Viable Paradise: A Travelogue (Part 6)

Friday morning there was a "free-play" discussion in the common room instead of the usual group critique. I admit that, having burned the candle in multiple directions over the last few days, this exhausted writer slept in a little bit instead of attending. It's a good thing I did because the next thing up was Patrick Nielsen Hayden's lecture about The State of the Industry, which was a fascinating blend of historical and sociological analysis of the factors which have shaped publishing in general and genre publishing in specific over the last 50 years. Patrick, having a long and illustrious (and now award-winning!) career as an editor at Tor Books, one of the heavy hitters in the genre publishing field, knows of whereof he speaks, so all the wee little writers in the room sat up and *listened* when Patrick (assisted ably, of course, by Teresa, also a longterm and illustrious editor at Tor, even though at the moment she's moved on to other things) gave forth his wisdom. I share what little bits of said received wisdom I managed to capture (again, this is long so those of you not specifically interested in book publishing or writing, feel free to just skim right on down to the next part):

-"The hidden history of category publishing is a history of distribution."
-Magazine publishing (e.g. magazines which publish short fiction) still exists, but it's more our "R&D" lab than a valid paying market these days.
-The history of the F/SF book industry is completely tied up in the post-war emergence of the mass-market paperback. (Mass-market refers to the distribution system, not the size or content of the books themselves.)
-Before mass-market paperbacks, book stores were few and far between, and mostly found near or in urban centers. There were whole states without a single bookstore. This led to the system of bookstores buying books on a returnable basis.
-Now we are a culture with "ambient" books--books are everywhere, sold in a wide variety of places besides bookstores.
-The mass-market revolution had been resisted at first because of the difference in the price point of a paperpack and a hardcover
-The key point that Ballantine and the other early paperback publishers realized was that they could treat mass-market paperbacks like magazines, as far as distribution goes--they could sell them in the same channels and in the same ways (returnable, swappable). This worked so well that bookstores eventually said "ok, fine, we'll take them"
-There was a certain fixed amount of rack space in this mass-market paperback system for F/SF books, and so in these early days you got a bunch of not always top quality books published in order to make sure that rack space was always filled (and filled on time)
-From the 1920's through the 1980's, F/SF wasn't a particularly defined industry, but there were holes to fill in magazines and on racks--so what was sold was not necessarily the best of the best or the super rockstar writers, it was all mixed in: a robust ecology with many levels
-From the 1980's on, the greatest factor that affected both publishing and the F/SF field was distribution: there weren't many distributors and most of them were involved primarily in distributing magazines and newspapers, with paperbacks as mostly an afterthought
-In the 1980's all kinds of retail changed--chains went national, and there was much merging and acquisition, but also better IT and informational systems
-All this merging/scaling up to national levels was catastrophic to F/SF because those paperbacks had only been a little side biz in the first place
-BUT the bookstore chains were also wildly scaling up to hugeness levels at the same time, because they realized they could make more money if they expanded their square footage…and this saved F/SF because a lot of backlist was required to fill up the big shelves at Borders and B&N and the like
-But the big bookstore chains still get a better return on hardcover and trade paperbacks
-Trade publishing doesn't have the same pressure of having to "fill slots" like mass-market paperbacks does
-Now, industry is less and less focused on filling pre-reserved space and more interested in assessing audience/$ potential for individual authors and works (so the midlevel is increasingly hard to publish)
-So all this really does change the advice around how to have a genre writer career--it's most important now to be a "brand", to be unique and memorable in some way, or at least to appeal to some specific niche taste
-Practical tip: deliver your book on time or even early, and you might be able to grab a mass-market slot that someone else blew
-Books are part of a bigger discourse in literature: the more you read, the more you read
-Every book is both an advertisement for itself and for the concept of books (and reading) in general
-Much more information "travels" with the book now--the art on the cover, the flap or back copy--all give immediate information about what kind of book it is so that the target niche is clear
-Covers are an advertisement for the book--they represent a feeling about what it will be like to read the book, not necessarily any specific scene or character
-Bookstores have categories in order to help readers more easily select what they like to read in a new book--it's a sorting process
-The core activity of publishing is to make public (not copyediting, not printing)
-Publishers really are a brand too
-Publishers are authenticators
-Writers are not just a specific kind of storytellers--we deal in the virtual reality of fiction narrative as a particular art form
-Follow your muse but also pay very close attention to what your readers want (the readers that really like your stuff, anyway)

Mind full to bursting of new perspectives, it was now time to decompress and take that one last chance to go see something of the Vineyard. Kim, Dorothy, Marta, Eric and I decided to go out to lunch (all the other days we'd just made sandwiches or frozen pizza in our townhouses), so we walked along the beach into the scenic little town of Oak Bluffs, yakking all the way. I hadn't had much contact with either Eric or Marta up until then (although Marta had been the other writer in the hot seat with me for Wednesday's group critique), and I'm so glad we had a little space to connect, because both turned out to be very cool people. It makes me sad, looking back on this weeks later, that I didn't find a way (where are those space/time continuum manipulators when you need them?) to hang out in more direct ways with each and every one of the VPXI people--because I know that under the surface of each of them was probably a person I'd really like.

In fact (tangent alert), I have to say that one of the most amazing aspects of VP, and one that is really hard to translate effectively into words, is the way in which hanging around these people felt like finally coming home to tribe. Not the tribe I've written about before, the real one based on both affinity and personal history, but the more abstract one based on cultural preferences, which I riffed on here when I first went to Comic-Con and encountered the biggest gathering of geek tribe I'd ever seen. (And Cory Doctorow did an amazing job riffing on the concept of affinity tribe based on time zone in his book Eastern Standard Tribe--go download it or buy it and read it!) But the particular tribe at VP was a specific subset of that larger geek tribe: the storytellers. (The bards, if you will.) I didn't quite realize what a specific subset of geek culture I was part of until I hung around these folks for a week. Writers, serious writers (and I am forced to conclude that everyone who comes to a workshop like VP is, indeed, miles above the slush pile even if in our darkest hours we feel like we too are slushy) are a particular species. We're the people who care about story of all kind, but especially like to play with the "virtual reality of literature" art form as Patrick mentioned above. And not only do we like to play with words and tell stories as well as read them, we like asking "what if" questions, and exploring our own human realities and relationships from the perspective of other worlds, other times and other beings. (Honestly, how can you not love genre fiction? But I digress.)

Based on others' reports of their experiences at VP that I'd read before I'd applied, one of the main reasons I wanted to go to VP (well, other than to get my predilection for overly long sentences and parenthetical asides shamed out of me by professionals) was to get some of the "tribe" experience, or at least make a few more writerly friends. But what I found really went beyond my expectations. We storyteller geeks, we *get* each other. We share the same cultural references, like other geeks (not having to mutter Star Wars or Lord of the Rings references half under my breath as a self-indulgent aside during normal conversation: priceless). But we also quite excitedly wanted to talk about worldbuilding and story structure and character development, and on the struggles of living a writer's life while trying to make money and raise children and deal with "mundanes". There was an immediate acceptance there, which I think is indicative of geeks in general, but was heightened by the fact that we all had the same "I want to get serious and improve my writing" goals in coming to VP. Finding this tribe was transformative for me, and I am frantically trying to rearrange my life so as not to lose track of/touch with them. (Hence the staying up late reading others' LJ's, instead of working on my own or doing the sensible thing and going to bed already so I can get up and write my own stuff the next morning.) I *will* read (and comment on!) others' blogs. I *will* go to cons and try to meet up with people. I *will* try to keep up email correspondence. I will *not*, in the famous words of Toad the Wet Sprocket, take these things for granted.

All right, there was so much tangent there and there is still so much to tell about Friday's experiences, I think I'll end this entry here. (Besides I'm way late to go wake up the kids and get the morning routine rolling. Yikes!)