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.

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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.

Categories: Writing 101