The flip side to all this, of course, and what makes it all worthwhile, is that once you sell to a major magazine, like the ones I mentioned (or the one you're reading), you've beaten the odds and there is no question that you belong there. Not many triumphs in your future will be quite as satisfying or meaningful.
Okay, so much for slush. It's probably just as depressing as when you began reading this, but hopefully it's a little less mysterious.
* * *
The Conventional Wisdom
Written by Barry N. Malzberg
Kurt Vonnegut called the phenomenon "Foma" . . . myths whose falsity was well understood but which we had quietly agreed to treat as if they were true. Simple comfort in an increasingly uncomfortable century. Therefore: Majority Rule. The Democratic Principal. Honest Elections. The trustworthiness of our leaders, the unimpeachable testimony of history. The benign nature of the Industrial Revolution. Flossing will prevent cavities. A just God presiding over a rational universe. Eternal life for those who follow His Commandments and take the text of the Gospels as sacrosanct. I could go on.
Perhaps I will not.
The Foma of science fiction are not as entirely embracing (we are, after all, merely another example of niche publishing) but in their quiet way they are equally pervasive. The Astounding of John W. Campbell as the repository of stories centered by "rigorous science" and "philosophical rigor". The primacy of the 1940's "Golden Age" Astounding which all alone created a huge readership and thus saved us from oblivion. The daring inventiveness of a forward-looking field of literature which made common currency in that most crucial decade of The Bomb and its terrible implication. The courage of science fiction readers and entrepreneurs during that Golden Age. ("It is a proud and lonely thing to be a fan" as Wallace MacFarlane did not quite have it.) The glorious receptivity of those proud and lonely fans to their daring literature and its profound warning. Toss that little girl from the spaceship, get the medicine to the colonies. Grim choice but science fiction readers know how unrelenting is the universe.
Again, I could go on and again I will not. As Allan Tate wrote of that Dickinson poem, I have taken a long look at the situation. My own Golden Age was spent in a cabin by the Sea of Foma and how happily I splashed on its shores.
Challenging or trying to dismantle this Conventional Wisdom is not a pleasant business. We all love science fiction so, me too. The old girl took me in and kept me warm at a time when Muriel and Harriet, the Quality Lit Sisters were quite shut of me and my landscape of the future resembled the vistas of Chan Davis's "The Nightmare".
In a corner of my stricken retrospect it is always 1951 and I am in Brooklyn, somewhere a little distance from Flatbush Avenue and three miles from Ebbets Field. There I am in the bedroom reading—again—Henry Kuttner's Gallegher stories. Singing rabbits who know the world is theirs and a proud robot originally constructed as a can opener. An alcohol delivery device which will inject the stuff directly rather than forcing all that dreary swallowing business. I had a good time there and like the kids in "Mimsy Were The Borogoves" this is the place I would be now if I could find a way out. But Kuttner and Campbell and the 1940's Astounding are irretrievable, no matter what the Wayback Machine says.
And no matter the Foma, Thrilling Wonder and Planet Stories outsold Campbell's Astounding in the 1940's by a significant margin. Raymond Palmer's despised Amazing outsold Astounding by an enormous margin. Amazing, at the peak of the Shaver period in 1946, sold more than a quarter of a million newsstand copies at a time when Astounding might have sold 100,000. The Golden Age, in sum, was only a tributary. Campbell's Astounding was not as marginal as, a quarter of a century later, was Michael Moorcock's British New Worlds but Moorcock's magazine also assumed a dimension and market impact which never existed. The Moorcock New Worlds at its peak in the late 1960's might have sold a few thousand copies in this country, maybe 10,000 in Great Britain. Judith Merril hyped it fiercely but very few in 1967 were buying her anthology England Swings/SF. Donald Wollheim at Ace took the paperback rights to that Doubleday anthology drawn from New Worlds. "Worst title, biggest bunch of nonsense I ever read," he said pleasantly. "Guess I got taken in."
Here, then, as everywhere else, we construct and falsely remember the history we would have preferred to that which existed. The Japanese film Rashomon, of course, is built on this premise as is Samuel Beckett's much less famous Play (a one-acter in which one man and two women now dead and peering from funeral urns, offer different versions of marriage, betrayal and an affair). Alfred Bester's great The Demolished Man ran in three installments in Galaxy in early 1952 but according to Bester was declined for book publication at every extant market. Shasta, a fan press, published it finally. Fred Pohl has made the same claim for his 1952 Galaxy serial (with Cyril M. Kornbluth) Gravy Planet which was rejected everywhere before Ian Ballantine who had just started Ballantine Books took it. One of the most remarkable deductions coming to me in the mid-1960's as I struggled to become a science fiction writer was how marginal those writers and works I most admired were. Alfred Bester had almost no help during that period in the 1950's which produced his greatest work, he had three editors, Horace Gold, Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas who gave him a platform, but beyond a small group of appreciators he had only a limited audience in science fiction. Of necessity he was always a part-timer, a hobbyist (who published much nonfiction and a 1955 mainstream novel Who He? well apart from science fiction.
These were for me enormous figures, enormous work, but I never understood until much later how difficult, even hostile, was the context from which they emerged. We have in science fiction's ninth decade as a distinct genre frozen a history and judgement which are generally accepted and which seem to have settled easily into the university curriculum. Science Fiction 201: The Golden Age. But this history, that judgement are no more "true" than are the Annals of Shaver. The first and second generation of science fiction writers are almost entirely gone, will be entirely gone in another ten years and we will be left with Foma.
A false history is probably better than no history, of course. But we could have done better. Do we get a mulligan?
—June 2007/New Jersey
Spillage: or, The Way Fair Use Works in Favor of Authors and Publishers
Written by Eric Flint
In my last essay, I said I would continue to explore the way in which fair use benefits authors and publishers. In fact, I went so far as to say that "fair use has always been the author's best friend" and I made the following two claims:
1) There is nothing that is "new" or "unparalleled" about the so-called danger of "electronic piracy."
2) From the standpoint of the narrow economic self-interest of an author (or publisher), a generous and expansive attitude toward fair use is every bit as beneficial as it is to society as a whole.
Before I start in on the first of those two claims, I need to preface my remarks by discussing a phenomenon I call "spillage." So far as I know—mind you, I won't swear to it—I'm the first person to use that term in the way I use it, but I'm hardly the discoverer of the phenomenon. It's been well known for centuries, not only by economic theorists but even more so by competent salesmen.
(If you're wondering why I invented my own term instead of taking the time to do the research to find out which term is actually used by most economists, the answer is three-fold. First, I'm lazy. Second, inventing stuff is what authors do in the first place. Thirdly and finally, the reason we get away with it is that we generally invent stuff that's way catchier and more interesting than academics do. So there.)
Car salesmen, for instance, are past masters at the art of spillage. Any car salesman knows perfectly good and well that he or she will not sell a car—doesn't have a cold chance in hell—unless they can talk the prospective customer into taking a test drive. If you don't believe me, review in your mind your experiences when it comes to buying a new car. Everything that salesman said to you was calculated, one way or another, to ge
t you behind the wheel of the car in question and drive it around for a few blocks.
Why? Because that's how cars get sold. True, occasionally, a customer will walk into a dealership knowing exactly what they want. That happens . . . maybe 1% of the time, at a guess. 5%, tops. In such a case, the only real issues involved are choosing a paint color and dickering over the terms. The customer doesn't need—doesn't want, in fact—a test drive, because it would just be a waste of everyone's time. They know they want that specific year and model of that specific automobile.
In other words, on the rare occasions when that does happen, it only happens because the car-buyer is already very familiar with the car in question.
But the vast majority of car sales don't happen until and unless the prospective customer takes a test drive. Every car salesman in the world, being a breed of people who (judging from the evidence so far) are ten times smarter than most authors and almost all publishers—not to mention the morons who run the music recording industry—knows that perfectly well.
Now, let's ask ourselves another question. Of the prospective customers who do take a test drive, what percentage actually wind up buying the car?
I don't know the answer to that question. I don't think anyone does, in the scientific sense of basing their knowledge on a series of controlled studies. But all you have to do is talk to a few experienced car salesmen to get a reasonably accurate approximate answer.
It's a relatively small percentage. Not tiny, no, but way short of a majority. At a guess, not more than 20%. I came up with that figure simply based on my own experience as a car buyer. I'm quite sure that, over the years, I've test-driven at least five cars for every one that I've bought—and that's simply if we restrict "test drive" to the formal process of taking a test drive in a dealer's car.
In reality, I've test-driven at least fifty cars for every one that I've bought. Every time I've rented a car from a car rental agency, I'm "test driving" a car—because, far more often than not, the model they give me is one that I've never driven before.
In fact, very recently in the course of a business trip, I wound up renting a model I'd never driven before that I discovered I positively detested—despite being a well-known and supposedly "top line" model. I'm not going to name the vehicle in question, partly following my grandmother's precept that if you can't find something good to say just keep your mouth shut—admittedly, a precept I've probably honored in the breach way more often than the observance—but mostly because it's simply irrelevant. The reason I hated the car had nothing to do with the "big issues" of its handling, performance, mechanical reliability, etc., etc. I hated the car because it was uncomfortable. Don't ask me why, because I couldn't tell you. All I know is that no matter how I tried to adjust the seat, that damn car simply didn't fit my body properly. Every time I drove it, my back started aching within half an hour.
There is no way in hell I will ever buy that car—because of that "test drive." Just as, a few years ago, it was the very pleasant experience of driving a different model that I rented that eventually led me to buying a new car of the same model. (Different year, but it was the same make and model.)
Every time I've borrowed a friend or relative's car, I am in effect "test driving" it. The reason I bought the first car I ever bought in my life—a used 1955 Ford that I still remember very fondly—was because a friend of mine had the same car and I liked it when I drove it.
Car salesmen know that. They know that you have to be willing to let your customers enjoy a certain amount of "fair use" if you want to have any chance of selling them a car. Even though, from their standpoint, that "fair use" costs them a little. Not much, to be sure. Still, there's a certain amount of wear and tear put on a vehicle every time it's taken off a car dealer's lot, even if it's only the requirement to keep it washed—not to mention that the dealer pays for the gasoline, not the customer.
That's what I call "spillage." It's a simple, basic concept whenever you deal with selling anything. The best way to put it is this:
For every sale you make, how many "freebies" did you have to pass out in order to make the sale?
Obviously, the nature of the "freebie" will vary widely, from one product to another. Car dealers will cheerfully allow a prospective customer to test drive a car—but they certainly don't hand out entire automobiles for free. The product is far too expensive for that form of spillage. On the other hand, many food companies and almost all wineries will pass out free samples of their product. Taken one at a time, the samples simply aren't that expensive.
But regardless of the specific manner in which it's done, most businesses dealing with retail customers—and a fair number of businesses selling to other businesses—engage in "spillage" as a matter of course.
So does the publishing industry, and it's been doing it for centuries. I think the reason so many publishers and authors are so much more dim-witted on this subject than car salesmen is because the specific form that spillage takes in the publishing industry—leave it to intellectuals to make things excessively complicated—got all tangled up in fancy and often legalistic doctrines.
So, we call it "copyright protection" and contrast it with "fair use"—even though, from a cold-blooded business sales standpoint, "fair use" is the main way that copyright protection means anything in money terms to begin with.
I will make a flat statement. At least 90% of all book sales, outside of the narrow market in course-required textbooks, begin with fair use. Without fair use—expansive and sweeping fair use—those books would not be sold in the first place.
The reasons are similar to the reasons that's true for car sales, but not identical. In the case of the automobile market, the big obstacle is simply price. Even the cheapest car costs a big chunk of a person's annual income, and so no one is likely to buy a car without giving it a test drive just to make sure that, if nothing else, they like the costly damn thing.
Price isn't particularly a problem with books—or music, or movies—except for the very poorest people in an advanced industrial society. A hardcover edition of a book, or a CD, or a DVD, will all cost about the same—somewhere between $5 and $30, depending on where you buy it, whether you buy it new or used, whether you buy it off the shelf or as part of a special sale, and so on and so forth. To put it another way, it's cheaper than the cost of a meal at a good restaurant for two people. In fact, if you shop frugally by selecting previewed DVDs or used CDs or books, especially during a special sale, it can cost no more than a meal for two people at a fast food outlet.
Financially speaking, no great obstacle.
Instead, the obstacle is the opacity of the entertainment market. That's even true of movies, by the way, although certainly not to the extreme degree that it is for the book and music market. Of course, since a movie is so much more expensive to produce than a book or a music CD, there are far fewer of them produced in any given period of time. But there are still more movies produced than anyone except a complete couch potato with a fat wallet could possibly watch. The prospective customer still has to make a choice between far too many selections, and without knowing very much about most of them.
With books, the situation is several orders of magnitude worse. And that's the reason that prospective customers generally stick to the very small number of authors whom they know they'll like—or, at least, have a good chance of liking.
And how do they know that? Nine times out of ten, because of fair use. One way or another, in the course of their lives, they ran across Author Joe or Jane through exercising fair use. They first ran across that author through a library, through a copy lent by a friend or relative, through a used bookstore—or, most common of all, by the word of mouth generated by other people's exercise of fair use.
Fair use is, by a country mile, the most important way that the opacity of the book market gets penetrated, at least to a degree—and it costs authors and publishers absolutely nothing. Any publishing house, much less any individual author, who tr
ied to substitute for the promotion they get through fair use would go bankrupt within a month. Period.
What's amazing are the number of authors and publishers who don't understand that—who even view fair use as costing them money.
Yes, it's amazing, but it's true. I've heard authors complain bitterly that used book sales hurt their income, because they get no royalties from such sales. I've heard authors complain just as bitterly that public libraries do the same. In fact, in one particularly grotesque display of cretinism not too long ago, Patricia Schroeder, the president of the Association of American Publishers, launched a general attack on public libraries for being a source of "electronic piracy" because they were too permissive toward their patrons' use of electronic texts.
Perhaps the single most outlandish instance of this sort of authorial imbecility I ever observed personally came a few years ago at a book-signing during a science fiction convention. I wound up sitting next to a midlist writer at the signing. I felt a little sorry for her because I had a fairly constant line of fans asking for my autograph, and in the first half hour no one at all came up to her. Sympathetic, too—because it hadn't been that long since I could well remember myself the near-complete obscurity I had as a new writer.
Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 2 Page 34
