Writing 101 • Understanding the Publishing Ecosystem, Part 3

Continued from: Part 1 | Part 2
Supplemental reading: How to Get Rich Quick Writing Big Hit Bestsellers!

This is where things get sticky.

I would have a lot more confidence in what I’m about to say if we’d had a big hit bestseller recently. We’ve had hit bestsellers. We’ve had books that made a plethora of Top 10 lists, been nominated for awards, and sold thousands of copies.

But not within the last three years. And here in StreamingWorld, more than three years ago is ancient history. That’s, like, forever ago.

I put the link to How to Get Rich Quick Writing Big Hit Bestsellers! in Part 2 with a certain sense of snark and irony. There are a lot of good ideas in that column, if you don’t mind that it’s dripping with cynicism. But I wrote that column 15 months ago, and parts of it are already obsolete. The idea of building your readership by serializing your novel on Kindle Vella, for example—

A few months later Amazon cancelled that program. You say it was a crucial part of your marketing plan? Tough. It’s gone. tb;ss. Too bad, so sad.

The first crucial thing to remember is that Amazon doesn’t care. 

If they cared, they wouldn’t sell all the A.I.-generated slop that’s already out there, with more being added every day.

The second crucial thing to remember is that it’s far easier to sell people more of what they already like than to get them to take a chance on something truly new.

On this foundation is the mighty Amazon commerce empire built. But in fairness, we can’t blame this on Amazon. Publishers have always used the, “If you liked [that], you’ll love [this]!” sales pitch. As the blind poet Homer wandered ancient Greece, I have to imagine he was preceded by an advance man shouting, “If you liked The Iliad, you’ll love The Odyssey!”

§

Take another look, if you will, at my inverted funnels sketch. It’s easy to see it as a stack of challenges, frustrations, and obstacles, through which you must fight uphill every step of the way to reach The Land of Happy Readers. Every writer who undertakes this quest sooner or later starts to think, “There must be an easier way! Some short cut no one else has discovered…”

What isn’t on the sketch is this: that at every step along the way there are hordes of Gríma Wormtongues, all eager to tell you that yes, there is an easier way, the shortcut does exist, and they will be happy to show you exactly what and where it is—

All you need to do is buy their self-help book. Or enroll in their webinar. Or hire them to write your book blurbs. The secret to success lies is Amazon advertising. No, it’s in Facebook advertising. No, it’s BookTok! It’s in posting videos on social media! It’s in learning to master the arcane secrets of Amazon Kindle keywords and having a great quote from Kirkus Reviews!

Did you know you have to buy book reviews from Kirkus? And if you want to quote their review in your advertising, that costs you even more?

The secret is, there is no secret shortcut to success. There is no foolproof way to game the system. No amount of money spent on advertising and courting the favor of social media influencers can push a bad book uphill. The big publishers have proven that repeatedly, every time they’ve bought a novel by a “celebrity”—unless you want to do what Putnam did with William Shatner’s TekWar series, and hire Ron Goulart to actually write the books.

I’ll assume you don’t have the resources to do either: to hire a well-known actor to be the public face of your books, or to hire someone else to actually write them. But know this: you can spend a lot of your own money trying to chase shortcuts and push your book uphill, if you listen to all the Grímas you will meet along the way.

§

The Best Option: Traditional Publishing

The best option for most authors remains what it has been for decades: to try to get a book deal with a major publishing house. They’re the ones with the resources to pay authors significant on-signing advances; to buy professional cover art and editorial and book design services; and to buy ad placements on Amazon. Getting a deal with a major publishing house is also the ticket to getting physical books into those few brick-and-mortar bookstores as still exist. If you can get a book deal with a major publisher, it’s still the way to go.

However, seeking a book deal with a major publishing house is not for the impatient, and the aperture of entry is tighter than a frog’s sphincter. Also, once you’ve landed a book deal there are still a multitude of ways in which it can go to Hell in a handbasket, and I’ve explored most of them.

MY ADVICE: Never ask a publisher what they want to see. The answer invariably is either something just like whatever was their most recent big bestseller, or else something just like whatever was a competitor's most recent and even bigger bestseller. You can save time and answer that question yourself, with about five minutes’ research.

Never ask an editor what they want to see. They’ll just tell you what their publisher told them to look for.

Never ask an agent what they want to see. They’ll just parrot whatever they heard from the last editor or publisher they spoke with most recently.

The Worst Option: Totally DIY Self-Publishing

Have you ever been wandering around Netflix or Amazon Prime late at night and decided to take a chance on a movie you’d never heard of before, because the poster art and description looked promising? Then, once you started to watch, the credits were something like—

Starring
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Directed by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Produced by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Screenplay by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Based on a story by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Catering by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Mr. Schwartz’s wardrobe by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Have you ever seen such a movie that was actually good? (Okay, Bambi Meets Godzilla. That’s one.) Or even watched such a movie for more than a few minutes before giving up on it?

This is what you’re up against when you decide to bypass everything and go the totally DIY route, straight from yourself to The World: the perception that anything published this way is very likely to be total crap. That perception may be wrong. Your book might be the one brilliant exception; the Bambi Meets Godzilla, as it were. But so many have trod this path before you and so thoroughly befouled it that you’re never going to make more than a few pity sales, no matter how much of your own money you hand over to all the Grímas you meet along the way who are eager to assure you that you are doing the right thing, and you’re sure to succeed, if only you take your spending to the next level and give them more.

MY ADVICE: This is the worst option. Don’t do it. All you will accomplish is to waste your time, money, and energy, and fray the nerves of your friends and relatives. Don’t do it!

And don’t think saying “Vince Flynn” is a meaningful rebuttal. (Self-pub evangelists love to do that.) As happens I have a signed, first edition, first-printing copy of Term Limits right here, and know quite a bit about how Flynn parlayed that self-published book into a lucrative deal with Pocket Books and NY Times Bestsellerdom. Suffice to say, it was a one-of-a-kind never-to-be-repeated exception, not a model you can emulate.

The Chaotic Good Option: Assisted Self-Publishing

 

And on this note I’m out of time to write today, so I guess this is going to roll over into a fourth column after all.  See you tomorrow!

~brb

 

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In science fiction circles Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his 1995 Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few people in the SF world have known about him until recently is that he actually began his career in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI interface and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but spent most of his career in supercomputer software R&D, doing work that was absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

 

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Writing 101 • Understanding the Publishing Ecosystem, Part 2

Continued from Part 1

Funny thing about time. It always moves forward. 

Never slows, never pauses—if anything, it seems to accelerate as you get older—and absolutely never flows backward.

I sometimes wonder if our perception of the passage of time is at the root of our urge to read and write science fiction and fantasy. We long to imagine what it might be like to live in the future, or to have lived in the past, or frankly, to live anywhere else except in the boring and grubby confines of our personal here and now. We want to imagine living a life beyond our biologically allotted fourscore and ten.

I’m pretty sure our perception of time is what’s responsible for the catastrophic / apocalyptic /survivalist themes the science fiction. Unable to imagine what the future might really hold, some writers say, “Aw, screw it,” and decide to destroy the world instead, so they can start over again with telling stories set in the Stone Age.

Slightly attenuated, this impulse might explain how steampunk was able to erase the 20^th Century and try to start science fiction all over again, beginning in the 19^th Century, with Jules Verne.

§

This column has proven more difficult to write than I’d expected. I left off last week with a promised confrontation with the Great Boss Monster, Guardian of The Critical Chokepoint.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I feel as if I’m biting the hand that’s fed us. Longtime readers know Stupefying Stories simply would not exist were it not for that first Kindle I bought for my late wife, when she first began chemotherapy and found her customary book bag too heavy to carry. That Kindle was a godsend for her, and on the RLP side of the house Amazon literally opened the world for us, making it possible for us to reach readers we had no hope of ever reaching before.

(And I will add, right from the start, dealing with Kindle Direct Publishing was always orders of magnitude better than dealing directly with Barnes & Noble Nook or Apple iBook publishing.)

Then again, the business relationship is essentially parasitic. Amazon’s business model seems predicated on convincing enormous numbers of people to pour their time, energy, blood, sweat, toil and tears into developing new markets and creating new products that make Amazon’s platform more valuable. Then, once a new market has been proven to exist, they change the rules and make it impossible for third parties to make a profit—at least, not without giving Amazon a bigger cut.

It’s difficult to think objectively about Amazon without becoming cynical. I base this not just on my long experience with Rampant Loon Press, but on our even longer experience with K&B Booksellers. If you are lucky enough to get in early on some new opportunity, they will do a good job of feigning being your partner, at first. Eventually, though, they will either undercut you and devour your business, or else simply kill off the program entirely, if they don’t find it profitable enough. If it’s a program you built your business around: tough.

The essential thing to remember is that Amazon doesn’t care what they sell. They only care that they sell, and skim a percentage off the top. They’re a conduit to customers, that’s all. Amazon would sell used baby diapers and outdated gray-market medical supplies if they could—and in fact they have, but that’s another story.

The problem for the rest of us is that Amazon has had years in which to develop their conduit, and they have gotten very, very good at it. As far as fiction publishers are concerned, Amazon is the world, and the world is Amazon’s. There are some fringe distribution channels left, but only because Amazon has not yet found it worthwhile to devour them. Whenever publishers and publishing-adjacent people get together, one topic keeps coming up: When is the pendulum going to swing back? When will we start to go back to the way things were before Amazon?

Answers: never, and we’re not. Time keeps moving forward, remember? That friendly neighborhood indie bookstore you remember so fondly? It’s not coming back. Spinner racks in convenience stories loaded with mass-market paperbacks? Not coming back. Magazine racks and newsstands? Nope.

You are in Streaming World now, and if it isn’t electronic and online, it’s not going to sell in more than boutique numbers. Movie industry people will complain about this long and loud, if you let them. Now, when a new movie is released, it’s not just competing against all the other new releases coming out at about the same time. It’s competing against almost every other movie ever made, now streaming on Amazon Prime.

Ditto for books. We writers have always sensed this, that we’re competing with our predecessors, which perhaps explains why each generation of writers seems to truly hate the generation that came before it. Mark Twain hated James Fennimore Cooper, after all. But now, you’re not just competing against all the other books currently on the shelves in your local bookstore. You’re competing against practically every book ever published.

So how do you break through that enormous inert mass?

§

Remember my inverted funnel sketch from Part 1? To recap, at the top is The World, the wonderful place where readers live. The World is huge, and thanks to the Internet in general and Amazon in particular, it’s much larger and more densely populated than ever before.

At the bottom is Author Space, which actually is a subset of The World, but it’s hard to express that in a two-dimensional pencil sketch. Thanks to the Internet, Author Space is also much more densely populated than ever before, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that there are a lot of writers in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America who can tell an engaging story much better than can someone who is fresh out of an American college with a newly minted BA or MFA in Creative Writing. My current theory as to why this is so is that the latter tend to be stuck firmly in Author Space, with minds so loaded full of received wisdom about writing qua writing that they have forgotten that their purpose is to entertain readers by telling them a story.

Emphasize those words. Entertain. Readers.

Basic theory tells us that communication consists of three elements:

• A transmitter (you)
• Sending information (your idea)
• To a receiver (the readers)

All else is noise, filtering, attenuation, encoding protocols, or other characteristics of the transmitter’s chosen medium. Without receivers, all else is meaningless. Or to paraphrase Mark Twain: ‘Writing alone purely for your own pleasure is like having sex alone purely for your own pleasure, and a practice you should stop before reaching adulthood.’

So the first step in breaking through to The World is to consider your orientation. Are you looking at this challenge from the perspective of Author Space concerns, or from the point of view of Readers?

If you’ve been focusing on Author Space concerns and finding yourself going nowhere, perhaps you need to adjust your frame of reference.

§

An aside before we continue: another thing hard to convey in a 2D pencil sketch are the 4^th dimensions of both Author Space and The World. Out in The World, most people seem to live inside a bubble about ten years long. Five years ago is ancient history. (“You mean, like, before the Pandemic?”) Five years in the future too far away to imagine. I sometimes think ten years might even be optimistic, and six years more accurate.

In Author Space, on the other hand, writers tend to live inside much larger temporal envelopes. They read; they remember. Writers tend to take a longer view of history, and a more far-sighted view of the future. But they also forget: most other people don’t.

Both populations are constantly turning over. Writers, I’ve observed, have a half-life of about ten years, between the time they decide to get serious about their craft and the time they get fed up and quit. The reading population turns over much more quickly: about six years, I’d say, between the time they decide to get serious about reading and the time their tastes have ossified; they’ve found their favorite authors and styles and aren’t open to trying anything new unless it’s very much like something they already know and like. The readers of today are not the same readers of even five years ago. Whenever publishing-adjacent people ask: When is the pendulum going to swing back? When will we start to go back to the way things were before Amazon?  

It can’t. There is no “there” to go back to. Those readers are gone. They’ve aged out of the marketplace and been replaced. And for the new readers who have come in to replace the old ones, the way things are now is the way things have always been.

Geez, you’d think people who routinely write about orbital mechanics and relativistic time-dilation would grasp that.

§

 

Thus we return to The Pass of Ultimate Glory or Failure, to find ourselves standing once more before The Critical Chokepoint, considering how best to deal with its guardian, The Great Boss Monster, Amazonas.

And at this point we must pause, because this planned 750-word post has already ballooned up to 1,500 words and I’m nowhere the end, and yet out of time to write today. I’ll try to wrap it up tomorrow, then.

In the meantime, your homework assignment is to read this:

How to Get Rich Quick Writing Big Hit Bestsellers!

 

...to be concluded...

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In science fiction circles Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his 1995 Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few people in the SF world have known about him until recently is that he actually began his career in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI interface and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but spent most of his career in supercomputer software R&D, doing work that was absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

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Writing 101 • Understanding the Publishing Ecosystem

I know I said I was going to let Writing 101 rest a while, but a few recent conversations have made this post seem necessary. Lately I’ve run into quite a few young writers who seem to be lacking very rudimentary knowledge of how the publishing business works.

I wish we could meet in person. If we could do that, in a room with a big white board and a nice assortment of colored markers, I could lay it all out for you in a single image, and then we could have a conversation about it. Since we don’t have that luxury, you’ll have to settle for this crude and hastily sketched-out scribble, with some comments.

Think of publishing as an inverted funnel: a stack of ascending and ever narrower chokepoints. I use an inverted funnel because this way a.) it looks less like Dante’s map of Hell, and b.) at the top, you find—

THE WORLD

The world is a wonderful place. It’s big, and beautiful, and full of readers, who are the people you want to reach. If you’re not writing with the objective of reaching readers, you are setting yourself up for frustration from the start.

The World is actually much bigger than it used to be. When I began to write for publication, “The World” basically meant the North American English-language market, with some potential crossover into the U.K. market. Now, it truly does mean the world, as in the entire population of the planet Earth. This presents both challenges and opportunities.

The foremost challenge for you as a writer is to fight your way up through this stack of ever-tighter funnels, to get your work out into The World and into the hands of the readers who live there. All else is subsidiary to this goal.

THE CRITICAL CHOKEPOINT

This is in hot pink because I couldn’t find a way to make it flash in some even worse eyesore of a color. We’ll get back to this in a minute, but think of this as the final challenge: the Boss Monster you will face on the last step your hero’s journey.

This boss monster has a name, and it’s name is Amazon, and it will pretend to be your friend, but really, it wants to drink your blood.

PUBLISHERS

This should be more of a wide, smeared, and cloudy bar, as there are a lot of different publishers of different sizes and with different agendas, but making it a smaller bar emphasizes the constricting nature of the funnel. There are a few large publishers, who can afford to pay authors large advances and put major marketing muscle behind new book releases, but there are fewer of these every day, as companies merge and consolidate. There are a plethora of smaller publishers, many of whom serve some religious or quasi-religious agenda, or else that are more directly coupled with their ownership, and thus are typically short on resources and funding.

With the exception of religious and/or grant-funded/non-profit publishers, all publishers work for the owners of their organizations and have the same job. It is to acquire content and put it out into the world, with the intention of moving a large enough number of copies of that content to make a profit by doing so. This means publishers have a built-in aversion to taking risks, and a bias towards making conservative choices when acquiring content. They want content they can get as cheaply as possible, and that will require as little production and marketing expenditure as possible, while immediately appealing to the largest clearly identified audience known.

The green dashed lines represent paths to the world that publishers used to have available to them—e.g., through independent distributors, direct sales, or independent bookstores—but that are increasingly more difficult to use now, if not completely defunct. Most publishers now depend on passing through the Critical Chokepoint to reach the World.

EDITORS

Editors work for publishers. There are many different kinds of editors, but the ones we are interested in are the ones who have the power to acquire content for their publisher. Their success depends on their being able to present their publisher with content that can be published profitably, on-time and on or under budget, with as little time and money as possible being invested into making it publishable. Therefore editors have a built-in bias towards considering submissions that “look professional” and buying work that aligns with their publisher’s current marketing goals. 

AGENTS

Writers have a lot of misconceptions about literary agents. You don’t need to have an agent to break into publishing. True, some agents do function as pre-filters for editors, as certain editors and publishers will work only with literary agents. Basically, though, if you are not already famous, either for your previous books or for your accomplishments in some other field, this doesn’t apply to you. You are unlikely to attract the attention of one of these kinds of agents.

At heart, reputable literary agents are essentially commissioned salespeople. They make their money by taking a percentage off the top when they sell an author’s work to a publisher. As such, they have a built-in bias towards representing works they believe they can move very quickly, for as much cash up-front as possible—which means novels, not short stories. Some reputable agents will handle shorter work, but usually just as a courtesy, and only for someone for whom they are also selling novels.

I use the qualifier “reputable” because there are a lot of people out there who claim to be agents but really are parasites, feeding off the hopes and dreams of aspiring writers, and it is really easy to attract the attention of these kinds of agents. Remember: the money always flows to the writer. Any so-called agent who wants money from you in order to represent you is a creature to be avoided.

AUTHORS (YOU)

At last, we come to the place where most writers begin: with thinking about themselves and their writing. By inverting the funnel, I hope this helps you to think of publishing as a game, through which you, the writer, must keep striving to level-up until you at last achieve victory.

I made the Authors cloud messy and chaotic because for most writers, it is. A lot of aspiring authors write like mad, but go nowhere. Some get stuck in loops and keep repeating the same self-defeating mistakes. Looking at the drawing now, I should have drawn at least a few lines that went straight to ground, because I’ve seen so many authors do that. 

Some authors believe they need an Agent to take them to the next level, but in the early stages of your writing career, you don’t. At this stage, the best an agent can do for you is to help you negotiate better contract terms, if you have written a novel and succeeded in getting a publisher interested in it. For most writers, though, time spent chasing after signing with an agent is time wasted.

For most aspiring writers (speaking in sweeping generalities again), the best path forward is to work on developing good relationships with Editors. Don’t get too attached to any particular one, as editors serve at the pleasure of their publishers, who serve at the pleasure of their owners, who can change their marketing direction at the merest whim of the Great Boss Monster. But in general, learning to work well with editors is the most useful skill you can develop early in your writing career. Editors are typically the gatekeepers controlling access to publishers.

I have seen writers bypass editors and go straight to Publishers. It doesn’t happen often, and it succeeds even less often, but to my astonishment, I have seen it work, once in a rare while. I have even seen writers bypass publishers entirely and go directly to The World, but that succeeds even less often.

The greatest danger at this level of the game is this. An author will look at their ever-growing collection of form rejections; look at all the traps and obstacles still lying in wait before them, and especially at all the conservative biases built into the game—

[N.B. I don’t mean “conservative” in the political or social sense. In this context it means, “What’s the safe choice? What’s going to be most profitable for the least effort? What is everyone else doing?” Depending on the zeitgeist, “conservative” might very well mean publishing yet another fangporn vampire romance with an LGBTQ+ protagonist.]

—and declare, “SCREW THIS! I’LL BECOME MY OWN PUBLISHER!”

Whereupon they hurl themselves with all their might into The Critical Chokepoint…

And the Great Boss Monster feasts on their blood.

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BUT WAIT! THERE IS YET CAUSE FOR HOPE!

COMING NEXT:
“The Great Boss Monster, and What Lies Beyond”

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In science fiction circles Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his 1995 Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few people in the SF world have known about him until recently is that he actually began his career in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI interface and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but spent most of his career in supercomputer software R&D, doing work that was absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

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It’s Amazon’s world. We just rent space in it.

 

I got a query from an old friend the other day. 

And by old, I mean old: this is someone I’ve known for more than fifty years. After a long and successful career as a teacher and writer of non-fiction books, he retired, and decided to try his hand at writing a novel. In the fullness of time he actually finished his novel, and then, to compound the miracle, found a publisher who liked it well enough to accept it for publication and pay him a modest advance. After another fullness of time spent working through the developmental editing, copy editing, proofreading, dust-jacket marketing copy development, etc., etc., etc., his novel was at last released…

Whereupon it promptly sank without a ripple. Not even a nice satisfying ker-ploonk! as it hit the surface of the literary world and went under. Two weeks after the gala release party, it was as if his novel had never existed.

Prompting his query to me:

Here in the 21st century, how in the Hell do you get your book noticed?

The truth is, I don’t know. I’m a time traveler from the past as well. I began my career as a fiction writer in the 1970s and am intimately familiar with the way the fiction publishing business used to work. But in the here and now? Here, in the year 2025? (♪If man is still aliiiiive…♫)

Beats me. 

§

It used to be hard to get published. Now it’s easy to get published, but really hard to get anyone to notice or care. When Andy Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous, but only for fifteen minutes, he was perhaps being unreasonably optimistic: fifteen nanoseconds seems more like it. Here in AmazonWorld—or as I prefer to call its electronic manifestation, NatterSpace™—ADHD seems to be a communicable disease, and the question of how to catch and hold someone’s attention for longer than the three seconds it takes them to glance at a tweet or “like” a cute photo of an annoyed cat in a pink bunny costume—

Well, that is the challenge, isn’t it?

It doesn’t help that your every step in NatterSpace is tracked, your every like and dislike recorded, studied, analyzed, and turned into data to drive further push-marketing. The Amazonification of the marketplace has reached its apotheosis. You live your online life surrounded by a cloud of tiny invisible digital spies, servants, and gnats and gadflies, all eager to push you into buying lots more of whatever it is you’ve already proven you will buy. If it seems to you there is a certain dreary sameness in the recommendations you see every time you go online…

There is. You are in the process of being bored to death by robots. Not out of malice, or even out of misguided virtue, but simply because that is the easiest way for their human masters to take your money. There is probably a great SF story hiding in this idea, waiting to be written.

But where would you get it published?

§

In 2005, a fairly bright person said in an interview—

I think it’s a mistake to talk about the “genre” as if it were a monolith. There may have been a time when it was possible for a dedicated fan to read a good sampling of all the new SF being published, but that time—if it ever really was—was long ago. What we’ve been going through for at least the last 30 years has been a sort of literary cladogenesis, with “the genre” fragmenting into dozens of related but distinct daughter-genres and microgenres.

The interesting part of this is that, between print-on-demand publishing, e-publishing, web publishing, and all the other emerging technologies, it’s now at least semi-practical to publish fiction that has no hope of ever appealing to a mass audience. If you wanted to, say, launch an e-zine devoted exclusively to publishing stories about promiscuous centaurs living in trailer parks in Alabama, you could do it, and do a very professional-looking job of it. Not only that, but thanks to the Internet, you would actually stand a pretty fair chance of reaching the 500 people in the world who want to read nothing but stories about promiscuous centaurs living in trailer parks in Alabama. So there’s more fiction being published than ever before.

The downside for the writer, though, is that there’s no money in it. The general interest magazines appear to be following the general interest anthologies into extinction, and extreme specialization and small-niche marketing seem to be the shape of things to come. Readers now have unprecedented power to find only exactly the types of fiction they want to read, without risk of accidental exposure to anything else. I suppose they’ve always had this power—I can think of entire years when I subscribed to Asimov’s and only read two or three stories in each issue—but at least with a general interest magazine, there was always the possibility that after you’d read the Michael Swanwick and Lucius Shepard stories, you might take a chance on Karen Joy Fowler.

But this trend towards extreme narrowcasting—it’s both fascinating and disturbing. When the reader can exercise such fine control over the input he receives, how does a writer crack through that protective shell?

Quelle surprise! The person who said that was me!

§

Twenty years later, the problem not only remains but has intensified exponentially: how do you get readers to take a look at fiction that does not conform to Amazon’s algorithmic predictions of what they should like?

I honestly do not know. In a sense we began Stupefying Stories magazine and this web site as an effort to seek the answer to this question, but instead have spent the past 15 years watching the market for original SF/F get ever smaller, narrower, and worse for writers, as it spirals down to extinction. The established general interest “pro” magazines are on their last legs, if not already dead and shuffling around like zombies. The new owners of Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Hitchcock’s, and Ellery Queen—yes, they’re all owned by the same parent company now—have introduced a new standard publication contract that is so bad for writers, at least one writer’s market resource has decided Analog is no longer a pro market and de-listed it.

Yet as one established writer I know put it, “It’s not like people are lining up to buy my stuff, so I would probably sign it.”

Thus we return to my old friend’s question:

Here in the 21st century, how in the Hell do you get your book noticed?

I don’t know the answer, but am open to suggestions. I’d love to hear what’s working for you, assuming something is. Remember, I’m a time traveler. I come from the past, where they do things differently. I am eager to learn the ways of this strange new world.

Over to you.

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In science fiction circles Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his 1995 Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few people in the SF world have known about him until recently is that he actually began his career in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI interface and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but spend most of his career in supercomputer software R&D, doing work that was absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

An earlier version of this column was published in 2017. Since then, the situation has not improved.

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Status Update • 27 July 2025

Enough people have asked that it’s time for me to respond. Where have I been for the past two weeks?

Answer: Busy. Really, really busy.

Rather than chatter, then, let’s get right to the agenda.

Item #1: REMINDER: You have five days left in which to recommend your favorite stories for inclusion in The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge. You’ll find the (mostly) complete list of PWC stories here. 

Nominate your favorites either by commenting on this post or in an email message to stupefyingstories @ gmail [dot] com.

ANOTHER REMINDER: Do not bother to comment in the comments sections of the stories themselves. Because of aggressive spambot activity, we’ve had to lock down commenting on old posts. Comments or recommendations made on older posts, as well as on social media, very likely will be overlooked.

Item #2: HENRY VOGEL just won an Imadjinn Award for Best Graphic Novel, for The Complete X-Thieves. Sadly, his most recent RLP novel, The Princess Scout, was only a finalist and didn’t win in its category. Henry writes good books, most of which we’ve published. You should check them out.

I sometimes complain that people only seem to care about stories and books I wrote thirty years ago. Henry is finally starting to get awards and recognition for comic books he scripted in the 1980s. In some perverse way, this makes me feel better.

Item #3: ALLAN DYEN-SHAPIRO’s novelette, The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds, is at last out in paperback on Barnes & Noble. There are slight differences between the Amazon and Barnes & Noble (Ingram) editions, mostly in that Ingram did a much better job of printing the cover art, used a better grade of paper for the interior, and made the binding tighter and more durable. I don’t care which version you buy: we make more money off the Amazon edition, but the Ingram edition is a better book. Just, take a look at the thing, will you?

Note that the e-book is available on pretty much every e-reader platform there is, and the Ingram print edition is slowly trickling out to stores and e-commerce sites. This is what we’ll be doing going forward: releasing our e-books on every platform we can reach. This makes some difference in how we deal with Amazon, most notably in that we will no longer be putting new releases on Kindle Unlimited. KU sells novels—THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, by Eric Dontigney, is doing particularly well on KU—but KU totally cannibalizes sales of short story collections. So we’re going to stop using it.

Item #4: in the meantime, Stupefying Stories issues #23, #24, #25, and #26 remain available FREE to read on Kindle Unlimited. 

If you have any interest at all in what we’re doing here, beyond how much we pay and when we’re going to reopen to submissions, please, please, please take a look at any or all of these four books. You’re sure to find something you like in them. Maybe even something you think worth mentioning to your friends. And you can’t beat the price.

Item #5: I recently rejoined SFWA. It was an eye-opening experience.

Mind you, I did this not for my own benefit, but in hopes of learning some things about the SF/F market as it exists today, so that I might better promote the writers whose work I am publishing. Instead, what I learned was… disheartening.

First off, I was sad to see a lot of names I recognized on the In Memoriam page. Some of these people were good friends, back in the day. Some were even people whose work I’ve published. In particular, finding Zoe Kaplan’s name there was heart-breaking. She was too young to be gone already.

Second, I was shocked to see how SFWA has had to adjust their admission requirements downward. When I first joined—

No, never mind. That was then. This is now. But as a reflection of the general health of the SF/F market, it was disturbing to see. And the deeper I looked, the more disturbed I became, and perhaps I’ll have more to say about that another time. But right now I want to move on to—

Item #6: Getting back to The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge:

We’ve already found that two of the candidates for that book can’t be republished, because the authors have since died and left no contact information. 

Perhaps I’m just morose because of what I learned when I rejoined SFWA, but this is an important point. As an author, you own your copyrights, and they might someday have some value. I know it’s no fun to think about this, but you really do need to plan for someone to be responsible for your literary estate after you’re gone. Otherwise all your works will go to The Land of Orphaned Copyrights…

And then Google* will find a way to make money off them. You don’t want that to happen, do you?

* Probably under the well-known legal principle, “The dead can’t sue.” Someday I’m going to find a way to slip that line into a story. I just need to come up with a character loathsome enough to say it.   

~brb

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The Never-ending FAQ • Addendum, 11 July 2025

Following up on the 9 July Never-ending FAQ post…

Q: Pete Wood asks: “How come there are no questions in the FAQ?”

A: Because I’m really busy right now and trying to get a lot done in a very short amount of time, and something had to give. I got the three most important items out in Wednesday’s post: that I want people to look at the candidates for The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge, I want people to know that The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds is now out in print and ebook, and that the author, Allan Dyen-Shapiro, will be at Readercon 34 next weekend with books to sign.

That, and a lot of the questions that have come in lately have been on the order of this one:
 

Q: An anonymous commenter asks: [question redacted]

A: Never mind. I will not repeat the comment, nor will I send a private reply. I will only say this: “Trust me, pal, the world will seem like a much better place to you if you just keep taking your Lexapro as prescribed.”

Geez, I wish I’d used a pseudonym for everything I’d ever written for public consumption. Everything.
 

Q: Another commenter asks: I tried to comment on a story for The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge, but my comment never showed up. What happened?

A: To repeat: we had to impose strict moderation on comments because of the aggressive junk commenting by A.I. spambots. Comments made on posts go into the moderation queue, and we do see them—eventually—but if you want to recommend a story for The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge, please do so either in the comments section of the index post or in an email to our submissions address. Comments and recommendations made anywhere else—on Twitter/X, Bluesky, or the Stupefying Stories facebook page—will very likely be lost.

Q: Oh, come on. Is the spam commenting problem really that bad?

A: Yes.

It’s a pity. When we began, the comments section of this web page was a good place to have an intelligent conversation with writers and readers. Now, between the A.I. spambots and the certifiable lunatics, it’s a moderation nightmare.

Q: How long are the Pete Wood Challenge stories going to remain readable by the public?

A: Until September 30, 2025. We are in the process of selectively unpublishing other content now, to discourage A.I. bots and content trawlers. All of the Pete Wood Challenge stories will be removed from this site after September 30.

The plan is to cut over to a new web site on October 1st. The exact nature of the new site is still being determined. It might be behind a paywall, or require registration to comment. It might not allow commenting at all.

Q: That’s the plan, huh?

A: Yes. I have become wary of announcing our plans as they have a way of becoming recipreversexclusons. Whenever we announce plans, the universe seems intent on dreaming up some new way to thwart them. (Last summer’s oak tree limb through the roof of the house was pretty impressive, as thwarting goes.)

At the risk of drawing the attention of some capricious and malign Fate, the plan is still to get four more issues of Stupefying Stories out this year. This being mid-July already, though, doing so will require some creative thinking.

Q: Does this mean you’ll be reopening to submissions?

A: Not before mid-September at the earliest. It may be a limited or “by invitation only” submission window. Our first priority is to honor the contracts we have signed and publish the stories we already have in-hand. Whether we will need more stories to complete the books we have in mind remains to be determined.

Q: What’s going on with Writing 101?

A: I’ve had to rethink that. My original idea for the column was twofold:

1.) To force myself to get back into the habit of writing daily.

2.) To begin a conversation on what makes for good writing, and how to do it.

It was never my intention to do a series of lectures. I don’t do lectures. (Here in my mind’s eye I see my daughter rolling her eyes.) I was more interested in having a Socratic dialogue in which we could discover the answers together.

Since I began, though, two things have become apparent. The first is that I can either be a writer or an editor/publisher, but have a lot of trouble trying to be both at the same time. The second is that the comments section of a blogspot site is a really lousy place to try to have an intelligent dialogue. May as well be trying to do so in a St. Paul Skyway food court while the crazy shouting homeless people are on the loose.

Writing 101 may return, in some new form, but again, not before September.       

 

And once again, time’s up. See you next week.

~Bruce Bethke

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The Never-ending FAQ • 9 July 2025

Questions have been piling up while I’ve been busy with Otogu, so this is going to be a combination FAQ and status update. Quick, Robin, to the Bat-Agenda!

First item:  The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge

This is just a reminder that we’re soliciting reader input for a proposed short story collection, to be drawn from the hundreds of Pete Wood Challenge stories we’ve published over the past four years. You’ll find the details and links to all the stories here: https://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/2025/07/its-time-to-nominate-your-favorite.html

Remember, if you want to vote for a story, put your comments in the above post or send them to our submissions email address. We’ve had to lock-down commenting on older posts because of the spam. If you try to comment on an older story, your comment won’t be lost, but it will go into the moderation queue, and we’ll see it… eventually.

 

Second item: The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds

Another reminder, that Allan Dyen-Shapiro’s novelette, The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds, is now out on just about every ebook platform there is, and in trade paperback, too. Allan will be at Readercon 34 next week, with print copies hot off the presses and ready to sign. If you’re going to Readercon, be sure to stop by and say hi.

While the Amazon-specific print edition is available now, the Ingram print edition seems to be taking a longer than usual time to wend its way through the distribution pipeline. The Amazon edition is available now and slightly cheaper. The Ingram edition is better-quality and will in time be available in wide distribution, but at this time is available only directly from Ingram. (Or from Allan, at Readercon.)

The truly dedicated fan will want both, of course.

    

Third item: the growing A.I. menace

As you should be able to see from the photo at the top of this page but can’t, the black raspberries are ripe, and the red raspberries are just coming into being ripe. I’ve been unable to get a good photo of the black raspberries, though, because the “we’re going to make you use A.I. whether you want it or not” image filter in my cell phone’s camera software apparently recognizes them as being raspberries, and thus insists they must be red and keeps tinkering with the image to turn the berries red. I mean, everyone knows ripe raspberries are red, right?

This to me is the greatest menace of ubiquitous A.I.: millions of tiny A.I. algorithms out there all suffering from galloping Dunning-Kruger Effect, quietly and constantly editing all that we see, hear, and read to reflect what “everybody knows,” and thus in reality reflecting the original programmer’s unconscious biases and unthinking assumptions.  The collective effect on human cognition and critical discernment will be suffocating.

This is no mere jeremiad. It’s already happening in music, where creators are complaining that “AI-Generated Music Is Starting to Crowd Out the Real Stuff on Streaming Platforms.” (Heh. “…a wasteland of unchecked beatspam.” Great description. Wish I’d written that.)

Don’t shrug it off as, “So what? It’s hip-hop.” This is coming soon to your favorite ebook platform. Yes, I know, people are putting lots of low-grade A.I.-generated crap out there already, but such books are not getting much traction… yet. Right now, most readers are smart enough and discerning enough to recognize dim-witted A.I.-generated slop when they see it.

The coming change will not be that A.I.-generated books will get better. It’s that the people who buy books will get stupider.

This is where you come into the story. This is your challenge. Educate your readers. Make them smarter. Don’t succumb to the temptation to write down to the lowest common denominator. Write the best books you can write, and train your readers to expect better.

I know. This sounds like work. But your future depends on there being intelligent, discerning, and literate readers who want to read your work, and who won’t settle for A.I.-generated wordspam. 

</jeremiad>

Fourth item: the end of the world as we know it

While the robins in the nest under the deck have hatched, the raspberries are doing well, scattering used coffee grounds in the garden seems to be discouraging the deer from conducting any more midnight raids on my beans and tomatoes, and the plum trees are showing promise of producing ripe fruit in the fall, the mulberry trees have completely failed. They were loaded with flowers in the spring, a few weeks after the plums trees bloomed, but they’re barren now. 

I blame the suburban obsession with having a smooth, manicured, weed-free lawn. In the early spring, my yard and garden were full of bees. I counted six different species. Then the lawn service trucks came through my neighborhood, and the bees vanished. Any vegetable plant or fruit tree that blossomed after Extermination Day is barren now.

The entire human food chain depends on insect pollinators, my friends. Be kind to them. Don’t spread toxic shit* on your lawns. Tolerate the clover and dig up the dandelions if you must, but don’t poison the bees!

I suppose this explains why “Bootleg Bees,” by Laura Jane Swanson, remains one of my favorite stories, of all the stories I’ve ever published on this web site.

* One of the more perversely amusing lawn service signs I saw on one of my neighbor’s lawns boasted that they used “only organic chemicals.” Well, rattlesnake venom is an organic chemical, too, but I sure wouldn’t want to walk barefoot across a lawn that’s been freshly sprayed with it. 

Fifth item: the future of Stupefying Stories in general and this web site in particular

Quite a few questions have come in lately asking when we’re going to be reopening for submissions, how long stories on this site are going to remain available to readers, when the next issue is coming out, when is Writing 101 going to resume, etc., etc., etc. 

The answer to all of these questions is, “We’re working on it. We’ll have better answers next week.” But right at the moment I’ve run out of time for today, so must stop writing now and hit the Publish button.

See you next week, then.  

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Ask Dr. Cyberpunk • with your host, Bruce Bethke

This being the Independence Day holiday weekend, we’re running The Best of Ask Dr. Cyberpunk today. This column was originally posted on February 19, 2021.

One of the weirder things about being known the world over as “the guy who wrote ‘Cyberpunk’” is that people seem to think I am some sort of judge, arbiter, or elder spokesman for the genre. 

On the face of it, the idea of there being any sort of elder anything for cyberpunk is a contradiction in terms. What part of punk don’t you get? 

Nonetheless, the questions keep coming in, so I may as well get some value from this smelly dead albatross I’m wearing and turn it into a regular feature. Friday seems as good a day as any for it, so beginning today, the lines are open. Have a question you’ve always wanted to ask me about that story? Post it here, email it to me at brucebethke.cybrpnk @ gmail.com, send it to me in an IM—or what the hell, think it at me, really hard. But be advised that I am absolutely immune to telepathy, so I probably won’t answer.

Today’s question comes from Adrian, who asks: What comes between atompunk and cyberpunk, timeline-wise? 

The answer, obviously, is “beepunk:” stories of tech-savvy rebel gardeners hacking the genomes of common backyard pollinators in order to fight the agribusiness megacorporations and stick it to the man. Like this one:

SHOWCASE: “Bootleg Bees,” by Laura Jane Swanson

Somewhat more seriously: cyberpunk began as a self-conscious attempt to apply 1970s punk rock anomie to the emerging 1980s high tech scene, and then to extrapolate what might happen next and take it forward from there. I have always been more interested in what comes next than in what’s already been done, and figured that—

Well, it doesn’t matter what I figured, because that book was never written.

In the meantime, while almost every other young sci-fi writer around was writing Bill Gibson fanfic and every agent and publisher in the business was scrambling to find another book “just like Neuromancer only different,” Paul Di Filippo took a really good crack at “what’s next?” in Ribofunk, and essentially invented biopunk. 

Unfortunately, Gibson & Sterling had a much bigger hit with The Difference Engine, and thus invented steampunk.

I thought the basic idea of The Difference Engine was fairly clever—that Charles Babbage’s analog computers had actually worked, and therefore the computer revolution hit western civilization a century earlier than it actually did—but what most everyone else seemed to seize on was the Victorian Era costumes, trappings, and set dressings. Instead of going forward and thinking about what might be next, it was as if science fiction as a whole suddenly took a great leap backward, and started over again, with Jules Verne.

Ontology recapitulates phylogeny. Steampunk begat clockpunk—and gods below, I grew to hate clockpunk. Seemed like every week one of the major publishers was launching a new series with the word “clockwork” in the title: The Clockwork King, The Clockwork Crowbar, The Clockwork Assassin, The Clockwork Toaster, The Clockwork Schlockwork…

Nota bene: A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, is not a steampunk novel.

Steampunk begat dieselpunk, which begat raypunk, which begat atompunk, which begat solarpunk, which begat… Oh, I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few more in there. The point is, science fiction is now cluttered with dozens of *.punk microgenres, all of which suffer from such paucity of imagination that they can’t even think of a word to describe themselves that does not end in punk. Speaking ex cathedra, Doctor Cyberpunkenstein heartily wishes that all these eager young writers would find their own damn names for their new genres! 

Ahem. Excuse me.

So, to answer the initial question: if atompunk is a sort of refurbished atom-age SF of the 1940s~1950s as derived by way of steampunk, and cyberpunk began in the 1970s, then what falls between them in the timeline would be…

Hippiepunk? Except hippiepunk is an oxymoron, as punk rock was first and foremost a rebellion against hippies in general and the pompous dinosaur arena bands that evolved in the 1960s in particular, so let’s call it, oh—

Acidpunk. Stories of society’s rebels and outcasts fighting the pharmaceutical megacorporations and sticking it to the man by hacking the chemistry lab and cooking up new psychedelic drugs.

While listening to The Doors and Jefferson Airplane? Suddenly this all begins to seem terribly familiar to me. I suppose, just as William Burroughs and Alfred Bester were the points of departure for so many of the early cyberpunk writers, this means your points of departure for acidpunk would be Ken Kesey, Thomas Wolfe, and Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories. Considering that out here in the Real World we seem to be stuck recapitulating 1968 through 1973 right now, this is also probably exactly the right time to be revisiting Kurt Vonnegut’s early novels, with an eye towards giving Vonnegut’s ideas a punk style facelift. If I were to do this, I think I’d start by rereading Cat’s Cradle.

Over to you.

—Bruce Bethke

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In lieu of an author’s bio, Bruce Bethke would like to direct your attention to this very short story:

“On the Conservation of Historical Momentum”

 

After you’ve read it—and “Bootleg Bees,” don’t forget that story, too—why not take a look at Allan Dyen-Shapiro’s “The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds,” for a nice big heaping helping of hopepunk.

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Going to Readercon 24? (Plus, our 4th of July Sale!)

Allan Dyen-Shapiro will be at Readercon 34, July 17-20!

Better yet, he’ll be there with print copies of The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds, fresh off the presses and ready to sign! If you’re going to Readercon, be sure to find him and say hi!

If you aren’t going to Readercon, you can still get the book, either in ebook or paperback. It’s now out on a plethora of ebook platforms, all of which you’ll find at this link:

https://books2read.com/The-Day-We-Said-Goodbye-to-the-Birds

As for getting a print copy, the Amazon-exclusive version has been out for about two weeks now and looks fine, but we now have a link to the new IngramSpark edition, which is going into wider distribution and will be available (soon, we hope) through outlets such as Barnes & Noble, etc. The books Allan will have to sign at Readercon will be the IngramSpark edition.

We also have a QR code for the IngramSpark edition, which is something entirely new to us. If someone who is familiar with QR codes would be so kind as to do whatever it is one does with QR codes to this incomprehensible glob, and let us know what it does, we’d greatly appreciate it.

Why two print editions, you ask? Because while Amazon is much faster, the IngramSpark edition is just all-around better, in a variety of subtle ways. Better paper, better alignment of the interior content to the trim size, better color printing on the cover, and a tighter and more durable binding. The most important difference, though, is that while Amazon can in theory put the book into wider distribution, Ingram actually does get our books into real honest-to-God bookstores, most notably Barnes & Noble.

The astute observer will also note that as of today, the Amazon print edition is priced at $7.99 USD, while the Ingram edition is priced at $8.99. This is a temporary difference. While the Ingram edition is slightly more expensive to produce, it’s a lot more expensive to distribute. Thus, we had to set a slightly higher MSRP.

Consider this an inadvertent and unplanned Fourth of July Sale. Through the coming weekend, you can buy the Amazon print version for just $7.99. 

By Monday, we should have the two versions fully synced, and then the Amazon price will go up to $8.99 USD, to match the IngramSpark price.

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