Agent Incite

Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing Is Flying Solo

One of the odder and most disappointing things about sff publishing in particular, and the industry as a whole, but particularly our genre is how often it reaches back to touch its past. I’ve heard or seen innumerable times editors and publisher that they were looking for “Phillip K. Dick” or “Heinlein” or the like or “the next” whoever they fell in love with when they were introduced to the genre.

If the genre were still in its infancy, this would be fine. But depending on when you date the from it is well over a century old. That’s more than old enough to have a pair of overalls, a business suit, and to dress slutty whenever it likes as long as the story is good. I recently bought a zombie novel to research a publisher. I A: don’t have any real affection for zombies B: don’t much care for the “and then s/he falls in love with the non-human on page 24 trope but still enjoyed the book because (mostly) it was handled well, and the story had both internal consistency and solid characters.

This book wasn’t from one of the big names in SFF, but still a respectable house. Even this house has its own taint of the “just like” disease. As this post reminded me, speciation sometimes happens among odd members of a population. Sometimes those oddities rise to being a new and potentially dominant group, or simply the dominant type within a species. Other times they separate only to die off from too small a gene pool. Aurochs don’t exist today because they couldn’t compete. They didn’t think about their environment, they just failed to adapt.

The collective mindset that sees the genre of limitless horizons constantly caught in public with its hands at work south of the equator seems odd. Yes, a reverence for history is important. Ancestor worship is probably not a good business model however. But the great thing about societies, and environments is that they change. So must businesses. Farmers are known for a operational meme that tends to eschew change unnecessarily yet still adapt. Nowhere in the western world is slash and burn agriculture the most common method of soil renewal. The stock market isn’t run on little pieces of paper and rushed across the room, you will not find many schools have their students using chalkboards. Each of these example enterprises looks outside itself for its maintenance and growth, they look forward.

As with certain religious groups that chose not to reproduce, and social groups that became severely inbred over time the consequences of not adding new blood will eventually come to the fore. Neither the inbreeding nor the willful desire not to mix your genes with another is in the end any different from flying solo, and as someone once infamously quipped at a writers workshop: flying solo might feel good but it doesn’t produce anything.

Climate Change Needs To Cause Corporate Culture Change

The publishing industry has undergone a number of big changes over the last century. Publishing went from a country club for intellectuals to a mainstream way of aiding education and information, and then entertainment. Like television it went from a number of major sources that could be counted on one hand to a large lumber, then much like television or the “baby Bells” there was contraction into major powers, and a second wave of specialists to fill in the gaps.

And then came ebooks. When Jim Baen pioneered DRMfree ebooks long before other major publishers even considered it as an option, he said he did so because he wanted to be around in 15 years. Like many things in business, the doom and gloom and quick demises aren’t as cut and dried as the loudest voices would have you believe. This year other publishers large publishers have gotten (slowly) aboard the good ship Non-Crippled Content.

At a recent convention I spoke at, some of the most popular panels were on using the new independent boutique publishers like Open Road Media, Naked Reader Press, Bookview Cafe and others to get books into the hands of readers. The climate seven years ago when I entered the business was that these outlets (or their predecessors really, none of the examples were extant at that point) were non viable.

That is both true and untrue. The boutique publishers don’t have the financial clout to buy endcaps in the top 200 Barnes and Noble stores. They don’t have the brand recognition of Tor, DAW or EOS. They do however have the ability to identify, and quickly act upon an emerging or underserved market. At this point in time, the Mil-SF fans are greatly underserved by the major publishers.  Steampunk is still getting a large portion of it’s push from anthologies and small presses, and not from any of “the big six”.

It’s time for the culture at the big publishers to change too. While they still hold the advantages of brand recognition, reach, organization, distribution, and cash they need to use them. Main stream publishing, certainly in fiction, and likely in general runs the risk of going the way of AM radio. Sure it’s still there but how relevant is it? Where is it actually used? Where and who prefers it to other sources?

While I’m pretty much neutral on Amazon, this article points out that the reason the revolution will not be televised is that it is going to be webcast and streamed to a couple score million handheld devices. How-to-books on getting published and using a distribution system other than that of the big publishers themselves are the hammers bringing down the walls. The walled gardens that “mobile internet” had smashed down years ago are not going to last another decade for publishers.

“The Big Six” and the other larger publishers have a very small list of options, and only two really outcomes. With the advent of the Cult of The MBA the latter is the more important for the bean-counters: Outcome 1: Flourish at the highend survival as a minimum, Outcome 2: Extinction. Neither will be quick, it will almost certainly take two to three years to fully adapt to a reasonable projection of where to line up for the entertainment income of readers will be in five years. But it needs to happen.

Any publisher that is not better serving the consumer by offering a higher percentage of what they want to read in easy to find, easy to consume, and reasonably durable format in two to three years, well anyone under 45 won’t have to worry about retiring from that company.  One of the not so secret ingredients to success in any consumer driven business is pretty simple, and increasingly overlooked; have a product people want to buy. This means having writers who are producing enjoyable entertainment. And not all the same thing. The movie industry has room for Avengers and Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

The market for readers is and always was fragmented. Universal appeal doesn’t exist, never has, never will. The Harry Potter series was popular because it touched a lot of emotional responses for a lot of people. But there are still millions more people who never read one of the books or saw any of the movies than did either or both, much less those who saw all eight movies and read all seven books. McCormick certainly sells more pepper and basil in America than lemon grass or roasted sesame seeds, but they have all on the shelves because they will sell. The key for publishers is first to have the product and second to make consumers (aka money sources) aware.

Thanks to Janine Bruce for sharing the link.