Fantasy and SF for the connoisseur or for mainstream tastes: which path should a publishing house follow? That’s an interesting debate which the ever-erudite Lou Anders has raised on his blog. When founding the excellent Pyr imprint, Lou and his team took the conscious decision to publish what Norman Spinrad called “science fiction written specifically for experienced and intelligent readers of science fiction, with a bit of fantasy more or less in the same mode thrown in”.

I think that’s an excellent policy for Pyr. It’s certainly a truism that the more you indulge in a particular taste the more refined that taste becomes (which can also be a problem for critics, who, as Stephen King puts it, “lose their taste for pizza”). The core readership of fantasy and SF – the fans, although they probably don’t categorise themselves that way – deserve some gourmet dishes.

But there is a wider debate here. On The Genre Files, Ariel gives a smart overview of marketing genre books in the 21st century, a post that all authors and publishers should read. And in a separate article, editor George Mann writes about Solaris’ choice of traditional covers for their genre titles.

Both these articles get right to the heart of trying to sell books to a fragmented audience in the 21st century, and it’s something the music industry in particular, and TV and Film, are all struggling to deal with. Do you go for the hardcore fan or reach out to the wider audience? There are pros and cons for both. It seems that Lou, Ariel and George are all swinging towards an approach that caters to the dedicated reader, and I think that’s a business model that will work very well for Pyr and Solaris.

But if it was applied to the whole industry I would have real problems. In the music industry, where I worked for a while, the marketeers have struggled. By focusing on the tribalist music fan that has emerged over the last twenty years, they have had trouble gaining breakout hits from genres. Attention shifted to marketing bland fare that would appeal to all tastes to gain those mainstream hits, and sales have fallen dramatically (yes, I know there are many other factors, but this is a core concern).

The comics industry in particular has faced a great many problems because of the loss of its mainstream audience. That was caused by the collapse of its distribution network in the late seventies and early eighties and the shift to specialist comics shops. But the comics producers then found that to maintain sales in this rarefied atmosphere required stories that excited the jaded palates of the core fan – and were nigh-on incomprehensible to the casual reader. Sales fell further, the core fan market had to be shored up to a greater extent, and a desperate retreat from the centre ground took place, that is still damaging the industry.

The issue of covers and marketing is not just an industry issue. I’ve had several readers complain about my move away from traditional illustrative fantasy covers to the latest design-oriented ones. I’ve had just as many applaud the move. These covers are a personal choice. I like design; they work for me. And, I have to say, sales have been much, much better. But I don’t think you can extrapolate too much from that for the wider market. If all covers were designery, mine wouldn’t have had the same impact.

I love fantasy, science fiction and horror. I believe these three genres are appealing to mainstream tastes, if some way can be found to communicate their values to the casual browser. I’m afraid that an across-the-board retreat to the ‘core fan model’ will ghettoize them even further and lead to a long-term decline. The best way for the industry, I think is – to use music industry analogy – hardcore labels for the purist, and general labels to attract new users.

But that is a fiendish and crippling trap for the writer. Once you establish yourself in one pool or the other it will be very hard to crossover and gain, on the one hand, the new readers and wider sales that sustain your career, and, on the other, credibility that is just as valuable a commodity in the internet-empowered world.

The massive explosion of RPGs, table-top, video and net games over the last fifteen years has changed the landscape for fantasy authors. In ancient times, if you wanted to slip quietly into another world, you had only a handful of potential access points that were widely available in commercial locations: some Moorcocks, the odd reprint of the Weird Tales authors and the ubiquitous Tolkein. Mythologies were being re-interpreted for a new audience, strange horizons were invoked and it was all fresh and exhilarating.

Now we’ve all visited fantasy worlds hundreds or thousands of times by our teens, whether it’s the Dungeons and Dragons of the eighties, the paper-based games that grew out of it, or the World of Warcraft and other MMPORGs of the netscape. This huge industry has turned all the tropes of fantasy into crashing cliches. Elves, dwarves, and dragons are as familiar as your next-door neighbour. We all know how magic works, as clearly as the laws of physics – it’s defined in a thousand rule books. Games Workshop alone has mapped an entire universe of new worlds. And when I say mapped, I mean geographically, culturally, economically, racially, sexually, theologically, scientifically and mythologically. They are defined as clearly as the world you might search for in Wikipaedia or the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This is not fantasy. This is reality, living, breathing and evolving all around.

Nor is this is a criticism of games, far from it. Their remarkable success has turned our shared minority interest into a mainstream taste – or it will have when the next generation comes to maturity. How will our western society be shaped when people rooted in imagination and the fantastic become the majority? But that’s a different blog…

The question now is, what is the point of the fantasy author? Any writer coming into this field in this age faces immediate dangers. The core fantasy elements have been so colonised by the games industry that the writer automatically has to handle accusations of being a hack dabbling in cliches. Yes, a good writer should infuse their work with levels of meaning, subtext and characterisation usually unavailable in games and their fictional tie-ins. But is that enough? Any author utilising the long-standing tropes and landscape of fantasy fiction will now always be hamstrung by suffocating familiarity. The games worlds are so diverse, so cleverly and startlingly imagined (usually by teams of highly inventive people) that authors working in these traditional fields will be seen as ‘more of the same’ by anyone giving their work a cursory glance on the shelves. And what author worth their salt wants that?

Fantasy authors – and all the thousands of would-be fantasy authors out there – need to wake up. They’re being squeezed out of the territory they have occupied for the last hundred years or so. They can no longer count on the fact that they’re the only visionaries in town, or the only explorers charting the fringes of the imagination. They’re being supplanted by a much more dynamic and agressive breed.

I’m not convinced that simply ‘doing it better’ will work. Fantasy authors need to find a new unique selling point. If they want to maintain their reputation as the elite of this field, they need to work their imaginations harder, start defining new territories, go to places that the gamers wouldn’t (yet) dare to go.

Who is up for that challenge?

Yesterday I gave a very successful lecture at the world-famous Tate Britain art gallery in London, entitled ‘Myth, Memory and the Art of Richard Dadd’. The event was a sell-out, and also pretty ground-breaking on several fronts. I was one of the first – if not the first – genre writer to be invited to the Tate to give a lecture for one of their rightly-acclaimed study days. And personally, it was one of the most high-profile appearances I’ve made.

I only have praise for the staff and academics at the Tate who treated both myself, and the genre, with a great deal of respect. Before the lecture, the audience toured the gallery to see Dadd’s work and many took the opportunity to ask me about my opinions on the artist and his work. After that I gave the lecture, touching on not only my interest in Dadd and my novella about his most famous painting, ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’, but also about other authors influenced by Dadd – Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Angela Carter, Robert Rankin and more. We followed this with an at times intense debate with an art historian about the meaning of Dadd’s work, and a couple of readings from The Fairy Feller novella.

The novella has gone from strength-to-strength since it won the British Fantasy Award four years ago. The limited edition by PS Publishing has nearly sold out, and the added attention from this Tate event has created interest from across the world. Now I need to find a mainstream publisher interested in reprinting it as part of a collection so it can reach a wider audience.

[cross-posted]

Here.

Anyone disconcerted by what has come to be known as my “brawling, boozing and shagging post” below (all in the dim and distant past, obviously, now that I am confined to a single room writing like those monks in The Name of the Rose…), should take a look here. Clearly, in the writing world I am something of a saint.

Remember: all writers are monsters. Do NOT invite them into your house.

Apparently horror is going to be the big literary trend for 2007. One highlight to look out for is Heart Shaped Box by Stephen King’s son Joe Hill out next month (and, boy, is he going to be sick of that tag in a few months time – no wonder he kept it a secret for ten years). Great writer, and I have to say, a thoroughly nice bloke.

Lots of other names coming through too, from most of the major publishing houses. The genre has been moribund in the UK for going on ten years now so it’s about time for a resurgence.

Warren Ellis has contributed to the debate about the slow, sad decline of science fiction as a publishing powerhouse with an interesting notion: that we should stop building ‘castles in the air’, as he says – ie writing about wild and wacky futures – but concentrate on the world around us with an SF writer’s eye for detail and extrapolation…because we are living in a science fictional age. Read more here.

That is, essentially, the premise of the TV series I’ve been developing for the BBC. I think it’s bang on the nose as a way to pull science fiction back into mainstream consciousness. But quite what all those people who love stories about Big Machines will make of it is a different matter.

My publisher, Victor Gollancz, has started a new email newsletter which will give you the chance to win lots of swag, find out advance news about fantasy, SF and horror books and get exclusive interviews and extracts.

Sign up for it here.

And a happy New Year to you all. I am now officially out of hibernation.

New limited edition, exclusive books coming from PS Publishing:

PAST MAGIC — Ian MacLeod (collection) (ready to ship late this month)
THE VOYAGE OF NIGHT SHINING WHITE — Chris Roberson (novella) (ready to ship late this month)
ILLYRIA — Elizabeth Hand (novella) (shipping in December)
JULIAN — Robert Charles Wilson (novella) (shipping in December)
FLAVORS OF MY GENIUS — Robert Reed (novella) (shipping in December)
TWELVE COLLECTIONS & THE TEASHOP — Zoran Zivkovic (double novella) (shipping in December)
THE MERMAIDS — Robert Edric (novella) (shipping in December)
POSTSCRIPTS # 9 — winter 2006 issue (shipping in December)
HEREAFTER, AND AFTER — Richard Parks (novella) (shipping in January)
THE SCALDING ROOMS — Conrad Williams (novella) (shipping in January)
WHERE OR WHEN — Steven Utley (collection) (shipping in January)
PROMISED LAND — Jack Dann (collection) (shipping in January)

Anything grab your fancy?

“1984 is the worst book I have ever read. I would advise anyone who is thinking about reading this book to reconcider!”

Charlie Stross identifies what the reading public really thinks about literature…

SF editor Lou Anders is talking about the sales decline of SF – from about one third of the mass market in the 70s to around 7 or 8 per cent now.

One of his readers suggests: “the answer is to bring back more complex, involuted, experimental stuff like the early 70s had when s.f. was something like a third of the mass market, not drive readers further away in an era where anyone can use fantastic material in novels in or outside of marketing categories.”

The thinking is that movies and TV have colonised the more populist form to such a degree that SF books need to move into more rareified territory.

To me, that is not the answer, but exactly the problem. It’s like saying, ‘Labour (or the Republicans or fill-in-political-party-here) has so successfully colonised the middle ground, we need to become more extreme’…

The real problem for SF, in my eyes, is that too much of it is failing in the art of communication. It’s written by scientists, for scientists. Every time this charge is levelled, the Big Machine Writers always talk about not wanting to do ‘dumbed-down fiction’ – SF is the genre of ideas, they say.

But they are confusing the art with the delivery of the art. If you have a fantastic idea, surely you want to communicate it to as wide an audience as possible. That means developing forms of communication – in this case, story, plot, and, most importantly, recognisably human characters with human concerns – that will piggy-back the idea into the minds of readers.

By becoming more esoteric, SF will only go the way of the Western genre: a tiny backwater for specialists and nostalgia lovers.

Hollywood movie moguls are circling fantasy author Simon R Green to seduce him into signing a deal for his Nightside series of books. Nightside, about a private eye investigating tales of the weird and uncanny in the Twilight Zone, is about to reach book number eight and they really are excellent tales.

Simon is a prolific author – famed for the Deathstalker series – with an uncompromising sense of humour. Going back a few years, he handed the second Deathstalker book in to his UK publisher, and the copy editor turned out to have no discernable sense of humour. At all. So she went through his book and crossed out every single joke. And then she looked at some of the science, and decided to “improve” it. He contacted his editor, who basically said “Oh no, not you as well.” They went through the book putting the humour back in, but there just wasn’t time to undo all the damage that had been done. Which is why the US edition of Deathstalker Rebellion is the only full and authentic version.

On the other hand…. the fourth Deathstalker book turned out to be the longest in the series, at some 800 pages of Manuscript. His then US editor said that it would cost too much at that size, and that the book needed cutting by ten percent. And either he could do it, or she’d do it for him… He wasn’t in any position to argue, so he did it. When the UK editor saw the manuscript, she had no problems with the size. So the UK edition of Deathstalker Honour is the only full authentic version.

And not forgetting the US copy editor who objected to his making jokes about the disabled. Simon knew very well he hadn’t done any such thing. It turned out she was objecting to a joke he’d made, saying that a character’s actions were about as sensible as a leper playing volley ball… Later in the series, he wrote a retelling of the Alamo story, set in a leper colony, but that copy editor had moved on by then.

His new series is Secret Histories featuring Shaman Bond, the very secret agent who fights all the secret wars with dark forces on our behalf so we never have to find out what a dangerous world we live in. The first books is The Man With The Golden Torc to be followed by Demons Are Forever.

Go on, you know you want to…

A brand, spanking new omnibus of the Age of Misrule trilogy – featuring World’s End, Darkest Hour and Always Forever – is now available to buy.

It’s got a great, black and red designery cover and, more importantly, has a very slightly updated text to eliminate some of the errors that crept into the original printings.

The story – like the current Kingdom of the Serpent – was designed as one big tale, which for marketing reasons was split into three and published annually. Now it’s presented as originally intended, where the more subtle interweaving of plotlines are clearer.

And maybe now more people will get that enigmatic final paragraph…

You can see it on Amazon.co.uk.

Don’t forget – if you’ve only read Jack of Ravens, the epic story starts here…

Fiction is not disconnected from the real world.  This might be stating the obvious, but some people seem to think that books just get written, published and sold at the whim of authors and publishers.  But it’s possible to map out a correlation between trends in publishing and real world events.  That’s just common sense – we are all at the mercy of what’s going on in the world, and we unconsciously adjust our perceptions and tastes accordingly.

Fantasy and science fiction are interesting cases in point.  Fantasy has always been published to discerning tastes, but the great ages of commercial fantasy were in the late sixties, (slightly shading into the early seventies) with the rediscovery of Lord of the Rings and the Weird Tales authors with Robert E Howard’s Conan in the forefront; and in the late-seventies, early-eighties with books like Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara and Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant stories.

The first of those coincided with the rise of the Hippie movement, the Vietnam War protests and mounting disillusionment with elected officials.  The second coincided with cynical right wing Governments on both sides of the Atlantic, great fear in the waning days of the Cold War and even more disillusionment with elected officials.

The superficial reading would be that these were both times when the general public fled from harsh reality into the comforting and conservative arms of fantasy.  I don’t think that stands up, as people were regularly confronting the powers they feared in wide-ranging protests, not running away.  The common thread, in my opinion, was the deep need for heroes, in the mythological sense.  Champions of right (not Right) who could help make sense of the world.

Which should, by all rights, put us on the brink of another golden age of commercial fantasy publishing.  Politicians of all stripes are generally despised across most of the west.  With the events in the Middle East – a massive failure of elected officials (again of all political positions) that has caused a devastating death toll – and the weak-kneed attempts of politicians to tackle issues that really concern the public, like climate change, there has never been more of a need for heroes.  Sales of fantasy novels have declined a little in recent times (partly due to more widspread problems in the book trade).  I reckon a few good marketing campaigns could turn that around nicely.

Conversely, I don’t believe this is a very good time for science fiction, which has seen quite significant falls in sales.  We’re living through another industrial revolution.  Techonological changes are increasing exponentially, with the accompanying societal and cultural transformations.  People are burned out by science or blase about it.  They see its effect in every aspect of their lives, 24/7.  They (and I’m talking here about the wider reading market, not the dedicated fan) don’t want to spend their time reading about it.  Of course, SF isn’t just about science, but unfortunately it’s that aspect that the non-hardcore fan focuses on.

This is in marked difference to the past ‘great ages’ of SF (for argument’s sake, let’s just say the thirties, the fifties, the seventies) when there were bursts of scientific advance that left the public exhiliarated and keen to know more.  Has the real world techno-advance left SF unable to create a sense of wonder any more?  I think that’s possible.

But if I were a canny publisher I’d put my money on a horror resurgence.  With that same techno burn-out people are fleeing rationalism to the realms of the unconscious.  And with the terrors and instability out in the world, they want the more manageable terrors of the supernatural.  Yet at the moment, no British publisher (and few US ones) have a horror list.  That has to change, surely?

As I’m sure most of the readers of Jack of Ravens will already know, the fantasy genre lost one of its most accomplished and popular writers when David Gemmell passed away on July 28th.

Juliet E. McKenna has posted links to various newspaper obituaries on her blog, and I’ve added links to a few additonal items to the article that I posted on the day, over on The Alien Online. And 418 people to-date have signed the online book of remembrance that will eventually be printed and passed to his family.

Always sad to lose an author, but particularly one who was both so prolific and so consistently good at providing his fans with exactly what they wanted to read – action, adventure, heroism, honour, love, redemption – time after time.

–Ariel–

John Jarrold is talking about the number of fantasy novel debuts this year compared to the complete lack of SF debuts.

He points out that fantasy has about 70% of the market compared to SF’s 30%, even though SF is performing stronger than it has done for years.

When I started reading, I picked up SF, fantasy and horror, as the mood took me.  It seems today’s readership is much more tribal.

Hearing some interesting things about Winterbirth by Brian Ruckley.  Orbit supremo Tim Holman has described it as the most commercial debut fantasy from a British writer that he’s ever read. 

You can’t say that many times in a career without looking foolish so I’m looking forward to getting an advance copy.  It’s out in October.

Amazon describes it like this: “It is a godless world. An uneasy truce exists between the human clans and ancient races. But now the clan of the Black Road move south, and their arrival will herald a new age of war and chaos. Behind it all seems to be one man, Aeglyss, a man whose desire for power will only be sated when he has achieved his ultimate goal: immortality.”

I’ll keep you posted…

“Magicians-in-training, genies-in-exile, apprentice wizards, belligerent fairies, plucky orphans, kind dragons, kind orphaned dragons—a reader cant enter the children’s department of a bookstore these days without tripping on a wand or falling into a portal. Has the saturation point been reached?”

Editor Terry Whalin has some good advice for people thinking about writing fantasy.

A writer has a different idea.

While Alma Alexander has a good rant about writing fantasy fiction for a living.

But if you’re thinking about carrying your royalties home in a J K Rowling-style wheelbarrow, you might like to think again.

The publishing world is a very strange place to be, sometimes.  It’s mostly filled with people staring into their crystal balls trying to guess what “the reader will want” in the coming 12 months to three years, desperately trying to keep hold of their jobs every time the latest round of sales figures come in, and trying to hunt the mythical new, unpublished, best-selling author.

For a long while, these arcane forces decreed that when a reader said they wanted fantasy, they actually wanted a very particular and narrow brand of fantasy.  Essentially Re-fried Tolkien.  Different map, same world.  The shelves would be full of them, and if anyone questioned why you had an ice cream store where they only sold vanilla, they would be told “it’s what the readers want”.

I’m not knocking the quality of the books – many were, and are, extremely engaging.  It’s the lack of diversity that always got me.  Fantasy is the uber-genre.  In it, you can write about anything at all in this world, the next world (after death), and any other world you could possibly imagine.  No other genre has that scope.  So to get a tiny little slice of that great potential was just a little…depressing.

Times are changing.  More and more books are reaching out from Tolkien’s well-trod patch into the great unknown.  Whether it’s China Mieville with Perdido Street Station or Hal Duncan with Vellum, the sense of some kind of change in thinking is palpable.

It helps that the people at the top of the main fantasy publishing houses know the SF/F genres and love them.  Orbit, Macmillan and my own publisher Victor Gollancz all have people with good taste and a depth of knowledge that allows them to seek new horizons.  That doesn’t mean they’ve stopped desperately trying to hang on to their jobs, of course, but there’s hope.

I only bring this up now because SF Site has branded me the “Anti-Tolkien”, which makes me think I should have some kind of number burned into my scalp.  It was meant as a compliment, and I certainly take it that way.

But one question remains: what do the readers want?