I’ve been thinking a lot about inertia and entropy lately.
This two-month hiatus wasn’t planned. While it’s tempting to blame it on the Never-ending Repair & Remodeling Project, that was only the inciting incident.
Previously on Stupefying Stories: Last summer’s destructive hailstorm made major repairs to the house necessary, which subsequently mushroomed into The Remodeling Project That Would Not End. A “minimally invasive, three days tops” sub-project that began in January eventually required my moving everything out of the front half of the house, and nearly two months later, that sub-project is still only “mostly” finished. From time to time a worker will show up unannounced to put in a solid half-day of chaos generation, and then vanish again, leaving only debris behind.
On the positive side, the primary contractor has yet to bill me for any of this. Perhaps they’ve forgotten I exist.
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The insidious thing about inertia is that it’s so tightly coupled to entropy. The longer a body at rest stays at rest, the harder it is to get it moving again, as rust and rot set in. All my best analogies on this topic come from my many experiences with old British sports cars, and with the delusional owners of barn finds who imagine their rusty piles of junk are restorable classics when they’re more likely to break in half if someone tries to hook them up to a tow truck and pull them out of the mud into which they’ve sunk up to their door frames…
But I’m speaking to an audience of writers now, so let’s couch it in terms of writer’s block—which in my experience is an imaginary condition that results from a writer beginning to write a story with no clear idea of where it’s going to go or how it’s going to end.
When we began the Stupefying Stories story fifteen years ago, we began with an overabundance of enthusiasm and ambition and no clear idea of what we were trying to do or how we’d ever know if we’d done it. The idea that it might someday end never even occurred to us. After a few very promising early years, though, Karen’s cancer took control of the narrative, and we spent the next decade scrambling to find ways to keep Stupefying Stories moving forward while learning far more about oncology and the cruelty of hope than we’d ever wanted to.
As regards publishing fiction, we tried a lot of things. We went off in a lot of different directions, often simultaneously. We learned a lot of lessons, some fun, some eye-opening, and some painful and expensive.
What have we learned?
I’ll get to that in a moment, but first, an observation. Two years, three months, and twelve days after she died—after a lifetime of being one half of “we”—I’m still finding it really difficult to think in first-person singular again.
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A lifetime ago I was working for a company that was doing contract software development work for a Really Famous Musical Instrument Company. The new product we were helping them to develop was very impressive, and later went on to be incredibly successful in the market, but at the time we were working with the prototypes, the deeper we dove into them, the more we noticed some…peculiarities. Seemingly designed-in limitations. Things that made us wonder why they did it that way, instead of in some other way that, while admittedly a bit esoteric, would make the instrument far more useful for professional musicians. So we pulled together our list of questions, concerns, and suggestions, and presented them to RFMIC.
Their response was both disturbing and enlightening. They didn’t intend to sell this thing to professional musicians. They shared their data with us, which showed that the entire world-wide “pro” market was far too small to be worth pursuing. They could afford to give their instruments away free to well-known working professional musicians, because there were so few of them; in fact, doing that was part of their marketing strategy. The real money was to be made in selling to the student market, because parents will pay stupid amounts of money to encourage their kid’s budding talent, and to the semi-pro “aspiring amateur” market, who always believe they’re just one more expensive purchase away from cracking the secret of how to make it big and become rich and famous. RFMIC wasn’t really in the business of making and selling musical instruments. They were in the business of selling the dream of success to sufficiently affluent and somewhat talented amateurs.
So thanks for your input, but stick to the spec, okay? The changes you’re suggesting will only make it more confusing for, and thus harder to sell to, the amateur market.
A lifetime later, I must admit: they were right. Dammit. At the time I was taken aback by their naked cynicism. Ultimately, they sold four times as many of those instruments as there were working professional musicians then working in all genres in the entire world.
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A decade or so later I was on the board of directors of SFWA, and in the process of learning a related lesson, although I hadn’t quite put the pieces together just yet. In particular I was paying a lot of attention to the Nebula awards; how works got on the ballot, how the voting process worked, how many ballots were sent out, who returned their ballots, etc., etc., etc., etc. (The actual ballots were secret, of course, but the organization did a great job of tracking who bothered to return their ballots. Surprisingly few members did.)
Slowly, it dawned on me. The then-currently active successful working professional writers—the Big Names, who were always a very small minority of the membership—just plain didn’t have the time to pay serious attention to the Nebulas. They didn’t have the time to read enough of anyone else’s work to make more than a few token recommendations; they didn’t bother to vote in significant numbers on the preliminary ballot; they didn’t even have the time to read only the works that made it to the final ballot, much less to vote on it. Thus, by the time the results of the final ballot came out, what it really reflected was the collective opinion of all the deadwood, has-been, wannabe, never-were, and enthusiastic newbie members who made up the vast majority of the voting membership—and especially the opinions of those newbies who engaged in aggressive campaigning and Nebula-vote log-rolling.
Decades later, I can’t say things have improved. Just a few days ago a writer I know put out a desperate plea on social media for people willing to accept a review copy of his latest novel, no strings attached, in hopes that they might consider giving it a review or rating. What he received in return were lots of comments from all his writer-friends, who began with really encouraging words, but then segued into, “Unfortunately, right now I’m too busy finishing my own latest [novel, story, whatever] to look at it.”
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Fifteen Years Later: What We’ve Learned, So Far
1. Writers are not readers.
A. They typically begin as readers. Students and aspiring writers will read other writers’ works, but only until they start getting published themselves. After that
their interest in reading or promoting other writers’ work tapers off
rapidly. It’s the very rare writer who will help to promote any work but their own. Some writers won’t even help their publisher promote
their own work. They’re too busy writing their next thing and trying to find their next publisher.
B. There is something really wrong with the way we teach literature. Children love
to read stories, but by the time they’re teenagers most have had that
love beaten out of them—except for the few who have embraced the dream of becoming a writer.
C. We’ve done an intermittently good job here of building a publication that
draws the interest of writers. Unfortunately, see Point 1, above.
2. New original novels sell.
A. Reprints of old out-of-print rights-reverted novels don’t.
B. Readership-over-time drops off very rapidly. There’s too much new content streaming out constantly and competing for the reader’s attention. The window to get readers interested in a new publication closes faster than the drop of a guillotine blade.
C. Series novels sell much better than standalone novels. Readers like to follow the characters in a series, not the author—and definitely not the publisher!
3. “General Interest” short story collections don’t sell.
A. General interest collections appeal to general interest readers, which are mythical creatures, or at least now extinct in the wild. See point 1B, above.
B. Strongly themed collections can sell, but only with aggressive and carefully targeted pre-release advertising.
C. Standalone novellas can sell, but only with aggressive and targeted pre-release advertising. Effectively, these are original novels for people with short attention spans.
D. Reprint
collections are a very tough sell, unless they have both a strong theme
and at least one famous or award-winning story. Mostly they’re vanity
projects.
E. The
primary market for the existing general interest short story publications appears to
be students and aspiring amateur writers who hope to sell to those publications, and that
market is very small. Smaller even than the market for professional musicians.
4. There is nothing older than old science fiction.
A. If it’s any good, Street & Smith already owns it and has sold the reprint and film rights at least a dozen times over.
B. Eric Frank Russell would never get published today.
C. Newly written “vintage style” stories aren’t cool or retro, they’re just faux old. They’re prose karaoke. They’re Franklin Mint collectible plates. They don’t appeal to older readers, who already have shelves full of the original stories in the form of Street & Smith-licensed reprint collections, and they don’t appeal to many younger readers either, because they’re old.
5. Speaking of old SF styles and forms, online serials don’t draw readers.
A. Amazon proved that with Kindle Vella.
B. Online multi-part stories aren’t read. If readers don’t get hooked on the first part within the first two weeks of publication, they’ll never go back to look at it later. See point 2B, above.
C. Online fiction readers have very short attention spans. A thousand words tests their patience.
6. Free content on a web site does not drive click-throughs to book sales.
A. Therefore, why are we doing SHOWCASE?
B. In fact, why are we doing a web site at all?
7. Our fundamental approach has been wrong since Day One.
A. If we want to reach writers, we should forget publishing fiction entirely and start selling the dream that you can become rich and famous while also losing weight and having a great sex life by writing best-selling fiction—but only if you buy our series of “how to write real good” self-help books and sign up for every single one of our series of “bestseller secrets” webinars.
B. But if we want to reach readers… See points 3A through 3E, above.
8. In retrospect, I should have put a lot less time into actually publishing fiction and a lot more time into establishing myself as a tastemaker/influencer and making the case for why “Stories That Impress Bruce Bethke®” is a valuable endorsement readers should seek out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, coulda woulda shoulda. Hindsight is always 20/20, except when you’re considering someone else’s failures and shortcomings, in which case it’s closer to 20/15.
9. This is a terribly fraught time to be working in publishing.
I’d thought things would settle down once the 2024 election was over. Then I’d hoped things would settle down after the inauguration. Now I’m beginning to feel like I’ve fallen through a time warp and am stuck living through 1969 again. If you’re too young to remember that year; trust me, it was not a good time, and 1970 was worse.
Lately I’ve been running into a lot of people in publishing and the publishing adjacent spaces who shouldn’t be writing for publication or active on social media at all, they should be talking to their doctor about Zyprexa®.
These people make me… nervous. And there sure seem to be a Hell of a lot of ‘em on the loose now.
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Being forced to move everything out of the front half of my house for a few weeks was therapeutic, I guess. There were things in there I hadn’t touched in years. There were rooms I’d scarcely entered since Karen died. Cleaning out her office was bad enough, but cleaning out her sewing and craft room was worse. There were so many creative projects she’d begun with such great enthusiasm…
But then another set of metastatic lesions would pop up in some new place, all her hopes, plans, and dreams would get shoved aside while she went back on the treatment treadmill, and in the end, all that was left was the sad evidence of an unfinished life.
Through it all, we clung to the dream that we could make Stupefying Stories work. We both loved to read. We both loved the same kinds of fiction. As the cancer slowly stole her life, one piece at a time, reading and talking about stories remained one of the last things we could still do together. With each new treatment plan, we clung to the hope that this time it would work, and buy us more time, and we’d have a chance to get back to something like a normal life.
“A chance to live longer…”
I really hate those commercials. I no longer scream obscenities at the TV when one in particular comes on, but considered in hindsight, that’s what her doctors were selling us: the hope that the next treatment might succeed where all the others had failed. Until the last one, which not only accelerated her death, but robbed her of what little remained of her dignity.
The women in that particular commercial look so happy, though. Why, they don’t even begin to look like Stage 4 cancer patients. They look like… actresses.
Is that an acting career specialty? Looking like a happy cancer patient living life to the fullest in a pharmaceutical commercial?
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For the last few years I didn’t worry too much about the business side of Stupefying Stories, because I was considering it more akin to occupational therapy. If it was losing money, so what? It was keeping her intellectually engaged. We never talked about how we might wind down and end Stupefying Stories, because the very idea of endings was terrifying.
But now her story has ended, and looking at all the stuff cluttering up the place around here, it’s clear that it’s time for me, first person singular, to outline my plan for how the Stupefying Stories story ends.
» I could just end it cold, with a hard cutoff, but I won’t do that. I have too much stubborn pride to do that. I’ve promised people I will publish their stories, and dammit, I’m going to publish their stories! If you have a story under contract with us, it will be published, unless you choose to withdraw it.
» But, there doesn’t seem much point in continuing Stupefying Stories as a general interest magazine, either. There’s too much competition, too few readers, and whatever goodwill we may have accrued in our early years was pissed away in our later years, as we struggled to get issues out while fighting increasingly desperate rearguard actions against cancer. As our most recent promotion with SS#26 proved, we can scarcely give the magazine away now.
» I have the financial backing lined up to put out four more full issues. Strangely enough, though, while when it was my own money I didn’t worry too much about it, now that it’s my investors’ money, I feel obligated not to spend it stupidly. I guess that’s capitalism for ya.
» In light of lessons learned 2B, 3B, and 3C, then, here’s what I’m going to do:
• We have a standalone novella in the works right now. In a just world, it would be at least a Nebula finalist. Getting it out on schedule in time to make this year’s eligibility window is a top priority.
• I’m recasting the stories we accepted for Stupefying Stories issues 27, 28, 29, and 30 as at least three theme anthologies, to be released under the Stupefying Stories Presents aegis. Cyberpunk 2.0 is an obvious theme, as is Cyberpunk 2.1. I’m still developing unifying themes for others. “Clankalog,” while apt, is too much of an inside joke. Once I firm up the themes I may put out a very selective call for submissions, if I find I’m coming up short.
• I was planning to wind down the stupefyingstories.blogspot.com site by the end of this month; however, that was before I lost about four working weeks due to not being able to get into my office. We have content in the queue for the web site and will be running it out through at least the end of April now.
• Concentrate on pre-release marketing like you wouldn’t believe! In the past we could just fling books out there and hope they were found by readers. That’s over. Going forward I’m going to market the Hell out of books before they’re released, in hopes that we’ll get decent sales in the two weeks before the guillotine drops.
• This is the difficult one. In light of lesson learned #8—well, I am not by nature an arrogant extrovert, but I can perform the part, for a few hours, about once a month. So I’m going to give that a try. Let’s see how it works.
• And in six months we’ll reevaluate, to decide if we (now meaning me and my financial backers) want to continue into 2026.
» Of course, lesson learned #9, pardon the expression, trumps all else, so I do reserve the right to torch the social media accounts, throw away my cell phone, go dark, and hide out somewhere in the north woods until the civil war is over.
Submitted for your consideration,
Bruce Bethke
