My GenCon Writers Symposium schedule

Going to this year's GenCon? Then swing by the GenCon Writer's Symposium, which is held right upstairs from the main exhibition hall. Your GenCon badge gets you in for free to the Symposium's more than 140 hours of programming by more than 50 authors, including myself.

My schedule of events includes:

Friday, Aug. 15 at 2 pm
Writer's Craft track: Writing Amazing Short Stories with John Helfers, Toni L. P. Kelner, Jim Lowder, and Catherine Shaffer.
Learn what makes a great short story great, what types of stories work in short form, and tips for crafting amazing short stories of your own

Friday, Aug. 15 at 5 pm
Business of Writing track: Selling Your Stories with Elizabeth Vaughan, Carrie Harris, Scott Westerfeld, and Maurice Broaddus.
Learn how to sell a finished story, get advice on choosing a market based on the length or genre of your story, and learn to improve the chance that the person you send your story to read it!

Saturday, Aug. 16 at 1 pm
Publishing track: Traditional Publishing with John Helfers, Erik Scott de Bie, Saladin Ahmed, and Jim Minz.
Find out what it takes to get published by the big publishing houses, learn the advantages of going this route, and discover the challenges 
inherent in this path to publication

Saturday, Aug. 16 at 6 pm
Writer's Craft track: Short Fiction Plotting with Don Bingle, Catherine Shaffer, Dylan Birtolo, and Christopher Rowe.
Learn to shape a plot when you have less than 10,000 words to tell the entire tale! It takes a special set of skills to forge a plot that works in 
short fiction, and we'll tell you how to do it

Sunday, Aug. 17 from 11 am to 1 pm
Read and critique session with Elizabeth Vaughan, David B. Coe, and Maxwell Alexander Drake.
This session gives attendees the opportunity to read something they've written and to hear instant feedback from published authors. If you stop by this session and share a little of your fiction I'll not only give feedback but also suggestions on where to submit the story.

If you see me at the Symposium, be sure to say hello. I love talking with people.

 

Like any human creation, Amazon can do both good and bad

This morning I wrote about a desperate-sounding email Amazon sent to all their Kindle Direct Authors in response to Douglas Preston and other authors who are tired of being abused by the online giant.

I've now heard from a number of people who have defended Amazon, and others who wondered why I don't accept Amazon's belief that lower ebook prices will be a boon for all authors.

Understand this—Amazon was created by humans and, as with any of our creations, can be used for both good and evil. For example, I grew up in an area with a bad library system and very few booksellers, none of which carried an in-depth stock of the books I desperately wanted to read. Because of that I loved going to big cities like Atlanta or New York where I could find independent booksellers who actually carried, you know, a ton of books.

I know my experience mirrors that of many people both in the U.S. and around the world. And for people like us Amazon is a true gift from the literary gods, enabling readers to have at their fingertips a sizable portion of the world's books.

Because this I've been sympathetic to people who both complained that Amazon was driving their local booksellers out of business, and to people who said they loved Amazon. I've seen the world from both perspectives, so to speak. 

As an author, my Amazon viewpoint is similarly complex. I appreciate that Amazon has helped my fiction be read by people around the world. However, I wouldn't have found any readers without traditional magazine publishers like Interzone and Asimov's Science Fiction, which took a chance on my short stories. But I also know that Asimov's has seen its circulation grow in recent years thanks in part to the exposure the magazine's electronic edition receives on the Kindle.

Despite all this, the reason I'm opposed to Amazon's current stance toward book publishers is because I don't see any good coming to authors if Amazon becomes the world's defacto publishing monopoly. Yes, Amazon has done a lot of good for authors and often pays authors higher percentages than traditional publishers. But Amazon is in this for Amazon's sake—as are almost all businesses—and I have no doubt that if Amazon is able dictate terms to traditional publishers they'll eventually dictate not-so-great terms to all authors.

There's no going back to how the publishing and bookselling world used to be, nor would I want that to happen. But that doesn't mean I want any one corporation to have ultimate power over which books are published, how they are priced, and how much authors are paid.

Amazon feels the fear

A new email from Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing sneaked into my inbox this morning. I say "sneaked" because who sends out a promotional or marketing email at 4 am on a Saturday morning.

The answer: A company beginning to panic.

The letter is obviously in response to the letter signed by Douglas Preston and more than 900 other authors who are tired of being abused by Amazon. In the letter Amazon compares ebooks to the creation of paperback books before World War II and how that invention shook up the publishing industry. They also beg their Kindle Direct authors to email Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch and demand Hachette remove authors from the middle of these negotiations.

You can read the letter here.

I'm not going to dissect the letter, which contains a rehashing of Amazon's standard talking points. Instead, consider the timing. Amazon releases this letter early on a Saturday morning when most of their customers are asleep.

My guess is the Preston letter, which will appear in the Sunday New York Times but has already gained massive amounts of publicity, has them in a panic.

Amazon is used to being the friends of both authors and readers and investors. Now two of those groups have partly turned against them.

So they strike back with a 4 am email.

Yeah, they're feeling the fear.

We hate your genre—except when we write it

The news for On Spec Magazine is bad—the Canada Council for the Arts denied their grant application for 2015 because "the quality of writing remained low." As On Spec's managing editor Diane Walton explains, this is flat-out wrong and merely the rationalization the Council used to remove funding from a genre publication. Walton says the magazine is exploring alternate funding mechanisms and asking for support.

This appears to a case of bias against the speculative fiction genre (a view shared by Michal Wojcik and others). My belief in this is based not only on the fact that On Spec continually publishes high quality fiction but because I've witnessed first-hand the literary snobbery and beliefs which appears to have doomed On Spec's application.

You see, a while back I received a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, which at the time was a very nice monetary grant awarded to individual artists (they've since discontinued the program). I won the award with a story which, while containing genre elements, easily passed for the types of stories at home in the Mississippi Review and the Beloit Fiction Journal. Since I'd published works in those exact literary magazines, and ran a literary journal called storySouth, the Arts Board judges no doubt saw me as one of their own.

I'm not merely making this assumption—I know this is truth because a few years later I ran into one of the judges who'd decided I was fellowship worthy. This person introduced herself to me, praised my writing, and asked what I was writing these days. 

When I mentioned science fiction stories, she promptly informed me that if she'd known I was going to write those types of stories she wouldn't have be voted for my fellowship.

Ouch. Burn. How dare I take their official literary imprinteur and use it to write that nasty genre stuff.

Of course, the irony is that major literary authors from Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison to Michael Chabon and Junot Díaz regularly dip their toes into the genre pool. But that's evidently okay with our world's self-appointed literary elite.

I now understand that the distinctions between genres—including between the so-called "literary" genre and all other types of fiction—don't matter as much as many people believe. Great fiction can exist in any genre or type of writing, just as bad writing also exists across all genres.

It's too bad the Canada Council for the Arts and many other lovers of literature don't understand this.

Really?

So I wrote the other day about the speech guidelines for the upcoming Hugo Awards ceremony. Quite a few people in the genre have commented about the issue, including author and critic Ian Sales, who stated:

Really, Ian? I'm an American and the Worldcon is in Britain, so I simply have to "deal" with my concerns over these speech guidelines curtailing discussions of politics in our genre?

Just so no one misunderstands, Ian later states that he is clearly referring to free speech issues:

It's nice to believe that the science fiction and fantasy genres—and indeed, all of literature—are based on the free-flow of ideas and words. But this has never been true. There are certain people and themes and motifs and beliefs we are supposed to accept without questioning if we want to be a part of the genre, and likewise certain people and views who are not supposed to be a part of genre discussions. And if you dare to raise a point which the dominant genre voices disagree with, they simply dismiss your concerns as if what you're saying couldn't possibly matter.

That's what Ian Sales is doing by saying that free speech is a US argument. He is too smart a writer and critic to be dismissing views like this, but there he is, still dismissing away.

As Damien Walter said in response to Ian's comments, this year's Hugo Award speech guidelines "seem to be about stopping an embarrassing scene" when the genre might need just such a scene because of the issues we're dealing with.

So true. Sometimes the genre needs a scene. Unfortunately, the scene many in the genre want is merely more of the same old same old.