Publishing Basics

I've spent the last couple of hours doing some preliminary work for my "Reviewing the Mail" posts for Monday, and I've been surprised and appalled by how many comics publishers -- generally the big ones, too -- who can't handle the very basics of 21st century bookselling.

Here's the #1 thing: you need to have your final cover feeding to the online retailers. Their pages -- particularly Amazon's -- rise to the top of search results for book titles and authors, and it behooves you to have your actual, final cover (not the art without type, not a panel from the book, not any other damn thing) there.

I know feeds don't always run smoothly -- a fair part of my job is dealing with "this book has the wrong cover/wrong copy/ is missing quotes" issues. But you get them done, because they're important.

And it wouldn't kill you to have some decent copy there, as well.

Mr. Fooster: Traveling on a Whim by Tom Corwin & Craig Frazier

I've seen this book generally cited as if its full title was Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim, but the book itself clearly differentiates between title (Mr. Fooster) and subtitle (Traveling on a Whim) on cover, spine, and title page -- though not in the CIP data on the copyright page -- so I'm doing that as well.

Mr. Fooster is a slim, heavily-illustrated book at a low price point, designed to sit near the cash-wrap as an impulse purchase. Each spread has a one-page illustration by Frazier, in a light brown tone with lots of little lines for shading and more than its share of crosshatching as well. The facing page has a paragraph -- rarely, more than that -- of the story by Corwin.

It's narrated from a third-person omniscient perspective, though it spends most of the time in Fooster's skull. And this is good, since Fooster never actually speaks, and otherwise he'd be a bit enigmatic.

Mr. Fooster's eleven chapters add up to about five separate stories, in each of which Fooster goes out wandering -- traveling on a whim, as the book repeatedly hammers home -- and then something odd happens. He usually deals with the odd something by blowing a bubble, using a bottle and wand he always keeps with him. And the bubble magically makes everything better, by forming some object which is precisely what is needed. Each story then ends, as if it had just delivered a moral but without the moral itself.

Mr. Fooster has the form of an allegory, but I haven't been able to make the parallels come into focus -- it feels like a book that desperately wants to teach a lesson, but can't think of any lessons to teach. (Other than, perhaps, the very flabby one of "take a look at the world around you.")

Fooster is also fond of musing on odd questions -- some of which are very debased existentialism, some of which are minor-comedian-level wordplay, and some of which would be easily answered by anyone who bothered to do any research. I'd be much more impressed by him if he weren't such a derivative and sloppy thinker.

Mr. Fooster is short and harmless; I vaguely enjoyed it, for the same reason that one smiles at a cute slobbery puppy, even if he is making a mess on the rug. But it's clearly reaching for profundity, and falling very short. I am terribly cynical, so I'm afraid that I assume that this Mr. Fooster will only be the first of many and that it will sell far, far too many copies. But, to me, it reads like a version of Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts that doesn't know that it's a joke.

Manga Sex at ComicMix

Today's Manga Friday column at ComicMix dives into two of the more adult -- not actually pornographic, but with characters who actually do have sex -- subgenres of Japanese comics, redikomi and yaoi.

(I'm really not the person to be reviewing yaoi, but I'm the designated manga guy at ComicMix, so I thought I should bring it up at some point.)

Anyway, I reviewed the titles Love For Dessert, Real Love, and Kiss All the Boys.

Come and see me try not to make a fool of myself...

Roc and Ace Fall

(That's the season "fall," not "fall" in its verb form.)

Valerie Cortes, a Penguin USA publicist, has created a teaser video for the Ace/Roc Fall hardcovers and trade paperbacks.

It's a different way of getting the information out, and I'm not sure if it's quite as usable as it could be -- getting to any book in particular would be difficult -- but it's definitely interesting and new and webby and eye-catching, which are all good things.

And, from this, I learned that Jack McDevitt has a new book this fall, and that John Steakley's Vampires will be republished. (Maybe I'll read it this time; people have been telling me I should for about a decade.)

Did I Miss the US Sale?

Publishers Lunch's weekly round-up of deals had the following squib this evening:

NYT bestselling author Terry Goodkind's A DIFFERENT KIND OF HUMAN and THE HINGES OF HELL, to Maya Mavjee and Kristin Cochrane at Doubleday Canada, for publication in 2009 and 2010, by Danny Baror at Baror International, on behalf of Russell Galen at Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency.

Did I miss the US announcement, or is that deal still hanging fire? It's odd to see a major author -- who isn't himself Canadian, as far as I remember -- with a solo deal for Canadian rights, instead of having them rolled up with either the US or UK.

Update, 6/21: With the (utterly unsubstantiated, but what the hell) rumors posted by the second Anonymous, below, we can work out some of the expected parameters of this deal.

Goodkind has been reportedly unhappy with being a fantasy author, and wants to be seen as a "mainstream" writer (which somewhat explains the quote ascribed to HC UK; they're desperately trying to keep him happy when he's already jumped ship from his US publisher -- the one who discovered him and made him a bestseller).

And "two major powerhouses" -- who could they be? Tor is explicitly out of the running. Given Goodkind's interests and history, I would expect that general trade powerhouses are meant -- and the biggies there are Random House, Penguin USA, Hachette, and HarperCollins. Since it's not necessarily the SF imprints in the mix, I couldn't even guess as to which two of those it is (or which imprints or editors).

I'm intrigued by the "so low in the double digit millions" comment -- for a two book deal, that means the expectation is well north of $5m per book, probably at least $10m for purely US rights.

Let's run some numbers based on that, shall we?

We'll assume a $29.95 hardcover and a subsequent $9.99 mass-market paperback -- both on the high end, but it'll do for these purposes -- and royalty rates of 20% for the hardcover and 12% for the paperback -- similarly high, at the edges of the plausible.

And let's assume that these two books sell just as well as the hardcover of Confessor (the last book of "Sword of Truth") and the paperback of Phantom (the penultimate book of that series). This is an unreasonable assumption, but it's one I expect the agent will be making, and insisting on.

Confessor has sold, according the the standard industry-reporting vehicle that I have access to, on the order of 175,000 copies to date. Let's be generous and say that's only about 60% of Confessor's total final hardcover sales -- it's still selling now, for one thing -- and take the total up to a round 300,000. At a 20% royalty and $29.95 list, that's about $1.8 million earned royalty.

On the paperback side, Phantom has reportedly sold somewhat north of a hundred thousand copies. Again, let's be generous and say the total sale will be two hundred thousand. Assume, again, a $9.99 list and 12% royalty, and each of the new books will earn about $240,000 in paperback.

Add those together, generously assume some revenue from audio sales and other domestic subsidiary rights (but no book club sales -- Goodkind hates bookclubs), and you come out with roughly $2.5 million earned for each book, under quite generous assumptions.

If Anonymous #2 is correct, Tor offered at least twice this figure and was laughed out of the auction.

Since agents love round numbers, I suspect the figure desired in this case is $10 million per book. And, to even get the publisher's revenues to that level, A Different Kind of Human and Hinges of Hell would need to sell over half a million copies in hardcover, each, with a similarly blockbuster paperback sale.

As we know from Publishers Weekly's annual round-up of hardcover sales, only about twenty fiction books hit that level at all in any given year. Goodkind's books have not previously been among them.

To earn out at that level, these Goodkind books would have to sell five or ten times as well as his previous books have -- to be blunt, they'd need to sell to the vast general female audience for romances and thrillers. They would need to sell at a level that -- of the vast range of writers ever connected with the SFF field -- only Stephen King has done consistently, and only a few others (Dean Koontz, John Jakes, etc.) have ever done.

I have not kept up with "Sword of Truth," so I may be working for an outdated image of his work, but...I don't believe Goodkind is the kind of writer whom that mainstream female audience is going to take to heart. He does have a large, devoted fan-base -- mostly of fantasy readers, despite his protestations -- and that audience could always get somewhat bigger. But if A Different Kind of Human sold even one million copies in hardcover, I'd be astonished.

It will be very interesting to see who, if anyone, walks away with US rights for these books, and how much they are reported to have paid for those rights. (And what is included in those rights -- at $10m per book, I know I'd demand film rights be thrown in.)

Update, 6/26: The US sale, as reported today by Publishers Weekly, was for three untitled books. If that's the deal Anonymous #2 was talking about below, the financials become quite different -- obviously, the sales projections from three books will be about 50% higher than for two books. So, assuming this deal was in the low double-digit millions, Putnam Berkley can make money on these books -- as long as they sell at least as well as Goodkind's previous work.

Now, the thing to do is to wait and see -- the first of these books will be published in fall 2009, and, since Putnam is trying to reposition Goodkind, I'd expect a major galley push to booksellers, reviewers, and bloggers (but probably not many fantasy bloggers, if any) in the late spring to early summer. (It'll probably also be a big BEA galley.)

Explain This Bill Day Cartoon To Me

First of all, this image's official home is here; I only host these editorial-cartoon images myself these days because the originals sometimes disappear. If you are UFS Inc. and you disapprove of this use, e-mail me at the address to the right and I'll switch to a hotlink to your image (for as long as it lasts).

Right.

So, in this cartoon, our president is coming out of a building (the Department of Justice, maybe? the Supreme Court? does it matter?), and comes upon the traditional statue of justice, depicted as a svelte, robed, blindfolded woman (a grandmother in this case) holding a sword and a set of scales.

(I'm not mistaken than the figure is George W., am I? It's a loose caricature, but I thought it was supposed to be him.)

W. is carrying a briefcase marked "Jobs/Resumes," for whatever reason.

Looking at the statue, he whistles (presumably a wolf-whistle, which is not really plausible, given that particular statue) and thinks about an elephant (representing the GOP), blindfolded and wearing a bikini.

Every single element of this cartoon is confusing:

What does the star-spangled bikini stand for? (Is that a reference to hiding behind the flag, and the tininess of the bikini shows that the cartoonist thinks there's very little justification?) Or is it just there because it's hard to drawn an elephant in a robe?

Does the fact that the elephant's scales are much much smaller than the original statue's scales mean anything? The elephant's sword is also shorter and stubbier, if that means anything.

Does the briefcase have anything to do with anything?

And what is the message of this cartoon -- that W. needs a job after the end of his term, but has jut realized he can get a sex-change operation and massive plastic surgery in order to become a Supreme Court Justice? That W. has just this second realized that he has the power to appoint judges, so he thinks that he should pick ideologically friendly ones? Or what?

So Who Got Goodkind?

Today's Publishers Lunch teases their (pay) Deal News service with several half-reports, including "Terry Goodkind moves houses."

So, does anyone out there know: which house, and has the dollar amount been released? (I'm assuming this is the two-book deal for A Different Kind of Human and The Hinges of Hell; if not, that would also be interesting news.)

Movie Log: Fever Pitch (1997)

The Wife is an immense Colin Firth fan, so I'm not entirely sure how we missed Fever Pitch the first time around, but we finally caught up to it about a week ago.

This was the first attempt to adapt Nick Hornby's memoir of the same name into a movie -- an American version with Drew Barrymore came along a year or so ago, translating soccer football into baseball (and adding Drew Barrymore, which is no bad thing). I haven't seen the newer American movie, so I won't be comparing those two.

I have read Hornby's book, though, and it's a small gem of its kind. That kind, though isn't fiction, and it definitely isn't a romantic comedy, which both movies have been. The book is a serio-comic look at one man's obsession with a football team -- Arsenal -- and what that's done to his life. It extends out from there, as well -- Hornby is very thoughtful and interesting on the subject of a man's relationship to sports, and to any activity he's a passionate spectator of, giving over his emotional state to something he can't control.

The movie, on the other hand, is on the side of Paul Ashworth (Firth) from the start, which unbalances it. As in many rom-coms, two people with nothing in common are thrown together -- Paul and Sarah Hughes (Ruth Gemmell) are teaching in rooms next door to each other at the same London school, and dislike each other on sight.

Paul is a mussed, indulgent English teacher who loves football far too much. (Well, nearly all of the audience will think that, but the movie doesn't.) Sarah is a new teacher of history, all buttoned up and serious.

So Fever Pitch sets itself up as the story of how Paul loosens up Sarah, and she gets him to grow up. But that's not actually what happens. Over and over, Paul makes it clear that, in any and all circumstances, football will always come first in his life -- before Sarah, before work, before friends, before anything. He's unapologetic, even pugnacious, on that point, and Sarah never really pushes back the way she should. (The script was written by Hornby, who may have identified too much with his male hero.)

So, in the end, Fever Pitch becomes the story of how Sarah changes to suit Paul. And that's exactly backwards -- she was a little stiff, but she'd already loosened by that point. At the end of the movie, Paul is clearly the one who needs to change to make the relationship work...but he doesn't.

Fever Pitch has some nice performances, with Firth particularly good as the kind of guy who cares about his team more than anything else in the world. But it's not as smart about itself, or about that guy, as the original book was, and the ending is a problem.

(The cover up top is the current US DVD, which is frankly horrible -- I guess Firth is too big now to let his face be used for his old minor movies, but it misrepresents the movie very badly. The British cover, second, is better, but I could only find fuzzy versions of it.)

Everyone Must Blog Everything, Forever and Ever, Amen

This week's think piece at Booksquare, "Why Publishers Should Blog," does a good job of presenting the positive aspects of blogging for publishing organizations. But there are people out there -- like Jason Pinter, for example -- who could speak to the negative aspects.

Not me, though. Been there, done that. Got the T-shirt. That's all the dead past.

But there always is a negative side, and it's important to think about those possible negative aspects first. Whether you're the publishing company opening things up, or the employee encouraged to "convey excitement and information" without talking "the way you talk about books in your catalog," think about what can go wrong, and what you'll do if it does. Because, in this world, it always does go wrong.

E.C. Segar's Popeye, Vol. 1

The subtitle of this first collection of Segar's Thimble Theater strips is the very appropriate "I Yam What I Yam!"

I've already taken it back to the library -- I actually read most of it on the afternoon of the day after it was due back. (Mostly because it's outlandishly oversized, and so can only be read really comfortably at a table.) So I can't cite chapter and verse.

But damn if E.C. Segar wasn't a sly, funny, and amazingly entertaining cartoonist. The character of Popeye has been very badly served by other hands for the past fifty or seventy years, so seeing the pure Segar is a revelation.

Popeye doesn't even appear until about page twenty-seven -- and this volume starts ten years into Thimble Theater's twenty-year run. The first part of the story has then-lead Castor Oyl inheriting Bernice the Whiffle Hen from his uncle, and then trying, repeatedly, to kill it for a reward. (Whiffle Hens are rare, valuable, and consummate escape artists.) Then Castor spends a month or so selling Bernice to various shady characters -- she always comes home to him, which causes trouble.

Finally, Castor and his friend Ham Gravy -- who had been Olive's long-time boyfriend before being rudely shouldered aside by a rough seaman -- learn that rubbing a Whiffle Hen's feathers brings great luck, so they set off to break the bank of an island casino. But to get there, they need a boat...and a crew.

For crew, Castor hires Popeye. The sailor is clearly supporting cast for the rest of that story, but it's also clear that Segar was having fun with the new character -- and, outside the world of the strip, Popeye was becoming hugely popular.

Popeye leaves the cast at the end of that story, but he's back pretty quickly -- either Segar or someone at his syndicate must have realized they had a great character on their hands. And what's astonishing -- at least to me, in 2008 -- is that Popeye wasn't the caricature that we think of these days. He was a tough guy and a sailor, and not book-smart, but he was canny and knowledgeable, with a great wealth of experience and an individual view of the world. He didn't eat spinach, he didn't fight with a sailor named Bluto (or Brutus), and he didn't talk in catchphrases.

Anyone who thinks Popeye is a dull, essentially limited character should check out this reprint series -- along with anyone who has an interest in classic comic strips. Segar's Thimble Theater was one of the good ones, with long, intricate stories and detailed art.

Recent ComicMix Activity

I'm behind again...

Today: a review of Michael Chabon's nonfiction collection Maps and Legends

Yesterday: a review of the graphic novel Muzz, Vol. 1 by FSc

Friday: the usual Manga Friday column, covering books called Variante, Classical Medley, and The Girl Who Runs Through Time

Coming up this Friday: two kinds of sex for girls!

SFX Top 100: Meming Away the Day

First I saw Larry of OF Blog of the Fallen doing it, and thought "is this a meme?"

Then I saw RobB do it, and I knew it was a meme, since he linked to several others.

So now it's my turn -- below are the Top 100 SF Writers, as voted on by the readers of the British magazine SFX, with comments by Yours Truly.


First of all, a caveat: the SFX list is explicitly of "Favourite" authors, not "best." And there really is no arguing with taste...particularly with bad taste. But, since I want to do this anyway I'm going to pretend that the list is of "Best," and complain or praise on that basis. Remember: I know the difference; I'm just ignoring it as suits me. (And also being sarcastic and/or joking much of the time.)

• 100. James Herbert
  A minor British horror writer who just sneaks onto the list because the voters are all British. I've never read him, but I don't feel it much of a lack. If this were a list of "Best," this would be the first name jettisoned.


• 99. Gwyneth Jones
  A fine writer whose work has never done much for me. She's influential and worthy, but probably only made it onto this list at all because she's British.


• 98. Sara Douglass
  She's a crowd-pleasing epic fantasy writer, in a modern, quite feminine way (lots of talking about the relationship and hurt/comfort), but not what I would call a major important writer at this point.
  


• 97. Charles Stross
  I'd think he would be higher on the list, but he's had a lower profile in the UK than in the US so far. And his novel career is still only about a decade old. Still, I bet this is only the first hint that this list -- and the reading audience in general -- leans more to Fantasy than SF.


• 96. Terry Goodkind
  On the grounds that he's a major bestseller with a very popular series, I'm surprised that he's this low on the list. Does he sell less well in the UK? Or do his readers there think of him as a guilty pleasure?


• 95. Brian W. Aldiss
  Probably should be higher if we're judging pure worthiness, but never wrote that one big novel to crystallize his fame. Aldiss is inevitably the least of the British New Wave triumvirate (with Ballard and Moorcock), but third isn't a bad place to be. The fact that he's on this list at all shows that he's not forgotten, which is the usual fate for older writers.


• 94. Ken MacLeod
  Given the length of his career to date, this is a reasonable placement for MacLeod.


• 93. Olaf Stapledon
  On the one hand, he's easily the third most influential British genre writer ever, after only Tolkien and Wells. On the other, he never was the kind of writer to really be a favorite; there's something chilly and distanced about Stapledon. So hitting the list at all, so long after his death, is probably an achievement.


• 92. Michael Marshall Smith
  I think of him as a minor writer who isn't even writing SF anymore; the great British public (or some subset of it) clearly disagrees with me.


• 91. Jon Courtenay Grimwood
  I've read a couple of his books and found them decent but slightly sloppy thrillers with not always consistent SFnal skins on them. He's clearly an enjoyable writer, which is why he's on a list like this.


• 90. Christopher Priest
  He's an influential and highly respected writer, but I wouldn't have expected many people to list him as a favorite. It's a pleasant surprise to see him on this list.


• 89. Jonathan Carroll
  I do have the feeling that he writes more-or-less the same book every time out, at least for the last decade and a half, but his best works are mesmerizing fantasy novels that merge everyday life and the luminous. I'd have liked to see him higher on this list, but I'd like to see a lot of things that I never will.


• 88. Scott Lynch
  Can someone really be a favorite when he's only published two novels? Sure, they're both really fun novels, but it seems a little soon for readers to be nailing their colors to his mast.


• 87. David Weber
  Would probably rank much higher in a poll taken in the US, but his showing here proves that even the Brits like to see regular explosions in space, complete with earth-shattering kabooms.


• 86. M. John Harrison
  I think of Harrison as being like Priest (#90) only more so, so I'm not entirely sure if I expected him to place higher than Priest did. Priest feels more British to me, and Harrison more New Wave, so I guess I'm surprised Harrison outpolled Priest. But Harrison has had a high-profile book more recently than Priest, which probably explains it. I've only tried to read Harrison a few times, and never got very far.


• 85. Jacqueline Carey
  Her current "Kushiel" trilogy seems to be notably less popular than the first one -- I suspect that sexy fantasy really needs to have a female protagonist to draw in a large appreciative audience -- which may have hurt her standing in this poll. For myself, I've enjoyed large swaths of her writing, but generally found that there were too many swaths in all for my taste, especially when so many of them involved people hitting each other, ostensibly for fun.


• 84. Kim Stanley Robinson
  My cynical brain wonders if his recent "only policy wonks can save us from runaway global warming!" trilogy was better received in the UK than over here (where it seem to have just passed through town quietly; I haven't checked sales). His profile seems to have been slowly dropping since the heyday of the Mars books; maybe it's dropped less -- or come back more -- in the UK.


• 83. Theodore Sturgeon
  In a list of pure merit, this would rank somewhat higher. But, for a guy who's been dead a quarter-century and was never much of a novelist, being 83rd favorite writer is pretty darn good.


• 82. J.V. Jones
  I believe Jones didn't have the same publishing hiatus in the UK as over here, which may be what makes this seem like an odd choice to me. I may also be judging her too harshly, but she's always seemed like just another average decent fantasy writer to me -- which makes me wonder if the upper reaches of this list will be awash in similar types.


• 81. Joe Abercrombie
  Who's written, what?, two-thirds of a trilogy so far? Some people may have really low standards, but I don't think anyone can be your favorite writer if you don't even know how he handles endings yet.


• 80. Joe Haldeman
  A fine SF writer, and I'm happy to see a sizable number of Brits remember him and like his stuff.


• 79. Simon Clark
  See James Herbert (#100) -- Clark is the equivalent for the next generation. I guess there are people who like horror novels as a matter of course; I find such people creepy and cross the street to avoid them.


• 78. George Orwell
  I've written about how powerful and important Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are before, but I suspect this he's mostly an "I really should" choice. Animal Farm is deeply enjoyable, and could easily help Orwell get on this list, but not Nineteen Eighty-Four. When I think of favorite Orwell, it's his reportage and essays that come to mind, not his SFnal works.


• 77. Samuel R. Delany
  This is an awfully good showing for a writer who's published only gay porn and literary criticism for the past decade and a half (and left his last major SF work as half of a duology). I've never really loved any of Delaney's novels, so he wouldn't be on my similar list, but he's utterly respectable.


• 76. Charles de Lint
  Only intermittently to my taste, but a respectable and popular writer -- probably would rank higher on an American version of this list. (And even higher than that in Canada.)


• 75. Julian May
  Her books are quite enjoyable, which is surely why they're here, but it's all one long series (in two discrete parts). That's not quite the same problem as Abercrombie (#81), but it's close.


• 74. Edgar Rice Burroughs
  I know that there are people who read ERB for pleasure, but I find his prose like a piece of gravel in my shoe -- rough, uncomfortable, and forever keeping me from moving forward with any grace.


• 73. Robert Silverberg
  One of the best writers ever to work in SF and the author of many, many great novels and stories. I'd place him higher.


• 72. Susanna Clarke
  Again, she hasn't written enough for me to be comfortable classing her as a favorite -- it's just one novel and a small stack of short fiction so far. What's there is good, but it's not a whole lot, yet.


• 71. Stanislaw Lem
  I've never read anything by Lem I'd really call enjoyable; I'm not sure if that's my fault, his, or his translators'. But he'd be nowhere on my similar list.


• 70. Larry Niven
  Some of Niven's stuff has been really wonderful -- "Inconstant Moon" is one of my favorite stories -- but I've never tried to seriously read lots and lots of his work. He clearly has a devoted fanbase, though.


• 69. Alfred Bester
  One of the greatest writers in the history of the field, but, still, showing up remarkably high on the list for a guy who wrote two novels fifty years ago.


• 68. Katherine Kerr
  As others have said elsewhere in a different context, I always mix her up with Katherine Kurtz. I think Kerr is the Celts in Space writer, and I guess a fair number of people like her stuff.


• 67. Jack Vance
  A great, wonderful, idiosyncratic writer who apparently is remembered more than I was afraid he would be.


• 66. Harry Harrison
  An intermittently interesting writer, most of whose books are aging badly (even the very lightweight ones). I wonder if he placed this highly mostly out of memory.


• 65. Marion Zimmer Bradley
  Not my kind of writer, but indubitably popular.


• 64. Richard Matheson
  Really? All those movies based on his books must be paying off. Good for him!


• 63. Dan Simmons
  The SF Simmons, the horror Simmons, the mainstream Simmons, or the ranting-against-Muslims-on-the-Internet Simmons?


• 62. Elizabeth Haydon
  Another solid but unspectacular fantasy writer, as I see it -- I guess a lot of people like that.


• 61. Terry Brooks
  Like Goodkind, I would have expected to see Brooks higher on this list.


• 60. Richard Morgan
  They do like him over there in the UK, don't they? I still think his first book, Altered Carbon, is much, much better than anything else I've read by him.


• 59. Stephen Baxter
  Very talented, very prolific, and fond of writing a chunk of novels in one style and then moving on -- the latter doesn't seem to be a recipe for popularity, but Baxter has made it work somehow.


• 58. Jennifer Fallon
  Another one of those fantasy writers; I've liked what I've read of hers, but there are an awfully lot of women who write big fat books that I never have enough time for on this list.


• 57. Mercedes Lackey
  Lackey writes shorter books, and was one of my guilty pleasures for at least a decade. She's also got a huge back catalog at this point, so I honestly could have seen her higher on the list.


• 56. C.J. Cherryh
  Another writer who does a lot of different things -- many of them very well, but not always to everyone's tastes. It's goo to see her solidly in the middle of this list.


• 55. Harlan Ellison
  I'm sure he'd be angry at placing this low, if he found out this list existed. (And he'd probably also hate SFX on principle, which is not unreasonable.) But, for a writer who doesn't write novels, hasn't published anything new in nearly a decade, often denied writing SF, and has personally alienated half of the pros in the field, #55 isn't a bad showing.


• 54. Jasper Fforde
  His novels are all very entertaining, but they're beginning to seem like they're all the same thing. He could potentially be Terry Pratchett if he wanted to be.


• 53. Octavia Butler
  Another writer I'm surprised to see chart this high; I've read some of her stuff, but I always felt dutiful (rather than joyful) in doing so.


• 52. J.G. Ballard
  I'd personally rank him much, much higher, but I have quirky tastes. It's great to see him on the list at all, let alone in the middle third.


• 51. Robert E. Howard
  Unlike ERB, Howard was actually a good writer of prose (despite working for the pulps most of the time), and I find his best work endures. Glad to see others agree with me.


• 50. Sherri S. Tepper
  Tepper writes for an audience that has a different set of equipment in their trousers than I do; that's fine, but it means I can save some time by not reading her books.


• 49. H.P. Lovecraft
  Even I'll admit he can be clunky, especially reading him these days. But his SF/horror hybrid hasn't yet been equalled at the things it does best.


• 48. Mervyn Peake
  Another writer that I'm sure the British esteem more highly than Americans would, and another one who only wrote a few books. The first two Gormenghast books are excellent neo-Dickensian fantasy, and the third is not quite as good and quite different.


• 47. Jules Verne
  Do Brits read Verne for pleasure? Or is that what the non-readers voted, because they can remember his name? Nosy Americans want to know.


• 46. Alastair Reynolds
  He's been publishing novels for about a decade, which is long enough to become one of my favorites.


• 45. Neal Stephenson
  He's an odd case of the writer who started as SF, and never denied writing SF, even though most of his output is not what most of us would call SF unless we squint and make excuses and flail our arms out a lot. What I've read by him - not including the doorstop historical trilogy -- has been reliably smooth and entertaining.


• 44. Clive Barker
  He seemed to be poised to take over the whole world in about 1991 -- that didn't happen, and his books got farther apart (and often smaller), but he does still have a lot of readers.


• 43. Jim Butcher
  I like him, and I find this placement about right.


• 42. Tad Williams
  Another writer of big fantasies -- though I am surprised that Brits apparently like him substantially better than Brooks or Goodkind.


• 41. Kurt Vonnegut
  Now, now, Vonnegut never wrote fantasy. He explained that over and over again. Who are we to doubt him? (The non-SF books he did write often tend to the sophomoric -- probably not a concern for the SFX crowd -- but were occasionally gems rather than pebbles.)


• 40. Trudi Canavan
  A writer I've never read, and who seems to be notably more popular in the UK than here. Yet another one of those newish female fantasy writers.


• 39. Michael Moorcock
  The architect of the New Wave and an unabashed writer of pulpy adventure. Has written more pretty darn good novels than the any random two writers put together.


• 38. David Eddings
  I get the impression that his fans only really like the Belgariad and related works, but they really like those.


• 37. Alan Moore
  SFX readers prefer to look at pictures than to read long columns of text -- it's not Voice of the Fire that they're thinking of here. He has written some great stuff, but he's also written some pure filler and some pseudo-spiritual bumf.


• 36. Orson Scott Card
  Some people love thinking of themselves as the tormented super-genius who saves the entire human race. Others have grown up. (I kid OSC; he's done a lot of other things in his career, and I've enjoyed quite a few of them. But it's Ender's Game that's driving this placement.)


• 35. Stephen Donaldson
  Bestseller outcast unclean! I had an intense love-hate relationship with the first six Covenant books, and I still think that Donaldson has caused more people to say "That word: I do not think it means what you think it means" than any other.


• 34. Gene Wolfe
  I'd place him much higher, but a lot of people find his work too hard to follow. So this is a pretty good placement.


• 33. China Mieville
  His career is still quite young, and I wonder how many of these are "he's so dreamy!" votes, but he does have the writing chops (and the storytelling chops, too) to carry it off.


• 32. Raymond E. Feist
  Above Brooks and Goodkind? The Brits' tastes in epic fantasy are subtly different from those of Americans.


• 31. Lois McMaster Bujold
  RASFW would be outraged at this low placement. I haven't kept up with her current fantasy series, but she's been a dependably readable writer for nearly twenty years, which is no mean feat.


• 30. Roger Zelazny
  One of my personal favorites; he'd have been in my top 5. I imprinted early and hard.


• 29. Anne McCaffrey
  Once she would have been in the top 5 of a poll like this, but perhaps her recent works (particularly the co-authored ones) have dimmed her fans' enthusiasm a bit.


• 28. Steven Erikson
  A remarkably high placement for a guy who's written seven dense, small-mammal-crushing fantasy novels that are only comprehensible to readers who have already read a small library of fantasy. I mean, I'm happy for him, but it could be a sign of incipient fantasy decadence.


• 27. William Gibson
  I'm several books behind, but he's both important and a lot of fun to read.


• 26. Guy Gavriel Kay
  Very respectable, both the writer and his showing here.


• 25. CS Lewis
  Seriously? Is this based on Narnia, on the fact that non-readers could remember his name when polled, or is there some huge UK cult around Till We Have Faces?


• 24. Diana Wynne Jones
  I wonder if her high placement means a lot of SFX readers are younger, or if they're remembering their childhoods. (Or if they're just still reading Jones because they love her books.)


• 23. John Wyndham
  ...Beynon Harris Parkes Lucas. (From memory -- goes to check, and finds that, as usual, I put the "Beynon Harris" before the "Parkes Lucas," but at least I remembered all of them.) I don't think I've ever read him, but I like his name.


• 22. Philip Pullman
  I'm only one book into "His Dark Materials," so have no personal opinion. The placement is reasonable, given how successful the trilogy was and the recent movie.


• 21. Robin Hobb
  I've read one trilogy, which I found full of interesting stuff but a bit too long and overstuffed. I'm a bit surprised she shows up this high on the poll, ahead of a bunch of writers I'm pretty sure sell better than she does (even in the UK).


• 20. Stephen King
  I think I've heard of him...


• 19. Ray Bradbury
  Pretty good placement for an author of his stature; a good proportion of the voters for this poll have good taste.


• 18. Arthur C. Clarke
  There was a time when Clarke would have been in the top ten, but that was at least a decade ago.


• 17. Robert Jordan
  Sales don't mean everything, I see.


• 16. J.K. Rowling
  Ditto for sales not meaning everything; fifteen writers who sell substantially fewer copies (except maybe that Tolkien chap, over the long run) outpolled her.


• 15. Robert Heinlein
  Wasn't there some friendly argument, either in comments here or over at RASFW, about how Brits don't read Heinlein anymore? I guess that isn't true.


• 14. Frank Herbert
  Herbert above Heinlein? Ick.


• 13. Peter F. Hamilton
  Are we in the H's suddenly? I would not rank Hamilton here personally, but it's not my poll.


• 12. David Gemmell
  They do like Gemmell over there. I've never read much by him, so I have very little opinion on his work.


• 11. Ursula K. LeGuin
  Makes sense.


• 10. Robert Rankin
  A very high placement for a very British writer; Rankin's never gotten much traction on my side of the Atlantic, but he seems to be very popular in old Blighty.


• 9. HG Wells
  I do suspect many of these votes were out of name recognition or guilt rather than by people who regularly read Wells for fun.


• 8. Philip K. Dick
  And the Dick revival is seen to extend beyond the USA.


• 7. Iain M. Banks
  Of course. I'm slightly surprised he isn't in the top 5.


• 6. Isaac Asimov
  This is a surprise -- above Heinlein and Clarke, Bradbury and Wells? Is he considered that much of a classic over there? (And does that mean, like Wells, he's name-checked but rarely read?)


• 5. George R.R. Martin
  Martin has proved that he can write endings, but he's on this list almost entirely for a series that has not yet ended, and so I consider this placement somewhat premature. He's damn good, though.


• 4. Douglas Adams
  His stuff -- particularly the later books -- is looking clunkier and more dated as time goes on, but the core of his work will live for quite a while.


• 3. Neil Gaiman
  This is an impressive placement -- I wonder if it's primarily for Sandman or American Gods?


• 2. J.R.R. Tolkien
  Typically, Tolkien only comes in #2 in polls like this if Jane Austen is in contention. But now he's been lapped by someone in his own field. Someone check his grave for signs of spinning...


• 1. Terry Pratchett
  There's probably some element of sadness at his recent medical diagnosis, but he's also a really good, and really consistent writer with a vast audience. So his coming in at #1 is no surprise.

My god, that took vastly longer than I'd expected. I've been pecking away at this for two days...

Edit: Spelling of "Delany" corrected -- thanks to Neil Gaiman (Mr. #3) for the nudge. (Several other spellings -- notably "Jon Courtenay Grimwood," and periods in several authors' names, were silently corrected earlier or at the same time.) And for those of you who followed a nearly blind link from Neil's blog, welcome. Hope this entertains you for at least a moment or two, and please do stick around if you feel like it. The point of this blog is explained, more-or-less, here.

How Sad Is It That I Knew Instantly The Name of the Book?

Project manager, discussing book: "It was so tragic! It's not just that they were clones and had their organs harvested, but they never got to really love each other!"
via Overheard in the Office, Jun 13, 2008

(And that's Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, sadly)

Pathetic, That's What It Is. Pathetic.

I haven't done a quiz in a while, so I picked up this one from Ben Jeapes:

Your result for The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test...

Eeyore

"Do you know what A means, little Piglet?"

"No, Eeyore, I don't."

"It means Learning, it means Education, it means all the things that you and Pooh haven't got. That's what A means."

"Oh," said Piglet again. "I mean, does it?" he explained quickly.

"I'm telling you. People come and go in this Forest, and they say, 'It's only Eeyore, so it doesn't count.' They walk to and fro saying 'Ha ha!' But do they know anything about A? They don't. It's just three sticks to them. But to the Educated--mark this, little Piglet--to the Educated, not meaning Poohs and Piglets, it's a great and glorious A.

You scored as Eeyore!

ABOUT EEYORE: Eeyore lives in his own thistley corner of the forest and wonders why people don't come to visit him more often. He is master of the Guilt Trip, and is always gently forgiving his visitors for neglecting him. Eeyore considers himself to be smarter than the other inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood, and is often exasperated by their habit of having adventures and general merriment.

WHAT THIS SAYS ABOUT YOU: You are an anxious person, and you tend to expect the worst. Your friends find you somewhat cynical at times, because you have found that it is best to expect disappointment. You often feel unappreciated by the people you work with, but you rarely actually try and do anything to change that fact.

Your close friends admire you more than you think they do. They wish that you would learn to stop worrying so much and actually start trying to fix what is bothering you. If something is making you unhappy... change it!

Take The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test at HelloQuizzy

Reviewing the Mail, Week of 6/21: Comics

And this is the second half of the post listing the books I received for review last week, including comics and manga and other similar things. I saw large packages from both CMX Manga (part of DC) and from a manga publisher (one new to me) called Aurora, so I'll start with the latter, end with the former, and add the miscellaneous stuff in the middle.

Nephilim by Anna Hanamaki is the first book from my Aurora package: the main character Abel is from the Nephilim tribe, who all change from male to female at sundown every day (and, apparently, are required to kill people who see them at night, as women). Looks like this will turn into a romance between Abel and Guy (described on the back cover as "playboy/Imperial soldier"), with a fair bit of hurt/comfort and some mild domination. It was published this year.

Also from Aurora is Walkin' Butterfly, the first volume in a story about Michiko, an amazingly tall girl who has suffered for that...until she accidentally becomes a model. The chapter-opening art is a full-page view of Michiko, nude and scowling, which is a bit unusual. It's by Chihiro Tamaki, and was published last year.

Kaoru Ohashi's Nightmares For Sale is the third Aurora title, a series of horror stories about a pawnshop run by a mysterious man named Shadow. As usual with "mysterious shop" stories, I imagine that the people pawning their good get a lot more than they expect. Aurora published the first volume of Nightmares for Sale in 2007.

And also from Aurora is Flock Of Angels by Shoko Hamada, about a boy-band that wear wings onstage and people who got a disease called Angelosis, which made them grow real wings. Oh, and "being bitten by a radioactive spider" is vastly more plausible? (Comics have the weirdest set-ups imaginable; I don't know why, but it's true worldwide.)

Aurora also has imprints devoted to other manga subgenres, and they sent me a few books from Luv Luv, which focuses on romance stories for adult women -- rated "M" for mature. (Does that make these josei, or something more specialized? I need to get up to speed on my manga genres.)

First of the Luv Luv books is Hana Aoi's Love For Dessert, from which we see that having a man sticking his tongue out on a cover only very rarely works. Love for Dessert has six short stories of romance, which all seem to end in very tasteful sex scenes. (Luv Luv looks to me like the comics equivalent of sexy romance novels -- it's all about the woman: what she wants, what she thinks about things, what she fantasizes about.)

Also from Luv Luv is Real Love by Mitsuki Oda, which has the long title story and two shorter pieces. Again, just from poking through it, I see a whole lot of talking about the relationship, ending with sex. (The other way I can tell these books are by and for women? The good sex, at the end of the story, typically starts with just-off-panel cunnilingus.)

Last from Luv Luv is Kanae Hazuki's Voices Of Love, which is much the same: five stories of romance and sex, from women's points of view. (I wonder if this subgenre -- which I see from ads inside the books, once I got rid of the shrinkwrap, is called "Ladies' Comics" or Redikomi -- is always in short-story form? They seem to be all about the Happily Ever After ending, just like mainstream prose romances over here, and that would tend to keep the stories from getting too long...but they could still be as long as a tankubon or four without much trouble.) All three of the Luv Luv books were originally published this year.

Moving outside of my comfort zone, Aurora also publishes yaoi comics under the Deux imprint, and they sent me two titles from that line: Kiss All the Boys by Shiuko Kano and Yakuza In Love by Shiuko Kano. I'm not entirely sure if I'm ready for boy-boy sex in my comics, no matter how tastefully depicted (or how much some of the characters look like women to begin with), but how could I not read something called Yakuza in Love? (I ask you.) So look for my Manga Friday column this week to cover some explicit Japanese sex, and see how squicked out I get...

Moving away from adults-only comics for a while, First Second sent me Prince of Persia: The Graphic Novel, by Jordan Mechner, A.B. Sina, LeUyen Pham, and Alex Puvilland. It's related to the long-running game series and to the movie (based on the games to some degree) coming next summer, but seems to be a mostly original story told in that setting. The graphic novel version of the story will be available September 2nd.

SLG Publishing, the company once known as Slave Labor Graphics, published Muzz, Volume One by the interestingly-named FSc in May, but I only just saw it. Look for a review of it (by me) at ComicMix sometime later today -- or maybe tomorrow, if there's a lot of other stuff in the pipeline.

And now I turn to the CMX package, which, like the one that came last week, had no cover letter or other identifying information. (Hey -- getting the books at all is a big step, so don't think I'm complaining. Don't get the idea that I'm knocking the American system.) CMX sent me a book with my new favorite title, I Hate You More Than Anyone! (I'm particularly interested in the precise meaning -- does the speaker hate the object more than anyone else does, or does she hate him (I'm making assumptions about gender here that may not be warranted) more than she hates anyone else?) It's by Banri Hidaki, and the fifth volume (the one I have) is coming July 16th.

CMX also published Kiichi and the Magic Books,which looks like another entry in the now very popular "magic school" genre. The second volume is what I have on hand, and that's coming July 23rd. It's by Taka Amano.

Another second volume is Dorothea, coming July 16th for Mature readers. It's by the one-named "Cuvie," and features a medievaloid (or possibly actually medieval) warrior-woman, who -- as unlikely this may sound -- actually wears armor pieces that cover her torso. (Her legs look pretty naked, but we'll let that pass for now.) This is coming 7/16.

And last for this week is CMX's Tears of a Lamb. It will be published on July 16 as well and it's by Banri Hidaka. After staring at these manga covers all day, I'm now having trouble telling the boys from the girls. Dr. Andy self-diagnoses a case of manga overload, and that means it's it for me this week.