Audio rights to Noble Family, Stagecraft, and the first volume of Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal went to Steve Feldberg at Audible via Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.
Audio rights to Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix sold to Vikki Warner at Blackstone.
Audio rights to Camelot Burning by Kathryn Rose went to Contessa Nyree at Audible via Marisa Corvisiero of Corvisiero Literary Agency.
Audio rights to Mary Alice Monroe’s Second Star to the Right sold to Lysa Williams at Blackstone Audio via Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media Group on behalf of Kimberly Whalen of Trident Media Group.
AUDIOBOOKS RECEIVED
Out of the Black, Evan Currie (Brilliance Audio, $14.99, 10 CDs, 11 hours: 27 minutes, 978-1-4805-8087-9) Unabridged audio version of Out of the Black read by David deVries.
Interlopers, Alan Dean Foster (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 8 CDs, 9 hours: 28 minutes, 978-1-4805-8116-6) Unabridged audio version of Interlopers read by Ben Browder.
Thorn Jack, Katherine Harbour (Brilliance Audio, $29.99, 12 CDs, 13 hours: 57 minutes, 978-1-4805-9681-8) Unabridged audio version of Thorn Jack read by Kate Rudd.
The Eternity Gate, Traci Harding (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 11 CDs, 13 hours: 59 minutes, 978-1-4862-1287-3) Unabridged audio version of The Eternity Gate read by Rupert Degas.
Alien Shores, Vaughn Heppner (Brilliance Audio, $14.99, 9 CDs, 11 hours: 3 minutes, 978-1-4915-1916-5) Unabridged audio version of Alien Shores read by Jeff Cummings.
Fool’s Errand, Robin Hobb (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 21 CDs, 25 hours: 1 minute, 978-1-4915-1284-5) Unabridged audio version of Fool’s Errand read by James Langton.
Sand., Hugh Howey (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 9 CDs, 10 hours: 22 minutes, 978-1-4915-4586-7) Unabridged audio version of Sand. read by Karen Chilton.
Ill Met By Moonlight, Sarah A. Hoyt (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 8 CDs, 9 hours: 44 minutes, 978-1-4805-8115-9) Unabridged audio version of Ill Met By Moonlight read by Jason Carter.
The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction: 6, Allan Kaster, ed. (Infinivox, $37.99, 8 CDs, 9 hours: 30 minutes, 978-1-8846-1299-2) Unabridged audio version of The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction: 6 read by Tom Dheere, Nancy Linari, and Dara Rosenberg.
Crown of Vengeance, Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 19 CDs, 23 hours: 20 minutes, 978-1-4915-0296-9) Unabridged audio version of Crown of Vengeance read by Kate Rudd and Christopher Lane.
Troll Mountain, Matthew Reilly (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 4 CDs, 4 hours: 24 minutes, 978-1-4862-2513-2) Unabridged audio version of Troll Mountain read by Sean Mangan.
PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED
The Gridley Wave No. 369 (June 2013), No. 378 (March 2014), and No. 379 (April 2014), monthly newsletter supplement to The Burroughs Bulletin. Information: editor Henry G. Franke III, 318 Patriot Way, Yorktown VA 23693-4639; e-mail:
The NASFA Shuttle Vol. 34 No. 6 (June 2014), monthly newsletter of the North Alabama Science Fiction Association. NASFA news, reviews, etc. Single copy: $2.00. Membership: $25/year, subscription only: $15/year. Information: NASFA, Inc., PO Box 4857, Huntsville AL 35815-4857.
P.S.F.S. News (June 2014 and July 2014), newsletter of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society with news, meeting minutes, calendar, convention information, etc. Information: PSFS Secretary, Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, PO Box 8303, Philadelphia PA 19101-8303; e-mail:
CATALOGS RECEIVED
DreamHaven Books, 2301 E. 38th Street, Minneapolis MN 55406; phone: (612) 823-6161; e-mail:
Wrigley Cross Books, PMB 455, 2870 NE Hogan Rd., Ste E, Gresham OR 97030; phone: (503) 667-0807; toll free: (877) 694-1467; e-mail:
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KAMERON HURLEY: PEOPLE DON’T BUY BOOKS THEY DON’T KNOW ABOUT (EVEN GREAT ONES)
I get into perennial discussions with other authors about whether or not blog posts, or bookmarks, or reviews, or carrier pigeons, or flash mobs sell books. The cold reality is that any of these tactics, when done as a one-off, probably doesn’t sell more than a book or two, unless the person convinced to buy a book during that breakdancing skit at SuperWowCon was a minor celebrity who ended up loving it and telling all their friends.
Ending up loving it is the key, there. If nobody loves the book, they aren’t going to talk about it.
But nobody can love a book they don’t know about.
So what happens after you write a good book?
You hope the market is ready for it.
And then what?
You get to work.
Sure, you might get lucky and have a big advance book, and your publisher does that amazing thing where they’re able to convince those key book buyers at the big chains to make massive orders, and you can just sit at home eating bonbons and updating Twitter. (OK, let’s be real: we all want our publishers to magically figure out how to do this, not so we can screw off, but so we can have more time to just… you know, write more books. That’s how a lot of us thought this business worked. Alas.)
Kameron Hurley
The reality is that when the buyers aren’t convinced the market is ready for your book, your push is going to need to start from the ground up. You will be out here in the trenches with authors like me, firing up the marketing machine with every release, even if you sometimes resent it. The truth is that there never really were ‘‘good old days’’ where an author didn’t promote their work. The advent of the ‘‘reading’’ was a purely promotional activity. If you’re from a traditionally overlooked group that’s had a tougher time getting reviews and shelf space, promotion is especially vital. We’ve all seen the statistics on how often women and writers of color are reviewed in mainstream publications, compared to their white male counterparts.
Where I see a lot of authors falling down in this is that they’ll write a blog post, or make a book trailer, and call that it. When they do the book trailer and it doesn’t magically ‘‘make’’ their book a bestseller, they declare that book trailers and blog posts don’t sell books. And that’s true – your chances of connecting with readers who have big followings that can start the word-of-mouth machine going are incredibly low when you just throw a couple bookmarks on a table at SuperWowCon.
Placing all your book’s hopes on a book trailer is a heavy burden for one book trailer. Or one postcard. It’s hoping that just that one effort and nothing else will connect with the right people, who love the book and share it. Because the truth is, if you’re a low-advance mid-lister like me, not necessarily beloved by book buyers, your best shot is to try and reach as many readers as directly as possible, through as many different venues as you can in the weeks leading up to and directly adjacent to your book release.
No, the postcard won’t sell the book. But when they read a review on their favorite book blog, read a blog post from you on their favorite site, see a Facebook ad, listen to an interview with you on their favorite podcast and pick up a postcard at a con – all in the same week – all those touches reinforce one another. They say to somebody: ‘‘This is a project folks are investing in and talking about. This is a project worth taking a look at.’’
So let’s pretend a couple of amazing things, first: you wrote an excellent book (the talent part). The market is ready for it (the gamble part). Now what?
I tend to point folks toward author Saundra Mitchell’s simple, inexpensive and practical marketing plan (
ash and repeat. Easy.
What if there’s stuff in that plan you don’t like? Well, find something else you do like.
One of the greatest things I’ve learned in this part of the business is to only do the things I enjoy. Author Tobias Buckell advised me on this one early. If you don’t like readings, don’t do them. Signings? Scrub them out. Focus on what you enjoy. For me, that’s meant a lot of guest blogging, giveaways, postcards, some convention appearances, and free swag of the postcard and sampler variety. I also get a kick out of making book trailers, and have learned how to update my own website, which is a constantly evolving entity.
Jeff VanderMeer offers another great resource for writers struggling to balance writing and the business of promotion, called Booklife. I’ve been using strategies from that book about dividing writing, networking, and promotion time since my first novel came out, and it’s been a great sanity-saver.
I suspect that what makes marketing talk among writers such a contentious activity is that one can do none of these things and have a massive bestseller, or do all of it and sell 600 copies. Why is that? Well, remember what I started out this conversation with: first, write a good book. Second, the market has to be ready for what your good book has to say. If those things aren’t in place, there will be less return. But will you still get some return? Yes.
At the end of the day, I sleep better knowing that when a book goes off into the wild – the way I’m about to send off The Mirror Empire, my new epic fantasy – that I’ve done all I could to help it out into the big bad world. My marketing work – blog tours, convention appearances, interviews, and the like – takes up six weeks of my writing time.
Isn’t six weeks of my life worth it, for a book I’ve been working on for ten years?
Writing is a largely solitary business, and what makes many of us perfectly suited for writing makes us terrible at promotion. Today’s noisy world, though, will often require us to push out into areas where we’ve not been as traditionally comfortable. Many were raised to speak softly, to not talk about themselves, to believe that if you did anything of worth, it would be spoken about without you raising a hand.
In the sea of books and films and games and other entertainment options we have today, we must look for ways to cut through the noise in the hopes of getting our work into the right hands.
It’s a magical thing, when readers get caught up in a book so completely they press it on all their friends, they cosplay as their favorite characters, they dabble in imagining their own, and completely fan-out when they meet their favorite creators. They – and me! – are super passionate about books, and love to speak about the ones that connect with us.
Yet I can’t read and share what I don’t know about… and neither can our readers.
–Kameron Hurley
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Return to In This Issue listing.
The Locus Awards were held in Seattle for the ninth consecutive year, June 27-29, 2014, at the Best Western Executive Inn, directly across the street from the EMP Museum and Seattle Center. In addition to perennial supporter Norwescon, the events gained a new sponsor this year: Arisia, ‘‘New England’s largest and most diverse science fiction and fantasy convention.’’ Seattle weather was balmy with infrequent rain showers. Attendance was 120, down from last year’s 150.
Connie Willis and Christopher Barzak taught a two-day-long writing workshop bookending the weekend, titled, ‘‘I Grew it from a Bean: Storytelling from Inspiration to Implementation’’. The awards events kicked off with a Friday night reading and Q&A session with Willis and Barzak, followed by an evening party hosted by Clarion West in honor of first-week instructor James Patrick Kelly.
Jerry Kaufman & Suzanne Tompkins; Astrid & Greg Bear; Margaret Chiavetta, Brooks Peck
The Saturday schedule began with two well-attended panels: ‘‘Prediction-Schmediction: Why Science Fiction Never Gets It Wrong’’, included Willis, Nancy Kress, Karen Lord, Jack Skillingstead, and moderator Eileen Gunn, and the second panel, ‘‘Adventures in Transrealism: Mixing It Up with Speculative Fiction Based on Personal Narrative’’, included Barzak, Terry Bisson, James Patrick Kelly, Nisi Shawl, and moderator Gary K. Wolfe.
An autographing session followed, with attending authors Emily Croy Barker, Barzak, Greg Bear, Bisson, Jason V Brock, Karen Joy Fowler, Gunn, Randy Henderson, Kelly, Kress, Lord, William F. Nolan, Shawl, Skillingstead, Bruce Taylor, Willis, and Wolfe. Books were available for purchase thanks to University Book Store.
After the lunch banquet, the awards ceremony was opened by Liza Groen Trombi, who introduced EMP Museum curator Brooks Peck. Peck invited James Patrick Kelly, Karen Joy Fowler, Christopher Barzak, and Leslie Howle to the stage to announce this year’s inductees to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame: Olaf Stapledon, Hayao Miyazaki, Leigh Brackett, and Frank Frazetta, and curator’s choice Stanley Kubrick. Trombi then took a moment to remember Jay Lake: ‘‘He was a vibrant and generous spirit, and he was an incredibly prolific writer. He was a friend of the field, a friend of Locus, and a friend of mine. He came to many Locus Awards and he brightened every one that he attended.’’
Locus Writers Workshop: Manny Frishberg, Raven Oak, Janka Hobbs, Denny Atkin, Douglas Rudoff, Connie Willis, Christopher Barzak, Leslie Howle, Bridget Natale, Marta Murvosh, Kathryn Hoppe, Russell Ervin, Jill Seidenstein, Torrey Podmajersky, David Simerly
MC Connie Willis began the ceremonies by recognizing attending authors, editors, and publishers including Anne Groell, Randy Henderson, Claire Eddy, David D. Levine, Patrick Swenson, Tod McCoy, Julia Sidorova, Sally Harding, and all of the signers. Official event heckler Nancy Kress criticized Willis for wearing the same shirt as last year; Willis then unveiled a spectacular handmade red Hawai’ian shirt, with the theme of the TV dinosaur epic, Primeval (thus giving her the excuse, in perpetuity, to discuss Primeval at the Locus Awards). Willis riffed on tourists and their blunders (including a few of her own gaffes in England) and spectacularly clueless questions (‘‘What time do they turn off Old Faithful for the night?’’), and the similar questions sometimes received by writers (‘‘Have you ever really done all the things that you have written about?’’) She then cancelled the traditional ‘‘news of the weird’’ presentation, because ‘‘all the news is now weird.’’ This year’s Hawai’ian shirt trivia contest winner was Keffy Kehrli, who received a giant pineapple-shaped sippy cup and the coveted grand prize, an autographed plastic banana.
The first Locus Award, for Best Art Book, went to Spectrum 20: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, edited by Cathy & Arnie Fenner. Francesca Myman accepted, saying, ‘‘We would like to thank the Locus readers and Locus staff for this honor. We’d like to thank all of the artists, without whose participation and trust Spectrum couldn’t have existed.’’
Sally Harding, Karen Lord; Stacie Hanes & Gary K. Wolfe, Courtney Willis; Leslie Howle, Neile Graham
The Best Nonfiction Award went to Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer. VanderMeer’s agent Sally Harding accepted, offering the author’s thanks to ‘‘Jeremy Zerfoss for the art, and John Coulthart for the design’’, and to ‘‘everyone who contributed to Wonderbook – more than 150 writers and artists, including 15 of the creators on the Locus Awards ballot… I’ve never before had a publisher give me a budget and then say, ‘We trust you. Do whatever you want.’’’
Michael Whelan won Best Artist, with Leslie Howle accepting. ‘‘It’s a great time to be alive, to be part of such a magnificent era in the art and literature of speculative fiction.’’ The Best Editor Award was presented to Ellen Datlow for the tenth year in a row. Eileen Gunn accepted with thanks.
Liza Groen Trombi presented the Best Collection winner, The Best of Connie Willis by Connie Willis. Willis said ‘‘I always think it’s not me! Thank you so much. This means a great deal to me.’’ Best Anthology went to Old Mars, edited by Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin, with Marti
n’s longtime agent Anne Groell accepting. ‘‘I’m sorry I cannot be with you today. Alas I am off in France and Switzerland signing books, gazing at mountains, and eating cheese and chocolate. I’ve been reading Locus since it was mimeographed, and I was slim, and that was a very long time ago.’’
Nancy Kress & Jack Skillingstead; Bruce Taylor, Emily Croy Barker
The Meritorious Service Banana was awarded to Connie Willis’s ‘‘lovely assistant’’ Gary K. Wolfe. The ceremony continued with the Best Short Story award, which went to ‘‘The Road of Needles’’ by Caitlín R. Kiernan, with Jason V Brock accepting. ‘‘Thanks to Paula Guran, for whom I wrote ‘The Road of Needles’ and who first published it, and to Jonathan Strahan who reprinted it.’’ Best Novelette went to ‘‘The Sleeper and the Spindle’’ by Neil Gaiman, accepted by Gary K. Wolfe. ‘‘I owe an enormous vote of thanks to Melissa Marr and to Tim Pratt, who were patient.’’
Asimov’s won the Best Magazine Award, with Liza Groen Trombi accepting for Sheila Williams, with thanks to Asimov’s readers and contributing authors, and ‘‘to everyone who voted for these awards.’’ The Best Publisher award went to Tor. Claire Eddy, Tor senior editor, accepted enthusiastically on behalf of the publishing house and Tom Doherty.
Best Novella went to Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente, with Christopher Barzak accepting. ‘‘Six-Gun Snow White grew out of my childhood in the West and it is especially lovely that it should be honored so near where I grew up.’’
Olivia Ahi, Duane Wilkins; Claire Eddy, James Patrick Kelly; Julie McGalliard, Tom Whitmore
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie won Best First Novel. Rashida Smith accepted on Leckie’s behalf, saying, ‘‘First I would like to thank the other finalists…. They all wrote wonderful books and it has been an honor to find mine listed among them and a genuine pleasure to see that the voters hold these books in such high regard…. Writing is one of those things that you do all by yourself and so it is a wonderful and amazing thing to find that what you have written has connected with other readers.’’
Locus, August 2014 Page 6
