Relativity

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Just as important is what’s not included. Don’t try to synopsize the story. It’s an instant turnoff to read things like “‘Zombies’ is a poignant love triangle between two humans and an alien slime-being…” Likewise, don’t tell the editor why you wrote the story: “I was inspired to pen this tale after discovering slime between my own toes—moving me to ask that classic SF question of ‘What if?’…” None of that matters; the story should stand on its own.

  SASEs

  A SASE is a self-addressed stamped envelope. That means the destination address—the one that appears on the lower half of the envelope—is your own complete address. (We got some SASEs that were addressed to us, instead of the submitter.)

  We were stunned to see how many people sent envelopes with no stamps, or sent big SASEs for return of the manuscript, but with insufficient postage. Also, don’t send loose stamps: stick the stamps on the envelope yourself.

  If you’re submitting to a market outside your own country, you need stamps from that country—Canadian stamps are no good in the United States, and vice versa. If you can’t get hold of foreign stamps, buy International Postal Reply Coupons at the post office, and include one for every thirty grams of material you want mailed back to you.

  You must submit a SASE with every story manuscript (although one SASE per small batch of poems is fine). Some writers made multiple submissions to Tesseracts 6 on different dates, but only sent a SASE with the first submission, expecting us to sort through hundreds of envelopes to find theirs (instead, of course, they got left to the very end of the reading process).

  Others said they hadn’t bothered with a SASE, but told us we could reply by e-mail. That’s a no-no: never ask an editor for special treatment. The only way in which you want to stand out from the crowd is by making a proper, professional-looking submission.

  Good luck!

  Self-Promotion

  At the science-fiction convention ConText ’91 in Edmonton, I gave a talk on self-promotion. The room was packed, and the talk seemed to make a big splash. Audio tapes of it have been circulating for the intervening six years, and people still ask me questions about self-promotion. More: large numbers of Canadian writers now seem to be doing the things I discussed.

  I say “seem to,” because although much energy is going into their self-promotion, these writers aren’t getting the results they want. So, this time out, I thought I’d give you Rob’s Six Rules of Self-Promotion.

  Rule One: You’ve Got to Break Eggs to Make Eggs

  Self-promotion costs money. If you were starting a dental practice, you’d expect to spend tens of thousands of dollars getting your business off the ground. Why should a new writer balk at spending some money, too? I met one wannabe recently who said he couldn’t afford to do any promotion while he was starting up, but would do some once he got established. He was missing the whole point: promotion is a large part of how you get established.

  On the other hand, your promotional efforts have to be cost-effective. I do a newsletter a couple of times a year called SFwriter.com: News from the Robert J. Sawyer Web Site. It goes to the media, booksellers, and librarians, but I normally don’t send it to individual readers (although I do put a small supply out on the freebie tables at SF conventions). Printing and mailing costs me about a buck an issue—meaning if I mail the newsletter to someone, and that person decides to buy my latest paperback because of it, I’ve lost about fifty cents on the deal. Which brings us to…

  Rule Two: Let the Media Leverage Your Efforts

  It’s pointless to try to promote your book one-on-one to readers—and it’s also irritating for the reader. They call it “mass-market” publishing for a reason: a U.S. publisher will want to sell a minimum of 3,000 hardcovers or 15,000 paperbacks. With real perseverance, you might persuade thirty people to drop the thirty-odd bucks on your hardcover, and maybe even 150 people to spend eight bucks on your paperback. But, for all that making a pest of yourself, you’ve only reached one percent of the number of people you need to make the book even marginally successful.

  Instead of going after individual book-buyers, almost all of your promotional efforts should be aimed at the media: newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. They’ll get word of your work out to thousands of people for you. Learn to do press releases (there are samples on my web page at www.sfwriter.com, and you’ll find some more in the wonderful book The Writer’s Guide to Self-Promotion and Publicity by Elane Feldman, published by Writer’s Digest Books).

  Also, learn to send your press releases effectively. The cheapest, fastest, and easiest way is with a fax modem: I write my press releases on my computer, and, while I’m sleeping, I have my fax modem send them to a list of forty or so media outlets, including CBC’s Midday, CTV’s Canada AM, The Globe and Mail, other daily papers across Canada, my local community papers, and the Canadian Press wire service. Note that press releases must be timely: I’ve seen many writers win awards, then, a month later, decide to snail-mail out a press release. Of course, they end up getting no coverage at all.

  Rule Three: Quality Counts

  Still, you may want to do some flyers or bookmarks—although, in my experience, these are the least effective marketing tool. But if you are going to do them, they have to look professional. If you don’t know anything about layout and design—learn. I’m lucky enough to have a wife who worked for years in the printing industry, but for those who don’t, get a copy of the book Looking Good in Print: A Guide to Basic Design for Desktop Publishing by Roger C. Parker (Ventana Press).

  Print your promotional material on fancy paper. The best selection (but also the priciest) is from the mail-order firm Paper Direct (1-800-A-PAPERS); most office-supply stores also carry desktop-publishing papers from GeoPaper, GreatPapers!, and other suppliers.

  Rule Four: Promotion is Cumulative

  The first time you send out a press release, you won’t get much response—maybe a couple of column-inches in the local weekly paper, and that only if you’re lucky.

  But it’s just like sending out short stories. You can’t give up after the first rejection. A little while ago, Imprint (a weekly book program produced by TVOntario and also carried nationally on CBC Newsworld) phoned me and said, “We’ve got a thick file folder about you, and we’ve been meaning to do a piece on you for a long time. Now’s the time.” Unless you win a major award, or a movie is made of your novel, not much will happen around the publication of a single book—but if you draw attention to your work on a regular basis, you will become a media presence…and that translates directly into book sales.

  Rule Five: Become Comfortable with Yourself

  I’ve sat on both sides of the interviewer’s table: as of this writing, I’ve done sixty-six TV appearances, countless radio programs, and have been interviewed over a hundred times for print—but I’ve also conducted a lot of interviews with other people, and I’m constantly amazed at how poorly most writers present themselves.

  Be expansive, expressive, and bubbly. If you’re on TV, talk with your hands, smile, laugh—have a good time. The only way you can come off looking badly is if you’re nervous and defensive. (One Canadian SF author recently scored quite a coup—an appearance on a network talk show. But the first thing he did was try to distance himself from the proceedings, and throughout he looked uncomfortable. What could have sold thousands of books probably ended up selling only a few hundred.)

  Take every opportunity you can to hone your public persona. Do readings, talks, classroom appearances, and so on. Take a public-speaking course or join Toastmasters. Record yourself with a camcorder. (Me, I did a degree in Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson; after that, there was no conceivable circumstance under which I could be uncomfortable on camera or in front of a microphone.)

  Never take offense at the interviewer’s questions (you’ll turn him or her right off if you start quibbling over the use of the term “sci-fi”) and never talk over the interviewer’s head. You know who Olaf Stapledon
is, what an ansible is, and so on—but the interviewer won’t, and neither will the audience.

  Indeed, almost every interviewer you’ll ever speak to will know almost nothing about science fiction, and probably won’t have read your work.

  The single most important thing you can give in an answer is context; producers have repeatedly cited my ability to do this as the reason they keep asking me back on their shows.

  The interviewer might say, “I guess SF books are riding the coattails of the success of The X-Files and the re-release of Star Wars.” Don’t reply with a simple yes or no; instead, give an interesting, context-rich response: “Actually, I don’t think that has much to do with it. We’re about to enter the 21st century; in the past year or so we’ve discovered evidence that there was once life on Mars, and we’ve found planets orbiting other stars. What could be more natural than for readers to be turning to a literature that devotes itself to exploring these issues?” Note that I say “literature”—in interviews, I always refer to SF as literature, and myself as an artist. Connect you and your work to the larger arts community that the interviewer is already familiar with; you’ll find you get much less smarmy coverage.

  Note, too, that I didn’t force any reference to my own work; such references will come up naturally in the conversation, but you’ll seem pushy and insecure if you keep mentioning your own books.

  Rule Six: Write Really Well

  All the self-promotion in the world is pointless if you don’t have a great product. I spend maybe a day a month on self-promotion activities—and the other twenty-nine days working very hard at my craft. I received the most publicity I’ve ever had when I won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award for Best Novel of the Year. Sure, I did everything I could to capitalize on the win, but winning the award happened because I wrote a good story—and that’s the real key to getting people’s attention.

  Professionalism

  This final installment of “On Writing” is devoted to what my wife Carolyn Clink and I discovered while editing the Canadian SF&F anthology Tesseracts 6.

  Unlike many anthologies, the Tesseracts series is wide open: anyone may submit work and it will be seriously considered (indeed, our mandate was to bend over backward to find work by new writers; Carolyn and I are proud of the number of beginners from whom we bought stories or poems).

  Still, despite the high quality of the work we did choose, as a group, it appears Canadian writers have a long way to go in the area of professionalism.

  First, we were stunned by the very large percentage of submissions that were not in standard manuscript format. There’s only one universally accepted way to do it, folks: Courier 10-pitch / 12-point type, or as near as you can manage it, on one side of white 8.5x11" paper; 6.5" line; double-spaced (i.e., 24-point leading); ragged right margins; italics shown by underlining; blank lines between scenes shown by a centered number sign; a descriptive header and a page number on each page after the first; and, if your story ends near the bottom of the page, some indication that this is indeed really the last page (we had to phone one author to ask him if his story really did end with the words that appeared on the last line of what we thought was the final page).

  Despite our intention to be forgiving, after slogging through about the tenth manuscript with no page numbers I vowed I would summarily reject unread any unpaginated manuscript that happened to fall on the floor; life is too short to try to figure out which page goes after which other page by piecing together the text.

  On fonts: you may think Times, or some other proportional typeface, looks nicer than Courier. However, most editing is still done by hand. Trying to circle the extraneous letter for deletion in “illlicit” is much harder in a proportional font—and damn near impossible in a sans-serif one. If your printer can do Courier, use it (it was frustrating to see all the authors who had Courier page headers or cover letters, demonstrating they clearly could use that font, but who set their body copy in a proportional face).

  The guy who e-mailed us a manuscript because he was too busy to print it out and put it in an envelope didn’t do himself a favor—but even if a market is open to e-mail submissions (and ours wasn’t), you’re shooting yourself in the foot sending a word-processing file without telling the editor in a plain text attachment exactly what word-processing program, on what computing platform, was used to create the manuscript (and you really should check first to make sure it’s a format the editor can read).

  A big part of professionalism is appearances—including giving the illusion that the market you’re currently submitting to is your first choice. All those people who submitted multiple manuscripts on the day the anthology was announced were telegraphing that they were pulling old stories out of their trunk—and the person who submitted stories clearly dated “1986” and “1989” made it blatantly obvious. (Indeed, you’re not helping yourself by submitting more than two or three pieces to any market—no editor wants to see every old dog you haven’t been able to sell elsewhere.)

  And please—don’t ask for special treatment. There’s been a lot of grousing lately about how long publications take to reply, but, as a writer, ask yourself whether you have been part of the perceived slowdown by demanding that extra time be spent on your submission.

  Some writers asked for responses by e-mail, or by a specific date, or wanted critiques. Sorry, but the only way any editor can process the hundreds of submissions he or she receives is to handle each one exactly the same way. If you want acknowledgment of receipt of a submission, send a stamped postcard with the work’s title on it; don’t send an extra empty envelope and expect the editor to take the time to write you a letter to put in it.

  As I said, we tried to be forgiving of such lapses. But the one thing we couldn’t forgive, and were frankly shocked to see so much of, was the lack of basic literacy. We read countless stories whose authors didn’t know the difference between “its” (the neutral version of his or hers) and “it’s” (a contraction of “it is”). More subtle, but still grating, were the large number of people who didn’t know the difference between “that” and “which.” (“That” introduces a defining characteristic, and isn’t normally preceded by a comma: “This is the novel that Jacques wrote.” “Which” introduces an incidental characteristic, and is usually preceded by a comma: “That novel, which is actually quite good, was written by Jacques.”

  Also irritating were those who used words that weren’t in their computerized spelling checkers and couldn’t be bothered to look up the correct spelling in a dictionary (there’s no such thing as a “trilobyte”).

  It was also abundantly clear that many authors never looked at their printouts before submitting their stories. Some had missing lines of text or overprinted lines that even a cursory glance would have detected.

  A key habit of the true professional: reading the guidelines. We said our reporting time was “10 to 12 weeks following the August 15 deadline” (which I’ll point out, for those complaining that response times are getting longer and longer, is a much faster turnaround than the ten months Tesseracts 3 took to respond). Those people who started pestering me at my private e-mail address—which appeared nowhere on the guidelines—in advance of the expiration of our reporting period made no friends; those who cut no slack if reporting went a short period after that time frame likewise were no fun to deal with.

  Finally, a word or two about content. Please note that song lyrics aren’t public domain: you can’t simply add them into your story. Many authors quoted from popular songs in their manuscripts, but without paying a permission fee, this is illegal—and since most such fees have to be renegotiated for every new edition or translation of the work, most anthology editors will reject a work on the spot that contains such quotes, even if a note of permission for the current edition is included.

  We saw a large number of virtual-reality or cyberpunk stories; those are pretty moribund subgenres. We also saw a lot of high fantasy, most of it
not very fresh. What we didn’t see much of was hard SF; a well-written spaceship story with realistic characterization and dialog would have been a shoo-in.

  Anyway, Tesseracts 6 has passed into history. Paula Johanson and Jean-Louis Trudel are editing Tesseracts 7, which is now open for submissions. Apply the advice above—and, of course, write a good story—and maybe you’ll make a sale to them. But, no matter who you’re submitting to, always remember to behave like a pro—and someday you’ll actually be one.

  About Rob

  Autobiography

  I wrote this 10,000-word autobiographical essay in January 2003, for Gale Research’s Contemporary Authors; it appeared in volume 212 of that series, published early in 2004.

  My father, John Arthur Sawyer, was born in Toronto in 1924; his ancestry is Scottish and English. My mother, Virginia Kivley Peterson Sawyer, was born in Appleton, Minnesota, in 1925, but grew up in Berkeley, California. Her background is Swedish and Norwegian. They were married at the University of Chicago in 1952, where they were both graduate students in economics.

  Shortly thereafter, they moved to Ottawa, Canada’s capital, where my dad was employed by what was then called the Dominion Bureau of Statistics and is now known as Statistics Canada. I was born in Ottawa on April 29, 1960—but my parents almost immediately moved again, this time to Toronto, so that my father could take a teaching post at the University of Toronto starting in the fall of 1960.

  After a few years, my mother started teaching at the University of Toronto, as well, lecturing in statistics. It was unusual, back then, having a mother who worked outside the home, and even more so to have one who worked in an intellectually challenging field; my friends didn’t quite know what to make of it. Still, it had advantages: we were the first family on our street to have two cars—one for my dad and one for my mom. These days, that’s very common, but it wasn’t then, and I was very proud of both my parents.