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A number of people have linked to the article Why Strong Female Characters are Bad for Women. I’ve read it several times, and while I agree with a lot of what’s said, that title makes me cranky. Strong female characters are not bad for women (or for men). Stereotypical, cardboard, badly done female characters, on the other hand? Not a good thing. Writers and filmmakers who have no clue how to create a strong female character? Also a bad thing. A strong female character has to be a character. Characters are (usually) people. They have strengths and flaws both. They have their own goals — which don’t all revolve around a guy — as well as their own fears. They love and hate and yearn and regret. I’ve found that as soon as the writer tries to define a particular type of character — “This shall be the black character” or “This will be the smart character” or “This will be the strong female character,” then it fails. The character becomes one-dimensional, defined by that label and a (usually) shallow and stereotypical understanding of how to portray it. What about strength? Strong does not mean invulnerable. Strong does not mean perfect. Strong does not necessarily mean physical strength. Strength is my daughter holding back tears after her little brother accidentally hurts her, because she knows if she cries it will upset him. Strength is my mother calmly shoving chocolate into my dad’s mouth when his blood sugar drops too low. Strength is Susan Boyle getting up on stage, ignoring the derision of the audience, and singing the crap out of her song. Sure, strength can also be Uma Thurman kicking ass in Kill Bill — but that’s just one of many kinds of strength. When that’s the only kind of strength we see, it betrays a serious lack of creativity on the part of the writers. (And Thurman’s character is far from invulnerable. As the article notes, she is strong, but also flawed and human.) Lastly, a strong female character has to be female. This is a “Duh” moment, but I think there are a lot of writers who have a hard time creating realistic female characters. Sometimes women seem to exist only as sexual fantasy objects. Other times people complain the female characters are just “men with boobs.” Dangerous territory here. I’m not about to try to lecture everyone on what is and isn’t female. Nor am I going to claim I always get it right. What I do know is that sex and gender can affect our experiences and our identity, but they don’t define who we are, and there’s tremendous variety out there. We’re not getting enough variety in books and TV and movies. Often we get a few narrow character types and ignore 99% of the female population. And hey, here’s a hint: if you have only a single (strong, of course) female character in your ensemble, it’s extremely difficult to show variety. So no, I don’t believe strong female characters are bad for women. I do believe that, as a whole, we’re doing a lousy job of writing them. Discussion and disagreement are welcome, as always. When I was a kid learning Tae Kwon Do, I hated sparring. I don’t like to fight. Being small for my age didn’t help. It was my least favorite part of the lessons. Jump ahead 20 years to the present. Sanchin-Ryu, the style my daughter and I have been studying, has been a very different experience for me. Take last night. We had a session of fighting practice. I was the lowest ranked, least experienced student in the group. Among other things, I took a punch to the groin (thankfully, the black belt who threw that punch had very good control), as well as a punch to the back of my fist1. That one’s still sore this morning. I had a blast. Yes, a part of me is wondering if that’s a sign of deeper psychological problems. But mostly I think it’s because with this style and group of people, there’s always a clear understanding that everyone wants you to succeed. It’s not about winning or scoring points; it’s about helping you to see and understand what you did well and what you need to do better. It reminds me very much of the editorial process. My editor kicks my butt with every book. My agent often jumps in as well. (Much like the me-against-two-black-belts scenario I had last night, actually. That was fun!) I usually come away bruised, but it’s a good thing. They’re not the enemy; they want me to succeed and improve. And if one of their comments hits a little too hard or in a particularly sensitive spot? Well, you can bet that next time I’ll be paying attention to my form and technique to make sure it doesn’t happen again. —
With 11 days to go, the First (Pro) Novel Survey is up to more than 200 responses, which is wonderful! But it’s also generated some interesting feedback in comments and e-mails. Some people are upset that small press, self-published, and e-book authors can’t participate. Others say advances are part of a dying publishing model. There’s been worry that advances can actually harm an author who doesn’t earn out. To top things off, I’m told I’m completely out of touch with the current state of publishing. Let’s start with the basics. An advance is an advance against your royalties. When I sold Goblin Quest to DAW, they paid me $4000, half on signing and half on publication. (Slightly lower than the average, because Goblin Quest was a reprint of a small press title.) For the sake of easy math, let’s say I got 50 cents in royalties for every copy that sold. So for the first 8000 books, I got nothing — I had already received that money up front. But once we sold book 8001, I officially earned out the advance and began receiving royalties. Even if I never sold those 8000 copies, I keep the advance. Nor would I be blacklisted for failing to earn out. A lot of books never earn out their advance. Understand that the publisher doesn’t necessarily lose money on those books. The math is a little messy, but publishers can and do still make a profit on books that don’t earn out. Will publishers get a little cranky if they pay you a six-figure advance and you only sell 10,000 books? Well, sure. It might mean smaller advances in the future. You might need to adopt a pseudonym (as many others have done), or change to a different publisher. But it doesn’t mean the end of your career. Remember the advance represents an investment on the part of the publisher, and I want my publisher as invested as possible in my book. There are never any guarantees, but which do you think will get more of a sales push, the book where they paid the author $5000 up front, or the one where they paid $50,000? Finally, there’s the fact that royalties take a long time to show up. Let’s assume your book is going to earn out, which means you’re eventually going to get the same amount of money either way. Would you rather get that money today, or wait and get it in a year or two or more? Writing is not a hobby to me. It’s a career, one that helps me pay the mortgage and feed my family. My advances mean I know I’m going to receive a certain minimum amount on each book. I can start to plan and budget, meaning I’m better able to make a living with this. (Now if only my publisher would offer a health plan for its authors…) As for the frustration and anger that I’m shutting out small-press and self-published authors with this survey? Yes. Yes I am. I’ve got nothing against small press and self publishing. (Please see above, where I first sold Goblin Quest to a small press.) But that’s not what I was interested in for this survey. I wanted to learn more about how authors break in with bigger, advance-paying publishers. If you have a problem with that … well, it’s your problem. Deal with it. Novel Survey Update: 130+ responses and counting. My goal is to try to get at least 200. Steven Saus pointed me toward A Softer World’s comic on fairy tale romance. Yes!!! Michael Cannon took the picture of me in my hat and photoshopped it into something awesome. Yes, that is Smudge the fire-spider all blinged out on my shoulder. # The first time I noticed the author entitlement thing in myself was with book discussion forums. I’d come across a post asking for recommendations for good fantasy humor, or maybe someone wanted suggestions for a fun SF/F series with strong women characters. Naturally, I’d peek to see if anyone had recommended my books. Occasionally someone would, but usually it was the same old Pratchett and Asprin, Bujold and Bradley. And I realized I was getting cranky about this. Some of it seems to spring from envy. “Why aren’t I getting the same buzz as so-and-so? They should be recommending me! Strong female leads? Come on! Have you seen my covers? I deserve to be in those lists!” Only that’s not my call to make. The fact that I’ve written books about goblins and kick-ass princesses doesn’t mean I get a free pass to the top of everyone’s recommended reading list. I happen to think I’m a pretty good writer, but I don’t get to say how successful I should be. That’s up to the readers. (And for the record, I’m tremendously grateful for the success I’ve had — thank you!) The sense of entitlement seems worst with some of the authors from a certain subclass of “publisher.” Check out a few quotes from the testimonials page at Publish America. “…people always told me it was difficult to get published. WRONG!” “…no one,except Publish America will give the little guy, the unknown poet,the chance to get recognized.” “…PA creates a serious threat to the publishing industry. PA helps new authors get started.” Ignoring the idiotic assertion that commercial publishers won’t publish new writers, the underlying assumption is that we all deserve to be published. We’re all entitled to that success. Sorry, but no. In kindergarten, everyone’s drawing gets hung up on the classroom wall. But you’re a grown-up now, and writing a book doesn’t entitle you to a publishing contract. The fact that you think it’s good doesn’t mean you’re right, nor does it mean a publisher must invest tens of thousands of dollars to get your book out there. For those of us who do break in with a big publisher, that contract does not entitle us to NYT Bestseller status. It doesn’t obligate the publisher to buy major in-store displays or table placement at the major chains. Do I want those things? Heck yes! But am I entitled to them? Envious as I might feel when my friends get a bigger marketing push than me, I’m the last one qualified to say what my books do or don’t deserve. I feel it with the day job sometimes, too. I’m a published author. Why should I have to work a desk job? Unfortunately, just because I want to write full time doesn’t mean I get to do it. The world doesn’t owe me a full-time writing career, a NYT bestselling series, or a pony. Setting goals is good. Working toward those goals is even better. But the moment I start griping about not getting the success I deserve, the success I’m owed, then it just starts to feel tacky and childish. Comments, questions, and outright disagreement are all welcome, as always We talk a lot about how to sell that first novel to a major publisher, but it’s hard sometimes to draw any real conclusions on the best way to break in when all we’ve got is a lot of anecdotal data. Everyone’s path is different. The experience of someone who broke in twenty years ago might not match the realities of publishing today. For that matter, the experience of someone who broke in today might not match the realities of someone else who broke in today. So, taking a page from Tobias Buckell and his first novel advance survey, I’ve put together a survey about selling that first novel. I would love it if anyone who has sold at least one novel (any genre, including tie-ins — there’s a question where you can enter genre) to a professional publisher (for at least a $2000 advance1) could take a few minutes to click the survey link and answer about a dozen questions. If you don’t have exact numbers, please give your best estimate. http://jch.checkboxonline.com/FirstNovel.aspx The survey will remain open through March 15. Pass it on. The more data I can pull together, the more useful the results will be. Please send people to this post instead of directly to the survey, so they get the introductory info. I’ll post the results next month after the survey closes. This is rough, Mythbusters-style science — it’s not going to be a truly random sample, and it’s not a controlled experimental design, but it should give us some results. And it’s far better than “Well, this one guy who wrote a book once told me this is the way to sell your novel…” If any of the survey questions are unclear, or if the survey itself gives people any trouble, please let me know ASAP so I can get that fixed. ETA 1: For purposes of this survey, I’m not counting coauthored novels. I’m looking for the first professional novel sale where you were the sole author. ETA 2: I do ask for book titles for verification and deduplication, if necessary. This and any other identifying information will be stripped out before anything is made public. ETA 3: I’m looking for brand new authors and grizzled veterans alike. The broader the range of data, the more likely we’ll be able to see if certain trends have changed over time. Thanks in advance! —
Yesterday, Victoria Strauss tweeted a link to The Ugly Truth About Getting Your Book Published, in which Phil Cooke is just the latest voice to proclaim the Awful Truth about Publishing. The article flaunts various numbers to show that book sales are PLUMMETTING, and everything is AWFUL! (He also includes strategies for dealing with these awful truths. Coincidentally, Cooke runs Cooke Pictures, a media/publicity consulting company who will happily help you survive this terrible storm … for a fee.) (ETA: Phil Cooke commented to say that he does not, in fact, charge a fee for his services. And then follows up with a sockpuppet. Sigh…) For example, “Bowker reports that 560,626 new books were published in the U.S. in 2008, which is more than double the number of new books published five years earlier (2003) in the U.S. These figures include print-on-demand and short-run books, which is where most of the growth has occurred.“ (Emphasis added.) And then, from point number three, “Average book sales are shockingly small, and falling fast.” Ladies and gentlemen, we have MathFail. Let me break it down with simple and totally made-up numbers. Let’s say a decade ago, 1000 different books were published, and each book sold an average of 10,000 copies. 1000 x 10,000 means 10,000,000 books sold overall. Then print-on-demand technology leads to an explosion of self-publishing and vanity presses. Ten years later, we have twice as many books being published. But the average PoD title sells what, 100 copies? Let’s be generous and call it 200. Assuming no change at all in traditionally published1 books, we see: 1000 x 10,000 = 10,000,000 traditionally published books. Oh noes! Average book sales have been cut almost in half! It’s the end of publishing … even though, in our made-up example, traditionally published books are selling just as well as they did a decade ago. If you want to educate me, show me useful data. Be specific. Don’t just flash around misleading and utterly useless generalizations. Want another example? “A book has less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookstore.” MathFail Redux. If you sell a book to Tor or Baen or DAW, you have an extremely good chance of having your book stocked in an average bookstore. “Sell” to Publish America, and your chances are closer to 0%. But lump everything together, and you can get your average to be nice, scary, and utterly meaningless. “Here’s the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies.” And how many of those titles are out of print? Specialty books? Vanity Press? It’s true that publishing is in a rough place right now. Print runs really are down, overall … but not necessarily to the extent implied in Cooke’s article. Things are changing, and we’re working to keep up and adapt. It’s not the end of print, the end of publishing, or the end of the world. —
Got a note from my editor earlier this month, saying The Stepsister Scheme [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] was going back for a second printing! Always nice to hear. # It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about racism in Transformers, research failure in Criminal Minds, plot shortcomings in Avatar … pretty much all of these discussions eventually produce comments along the lines of: Why are you wasting your time and energy on this? Relax and enjoy it for the mindless entertainment it is. I was able to turn off my brain and enjoy the first Transformers movie. I even sat through most of Attack of the Clones yesterday. (Though I did fast forward through the “romance” scenes.) I’m perfectly capable of choosing to enjoy brain-dead entertainment. But it’s one thing to make that choice. It’s another thing entirely to wander into someone else’s critical discussion and tell them to stop all that unnecessary thinking. I’m speaking as someone who writes light fiction. My first book was called bubblegum fantasy, and I’m good with that. But the moment you try to tell me that light entertainment isn’t worthy of discussion, that it’s somehow exempt from criticism, I’m going to take it personally. Good writing — even fluffy bubblegum writing — takes work. It takes research. Goblin Quest [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] required a consultation with a geologist, weapon and armor research, lots of time looking up real-world recipes for Golaka the chef, and several re-reads of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. When someone e-mails to say I messed up a sailing term in Mermaid’s Madness [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy], am I supposed to tell them it’s just entertainment and they should stop being so critical? I made a mistake, and that mistake threw someone out of the story. They have every right to call me on it. Just as people were right to challenge problematic aspects of Talia’s character and sexuality in Stepsister. To say it doesn’t count, that there’s no point in critical discussion of such “fluffy” works, is a bit insulting. It’s also flat-out wrong. Often, this attitude goes hand-in-hand with the idea that criticism and analysis are academic practices, suited only to dusty old classics. Keep on analyzing Ulysses. Stop wasting your brain cells on Twilight or the latest Hollywood blockbuster. I think it’s the other way around. Those blockbusters are exactly what we need to talk about. How many people actually read Ulysses? Compare that to the numbers reading the Twilight series. The latter might be pop culture fluff, but it’s worthy of discussion because, for better or worse, it is our culture. Because it reflects and affects our society today far more than Ulysses does. There’s also the fact that, for many of us, this sort of discussion is fun. (Just look at Elizabeth Bear’s reviews of Criminal Minds.) I like stories. I like disecting them, trying to understand where they worked and where they failed. Like taking apart a watch to see what’s inside. Some people might say that the dissection takes the enjoyment out of the experience. For me, the discussion is part of the enjoyment. From this week’s episode of Criminal Minds, “The Uncanny Valley”: “Diabetics metabolize everything they consume differently. Food, drink, drugs … it all gets broken down into blood sugar.” Ignoring the fact that not all food and drink gets broken into blood sugar (Coke Zero, anyone?), you’re telling me my drugs all turn into blood sugar too? Guess I’d better start taking insulin with my cholesterol pills from now on. The show also asserts that diabetics can metabolize drugs faster, and thus our victim could shake off the paralytic. (Which was being received via an I.V. drip.) This struck me at first as either poorly researched or poorly explained. So I spent this morning digging up research so as not to come off as an idiot when I wrote my rant, and what do you know. I came across a 2007 study from The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases which states: In fact, type 1 diabetes not only leads to activation of drug metabolic genes, but also has a profound effect on the metabolism of certain drugs. Mice with induced type 1 diabetes rapidly clear their systems of a compound that induces temporary paralysis, while normal mice cannot. From that same article, “Controlling the diabetes reversed the effect: when insulin was given to the mice, the CAR-induced genes turned off. “ So in theory, since this woman was off her insulin, there might have been a window where she would have thrown off the effects of the drugs before falling into a diabetic coma. I’m not finding anything to support the idea that drugs all break down into blood sugar, though. That one still strikes me as goblin dung. According to the article above, a diabetic with out-of-control glucose doesn’t clear the drug by breaking it down into sugar, but because (in mice, at least) this activates certain genes that clear the drug from the system. So, I’m cranky about the “Everything turns into sugar” bit, but it looks like they did the research on the rest. Thanks for that, Criminal Minds — the widespread laziness and misinformation spread in most books and shows when it comes to diabetes is a huge peeve of mine. On that note, if any of my writer friends are ever doing a story that includes diabetes and have questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. I’m not a doctor, but I can give you the basics and tell you what it’s like to live with the damn disease. Also, I think I have a man-crush on Dr. Reid. So on Tuesday we had an all-nighter at the E.R. Last night my four-year-old got sick. This week officially bites the wax tadpole. I did have two follow-ups to yesterday’s post on e-book file sharing. 1. It’s almost a rule on the Internet: Don’t read the comments. Particularly with something like book piracy, it’s easy to get into rabid nastiness. Instead, once again people were thoughtful, respectful, and flat-out smart in your comments and conversation yesterday. Thank you for that. Y’all are awesome. 2. One of the questions that keeps coming up is “How can someone be against file sharing but not against libraries and used bookstores and people loaning books out to all of their friends?” Inspired in part by the discussion over on Facebook, I came up with this: When you buy a paper book, you purchase a physical object that you now own. It’s a thing, and you can do whatever you like with it — keep it, burn it, give it away, sell it, etc. With an electronic book, there’s no physical object. With file sharing, you’re not sharing a single object that you’ve purchased and now own; instead, you’re distributing that book. You basically set up a competing “publisher,” one which takes the work done by the actual publisher, then distributes the end product for free. Again, a lot of good points from yesterday’s comments, but the used bookstore/library question has always nagged at me, and hopefully this clarifies why. (I know it helped me to sort some things out in my own head.) And that’s about all my brain is good for today, so here, have some LEGO. Most of you should recall the Nebulon-B Medical Frigate from the end of Empire Strikes Back? Steef de Prouw has done it in LEGO. This thing is amazing, over four feet long, with little docked X-wings and even the Millennium Falcon. Click the pic for the full photo set.
Publishers Weekly posted an article talking about a book piracy study released today by the Attributor. PW article is here; their link to the original article wasn’t working. My thanks to Rich at Attributor, who contacted me with a link to their study results, including methodology, here. From PW: Publishers could be losing out on as much as $3 billion to online book piracy, a new report released today by Attributor estimates. Attributor, whose FairShare Guardian service monitors the Web for illegally posted content, tracked 913 books in 14 subjects in the final quarter of 2009 and estimated that more than 9 million copies of books were illegally downloaded from the 25 sites it tracked. Anyone seeing any possible problems here? Here are two that jumped out at me right off the bat.
Please don’t take this as approval of illegal file-sharing. I’ve made some stories available for free over on my web site (left sidebar), so I’m all for sharing some free fiction. But when you upload a copy of one of my books to a file sharing site, you’re being a dick. (Downloading a copy? Lesser dick.) If you don’t want to pay $7.99, no problem. Go to a used bookstore. Go to your local library. That said, I don’t think piracy is the end of the world. I just wish we could get more trustworthy data & discussion, and less dogma. ::Takes a deep breath:: So please feel free to talk piracy and file-sharing, but be aware that over-the-top extremism may be heavily mocked, regardless of what side it’s coming from. |
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Copyright © 2010 Jim C. Hines - All Rights Reserved |
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