io9: With the rise of digital books, is the printed book going to disappear?

Patrick Nielsen Hayden: I think print books will continue on into future. In my own life, I've seen myself ramping up the amount of text I consume digitally. For me, it's the weight and inconvenience issue - I want anything that will spare me having to carry around reams of paper. I'm not one of those people who says, "I could never read off a screen." I read an entire novel on a Palm Pilot in the 1990s. That's when I started reading e-books. It was great.

The small visual inconvenience of e-books is made up for with find and search functions, and the fungibility of digital text. My authors deliver manuscripts to me electronically – I encourage that. I will be happy if I never have to carry around 500 sheets of 8x11 paper ever again. That's me, and I process text for a living.

Nicholson Baker had an article in the New Yorker where he ruminated about the Kindle. He quoted somebody saying it was "like reading a wet newspaper." I don't have a Kindle but I'm on my third nonfiction book on the iPhone. I read work stuff with the Office app, and take notes with SimpleNotes app.

io9: Where do e-books fit into Tor's plans for publishing going forward?

PNH: E-books are tiny single digit in book market. But they are increasingly logarithmically - they went from something like a 10th of percent of sales to perhaps 1.5 percent in a few months. For a long time, e-books were this thing we had endless meetings about and which yielded laughably tiny sales, which led me to believe that e-books were like the old joke about Brazil, that it's the country of the future and always will be.

io9: But do you think you'll start moving into publishing electronically more aggressively?

PNH: We've been acquiring e-text rights as part of the default contract since the mid-90s. In mid-90s we needed to be sensible and we revised the contract to include electronic text. Now we have that as a clause. We won't buy a book without e-book rights.

So we have these rights, and we do make a lot of our books available on the Kindle, but there are a lot of logistics involved. Basically we're on the case, but at the moment there are a lot of factors that go into deciding what's available for Sony or Kindle and Barnes and Noble.

Tor.com was a place where people complained about lack of availability of e-books for a while. Before we launched the site we had this free e-book giveaway and people thought Tor.com would be all about e-books. But it really wasn't. E-books are phase B and C.

All the way from [Tor parent company Holtzbrinck in] Stutgart down to us, the conglomerate runs on the assumption that there will be changes in the next two decades and we don't know what they are. We're not locking ourselves into a platform. We don't want to let one player become choke point; we don't want to be a hapless manufacturer in the thrall of Walmart or something.

io9: Does it make a difference to you if an author has an online reputation? Does that go into your decisions to acquire books?

PNH: Obviously it makes a difference if an author has a public online profile of some sort, even just down to the level of having a moderately popular blog. Most books sell 5, 10, or 15 thousand copies. Most are midlist books. With those people, even a modest online presence can make a difference in sales.

io9: Thinking science fictionally, what do you see happening to SF publishing over the next few decades? Will we still have novels? How will we read them?

PNH: In 1991 or 92, I registered tor.com, and it was originally a gopher server. So I don't know what the technologies will be - I didn't know what 2009 would be like in 1989. I could have vaguely predicted io9, but not 4Chan or internet memes.

One thing I'm sure of is that we're going to be in linear immersive narratives that produce the reading trance. We won't be moving towards a "choose your own adventure" thing. People will do those things, but those are different art forms. There's something about immersive text that you can read in order - it's persisted through many technological changes. This fiction stuff works pretty well. It's been around a long time.

I do think immersive fictional texts will continue but it's obvious already that there's competition for people's time. Our competition at Tor Books is BoingBoing or Salon. There's more text online in a week than you could ever process in your life. It puts people into a hyperconsumptive, hungry-for-text state.

io9: Do you think serialization is one way we might go with online novels?

PNH: We're trying online serialization with [new Cory Doctorow novel] Makers. Serialization was an artifact of 19th century technological limitations. Now it's a gimmick. I say why? Why can't I FTP it?

io9: Will new online formats change the format of the novel?

PNH: I have a severe Google Reader habit. I think people will use blog forms and twitter to contrive fiction. Here's an interesting thing online: The explosion of fanfic. I don't read much, but back in fandom 1.0 - zines - there were people writing Star Trek stories, but it was below the salt socially. There was a strong aversion to publishing amateur fiction because people felt that if it were any good it would get published professionally. If you were seeing an amateur SF story, it was partly an admission that it was crap and couldn't get published.

But with fanfic, there's no ceiling on how great it can be because it's unlicensed and can't get published. It's often written far better than the stuff it's based on.

I wish [fanfic could go legit]. For most of human history, remixing narratives in circulation has been how culture worked. I believe in compensating artists, but yesterday [on a panel at WorldCon] the "moral rights" thing came up, and I think that's horseshit. I think artists should be treated well and so should waitresses and plumbers. Artists shouldn't have "treat them extra nice" rules. People experience art socially. People say "Watch this! Read this!" We experience art and we want to talk about it. I know that there are writers horrified by fanfic. Jo Walton hates fanfic. But in general I think with TV and the mass media world, somebody is going to figure out a way to encourage [fanfic] in a way that makes them a pile of money.

Art by Jon Foster from forthcoming Tor book Boneshaker.

Clarkesworld Magazine polled some of the best short fiction editors in the field about the state of the market, and they had some pretty interesting things to say. There seems to be some consensus that everything's going electronic. Mike Resnick puts it most simply:

[T]here are currently 17 science fiction magazines paying what SFWA considers pro rates, and 14 of them are electronic, so I don't think the short story is in as much trouble as it appeared to be a decade ago.

Weird Tales editor (and past io9 contributor) Ann VanderMeer expands on that point:

One of the main changes is the delivery system and how we communicate with each other. Technology has motivated us to change the way we do business. Right now it is more difficult to sustain a hard-copy magazine as the audience is getting more and more of their reading done online or on other virtual devices. Online magazines are getting more sophisticated and garnering more and more readers....

But on the downside, we've become so fragmented. And we seem to have no patience. Many short fiction venues out there are looking for shorter and shorter pieces, perhaps for space considerations, but I also think for the shorter attention spans of the current readership. And that's a shame.

Palimpsest author Catherynne M. Valente sounds a similar note, in an interview with Bookslut:

While there are a number of markets — and I find myself in a situation where the demand for my short fiction is often greater than for longer pieces; where I literally cannot keep up with the demand — I question whether actual readership of short fiction has increased in any significant way. Single author short story collections are still extremely limited in sales and appeal, and I do not see the same excitement about author A's newest short story as their newest novel, unless author A publishes only rarely. Short stories do not seem to get the discussion or the critical attention at the fan level, though in the world of writers being read by other writers they are certainly quite the currency — it is still the conventional wisdom that one ought to make a name in short fiction before publishing a novel.

I think, for one thing, the short story will get a whole lot shorter. Twitter is teaching us all to prune our prepositions, and as the unit of information gets smaller, so will fiction. I think there are a number of creative directions short fiction can take — tradable stories like cards, ARGs [Alternate Reality Games], text message fiction. The world will always want to tell stories, and our generation will always try to access information at faster and faster rates. Short fiction would seem to fill the niche perfectly — and yet, I think part of the reason short stories are not more popular is simply that very, very many of them, even in the prestige publications, are not very good.

I would certainly say the Internet is the future of short fiction. Print magazines will last awhile longer; print anthologies are still a going concern. But the real sharpshooters are publishing online, and as media, more and more, is perceived by the audience as something that ought to be free, online fiction will be the bulk of short fiction reading soon, if it is not already.

But actually, the most interesting comment from the Clarkesworld forum doesn't directly relate to how electronic markets are ruling, and changing, short fiction. (Although it probably does relate indirectly.) It comes from Tor's Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

I think the biggest change in SF's overall readership is that it's become much less dominated by hardcore SF buffs whose reading consists largely of SF. Compared to a generation ago, a lot more of our readers are just plain middlebrow readers-people who read a little SF along with a little of a lot of other things, and who don't necessarily regard the SF as alien to the rest of literature, or below the salt, or any of that stuff.

[Today's readers] are probably not connected to the SF social scene, they don't assess their SF and fantasy reading against a huge backdrop of inside-baseball industry lore, they may not have read all of the classics, but they're pretty good at making sense of fairly sophisticated SF storytelling because, guess what, in 2009, hundreds of millions of people are good at making sense of sophisticated SF storytelling. The problem for SF writers and publishers today isn't that there's not a mass audience for high-end SF storytelling; it's that there are immense numbers of other diversions on offer for those hundreds of millions of people.

The O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, held this past February, is a yearly event that brings literary professionals together to examine current trends and new technologies in the publishing world.

One panel, called "Where Do You Go with 40,000 Readers? A Study in Online Community Building," included John Scalzi (author of Old Man's War), Tobias Buckell (author of Halo: The Cole Protocol), and Patrick Nielsen Hayden (editor of the science fiction publisher Tor Books); the panel was moderated by Ron Hogan of Beatrice Books. All three of the panelists are bloggers as well. A video of the panel has just gone up (we've put it at the bottom of the post), and here's a quick summary of the highlights.

The basic premise of the discussion was that using blogs and newer media like Twitter can make publishing a more successful enterprise - a not particularly startling assertion in 2009. But the panelists delved into the nuances of what really makes a difference. Patrick Nielsen Hayden noted the appeal of successful bloggers goes beyond just their ability to write:

As an editor who's always look for good, promising new writers, obviously the ability to write an entertaining work of popular fiction is absolutely paramount, but on a secondary level, somebody who can keep an audience engaged with their personality and their thoughts on a variety of topics that aren't the incredibly boring subject of writing is a big plus. It basically suggests somebody who's going to flourish in the new media environment…

Towards the end of the panel, John Scalzi returned to this idea and succinctly spelled out the relationship between his roles as blogger and science fiction author:

When you build those 40,000 people or 4,000 people or however many you have because what you write is interesting to them and they come back again and again and again you develop an interest in yourself as an author. There's somebody in this room who once said the next generation of authors will be performers as well and there is something to that. My performance is not necessarily what I'm doing now, for example my performance is on my website on a daily basis. It makes a difference.

Of course, it's all well and good to trumpet the coming of this bold new media as the next big thing, but does it actually translate to increased sales? Nielsen Hayden gave a resounding yes to this question:

We published John's first novel, Old Man's War, as a hardcover original. Like most hardcover originals from unknown science fictions writers it shipped a very few thousand copies and went back to press almost immediately, and by the time a year had elapsed we had sold nearly like nine thousand copies in hardcover, over two-thirds of them through online sources, mostly Amazon. Which is to say the brick and mortar book industry mostly treated it like any first novel and it took them a long time to realize their lunch was being thoroughly eaten by online sales because John already existed online.

Moreover, a web presence is not only useful in driving up print sales; increasingly, it can be an end in itself, and a more popular one than traditional sources of science fiction at that. Scalzi discussed the impact of the Tor Books website offering original short fiction:

I think one of the things that was very useful for Tor to do, quite honestly, was they they did from the outset publish some original fiction. And I think that is something that is very useful, not just for upcoming authors but for existing authors…The short fiction market is kind of in turmoil at the moment and people are wondering where they're going to be able to find short fiction and how it works and where we go from there. The fact that Tor from the outset is doing short fiction has made quite a difference. I'll give you an example using my own particular story. We did, after The Coup, which came out when Tor.com debuted and after two weeks, more people had clicked through to read the story, or at least look at the story, than the combined circulation of the big three science fiction magazines.

One of Tor's advantages is that it actually pays writers a decent rate compared to the prestige science fiction magazines. Tor's online content pays about 25 cents per word, while their print counterparts pay about 7.5 cents per word. Scalzi draws the obvious conclusion:

Tor.com fiction is generally some of the best short fiction out there and it is specifically because it is paying a professional rate as opposed to a lot of the rates being paid in the genre.

They acknowledged that Scalzi's model for success can't really work for everyone, considering a huge part of his audience appeal is derived from the fact he's been writing online since 1998 (I'm not even sure how aware I was of the internet in 1998, but, in my defense, I was ten at the time). Still, there's always something new and different that those seeking to build a web presence can make their own, as long as they're able to do it in 140 characters or less:

Scalzi…Part of the reason that I have this audience I have is I was able to spend ten years building it. Now necessarily this is not…something that is necessarily practical for every writer to do. Every writer cannot replicate this because [to Nielsen Hayden] you say it's an early advantage and simply…

Nielsen Hayden: …right now there is just time for people who are suited to the medium to be early adopters of Twitter and become the huge Twitter stars of the future.

If I understand what he's saying, and I think I do, I believe this means Shaquille O'Neal will be the next big science fiction writer. I am very much on board with that.

Tobias Buckell, on the other hand, detailed common misconceptions about how online readerships work. Essentially, online marketing strategies can never have marketing as the sole, perhaps not even as the primary, purpose:

For an example, because I do have some credibility of being an author of a blog that's been around for a while and I've used it to leverage some of my success is that I will usually see a new writer with a first novel run off and create a website that is purely promotional and I have to say that one of the words I mentioned when I was first talking about what success I do have was ‘authenticity'…When I also do consulting for corporations occasionally about how to roll out some new media, like how to integrate Twitter or how to bring a blog to their website is always their first impulse is they want to speak to the customer, they want to deliver a press release, they want to tout their products. They're not interested in a conversation, they're not interested in building, like we said, a community. And so one the amazing things I've found is the honesty and authenticity to go out there and try to engage produces more long-term results, stronger result than just sort of vomiting content.

If you've got forty spare minutes and you really want to know more about this, you can watch the full video below:

[Bowling To The Future]

I wouldn't claim to be an expert on short fiction writing, but I have written over a hundred of the little fuckers, a large proportion of which have been science fiction-y. Here are a bunch of do's and don'ts, that I discovered the hardest way possible.

World-building should be quick and merciless. In a novel, you can spend ten pages explaining how the 29th Galactic Congress established a Peacekeeping Force to regulate the use of interstitial jumpgates, and this Peacekeeping Force evolved over the course of a century to include A.I.s in its command structure, etc. etc. In a short story, you really need to hang your scenery as fast as possible. My friend and mentor d.g.k. goldberg always cited the Heinlein line: "The door dilated," which tells you a lot about the surroundings in three words. Little oblique references to stuff your characters take for granted can go a long way.

Make us believe there's a world beyond your characters' surroundings. Even though you can't spend tons of time on world-building, you have to include enough little touches to make us believe there's stuff we're not seeing. It's like the difference between the fake house-fronts in a cowboy movie and actual houses. We should glimpse little bits of your universe, that don't necessarily relate to your characters' obsessions.

Fuck your characters up. A little. Just like with worldbuilding, you can't necessarily devote pages to your characters' childhoods and what kind of underwear they wear under their boiler suits. Unless your story is really a character study with a bit of a science fiction plot. I used to have a worksheet that included spaces to fill in in info about each character's favorite music, hatiest color, etc. etc. Never filled those out. If I'd tried to force myself to come up with a favorite color for every character, I would have given up writing. But do try to spend a bit of time giving all of your characters some baggage, just enough to make them interesting. Most science fiction readers are interested in characters who solve problems and think positively, but that doesn't mean they can't have some damage.

Dive right in — but don't sign-post your plot in big letters. When I started writing stories, my early efforts meandered around for pages before something happened to one of the characters to make him/her freak out. And then the rest of the story would be the character(s) dealing with that problem. And then, as I got more practiced, I found the foolproof map to awesome storytelling: introduce whatever it was that was freaking out my characters in the very first sentence of the story! And then the story could be about them dealing with that problem, until they solved it in the very end. It was so perfect, how could it fail? It took me another year or two to realize that plunging the characters into the story's main conflict right away was just as boring, in its own way, as the ten pages of wandering in circles. The best short stories I've read are ones which start in the thick of things, but still keep you guessing and let you get to know the characters before you fully comprehend the trouble they're in.

Experiment with form. Short fiction isn't one form, it's a whole bunch of forms jammed together according to their length. Short stories include your standard 3,000 word mini-odyssey thru the psyche. But they also include flash fiction (sometimes defined as under 100 words, sometimes under 500 or even under 1,000.) And those wacky list things that McSweeney's runs sometimes. In fact, for a while there, postmodern short fiction was all about the list, or the footnotes, or the krazy monologue, or the story told in office memos. Try writing super-short stories of only 10 words, or mutant essay-stories written by a fictional person. Also, if you always write third person, try first person. Or if you're always doing first person, try third.

Think beyond genre. Often the best genre fiction is the stuff that cross-germinates. Pretend you're actually writing your story for the New Yorker, and try to channel George Saunders or even Alice Munro. See how far you can go towards writing a pure lit piece while still including some elements of speculation. Or try writing your story as a romance. Or a mystery. Imagine it as a Sundancey indy movie.

Don't confuse your gimmick with your plot. You may have a great idea for a piece of future technology, or some amazing mutation that turns a whole bunch of people into musicvores who survive by eating your memories of rock concerts. Maybe you have the most original basic premise evar — but that's not your plot. Your plot is how your new widget changes the people in your story, and how it affects their lives. Or what decisions your people make as a result of this new technological breakthrough.

Don't fall into the character-based/plot-based dichotomy. People, especially in writing groups and workshops, will try to categorize stories as based on either plot or character. This is a poisonous idea that will turn you into a cannibalistic freak wearing a belt made out of human spinal cords. There's no such thing as a character-based story or a plot-based story, because every story has both. Even the most incident-free Ploughshares romp or the most twisty thumpy space opera tale. If you start thinking that stories can be categorized into either pile, you'll end up writing either eventless character studies or plot-hammer symphonies starring one-dimensional nothings.