Need a quick kick in the pants? Neil Gaiman has it for you over on his blog.
I’d add to it, but really, what else is there to say? Runners don’t start off running marathons; they run every day until they can. Ditto writers.
Write.
Finish things.
Keep writing.
Seems pretty obvious, but sometimes we need someone further down the path to call back and remind us to keep hiking.
I didn’t know much about the book when I bought it, other than it was categorized as “space opera.” From the introduction, I learned that Haldeman had a hard time finding a publisher for the novel because it was heavily influenced by his time in Vietnam, and publishers in the early 70s didn’t think readers wanted books about Vietnam. Boy, were they wrong.
The plot centers around Mandella, who we first meet as a private in the space marines, going off to train on the outermost world in our solar system, Charon. From there, we follow Mandella through his career as he reluctantly advances in rank and continues to fight—for 1,000 years.
Maybe it was knowing that Haldeman drew on Vietnam for this book, but several times throughout The Forever War
The Forever War
In his foreword to the edition I read, John Scalzi sums up what makes The Forever War
“The first is that it speaks to the time in which the novel first appeared. There is no doubt that The Forever War did this … The second thing is tougher, and that is that it keeps speaking to readers outside its time, because what’s in the book touches on something that never goes away, or at the very least keeps coming around.”
As much as we wish it to be otherwise, it seems that there will always be war. And as long as there is war, Haldeman’s novel will remain relevant, and thus remain a classic.
Howey’s story is one the one everybody points to when they talk about the new publishing paradigm that’s currently taking shape. Over at Wired, Evan Hughes published a fascinating look at how publishers are reacting to authors like Howey and the growing sales of e-books. SPOILER: They aren’t reacting well:
Still, it’s not clear that traditional publishers are well positioned to own the digital future. They are saddled with the costs of getting dead trees to customers—paper, printing, binding, warehousing, and shipping—and they cannot simply jettison those costs, because that system accounts for roughly 80 percent of their business. Ebooks continue to gain ground, but the healthiness of the profit margins is unclear.
My dream has always been to publish a paper book with a well-known house for a huge advance. But after seeing Howey’s numbers (as quoted by Hughes), perhaps my dream is outdated. I’m starting to wonder if the Dickensian serial model has found new life in the e-book world; Dickens and other writers of that time often published their novels piece by piece in the newspaper before they were published as bound books.
In the classic film Ghostbusters, Egon states categorically, “Print is dead.” And that was in 1984. Was he ahead of his time? Is print dying? I look at the success of Wool
FULL DISCLOSURE: I had never heard of Neal Pollack before reading this interview. I have read nothing by him. I now feel like I ought to, especially since I read a lot and feel like I should have heard of him. But I haven’t.
Regardless, Neal Pollack sat down with The Onion’s A.V. Club for a brutally frank interview about the ups and (mostly) downs of his career. He even breaks the taboo about talking sales figures, telling how many copies his “bestsellers” have actually sold. Check it out here.
Here’s how Pollack sums up his career as “the greatest living American writer”:
I was still just a guy with one book under his belt. And a book that, despite all the attention it was getting, sold maybe 10,000 copies. It wasn’t some sort of international publishing phenomenon. It was, at best, sort of a moderately successful indie-rock project. So I still had to do stuff like write promotional copy for Weight Watchers to support myself and pay my mortgage, which was relatively small. The year I quit the Reader, I made almost no money. Maybe $30,000. And I thought, “Aren’t I supposed to be a famous writer? Is this it? A drafty townhouse in Philadelphia?” So that pattern established itself for me over the years; I’d have a little success, let it go to my head, and then make some outrageous move to try and capitalize on that, and the move would come crashing down on my head. I would always get a little overexcited.
Have you read anything by Pollack?
Color me surprised. After first defending their wretched Hydra and Alibi contracts in a letter to SFWA, Random House has done an abrupt about face and changed those very contracts, along with the contracts for its Flirt and Loveswept imprints. This is good news for writers, folks. Here’s a blurb from Publishers Lunch:
Random House announced changes to the contract terms for their start-up digital imprints Hydra, Alibi, Flirt, and Loveswept on Tuesday morning, following pointed criticism from the Science Fiction Writers of America, the Horror Writers of America and other author group representatives. The company is adjusting the charges made under their profit-sharing contract model, and also offering authors a separate, more traditional advance-plus-royalty contract model.
The advance-plus-royalty model follows a traditional contract model: Random House’s “standard ebook royalty of 25 percent of net receipts” along with an agreed-upon advance, with the imprints covering all production, shipping, and marketing costs. In the revised profit-share model, there are fewer charges to the author’s share. In particular, the percentage-based fees for publishing services have been eliminated, as have the “out of pocket title set up costs” for ebooks, producing more of a true profit-share.
Now the imprints will cover entirely “all marketing costs connected with general, category- or imprint-wide marketing programs” and title-specific marketing plans up to $10,000. Any costs above $10,000 “will be proposed in advance to the author. If the author agrees, the incremental costs of such title-specific marketing activities over $10,000 will be deducted from sales revenue before profits are split.” For print books, “actual costs directly attributable to production and shipping of the book” will be deducted from net sales.
Under both models, Hydra, Alibi, Loveswept, and Flirt will still acquire rights for the term of copyright, but there will now be an out-of-print clause where authors can “request reversion of his or her rights three years after publication if the title fails to sell 300 copies in the 12 months immediately preceding the request.” The imprints will generally seek to acquire world rights in all languages, with earnings from subsidiary rights split between the imprint and the author subject to the business model the author chooses. Random House added that “If we see opportunities with select manuscripts for performance or transformative digital editions (such as video games), we will seek to acquire additional rights, subject to negotiation with the author.”
Writer Beware’s Victoria Strauss, one of the initial critics of the original contracts, said the changes “represent a significant improvement” and that she was impressed with Random House’s “openness to discussion, and with what seemed to me like a sincere commitment to responding to criticism and making the digital imprints’ contracts more author-friendly.”
Kudos to Random House for so quickly seeing the light.
The Random House Hydra/Alibi debacle has reignited the debate about pay-to-publish. Again, I advise sticking to Yog’s Law: Money flows toward the writer. Scalzi has more on why pay-to-publish business models (I prefer to call them scams) are a bad idea.
In writing the pieces about Random House and its egregious, non-advance paying eBook imprints and how no writer ever should submit to them, or indeed work with any publisher that does not offer an advance, there are some folks in the comments and elsewhere on the Internet who are saying things along the lines of the following (paraphrased to condense points into a single statement):
That’s easy for Scalzi to say because he has power now, but us newer authors have no power to negotiate. And the market is changing and there are lots of good eBook publishers who just happen not to pay an advance.
One word for all of the above: Bullshit.
First, for those you who think the “Hey, let’s not pay you an advance but instead you can share in the backend!” model of publishing was first thought up in relation to electronic publishing:
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The Science Fiction Writers of America have responded to a letter from Random House regarding their imprints Hydra and Alibi.
Yesterday, I posted links to the blog of John Scalzi, SFWA’s president, in which he tore into Random House and examined an Alibi contract. SFWA’s letter boils it down for you, in case you didn’t have time to wade through Scalzi’s two long blogposts. (Although I highly recommend you do. It will help you recognize similar scams in the future.)
SFWA goes on to say this:
The contracts of these imprints mean that SFWA will now be watching Random House very closely. If the egregious features of Hydra and Alibi’s contracts begin to make their way into the contracts of Random House’s other imprints, particularly Del Rey and Spectra, we will be required to act, up to and including delisting Random House as a whole as a qualifying market for SFWA.
Clearly, I stand with SFWA on this issue, and I am very glad to see that they are taking punitive measures against Random House. I do not want to see this become the new standard for publishing.
Yesterday, author and Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) president John Scalzi wrote a blogpost about the “appallingly bad” contract terms that Random House is offering writers for it’s Hydra imprint. Today, he followed that up with a close examination of an actual contract from Alibi, another Random House imprint. Hydra is a science fiction imprint, while Alibi publishes mystery novels.
Long story short, no writer should ever accept the terms of these contracts. Ever.
Reading Scalzi’s breakdown, it quickly became apparent to me that Random House has jumped into the vanity publishing biz. When I was an editor for Writer’s Digest Books, I frequently cautioned writers not to publish with vanity presses. Publishers should pay you for your hard work. You should never, ever pay a publisher. Never. Ever. Nerver. Neverinero.
And yet, that’s exactly what Random House is now asking writers to do.
Go read Scalzi’s posts about why this is bad. And remember Yog’s Law: Money Flows Toward the Writer.
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