Jason Sanford

No posting due to T-Day stuffing

Due to Thanksgiving stuffing--refering to myself as the one who is stuffed--I'm taking a few days away from this blog to digest. Check back next week for more fun and games.

Interview with Larry Eisenberg

In case you missed it, my interview with author Larry Eisenberg is up at SF Signal. In response to the interview, a number of people have asked where they can read Larry's stories. Unfortunately, his only collection is The Best Laid Schemes, published way back in 1971. Since Larry wrote a large number of stories after that date, that means to read most of his work you have to track down the original magazines he was published in.

My hope is that a publisher will notice this need for a new collection and approach Larry about one. If anyone wants to get in touch with him, drop me a line.

Where to shove your self-published crap

So I'm talking to a friend about publishing, and a friend of a friend's friend (FFF) slides in--you know the scene, where an intimate conversation is interrupted by the scurrying intrusion dance of a damn conversation hacker--and my friend, whom I'm trying to convince to submit his amazing fiction manuscript to an agent, hears these words from the FFF's dung hole: "Why bother submitting. Publish it yourself."

And so my friend is exposed to the worst possible advice. FFF pulls his self published novel out of his backpack and flashes it like gold. Nevermind the tacky cover which FFF likely asked his kindergarten niece to whip together in Photoshop.  Nevermind the typo I discover on page 1 while flipping through the book as FFF regales my friend about the reasonable costs of self publishing. Nevermind that FFF brags of having sold hundreds of copies of his novel.

"Hundreds?" I ask. I glance at the copyright page. The book was self published in 2007. Hundreds across two years is nothing. Hundreds means your friends and family bought all the copies.

"It's so easy to do," FFF says.

At this point I fight to restrain the great heaping pile of stinking truth I want to throw at this FFF. Idiot! You paid to have no readers. You paid to showcase a poorly written and edited novel. You paid to humiliate yourself merely so you can go up to friends of friends and say you're a published author.

But I restrain all that. My friend glances at the FFF book and hands it back, wishing FFF the best of luck with his novel. FFF wanders off to find others to dazzle with his authorial shine.

Right then, I decide if my friend even hints that he's considering self publishing for his manuscript, I will strike him down. I will beat him bloody until some sense--or fear of self publishing--enters his head. But I shouldn't have worried. People who can actually write amazing stories and novels know the self publishing score. Yes, it's good for some things, but don't pretend self publishing takes the place of landing your book with a good publisher.

"So," my friend asks. "Know any good agents?"

Circulation of Online Genre Magazines

A month ago, I posted Online Genre Magazines: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. At the time, I stated "Based on my experience with online magazines, a top publication like Strange Horizons likely has between 1,000 to 2,000 unique visitors per day. Most other top markets will have 400 to 1000 visitors a day, and obscure markets will have 10 to 100 visitors a day at most."

However, the one weak point with my estimate was I didn't have current access to the website statistics of many online magazines. In response to my call to examine web stats, I received a large number of emails from editors, and a good number of these gave me access to their statistics. While a few were fine with being named, most wanted to stay anonymous. In honor of this I am not naming either the editors or the magazines who provided me with this information.

It appears that my original estimates appear to be correct, aside from being somewhat optimistic. Here are my revised estimates:

• Top publications like Strange Horizons likely have between 800 and 1,500 unique visitors per day.
• Most other top markets will have 300 to 800 visitors a day.
• The majority of obscure markets will have 10 to 80 visitors a day at most, although a few climb into the lower hundreds per day.

Please note that, as I previously mentioned, places like Tor.com receive far more traffic than this since they focus on being more than a simple online magazine. Basically, the creation of an online community tied in with a genre magazine or publishing company brings many more visitors to a site. But most of these visitors are still not reading the online fiction.

One surprising finding was that the submission guidelines were the most popular pages at almost every magazine whose stats I examined. This means that for the less popular online magazines, the number of visitors who actually read their fiction may be less than the number who visit the site merely to learn how to submit stories.

Finally, not every unique visitor to an online magazine is truly unique. While I was working on this analysis, one print editor contacted me and said many people make the mistake of considering every visitor to an online genre magazine to be a unique visitor who only shows up once a month.

This is absolutely correct. Many visitors to online magazines return multiple times per month, just as a reader of a print magazine like Analog returns to one issue a number of times. So while Strange Horizons may technically have an estimated 30,000 plus visitors per month, many of these visitors return time and again to the site. This means it is unlikely even the biggest online genre magazines have surpassed print genre magazines in readership.

The other surprising finding is that major podcasts like StarShipSofa and Escape Pod have truly astounding levels of listenership, with tens of thousands of downloads per month. This doesn't prove people are listening to an entire show when they download a podcast. But since the act of downloading is a more dedicated act than surfing to a website--and since it would be rare for someone to download the same podcast more than once--I'm inclined to believe many genre podcasts should actually rank among the biggest online genre magazines out there.

I'll leave the comments below open for a bit, so please let me know if you think my analysis is on the mark or not. And if any of the editors I've consulted wish to state their view on all this for the record, feel free to do so.

How to waste your life

A few thoughts on how to waste your life:

• Forget that family and friends come first. Don't neglect yourself, or sacrifice everything about yourself trying to always please others. But likewise don't forget that we matter very little without those around us.
   
• Create a routine like "wake up, go to work, come home," and never vary a thing. Yes, we all have to work. Yes, we all have routines like cleaning the house and taking the kids to school. But find some way of doing something new every day. You won't remember the routine when you 80. You will remember the new things you did.
   
• Read the newspaper every day and scream about politics. Listen to talk radio or cable news and scream about politics. Read political blogs and write snarky ALL CAP comments screaming about politics. It is human nature to want to keep up on the latest news, just as we all love to share in neighborhood or work gossip. It's part of what makes us human. But if you are spending hours each day doing any of this, you're wasting your life. Try cutting your news intake back to once a week. 99.9% of what we call news is unimportant. I promise if something important happens, you'll hear about it.
   
• Lose your temper over minor things in life. Yes, life is full of irritations, many of which are highlighted day after day in the news. We all have things we'd like to change about the world. But change doesn't happen by screaming and jumping around in response to the world's outrages. Change happens on an individual level in one-on-one interactions with people. Live the life you'd like to see in the world, and the world is one step closer to being your ideal.
   
• Watch TV or play video games instead of taking the kids, your family, or your friends to the park, camping, walking, or some place where you can sit and talk. Amazing how I don't remember many details about all the video games and TV I did as a kid, but I remember the trips and fun stuff our family did. And don't mistake spending money with doing stuff. Life's best memories are free.
   
• Obsess on anything. There is a difference to being dedicated to something, like fiction writing, and obsessing on it. I've never heard anyone say "Gee, I'm glad I obsessed on ____."
   
• Believe you can be more productive through lack of sleep, neglecting your family for work, excessive cell phone use, spending all day on Twitter, or any other of today's modern addictions. Things which most people believe make them more productive actually have the opposite effect. For example, if you are talking with someone, don't stop the conversation to answer your cell phone. As Tolstoy pointed out in The Three Questions, the most important person is the one you're with and the most important time is now. Nothing can make you more productive than that.
   
• Don't understand why you do what you do. Self awareness is the key to understanding life. If you don't understand your everyday reactions--why did that person make you angry; why did you yell at the kids--then you can't understand life's bigger mysteries.
   
• Mistake material goods for self-fullfillment. This should be obvious, but isn't.
   
• Don't be a part of something larger than yourself. It goes without saying that we're all better people when we take part in something greater than our own selfish day-to-day needs.
   
• Don't set a goal and work your way toward it. If you want to write a novel, write a little bit each day. Even if your goal changes halfway there, you will accomplish more having a destination in mind than never knowing what your goals in life are.

Now, I'm sure someone will point out that there are many cliches in this list, and that much of what I've written is self-obvious. That far better people than myself have said all of this before. This is all true. But for people like me, who struggle over not losing our temper over some irritating item in the news, these are the points of life which we must remind ourselves of over and over.

This mystical, self-awareness post is now over. Please return to your regularly scheduled lives.

Interzone and Black Static stories eligible for the Nebula Awards!

As someone who regularly publishes in Interzone, and loves the other authors and stories they publish, it has been an irritation that Interzone stories weren't eligible for the Nebula Awards. I could understand this exclusion if the Nebula Awards focused solely on print publications from the United States. However, their rules state "Works first published in English on the Internet or in electronic form during the calendar year shall be treated as though published in the United States." That has meant a story published in a minor British online magazine was eligible, while a story published in one of the top print SF magazines in the world wasn't.

However, the good news is that stories published in Interzone (and its sister publication Black Static, which I'm less familiar with) are now eligible. Since both are reprinted in an electronic edition through Fictionwise, their stories can now be nominated for the Nebulas. Aliette de Bodard checked and the SFWA Awards Rules Committee said yes, stories published in the Interzone and Black Static Fictionwise edition are eligible. This is great news!

It appears all 2009 issues of Interzone are eligible except for the current Nov./Dec. issue, which has yet to be uploaded to Fictionwise. This also means my novella "Sublimation Angels" (available at that link as a PDF download) is now eligible since the Sept./Oct. 2009 issue of Interzone is already available on Fictionwise.

I plan to soon add a few more selections to my 2009 Nebula nominations. And you can bet Interzone stories will figure in the mix!

Why is World Fantasy Convention 2010 avoiding the 21st Century?

There was an interesting Twitter conversation today between Jay Lake, Michael Curry, Elizabeth Bear, and others. Seems World Fantasy Convention 2010 not only hasn't gotten around to setting up an online payment system for registrations, they possibly don't intend to ever have one. According to this tweet, one MKKare spoke with a convention staffer and was told it's only those "decadent coastal elites who want online reg."

Okay, this is BS. I'm really excited WFC is coming next year to my current home of Columbus, Ohio. But I also agree with Jay Lake that "Given the essentially wired nature of our community, not supporting online reg is deeply counterproductive." Last week I mailed my check for the WFC 2010 membership, but it was irritating that I had to physically mail the registration. I'd assumed the issue was WFC 2010 needing more time to get their website up to speed. But if they don't intend to accept online registrations, that is a major issue which will definitely hurt turnout.

My suggestion: Fix this ASAP, and embrace the 21st century.