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.

The "Ask A Pro" panel at WisCon included author Eileen Gunn (Stable Strategies And Others), Tor Books senior editor James Frenkel, agent Shana Cohen, and author Jack McDevitt (The Hercules Text). Here's a digest of their advice and wise counsel to you, the future literary superstar.

Don't hire a freelance editor to polish up your book prior to submitting it to agents and editors. Says Frenkel, "If you can't write well enough, nobody's going to be able to help you." And if those freelance editors were such great writers, they'd be selling novels themselves. If you submit a novel to a publishing house and say it's been professionally edited, it may not help – and it could actually hurt, advises Cohen.

Likewise, don't deal with "marketers" who promise to submit your work to agents. These queries will get rejected instantly, says Cohen — she only deals with authors directly. Also, companies that promise to write your query letter for you will probably just give you a cookie-cutter letter.

Get an agent, even you have a book already sold. You need someone to read over the contracts and deal with the publisher for you — Jack McDevitt told about selling his first book without an agent, and after he signed the contract, the editor asked, "You didn't actually sign that thing, did you?" A good agent should be able to get you way more than 15 percent more money than you would have gotten otherwise, justifying their 15 percent fee, because they can use their other high-powered clients as leverage to get you a good deal. "Treat this author well, or our famous-author client may end up going with another publisher." Also, publishers would rather not have to deal with authors without the buffer of an agent explaining everything and parsing all of the contract issues.

Get some feedback. Join a writers' group, get into a workshop, and get all the feedback you can. If possible, find a good critic of your work and marry him/her, advises McDevitt.

If your first novel doesn't sell, you should keep writing anyway. First novels often are deeply flawed, and you may just want to work on something different. Writing a second novel gives you two things you can possibly sell. Don't work on the sequel to a novel you haven't sold yet, advises Frenkel.

But actually if you have a sequel idea, you should write it up, because it may make your first novel seem more marketable, says Gunn. Wherever your creative energy goes, you should just follow – because a lot of writers enter the field with three novels already finished, and release them one after the other.

So how do you know how long a novel should be? "A narrative should be like a dog's legs: long enough to reach the ground," says McDevitt, quoting a writing guru.

You should always communicate clearly with editors – even if they don't do a good job of communicating with you. Don't submit your work simultaneously to more than one venue, unless the markets allow it and you let them know that's what you're doing. And if you haven't heard back from an editor in forever, you should write and query before withdrawing it. Gunn told the story of her first short-story sale: she had sent a story to Amazing Stories and hadn't heard back in a long time, so she finally wrote to them and said that she was withdrawing the story from consideration. Then she ran into John Varley at a party and he said, "Hey, your story's in Amazing!" If she had just gone ahead and submitted it elsewhere, it might have appeared in two different magazines – causing immense consternation.

Don't look down on small publishing and self-publishing, but bear in mind that only a few people can really make it work. Leslie What's most recent book, Crazy Love, came out from Worldcraft in a limited first edition of only 500 copies, but Booklist named it as one of the ten best science fiction books of 2008, and it's gotten tons of readers and sales. But that's a case of a publisher that knew what it was doing. "It's worked for people," says Gunn, "but a very few people."

Be careful when a small press wants to work with you – make sure you're not dealing with a scammer. You can look them up on sites like Editors and Preditors, and scope them out to see how they've worked with others, advises Frenkel. If a small publisher wants to work with you, look at who else they publish, advised someone in the audience. Try to figure out if that's company you want to be included in.

Write short stories. It's a lot easier to sell a novel if the editors know your work from the short story markets. "if you spend a year writing a novel and they think it's godawful, you're going to hate yourself," says Jack McDevitt.

Look for reviews of short fiction online to figure out who's publishing cool stories right now, and try to submit your work there. Try Locus Magazine, advises Frenkel. The markets that Frenkel looks at to figure out which authors are up and coming include the big ones, like Asimov's, Analog, F&SF and Realms of Fantasy, plus some online magazines.

Send your work to the biggest magazines first, and then wait for them to reject your work before sending it elsewhere. Also, the top magazines are the ones that pay the most, says Gunn. "You have to have enough ego to send your stuff to the top-paying magazines first."

Top image from Cult Of The Giant Brain.

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]

Reason talked to a number of Tor editors and authors, and got some great quotes about why science fiction is anti-authoritarian. Theories range from Heinlein's influence, to high-school bullying, to the fact that science fiction fans tend to be introverts who are neither leaders nor followers. Pretty much everyone involved, of course, denies having an agenda. But at the same time, Tor has dominated the Libertarian Futurist Society's most recent Prometheus Awards, with five novels including three alternate histories.

To me, as a publishing wonk, the most interesting stuff is the look inside Tor's editorial decision-making:

Tor has an unusual editorial process. At most fiction publishing houses, decisions are made by consensus. All the editors, often drawn from many genres, sit down together and decide which authors to sign and how much to spend on promotions and advances. The result, Doherty argues, is an unwillingness to try something new or unusual. Tor decided to do things differently. “We don’t do things by committee and we don’t expect anyone to take care of us,” Doherty says. “We can stray outside the genre as long as they sell. We’ve got to be self-supporting.”

The whole article is well worth checking out. [Reason]

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editor-in-chief of Tor Books, writes in an introductory post that Tor.com is embracing the subculture of scifi and fantasy fans, inviting them to join the conversations that usually only scifi editors get to have:

Much of what has driven Tor.com is our desire to more fully contribute to the great conversation that is the subculture of SF—that river of talk, in person and in print, that has surrounded and informed science fiction and fantasy (and “the universe,” and “related subjects”) since SF fans began cranking out fanzines and organizing meetups in the early 1930s. That conversation has done nothing but expand. It is a major tributary to the modern Internet. Tor.com aspires to be part of that conversation.

Reading Tor.com is like jumping into a room where a lot of my favorite scifi writers and bloggers are chatting. Can't wait for more!

Tor.com [via Tor.com]