HarperVoyager has invited submissions of 80,000–120,000 words (preferred) using an online portal, 1–14 October only. Details are on the website. The limited move follows a popular shift among legacy publishers to consider manuscripts sent in by email — there’s a list here. The program is for digital rights only and does consider reprints, as long as the author has the rights, naturally. It seems to be part of the push into the digital realm flagged by Publishers Weekly in July, involving HarperCollins’ ramping up output from its digital-only imprint, Impulse.
Romance icon Harlequin is also seeking digital content for its Escapes line, across all subsets of romance, and will consider self-published titles.
Hot on the heels of Penguin’s new open door program, British press Angry Robot is again appealing to unagented authors — they signed three debut novelists from last year’s program — but this time are being quite specific about what they want: classic fantasy and YA SF and fantasy. The submission period is April 16-30 using a website uploader. Details are here.
Tansy Rayner Roberts is sharing the love — a combined book launch with Margo Lanagan for those lucky enough to have easy access to Hobart (Lanagan has riffed her Sea Hearts novella from X6 into a novel, how tasty!) — and a reprint that shows even a story written for a specific universe can have legs outside it (and indeed, TRR’s yarn breaks more boundaries than that little piffle).
Alan Baxter has shared his love, too: the forthcoming ‘paranoirmal’ anthology Damnation and Dames from Ticonderoga with its whoop arse cover and two collaborations in its TOC. I look at the bare scraping of confused and contradictory notes on my hard drive and lament; there are two more upcoming titles I doubt I’ll be able to submit to, but they’re worth a look: issue 7 of Midnight Echo, closing this month, and another paranormal anthology, Bloodstones, open February–May.
And here’s pause for thought in the aftermath of Australia Day, in which Lit-icism considers the call for renewed focus on Australian literature. The part that especially struck a chord with me was this, from Italian academic Tim Parkes:
Parkes laments what is essentially a globalisation of literature in which novels provide no authentic sense of place at all, but are instead tailored to a global market by dealing with ‘universal’ – read: more widely marketable and international prizewinning – themes.
This is partly why I took up the pen with a view to being published — to see my country, my culture, reflected in the types of stories that I like to read. It’s heartening to see authors such as Trent Jamieson able to set their fiction in Brisbane — Brisbane! — and still find not only a wider audience, but an overseas publisher willing to run with it. It’s pleasing to see someone send some Aussie sensibility across the water, rather than regurgitating a trope-laden backdrop of New York or London.
It’s not just eucalyptus trees (hey, they have plenty in California, anyway) — it’s viewpoint. It’s attitude. It’s how we see the world. Sharing these things is how we help us all to understand each other — not just the different priorities or approaches we might take, but also the similarities: parents what a better world for their children, for instance. Language plays an incredibly powerful part in informing culture, and where else to find its evolution than in literature?
Parkes is talking about more than setting: he’s talking about themes and those, he suggests, can be culturally specific and deserve attention. Sure, though I’m not convinced that domestic themes don’t have wider resonance.
Australia doesn’t have the history of European countries in dealing with certain social ills, for instance — no civil war, no religious schisms — but the social history of those events can still impact on us; we can see movements here, we can relate to the humanity of the issue, we can learn a lesson.
And I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss universal themes. Harking back to Australia Day, is the Australian experience of colonialism, from invader or invaded viewpoint, any different to that of Canada or South Africa? How? What does it do to us? Perhaps a culture’s, or a subculture’s, response to those universal themes is equally important as those purely domestic discussions (assuming they exist).
Alan Baxter shows a pretty cool head on the issue of the .99c prince for e-books, and his post also touches on another issue that’s been banging around since a writers’ group discussion a month ago: what’s my price?
This comment from Alan really hit a nerve with me:
I love getting contributor’s copies of books I have stories in, because I’m a vain fucker and like to point to the brag shelf and say to people, “Yes, I have work in all those anthologies. And those are my novels. Ahaha.” Shut up, I need validation.
Validation. Yes indeed. Because I too like my trophy book, however vain that may sound. Because when the doubt sets in, as it frequently does, it’s comforting to look at a shelf of published works and say, well, those editors all thought my work was okay. So, maybe I should turn the TV off and press on with this yarn.
The thing is, who are those editors? What kind of benchmark are they setting? Is that anthology something I’m proud to have on my CV, or is it just a another centimetre of paper adding weight to the shelf?
It all comes down to what the writer wants. And how much they value their work.
I’m inclined to agree with Cat Sparks, who wrote earlier this year in WQ magazine that, for someone who wants to show they’re serious about their writing, one byline in one well-respected title is worth more than 20 in no-name nil-visibility publications.
Your CV — your bibliography — is an indicator of the kind of writer you are: quirky, top-shelf, developing, esoteric …
There’s a market for any story, I suspect. There seems to be no shortage of cowboys roaming the internet range, offering to publish your finely crafted yarn in return for ‘exposure’. Not even a contributor’s copy, but they might offer you a discount to buy your own. These outfits strike me as being particularly predatory, using their contributors not only as material but as a primary market as well.
Of course, there isn’t a lot of money in publishing at the bottom end of the scale. There’s probably an argument at the moment that there’s not a lot of money at any end of the scale, except for those few exceptional sellers who help finance the rest.
One pay scale that, anecdotally, seems to be increasingly common is the royalty share. It’s nice of the publisher to count you in in the profits, even nicer if that’s in addition to an up-front payment and/or a contributor’s copy, but I wouldn’t be holding my breath waiting for the cash to roll in. Take a look at the formula being used to calculate the royalty, the lifespan of the contract, the likely sales of the antho … It is at least a gesture and it does encourage the contributors to help market the antho.
And then there markets that offer no payment, but contributor copies. I don’t mind this tier at all. It’s honest and it’s contractually clean, and it shows respect for the contributors. It’s your story; of course you want to see what we’ve done with it. Here, show your friends …
And hey, if you can get someone to actually pay you money for your work, a token payment or otherwise, all the better. That’s a serious benchmark. That’s a sign of commitment and professionalism (you hope).
Some anthologies just sound so cool, you want to be in them. Some magazines have serious cache. Some themes stretch your boundaries, challenge your abilities. Some are published for good causes. Some have ace editors. All good reasons to submit, regardless of the pay packet.
It’s fairly common to hear a writer squee, not so much about being in an antho, but about who else is in it. Yeah, there’s a buzz, rubbing shoulders with your role models.
I suspect, too, that your requirements from a market might be more generous if you’re prolific and able to pepper the groovy anthos at all levels of the food chain.
If you’re like me, and squeezing out a short story is akin to pulling a length of barbed wire in one ear and out the other, then you probably want to make those sales count.
Me, I like the pretty, even more than I care about the money, in some ways. Money is good, but money goes away. That book, it lingers. I like a book that looks good, that has an editor who tries to get the best out of my story and a publisher who thinks enough of my work to, at the very least, give me my trophy for effort: my contributor’s copy. In the flesh. On the shelf.
And then, the art
You might notice that the word ‘art’ is contained within ‘artifact’. In the case of books, that’s not the spurious segue it might at first appear to be. Part of my love of physical books is the art: the cover, most obviously, but the stock, the font, the layout, the feel, the comfort … It’s the same reason I still by CDs as my first option.
Lee Battersby has been exploring not so much the physical art of the artifact, but the actual art of the story. I liked his take on it, as illustrated by a carrot — yes indeed! — very much, and added my two bobs’ worth at his invitation.
