeer by Sarah D’Almeida, Berkley Prime Crime Mystery, 2006
Dying By The Sword by Sarah D’Almeida, Berkeley Prime Crime Mystery, 2008
There are a couple more and Sarah expects to get them out as ebooks with new ones in that series. (see the problem? Sarah who?)
Here's a note from her about bylines:
----------
The mysteries are an open pen name. Also, the first musketeer's mystery has been re-released with a small press: http://nakedreader.com/
Amazon it should have this version up by now. If it does well, I will finish novel #6, The Musketeer's Confessor. I've just delivered A Fatal Stain (the third of the refinishing ones.) I'm now working on Darkship Renegade, which apparently will have a "sister book" that takes place on Earth with different characters. (I didn't know this. The character mugged me one fine morning... :/ so now I have to write him.)
-----
That's how writers keep up with each other's work -- notes on facebook.
And then there's a series of well, Steampunk-ish novels Sarah did that I loved -- more or less fantasy, maybe.
Heart of Light is one of the titles.
Here's a whole list of Hoyt titles:
Sarah A. Hoyt
I've just read DARKSHIP THIEVES by Sarah A. Hoyt, and it's REALLY GOOD SF-Romance in the Linnea Sinclair tradition -- a lot of running around in space ships and space stations, but no non-humans. This one is a break-off human colony with genetic modification issues. And a really good star-crossed lovers story.
FULL DISCLOSURE - you all know I'm a reviewer, and I get free copies. I don't review everything sent to me, only 5-star worthy items.
However, there's a bit of a brag on this one - there's a quote from me on the back cover of DARKSHIP THIEVES.
(Totally aside, in Amber Benson's new Ace Fantasy, Serpent's Storm (a Calliope Reaper-Jones novel), there's a quote from me on the front-inside-page with many other reviewer quotes, but that one only credits The Monthly Aspectarian, the magazine I review for. -- the point being reviewing is not an "objective" business. You can get my attention by quoting me and by giving me freebies. As far as I know Amber Benson doesn't have any other bylines. This is the actress/director/writer Amber Benson, a brand name in itself.
As Sarah A. Hoyt says above, she's working on a sequel for DARKSHIP, and that too would be for Baen.
Oh, and I'm not done with Sara yet. Hold your hat.
She's ALSO a mystery writer with byline Elise Hyatt!!! That's the reference to "refinishing" above. (and yes, this, too is great stuff you ought to read, and nevermind the genre label).
Elise Hyatt publishes with Berkley Prime Crime mass market paperback, two titles I've seen so far,
Dipped, Stripped and Dead,
and
French Polished Murder
The series, subtitled A DARING FINDS MYSTERY is contemporary setting, ho-hum yawn normality -- but the lead character is a woman who's divorced and raising a boy from her first marriage as she gets involved with a new boyfriend.
I think these 2 books made me a fan of "Cozy Mystery" -- there's nothing hard-edged, and a lot of character depth. The Relationships while dramatically charged, are more "normal" than I've been seeing lately.
Here's the thing - DARING FINDS is science fiction in disguise.
Why? Because this lead character, Candyce Dare, is living on subsistence income from refinishing furniture and selling it on the "antique" market. Her attitude is pure SF-Hero stuff.
Trust me, there's more than one science involved in her body of knowledge. It was a hobby she cultivated while married, and now is making a living from it, learning the hard way, gaining associates in this industry, and showering us with the science of it. This is the oldest, classic SF motif of a young person without format education in a subject becoming an expert with "outside the box" thinking.
Without the extraordinary skill at science fiction worldbuilding and information feed (topics I've discussed at length in these blogs -- you can find most of my blog entries on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com by searching for the tag Tuesday), these Elise Hyatt mysteries would be incredibly boring. Instead, DARING FINDS is a series with a luscious hook, and page-turning fascination, sizzling romance angle, and lots to learn.
The DARING FINDS mysteries is the very best science fiction romance with a mystery plot. Both books satisfy on every level.
OK, you don't get to the HEA because it's a series, but you know you will get there. The writer's hand is so firm and disciplined, it's like riding with a supremely accomplished rally driver.
Good grief, by now you're so confused you don't know which writer I'm talking about.
See?
Brand. Byline. Stigma.
Readers want to grab hold of a SYMBOL and know that anything sold under that symbol delivers what the other things under that symbol deliver. And that's the re-engineering of the fiction delivery system that Backlist eBooks is participating in. How can a reader navigate this avalanche of ebooks and find just what they want when they want it?
Publishers want to know which readership to spend money promoting a byline to -- mystery, SF, Fantasy, historical -- marketers see these as separate readerships. My contention is that this was true, but is less true with every passing year.
So here we have Sarah A. Hoyt, Sarah D’Almeida (also from Berkley Prime Crime, notice?) and Elise Hyatt, and there are other bylines of this author.
On the Elise Hyatt byline, she says:
-----------
I wanted to use Alice (my name pre-citizenship was spelled Alice, pronounced Elise, hence Elise Hyatt for Daring Finds, because I will answer when called that.) Alice Rye... because they asked for "white bread" -- I'm a horrible woman. Mind you my pre citizenship name was Alice Maria da Silva Marques De Almeida, (my grandfather spelled it D'Almeida) which means there is A LOT there to use. But... no. It had to be "white bread." Ugh.
-----------
But - (hold your head and groan) - she's starting yet another byline! Here's what she says about the new one:
----------
I've also just sold (but not announced yet) a series under Sarah Marques which also has the musketeers but very different musketeers than the mysteries (like alternate versions of them. Yes, it's weird to have both in my head, but no, it's not confusing) I don't have samples up, yet. The first book is called Sword And Blood.
SWORD AND BLOOD: the first in a series in which the Three Musketeers battle vampires in an alternate France where Cardinal Richelieu is one of the undead. In order to "save" France, a deal has been made to turn the churches and a good deal of the power over to the damned. Athos himself has been turned by the wife he thought he'd killed, who is in fact one of the vampires, and must fight his bloodlust while battling for his soul.
They'll come out under Sarah Marques simply because I think my Baen sf fans would choke if they picked that book up by accident. What do I mean choke? Well... it has a lot of sex. Woman-on-top (well, vampire on top) sex. Which hasn't been in my other books. Because of THAT I think it's fair to give fair warning. As it were. So I'll let people know it's mine and it's coming, but why it's under another name. THAT one was my choice. (The book also features a pagan priestess, the battle of evil having forced the good sides to unite, as it were, and forget their differences -- she's Madame Bonacieux and the religion is meticulously researched and reconstructed, not the least from the local workings I grew up with, which, while not in France, had a lot of the remains of Celtic religion [I come from a region known as Heights Of Maia -- Alto da Maia -- which was a Cultic center of the Celtic Common Wealth as well as the site of an annual bardic festival in pre and I presume early Roman times.] Although there's still humor in this book, it's quite different from the humor in the Musketeer Mysteries. One of my friends called this the "laughing in the teeth of H*ll" type of humor.
As for why I write so much? Heaven help me if I know. Rumor has it I'm compulsive. Of course, I never believe rumors.
-------------
This multi-byline author has also been discussing in public a Marlowe and Shakespear guy-on-guy thing she wants to write but doesn't think anyone would buy it. If it sells, though, that would likely need yet another byline.
Academics discussing this writer are going to have several Excedrin Headaches at once.
To help you track down some of these items, the author gives us a whole list of URLs with samples and descriptions:
----------
Here's a web page with her novels and she gives us a list of URLs with sample chapters.
----------------
http://sarahahoyt.com/novels.html
Samples of Darkship Thieves: http://darkship.sarahahoyt.com/dst-excerpt.html
Magical British Empire: http://empire.sarahahoyt.com/
Musketeer Mysteries: http://musketeers.sarahahoyt.com/
Daring Finds: http://daringfinds.sarahahoyt.com/
Shifters -- I have a third one due this year, and so far what I know for sure is that by the end of the book, Kyrie is pregnant (whee) -- http://shifters.sarahahoyt.com/
My career started with this, which now reads incredibly clumsy to me: http://shakespeare.sarahahoyt.com/
-------------
IT'S ALL GREAT STUFF YOU SHOULD READ!!!
Now, this byline musical chairs thing is a marketing ploy that the big guys have been very successful with.
This is very old traditional methodology, and there are times when it makes perfect sense if you understand byline as brand.
In fact, in the Science Fiction magazines of the 1930's and 1940's -- you'll see a table of contents with 4 or 6 bylines, and it's all by 2 people.
Pen Names are one of the oldest inventions in publishing, going back to hand-copied manuscripts.
Are they still a relevant marketing tool today, in the world of Amazon, Kindle, Nook, B&N, etc. etc.?
If you're starting a writing career, consider carefully.
Is it cheating your reader to change the book title and re-issue it? (believe me, that's an old tradition in science fiction publishing!) Is it cheating your reader to change the byline and reissue it? Will you have to do that at some point in the distant future?
Do you want to be known for doing that?
Will you ever want to tie your body of work together under one byline?
Asimov and Heinlein, and now C. J. Cherryh and some others write "future history" -- a single universe, many novels with different genre-signatures, but hidden underneath it all, a single vision, so they all need a single byline.
Sarah A. Hoyt admits she, too, has constructed a "future history" but only because she thought it was required.
How will your fans find and follow you?
And what happens if fiction delivery system technology changes in ways you can't anticipate now?
For more considerations and dilemmas of other writers forging the way ahead, see Part II next week.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, May 15, 2011
What Are Your Earliest Science Fiction Memories?
A thread on the LinkedIn group "Science Fiction readers, writers, collectors, and artists" has caught my imagination. Discussion starter Joseph asked "What or Who Influenced You Most To Become an SF Fan?" and the answers take me back.
Some movies and stories I never considered SF, until Orson Scott Card's book "How To Write Science Fiction And Fantasy" explained what was what. For instance, I enjoyed the superhero comics, not so much Captain America, or Batman, and I was slightly ashamed of liking Superman (probably because he wore his underpants outside his trousers), but I did like the Norse-god influenced heroes.
Would one say that Batman and Spiderman were not SF, but Superman was, because he was an alien? Or did Batman's tech make him SF, too?
Asimov's Foundation series needed no definition by OSC, but maybe I wouldn't have thought of John Wyndham's The Day Of The Triffids as SF.
It was written in 1951. When it was written is neither here nor there, except that it was already a course book in the 1960s. I must have read it in the Upper Fourth. I think "Lord Of The Flies" was also on the agenda. We read the dystopian classics in the Sixth Form (but called them "Modern Depressing" at the time!).... 1984, Brave New World, and others.
On TV, I watched Dr Who with the original William Hartnell and the persistent Daleks. Occasionally, I look at R2D2 and amuse myself with a mental compare and contrast session. I also recall thoroughly enjoying (alas!!!) Thunderbirds.
When my contemporaries might have been fancying one of other of The Beatles, I had a crush on a marionette named Scott. Oh dear!
Captain Scarlet did not have the same appeal for me. My fancies had moved to the dark side, and "This is the voice of the Mysterons" haunted my dreams. Then, along came Star Trek, and I preferred the tall, dark and continent --or perhaps I should say, logical-- Spock. But the truth is, I don't like a promiscuous hero.... which is probably a terrible thing for a romance author to admit.
Another dark crush was James Mason as Captain Nemo in "2000 Leagues Under The Sea".
I cannot put a date to when we saw "Battlestar Galactica" on British TV, or to The Twilight Zone, or The Other Limit, or Tales From The Crypt. Or to when I read "The Andromeda Strain". I'd left Britain by the time "Dark Skies" was shown, of course.
Musically, I liked Rick Wakeman's epic SF/F albums, especially "Journey To The Center Of The Earth", and some, but not all, of David Bowie's SF period. I dimly recall that Hawkwind "did" space rock, and Pink Floyd were also known as space rockers, but only Dark Side Of The Moon was on my radar.
What about you?
Some movies and stories I never considered SF, until Orson Scott Card's book "How To Write Science Fiction And Fantasy" explained what was what. For instance, I enjoyed the superhero comics, not so much Captain America, or Batman, and I was slightly ashamed of liking Superman (probably because he wore his underpants outside his trousers), but I did like the Norse-god influenced heroes.
Would one say that Batman and Spiderman were not SF, but Superman was, because he was an alien? Or did Batman's tech make him SF, too?
Asimov's Foundation series needed no definition by OSC, but maybe I wouldn't have thought of John Wyndham's The Day Of The Triffids as SF.
It was written in 1951. When it was written is neither here nor there, except that it was already a course book in the 1960s. I must have read it in the Upper Fourth. I think "Lord Of The Flies" was also on the agenda. We read the dystopian classics in the Sixth Form (but called them "Modern Depressing" at the time!).... 1984, Brave New World, and others.
On TV, I watched Dr Who with the original William Hartnell and the persistent Daleks. Occasionally, I look at R2D2 and amuse myself with a mental compare and contrast session. I also recall thoroughly enjoying (alas!!!) Thunderbirds.
When my contemporaries might have been fancying one of other of The Beatles, I had a crush on a marionette named Scott. Oh dear!
Captain Scarlet did not have the same appeal for me. My fancies had moved to the dark side, and "This is the voice of the Mysterons" haunted my dreams. Then, along came Star Trek, and I preferred the tall, dark and continent --or perhaps I should say, logical-- Spock. But the truth is, I don't like a promiscuous hero.... which is probably a terrible thing for a romance author to admit.
Another dark crush was James Mason as Captain Nemo in "2000 Leagues Under The Sea".
I cannot put a date to when we saw "Battlestar Galactica" on British TV, or to The Twilight Zone, or The Other Limit, or Tales From The Crypt. Or to when I read "The Andromeda Strain". I'd left Britain by the time "Dark Skies" was shown, of course.
Musically, I liked Rick Wakeman's epic SF/F albums, especially "Journey To The Center Of The Earth", and some, but not all, of David Bowie's SF period. I dimly recall that Hawkwind "did" space rock, and Pink Floyd were also known as space rockers, but only Dark Side Of The Moon was on my radar.
What about you?
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Winding Up a Series
I just finished reading THE LAND OF PAINTED CAVES, the final book in Jean Auel's "Earth's Children" series, which started with CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR several decades ago. If an author produces an open-ended series like Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover, the Star Trek universe, Terry Pratchett's Discworld, or Jacqueline's Sime-Gen future history, the stories don't necessarily ever have to stop. A "closed" series, though, has to come to a satisfying end. In theory, Auel could have gone on writing about Ayla and her family and friends indefinitely. Life, after all, doesn't have a definite end (as I mentioned last week); art creates that illusion. But Auel chose to set the climax of her heroine's life story at the point where Ayla achieves her goal of becoming a Zelandoni (spiritual leader and healer) among the people of her mate, Jondalar. In my opinion, this book is a bit weak on plot. Fans of the series will probably enjoy, as I did, reading about the geology, fauna, flora, life, customs, foods, medicines, and crafts of the Stone Age and meeting familiar characters again. Somebody who hasn't read the earlier books would be lost. The story meanders along from one easily overcome obstacle to another until a strongly defined conflict appears in about the last 100 pages. The novel is held together by thematic elements, echoing Ayla's growth throughout the series, and by the phases of her Zelandoni training. Her status in this book reminds me of a reviewer's comment about the characters in Robert Heinlein's later works: They don't have problems, only transitory difficulties. Fortunately, Ayla doesn't feel like a Mary Sue because she's puzzled by other people's astonished reactions to her, doesn't consider herself extraordinary, and shows awareness of her own mistakes and flaws. Auel's conclusion to the series has Ayla emerging from the rite of passage of her "call" as a Zelandoni with a life-changing new Gift of Knowledge for the people.
This week, coincidentally, the TV show SMALLVILLE airs its series finale. The conclusion of this story cycle has to be less theme-focused than plot-focused. We've known from the beginning that as the climactic final event, Clark has to publicly assume the role of Superman. Since the basic premise of the series was "Clark Kent as a teenager and young adult in his pre-Superman years," I originally thought it would end with the end of Clark's boyhood, when he started working at the DAILY PLANET alongside Lois Lane. I was a little surprised when the series continued past that point, and personally I haven't found the last couple of seasons as absorbing as the earlier ones. Nevertheless, I'm eagerly looking forward to the grand finale. Glimpses in trailers and reviews have assured us we'll see Clark transforming from the Blur to Superman and, almost as important for some fans, marrying Lois. Their romance and the unveiling of Clark as the hero he was always destined to become constitute the story arcs this program has to resolve in order to satisfy its audience.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
This week, coincidentally, the TV show SMALLVILLE airs its series finale. The conclusion of this story cycle has to be less theme-focused than plot-focused. We've known from the beginning that as the climactic final event, Clark has to publicly assume the role of Superman. Since the basic premise of the series was "Clark Kent as a teenager and young adult in his pre-Superman years," I originally thought it would end with the end of Clark's boyhood, when he started working at the DAILY PLANET alongside Lois Lane. I was a little surprised when the series continued past that point, and personally I haven't found the last couple of seasons as absorbing as the earlier ones. Nevertheless, I'm eagerly looking forward to the grand finale. Glimpses in trailers and reviews have assured us we'll see Clark transforming from the Blur to Superman and, almost as important for some fans, marrying Lois. Their romance and the unveiling of Clark as the hero he was always destined to become constitute the story arcs this program has to resolve in order to satisfy its audience.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
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