Last night I watched the last episode of series three of Medium.   Like any good series, they finished the story but they left a whole lot of plot lines unresolved. I wanted to know what would happen and was interested enough to go to the official NBC Medium site to see what plans they had.  The bulk of the site is based around videos.  All I wanted was a quick ’yes, there is more information’ or ‘no, there’s not’.  But the bulk of the site is videos and the written information is pretty extraneous.  I didn’t want to sit around all day watching videos in the hope that I might learn what I needed to know.

Then, this afternoon I read a thought-provoking article by Jim Huang, co-owner The Mystery Company bookstore, reflecting on 20 years in bookselling and how he views the publishing industry today.  Jim was talking about mysteries, but everything he says could equally apply to science fiction and fantasy—with the one exception that at least SFF does number their series books, or at least until the series gets so big that the numbers are embarrasing.

I think Jim’s article is spot on, if a little depressing.  I wrote recently about the future of books, and whether or not they will exist in the future and if so, in what form.  I think we are on the cusp of some form of change, although I have no idea what, yet.

Some of that change has to be in the direction the NBC Medium site has gone.  Less written word altogether, more videos and other media. You can see it on blogs, for example, which used to be written words.  Then pictures appeared.  Now a lot more video and audio is popping up.

I’d like to think that some of that change will be books, still printed (or ebooks), print on demand.

Change is inevitable.  Change is often good.  Let’s hope some of that change in the bookselling industry translates to a better distribution of mid-list books, and more money for mid-list authors, so they can make a real living out of it.  Because although I love a good movie, nothing beats sitting down with a good book.

Latest excerpt posted.  Cannot believe the book is moving so slowly.  Life and work deadlines keep getting in the way.  Like many would-be writers, I so want to live that dream of being able to work full-time on your novel. However, there are mortgages to meet, bills to pay.

I have set a new goal.  Complete the initial write of draft three by the end of this year.  Let’s see if we can do it.

Memory colours your perception of what you read, so that what you remember is often better than that the original.  Over time you forget all the bad bits and all you remember are the good bits.

This often happens with books you read at defining moments in your life.

As a teenager I devoured all the science fiction I could.  Science fiction was big back then, fantasy considerably less so.  One of the stories embedded indelibly in my memory is Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky, the story of a generational starship on which there was a mutiny some time in the past.  Most of the current inhabitants have no idea of the original mission, no idea that their world is a starship and no idea that they have already arrived (almost) at their destination.

It was a brilliant idea back then and it still is now, and I remembered it as such.

I re-read the book last year and hated it.

It was so … ordinary is the only word I can think of, and the way Heinlein wrote about women they may as well have been pieces of furniture (except, of course, that you couldn’t have the Adam and Eve thing going without the girl).

Yet that doesn’t detract from the fact that it was a brilliant idea at the time.  Just because Heinlein’s books (or that one, anyway) don’t stand the test of time does not mean that he is not one of the early masters of science fiction, and had a big hand in shaping it.

Another writer recognised as one of the masters of science fiction and fantasy is Fritz Leiber. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser come highly recommended.  I recently picked up the First Book of Lankhmar, an omnibus of their adventures and I’m really struggling to read it.  I doubt I will finish it.  Yet for many people this is one of the great fantasy series.

I think of it as the ‘Beatles effect’. To most people who were teenagers in the 1960s the Beatles were a super group.  They were around at a time of major change, and impacted a whole generation.  Yet to others who did not come of age through that era, it’s, “The Beatles.  Right.  They had some good songs, yeah, but so what.”  That doesn’t denigrate what the Beatles did, or how they changed music, but that is not relevant to the listeners of today. 

In today’s music world the Beatles might well find it difficult to sell music today. 

Leiber and Heinlein would almost certainly not be published.

Victoria Strauss, talking about a recent fake submission hoax of Jane Austen writings says:

Popular tastes and interests shift, often very quickly, as does literary style. Yes, people still eagerly read Jane Austen–her books outsell many popular present-day authors–but they do so in context, as classic literature. It’s hardly a wonder that a 19th century novel, written in 19th century prose, couldn’t find a home when presented as a new novel by a previously-unpublished modern writer.
Whoops — they did it again, Victoria Strauss on Writer Beware.

Earlier this year Howard V. Hendrix, the then vice president of SFWA, created quite a storm when he wrote that he was

… opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free. 
Howard Hendrix, posted on Will Shetterley’s Live Journal, 12 April 2007

Now I’m not going to talk about whether I agree with him or not.  GalleyCat, over at mediabistro.com covered it pretty well for me.  What I do want to talk about is where we find new authors, because I find a lot of mine on the web, at those very same sites of those people Hendrix calls webscabs.

When I was younger I discovered new authors through the pulp magazines—Asimov, Astounding, The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. I discovered Connie Willis through FireWatch, A Letter From the Clearys and The Last of the Winnebagos.  I discovered Vernor Vinge through a novelisation of Marooned in Real Time in Analog. I could go on and on.

If I found a good writer in the magazines I would buy their novels without even worrying about whether the book was any good or not.  I was seldom disappointed.

Some of the magazines have disappeared, some have stayed (even if not in the same format), and new magazines—particularly the ezines—seem to come and go.  Even so, I don’t read them any more. 

I used to buy books on spec, too.  I would go into the specialty science fiction/fantasy bookstores and just browse.  I’d pick up anything that took my fancy, or that the bookseller recommended.  Those old stores have gone now, forced out of business or online by the high cost of shopfront premises. 

I go into the big chains like Borders—the only local bookstores left now—and there is nothing I want to read.

So where do I find new authors now?

The truth is, I don’t find as many as I used to.  Of the new books I do find half come from personal recommendations of friends, or from a scoop-through at the library.  (I’m sure you’ve done it.  Go to the shelves and pick five books at random, or five whose covers you like, or five authors whose names begin with ‘C’.  Take them home and you may get one book you like.)

The rest of them come from the web.  I find an author whose blog I like, or someone who has posted a sample chapter or three on line.  It draws me in, and I’ll go search out the book.

I think this is probably the way of the future.

Over at the Rejecter’s blog she makes some interesting observations about the future of books.

She says Print on Demand (POD) is the way of the future.  She believes that

• Bookstores will still exist, but rather than warehousing immense numbers of books, the customer will buy the book and it will be printed in under an hour while the customer waits
• Audio books will become more popular still
• Ebooks don’t really work (and implies that they’ve had their day, although she doesn’t explicitly state this).

I sort of agree with the first point, definitely agree with the second, and totally disagree with the last.

It made me think about the future, though, and it’s interesting to ponder the way things are going.

My first question is … is there a place for bookstores as we know them in the future?  Many of the specialty bookshops have closed their doors already, and the proprietors work from home or warehouses.  Slow Glass Books, the last of the speciality SFF bookshops I purchased books from by physically going into the store, closed its doors back in 2002, but I can still order books through mail order.

I also buy a lot of books from Amazon nowadays—not because I love Amazon (and the postage is a killer when you buy only one or two books) but because often it’s the only place I can buy specific books.

Print on demand in the format the Rejecter talks about would work well for these people.  I imagine the cost of a decent printing press would be huge, but say Slow Glass Books gets an order over the internet (they use snail mail now) in the morning.  They could forward this order on to a publisher in their area who prints the book for them and has it back to them in time to catch the post that night.  Customer gets the book next day.  Everyone’s happy.  Customer gets an overnight delivery and the bookseller doesn’t store any more books than is ordered.

I could also see a big market here for personalising books this way.

What happens to the big bookstores though?  I don’t see them going away, or not really.  I think there will be less of them, and they will not hold as much stock.  If they sell one book they might re-order the same (or might not), through POD to replace the one they sold.

Ebooks though … I think that as soon as you get a decent reader (and there are some good ones coming) ebooks will arrive with a vengance.  There’s a whole generation now who are used to reading off the screen, and we’re a whole generation on more familiar with computers.  I don’t think a non-paper format will bother as many people as it might have 10 or 15 years ago.  Not only that, it’s instant.  Instead of having to wait for a book to be printed, you can download it immediately.

No matter what happens, I think there is one positive thing about the future of publishing.  It has to be better for mid-list authors than it is now, because so many of the high overheads that make midlist books so unprofitable will disappear.

Unfortunately, with that comes another burden.  Marketing books.  Authors can no longer rely on the publisher to do all their PR for them.  It takes a different type of person to be new media savvy, and that might mean the difference between selling and not selling.   Those of us who can network on the world wide web might have a better chance of doing something to sell our own stories.