Three things make a post, as the old gag goes. So, try this for size:

Do Androids Sleep With Electric Sheep?

That’s the title of an intriguing book I reviewed recently for SF Site; the subtitle reads “Critical Perspectives on Sexuality and Pornography in Science and Social Fiction”, and I just couldn’t pass it up. Funnily enough, I don’t think anyone else expressed an interest… I guess I’ve finally found my niche in the genre criticism ecosystem, eh?

It’s an interesting book, albeit something of a mixed bag. Skip to the money-shot:

Like good science fiction, the material collected in Do Androids Sleep With Electric Sheep? leaves us with more questions than we arrived with; if you can stomach the subject matter (which shouldn’t really appall anyone but the most prudish and conservative, to be honest, though my perceptions may be somewhat skewed), this is prime fuel for your imaginatory engines. The focal character of James Tiptree, Jr.’s story “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” suggests that, as humans, “we’re built to dream outwards” [pp 239], to project our desire onto “the other”, whoever or whatever it may happen to be. It’s an insight that makes more sense each time you read it, and serves to underline the basic commonality between sex and science fiction, or indeed art in general — they are both ways in which we try to subsume ourselves into (or control and dominate over) that which we are not.

Love makes us do strange things, after all.

It really, really does.

The (Schis)matrix reloaded; criticism and subjectivity

I can’t remember where I saw the first link to There Is No Genre, but I do remember Casey Samulski’s opening post made me think [he/she]‘d have interesting things to say in future, and subbing to the RSS feed. Today, that trust was rewarded with a repost review of Chairman Bruce’s Schismatrix (which I fully intended to review after re-reading it late last year… and so it goes) with a coda born of hindsight:

… this really is the tricky part of good criticism. Ultimately, it is subjective. An author can do their best to ensure that a particular effect resonates with his or her readership but it’s no guarantee of that outcome. No two people read something identically. We each take to a work our own experiences, including previous works read, our own sense of beauty, and our own preconceptions about the novel at hand. This is not to say that you cannot have some objectivity in this process – I have read things that I haven’t enjoyed but that I have appreciated for their craftsmanship. Instead, I would argue that objectivity is something of a distant shore to be paddled towards but never landed upon.

Preference. Mood. Taste. These are all culprits at various times and they are inevitable, responsible for sabotaging even the most sober of inspections. In order to criticize well, you must remember that these reign over your judgment, tirelessly skewing your sense of direction. Most importantly, I think you can never pretend that you understand a work completely – there must always be the admission that you are only witness to what you were able to discern and that, like all art, this does not define what is actually there.

Yes, yes, and thrice yes; I always thought that subjectivity was implicit in any and every review ever written, but the peridic cycles of angst und wagling about negative reviews and uppity critics serves to demonstrate that’s surely not the case. And now for the resonant chime in a passing pair of sentences from Jeff VanderMeer in a Booklife post:

… there’s also the uncomfortable truth that no one is ever going to perceive your book exactly the way that you intended for it to be perceived. In coming into contact with the world the text changes, given an additional dimension by readers.

[image courtesy nurpax]

Reviewing while blindfolded

But what if, to stymie future complaints about reviewer bias and preconceptional baggage, you inverted the normal anonymity curve of the reviewing process, namely naming the reviewer (generally uncredited in a lot of non-genre venues, or so I’m led to believe) but concealing the author’s identity (and, presumably, publishing details) from said reviewer?

… the editors of this magazine asked if I would be interested in being part of an experiment in criticism. They were curious what would happen if we inverted the standard “anonymous review” formula—if instead of the reviewer having the cloak of anonymity, we were to keep the book under review anonymous from its critic, and thereby shield it from any and all prejudice—whether positive or negative, whether directed at the author, the publishing house, the blurbers, the cover art, etc. I swore several oaths to stay true to the project (Eds.: “No googling”), and soon enough a book arrived at my house. Its covers, front matter, and endpages had all been stripped, and the spine blacked out with a Sharpie. I didn’t know what it was called or who wrote it or who was publishing it or when. I didn’t know if it was the author’s first or twenty-first publication. Fiction? Nonfiction? Genre? Self-published? I didn’t know anything (and at this writing, I still don’t) except that it wasn’t poetry. What could I do? I began to read.

Rose Fox of Publisher’s Weekly (thanks to whom I found that post) mentions that it mirrors periodic calls for genre venues to anonymise the slushpile – a suggestion plainly motivated by the “good stories lose out to established names” theory of short fiction publication.

The ones most readily identifiable–written by writers with very distinctive voices, or making use of familiar and copyright-protected characters or settings–would presumably be routed directly to the editors anyway, so generally anonymizing the slushpile seems like a reasonable way of reducing possible bias against authors with certain types of names. It wouldn’t do a thing to reduce unconscious bias against certain types of stories, but it would probably make it more obvious, which is not a bad thing.

Moving back to book reviewing, though, the point is made in the comments that with genre fiction, some sort of filtering is required (so that a romance reviewer doesn’t end up with a Greg Egan collection, f’rinstance)… but as I see it, that truism actually weakens the original thesis, which seems to be predicated on the ongoing fiction that there is some sort of objective measurement of quality that can be applied to all writing in the same way. With reference to the above links and quotes, I suggest that the myth of critical objectivity is long overdue for burial; there seems to be an evolving collective consensus on such matters when viewed en masse and at a distance, but once you zoom in close it’s subjectivity and personal opinion all the way down.

That this is unclear to so many people is a source of perpetual bafflement to me, but then so is Dan Brown’s status as a bestseller. So there you go.

Yes indeed; the tables are turned on me as Charles Tan of Bibliophile Stalker puts me to the question, primarily about stuff I do in the genre fiction world but veering off into other stuff as well. Reading it may make you understand why I tend towards reticence around new acquaintances; I’ve seen the looks on faces when I just open up and waffle at full bore. As such, replying to Charles’ questions was a lot of fun.

It also took me around three hours. What can I say? I type slowly.

Briefly donning the meta-hat of intellectual narcissism, it’s interesting to see that snap-shot of my mind, taken as it was right at the end of last year, before I’d made the decision to go freelance full time. So many things have changed in just four fast months. Time flies when you’re living the dream, AMIRITE?

Jay Lake on the future of written science fiction:

Given that our field has always defined itself, and even prided itself, on outsider status, the mainstreaming of our concerns has pushed us toward specialization as a way of defending our specialness.

Is this a good thing? Probably not, but I’m not convinced it’s bad either. Literature is like rock and roll…new movements come along, but the old ones never die.

I’m sure someone else said something like that once.

OK, for the record: although I thought some of his reasons and criticisms were wrong, I largely agreed when Jonathan said that Tor.com was late to the party and unnecessary[1] to the online genre scene.

And now there’s another one: Stephen Hunt’s SF Crowsnest is the latest to board the bandwagon with Hivemind.

Considering how long the Tor site has been in the pipeline – and the original-content-producing clout they have behind them – how could launching this now possibly be a sane option by comparison to just reskinning PHPbb and chucking it in a subdomain so your regular readers can beef without cluttering the comment threads?

Coming as it does from a site that hasn’t had a properly functional RSS feed since I started reading that way in late 2005[2], I hope you’ll all forgive me for not rushing over there to add you as a friend.

I follow a fair few PR and social media commentators via blogs and Twitter, and it’s interesting how social network saturation is finally starting to set warning flags a-waving among those who were first to praise their potential. Too much of a good thing, perhaps… but as has been pointed out, there’s no need to do anything. The web’s always been pretty Darwinian; many are born, few survive to thrive. [image by wafdaros]

[ 1 - Unnecessary does not equate to useless or unenjoyable, in case that isn't obvious. ]

[ 2 - Unless something has changed since last time I tried it around December last year, of course. ]

I went to interview and review Enochian Theory on Tuesday night, and I was packin’ a camera …

Ben (frontman, pictured) has been a friend for quite some time. The band are attempting to go the fully-independent route (no label, no management, treating it as a proper business), and the show was to demo their new album’s-worth of material. Despite a few minor technical hitches, it was bloody good stuff. If you like dark progressive metal, that is.

Writing about music

It’s all been a bit close to the wire this week, as the Masterclass took a big bite out of my headway. But everything that needed nailing for release date of next Monday is done, so yay me.

Still a notable lack of response from volunteer reviewers … with one exception, and she’ll be getting her first job when I see her down the pub this evening. More prodding required, perhaps.

Album of the week

Life … The Best Game In Town by Harvey Milk. Thinking man’s southern sludge, featuring Joe Preston on bass.

Honorable mention – Nephu Huzzband’s single “Nurse Nurse!” is very promising. Fugazi-era post-hardcore meets the more abstract and interesting end of the current indie sound. Ones to watch.

Writing about books

Much like my fellow travellers, I still have a head full of swirling ideas and concepts after the excellent second SFF Masterclass, and I’ve been too busy with other stuff this week to do anything coherent. But I’ve been thinking a lot about what to say in my re-examination of Snow Crash; I have many potential angles of attack, so to speak.

Freelance

Chuntering on with PS Publishing duties, which have settled neatly into a daily routine. A trifle behind schedule on a website project, but I have a catch-up binge scheduled for tomorrow.

Also on the horizon is another potential source of work and income, but I’m still in the process of sounding it all out. It’s quite strange – for my first year of putative freelancing I could hardly find any work whatsoever, but if this year carries on delivering new avenues of work at this rate I could be considering quitting the day-job come 2009.

Still, that’s a best-case scenario, and I’m not going to be too hasty. But things are definitely getting lively.

Futurismic

It affected all my sites (as some of you may have noticed), but a major FUBAR at my hosting company hit Futurismic the hardest and cost me the best part of Tuesday morning to unproductive panic and teeth-grinding*.

Anyway, the new team have pretty much bedded down now, though posting is a little less regular than I’d have liked. Plus we now have ads in the RSS feed – which part of me hates doing, and the other part of me figures is a necessity.

Oh, and new fiction early next week – keep ‘em peeled!

Books and magazines seen

The Masterclass had Convention-like properties, in that I came back with far more books than I went with. Best of all, none of them cost me a penny, as all-round good egg Graham Sleight was having a clear-out that included a number of titles I was only too happy to relieve him of. I shan’t list them all, but they include books of poetry, textbooks on alchemy and occultism, and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.

I’ve also been added to the Gollancz mailing list (that dastardly Spanton doesn’t miss an opportunity for merciless and underhanded hype, after all), which sees me supplied with ARCs of:

• The Quiet War by Paul McAuley
• Going Under by Justina Robson
• City At The End Of Time by Greg Bear

It’s all go in this household, y’know.

Masterclass

In lieu of a more complete summary (which will need to wait for the comparative calm of next week), allow me to say that the SFF Masterclass was even better this year than before. I say this not as a disservice to the organisers, attendees and lecturers who took part in the first iteration, but to emphasise the fact that the slightly larger group size seemed to work really well, with a great sense of camaraderie and community arising (as has been noted by others, so I didn’t just imagine it) and lots of quality discussion.

From my personal perspective it was much nicer having it happen in London as opposed to Liverpool, which made the entire business vastly more affordable, but I think I’ll continue to apply to attend any year when I can spare the time and money, wherever it takes place. Recommended to any hardcore genre book geek – be they writer, critic or both.

My Bloody Valentine

Saturday night, Camden Roundhouse. So loud you could feel it in your guts and bones. A new contender in my Best Gigs Ever list, so brilliant that I’ve decided not to write a proper review because I don’t want to spoil the memory with over-analysis. I nearly cried a couple of times thanks to a bizarre combination of bliss and bludgeon.

And Bilinda Butcher is still one of the most lovely women on the planet**. So there.

Coda

Crikey, wrapping-up time already. And the rollercoaster doesn’t stop here – tomorrow night it’s The Brian Jonestown Massacre at The Wedgewood Rooms, and then Sunday sees me tripping along the coast a bit for a family get-together in honour of my mother’s birthday before returning to Velcro City for poetry at Tongues & Grooves in the evening …

… business as usual, then! So I hope you’ll excuse me for keeping the coda brief***, and simply bidding you a good weekend before rolling out in search of The Friday Curry. Hasta luego, amigos!

[ * Two valuable lessons were learned: the first being a website-specific version of the eggs-in-one-basket aphorism, the second being a reiteration of the self-knowledge that I don't deal well with obstacles over which I have no control. I need to work out a better strategy for dealing with downtime, methinks - perhaps a list of tasks that don't require my sites to be live would be worth putting together. Not to mention less reliance on caffeine. ]

[ ** Her collection of classic guitars is merely a supplementary bonus to her natural awesomeness and beauty. Yes. ]

[ *** Because I was worried some of you might complain. Yeah, really. Napoleon who? ]

Richard Morgan’s recently-posted essay about the bitchiness and infighting of the sf/f fiction scene caused a flurry of reactions, some sympathetic, others less so.

Gary Gibson’s response chimes best with my own feelings on the matter, though:

“To me, I’d say all the bitchiness is a sign that things aren’t nearly so moribund within the genre as some have claimed. I’m not saying the arguments and fighting are always healthy, or necessarily mature; but I am saying it feels more alive than some genteel, mannered alternative. At least the way things are, it feels like people give a damn.”

Indeed. I mean, sure, sf people can get pretty entrenched in things, and rather more emotionally attached or opposed to certain words and definitions than really makes much sense (cough *mundane-sf* cough).

But if I’d stumbled into fandom as I did and found it to be an echo chamber … well, I’d probably be more focused on writing about music, I guess. The ability to debate the merits of a piece of art without resorting to fists, name-calling and hissy-fits is rare enough in my daily life that I’d rather not lose it.

That said – live and let live, eh? Maybe it’s just my nature as supreme wishy-washy diplomat of compromise, but I’ve always found the best way to get anyone to respect my opinion (even if they don’t agree with it) is to respect theirs. As my mother used to remind me at the end of every school sports day – it’s not the winning, it’s the taking-part.

[Disclosure- Richard Morgan is one of my clients.]

There’s been much in the way of writerly foresight from Jason Stoddard in recent months; plenty of people have been willing to suggest the novel will die (and less people are willing to contest the proposition as time goes by), but Jason is the only person that I’m aware of who is doing concrete thinking about future markets for creative writing from the POV of the writer.

Dude, where’s my market?

Additionally, he’s revived his popular metafiction theme. Popular metawhuta? In a nutshell, BoingBoing and io9 are popular metafiction … as well as proof that people are more than willing to read if you just put the right stuff in front of them. As Jason says himself:

“I’d like to see the science fiction magazines succeed. I’d like to see science fiction become more relevant. I’d like to see it come back to genre that is actively leading us forward, instead of telling us “there’s no use, we’re all going to die anyway.” Unfortunately, there’s little I can do to help the publications directly, so maybe this, in some small manner, will help point the way.

After all, BoingBoing grew organically. It didn’t take millions of dollars in advertising or the combined might of a television network to launch. It occupies a space where science fiction could be.”

Right; I know this first-hand. Now that I’m running Futurismic, thoughts like this weigh heavily on me – how the hell am I going to get that site to pay for the fiction and its hosting fees (let alone make anything on top)? There’s masses of traffic out there, after all; you just have to attract it to your content.

As is probably plain from my rather bitter comment on Jason’s post, I kind of resent the fact that io9 can post 90% fluff and 10% substance and still pay the payroll; it says sad things about the state of the market for fiction, and makes me wonder if I’m barking up the wrong tree entirely.

The readers are out there, they just don’t know where the good writing is

But then I look at the OMFG-Zerg-rush!!!1 we had on Leonard Richardson’s story when Cory Doctorow gave at the thumbs-up at BoingBoing – over 7000 page views within the space of a week, and a forty-deep comment thread of people raving about how awesome the story is. Some people obviously do want to read good fiction, and really enjoy it when they do so.

Hell, look at this item I included in last week’s Friday Free Fiction round-up at Futurismic – a busy gaming and media webzine is doing what its paper equivalents say is pointless, and experimenting with publishing fiction. Fiction that they’re paying the writers for. But they can do that – they have traffic, they have budget, they have leeway. They have the opportunity to throw sh*t at the wall and see if it sticks. I really hope it does, too – more paying markets can only be a good thing, I reckon.

Orienteering

So, where do I go from here? Arguably Futurismic is way closer to the contemporary metafiction model than most other genre webzines out there, and it also has the advantage of domain longevity – it’s a brand that has lasted a while. We’ve got a strong RSS subscriber base, too, and I’m doing my best to grow it further by expanding what we offer – a new non-fiction column goes up later today, as it happens.

But how can I turn that traffic into enough dollar to pay the fiction writers, cover the server bills and possibly throw a bit of cash at my non-fiction contributors too*?

There are options, sure, but they’re mostly not pretty.

Text Link Ads

There’s a couple of direct text-link ad companies who would pay pretty decent money for ads on Futurismic, but they have been proven to be a fast route to a Google blacklisting as they’re essentially a way of selling on PageRank to sites who are, shall we say, “not entirely deserving of it”. Ethically, I’m unwilling to cross that particular Rubicon – sure, there’d be enough money to pay pro rates for fiction, a reasonable column fee and chuck my blog team a bone or two, but what if I ended up boosting the online profile of some hate-group or snake-oil pharma company? Not on my watch, Admiral.

Adsense

Google AdSense offers me little control over what sort of ads are displayed (how often do you see vanity press ads on genre blogs with AdSense? – too often), and I know for a fact I’ve not clicked on an AdSense box in years; I’m not going to patronise my readers by assuming that they will do something I wouldn’t. Same applies to similar contextual ad platforms; the amount of actual clicks and/or impressions we’ll get just isn’t enough to make it worthwhile without crowding out the content with a bad signal-to-noise ratio. We’re too damn niche.

Affiliate marketing

Funnelling traffic to Amazon or similar might work if we accrue more organic click through, but isn’t going to pay the bills at current traffic rates; see above, essentially.

Direct sponsorship

I’d be willing to look into this, but I have no idea how I’d go about doing it, short of a hefty barrage of very polite cold emailing to publishers. I’d also insist on a made-public declaration from both parties that there would be no preferential coverage or favouritism. Independence and transparency is crucial for credibility, AFAIC.

Alternative ad networks

The current solution, namely Project Wonderful, has everything a niche scene like genre publishing should want out of an ad brokerage system. Seriously – I really can’t overstate the potential I see in this system, not just for Futurismic but for the whole industry’s online marketing business. Total control for advertisers and publishers; fine grain locational selection; precise budgeting, flexible low-scale payment options … it ticks all my boxes. The only problem – there’s not enough advertisers of the right type using it yet.

That last point is a shame – I think about small press publishers with a tight budget, and I know they must want to be able to target their online ads more effectively than paying for some keywords. They want to know what sort of audience those ads are going to, what those eyeballs are used to seeing and what they think is cool – they need demographic precision.

I can offer them that with Futurismic - 7000 views of one page over a week by people who expressly have an interest in written science fiction has to be worth something, right? – and so could a score of other sf webzines and blogs. But they don’t know it’s there yet – most internet ad platforms are aimed at traffic sources an order of magnitude larger than Futurismic.

So I guess yours truly has to go and be an evangelist on Project Wonderful’s behalf … which makes you realise just how crafty a business model they actually have!

The thesis

But I’m kind of digressing from my original point, which is that there’s definitely a market for fiction as long as you aren’t charging the reader for it directly. Jason also has things to say about how freeconomics effects you as a writer (in a nutshell: play the long game outside the box and you’ll be fine), but it’s us publishers that are caught in the middle. It’s our business model that’s dying, and hence the onus is on us to find a new one that works.

And this ain’t no violin solo, either – this is me thinking out loud, basically, but doing so in front of an audience I hope might chime in with some thoughts of their own. But to boil down my current thinking to the nugget – there’s enough money in genre publishing ad budgets to support the short fiction market in webzine form. I really believe this, and until I see concrete figures to the contrary I’m not going to abandon that belief – because webzines don’t need a lot of money beyond the fiction fees.

The problem is the book publishers are currently throwing their money at ineffective and imprecise advertising channels, and probably only because they don’t know the alternatives are there. If I can get them to a better channel that sends them actual interested buyers and exploits my currently under-used eyeball share, I’ve killed two birds with one stone and solidified the future of what I believe is a worthwhile short fiction market.

So, I have a strategy. What I don’t have are the tactics; I get the feeling the only way I’m going to find those is by getting muddy in the trenches and seeing what works. But if y’all have some advice (or have noticed the inevitable gaping hole in my tapestry of logic), my ears are wide open.

[ * Just to be perfectly clear, I was resigned to the idea that Futurismic will never pay me a red cent long before I took the plunge to take control of it. I am willing to subsidise it out of my earnings as a freelance for the foreseeable future ... which is a lot easier to say now that there actually are some freelance earnings on the horizon. But that's another post entirely; what I mean to say is "this is not a greed post". ]

A chap called J F Lewis is guest-posting at Scalzi’s Whatever today. He claims he’s written a totally new take on the modern vampire novel, but looking at the cover art supplied (which isn’t merely cheesy as all hell but also looks like a bad eighties hair-metal album cover) reminds me why I instinctively recoil from the thought of going near this genre as a reader, new take or not.

This is why book marketing is such a fascinating subject. Yes, I’m aware that many readers would have a similar reaction to the covers of books (and albums) I love dearly. No, I’m not being elitist. This is just another example of why genre fiction is like rock music.

Stoddard’s Two Cents

Here’s an intentionally provocative post from Jason Stoddard*, who suggests that we might get some interesting ideas about improving genre short fiction by saying what we hate about it:

“Back in my audio days, we used to ask our dealers and our customers a simple question: “What do you hate most about your gear?” And, based on the answers to this question, we’d frequently create products that drove stunning business growth.

Because it really isn’t important what they’re thrilled with. What matters is what they hate. Hate is a red-hot emotion that drives change.”

An interesting idea – there are already some stimulating comments on Jason’s post that are well worth a read, if only as a demonstration of how various the range of attitudes really is.

My Two Cents

I’m not going to go overboard here, because I’m a comparative newcomer to short fiction, and I don’t feel I have the same degree of emotional connection to (or experience with) it that a lot of longer-standing fans do. But here’s a few little nuggets:

• Heinlein’s Capable Men – they may have made sense in Heinlein’s era, but these stories just rub me up wrong when done by modern writers.
• The PKD rewrites – great stories in their day. Leave them be and write your own.
• The Hollywood screenplay – I know it’s a short story, but a soupcon of description and depth wouldn’t go amiss. My imagination loves a workout, but it needs calories before it can exercise.

Your Two Cents

What do you hate about the short fiction you read? Or is it all just fine, thankyouverymuch?

[* I'm late out of the gate with this one, I know; I have a mass of things to post about that other commitments have held me back from covering, and this is me beginning to catch up on the backlog.]

The news that UK band Radiohead have chosen to release their new album independently of record label support using an ‘honour box’ pricing scheme has set the internet alight. Is this a phenomenon that writers of fiction should be paying close attention to?

Lucky

The standard first response to this story has been “oh, but Radiohead are big enough (and rich enough) to be able to do this and not lose out financially.” That’s true enough, but the same model will (and indeed already does) still work for smaller artists.

The only overheads Radiohead have on that album is the money it cost to record and master it. No duplication, no distribution, no advertising, and no middlemen raking out the lion’s share of the revenue – which, believe it or not, shows signs of being quite considerable already, despite the fact that the option to get the download for free was available with the band’s blessing.

Now, granted, Radiohead have a strong brand already. None of the local bands in my town are going to make the same amount of news (or money) by releasing an album in the same way, because not enough people know who they are. But all bands make more money from touring (and selling merchandise at the same time) than they do from records, be they big or small.

Nice dream?

What Radiohead (and Prince, and others) have realised is that in a world where it’s impossible to stop people passing your music from person to person, you might as well accept it and use it to your advantage – let your music be a loss-leader advert for your other services, which in the case of musicians is live performances. If you can make some money back on the recordings, all well and good – and if you treat your fans with respect, they’ll be more willing to pay you.

So what does this mean for writers of fiction? Well, the publishing industry is not identical to the music industry, but there are similarities – especially when you look at the “play it safe” approach to developing new talent, leading to bookshops full of more of the same.

The big difference is that the “book experience” isn’t quite so readily reproduced electronically, and it will be some time before it can be, for various reasons. In other words, I’m not suggesting that fiction writers should abandon all desire to be published as novelists. But what I am suggesting is that new writers (and old ones) should be giving away snippets to build up their reputations and create a market for themselves.

No surprises

Publishers, as much as they may be sincerely interested in bringing great writing into the public eye, have a bottom line to look after. I don’t think it’s over cynical of me to suggest that, if given the choice between two debut novels of equal quality, a publisher is going to feel better about taking the gamble on the author whose name turns up more often in blogs, forums and webzines. That author has done part of the publisher’s job for them; he or she has demonstrated not just a competence at writing, but the will and drive to get out there and sell themselves.

Of course, I’m largely preaching to the converted here. But there’s still plenty of misunderstanding about these issues, particularly from the old guard of publishers and authors – witness the SFWA/Scribd spat, which I believe to have been done with the best of intentions, but on the basis of a decades-old understanding of the writer’s place in the modern market.

Optimistic

And, much as I hoped and called for (but am not taking any credit for), the genre scene is adapting to the new economics. Much as in music, it’s the fringe cultures that can afford to try out new models, because their communities are bound by loyalty and a sense of identity, and because the artists are going to keep on creating even if they can’t make much money out of it.

Hence the ongoing short fiction revolution – I was absolutely stoked to catch the news that Fantasy Magazine is giving up dead-tree magazine publishing, and moving instead to a weekly free-to-read online magazine model with occasional printed anthologies … and they’re increasing their per-word price for fiction at the same time!

Anyone can play guitar

So, what can writers learn from Radiohead? They can learn that things are changing, and where the big boys lead, they shouldn’t be afraid to follow.

OK, so you’re not Charlie Stross or Cory Doctorow – the Radioheads of sf, if I might mangle the metaphor – but Stross and Doctorow are breaking the trail ahead of you, making it progressively easier to follow in their wake.

Radiohead’s best advert for themselves is their music. As a writer, yours is your writing. So set it free – if people want to pass it around on your behalf, they’re doing you a favour.