Here is the first royalty statement for Twilight Fall, on which I’ve only blanked out Penguin Group’s address. Everything else is exactly as I’ve listed it. To give you a condensed version of what all those figures mean, for the sale period of July through November 30, 2008. my publisher reports sales of 64,925 books, for which my royalties were $40,484.00. I didn’t get credit for all those sales, as 21,140 book credits were held back as a reserve against possible future returns, for which they subtracted $13,512.69 (these are not lost sales; I’m simply not given credit for them until the publisher decides to release them, which takes anywhere from one to three years.)

My net earnings on this statement was $27,721.31, which was deducted from my advance. My actual earnings from this statement was $0.

Damn. That’s not a whole lot of cash for a bestselling novel. Kind of puts that dream of living as a full-time writer a little more out of reach… Oh well, we can always pin our hopes of selling lucrative foreign rights

EDIT: With apologies, the post above belongs to author Lynn Viehl. I followed a link to it and relied on the linker’s description, instead of perusing the site more thoroughly to double check who wrote that post.

As Andy LeBlanc theorized, that post came from a deep place of personal hurt. As Managing Editor of Every Day Fiction, I’m exposed to an unending stream of terrible, terrible fiction in the form of a deep slush pile. The “rules” that I mentioned in my previous article were, like any rule, meant to apply to beginning authors only. Masters* are free to break them (at their own peril).

For your convenience, here are a few rules about first person POV for you to break:

1) Your narrator cannot die in the end. Otherwise, who is he telling the story to?
2) There should be no scene breaks in first person POV. What do these mean exactly? Your narrator is taking a cigarette break?
3) No meta-narrative. Imagine you`re standing around a barbecue. Your friend is telling a story. How in heck does he relate the meta-narrative?

Anyone want to fire off a few more?

*Special note to Creative Writing Majors. This is not you. Masters have been published in one of the pros.

Andrew LeBlanc just passed along this link which contains a transcript of the story meeting held between George Lucas, Steven Speilberg, and Lawrence Kasdan (the writer). It’s a wonderful glimpse into how one of history’s most popular film characters was created, and what thought processes were employed in his creation by some of cinema’s most creative talent.

Mystery Man gets it right when he says that one of the most important insights here is that they started not by plotting out Raiders of the Lost Ark, but by developing Indiana’s character.

I’ll be posting my Clarion West Application Essay, so you guys can see what got me in (of course, the fact that the story I submitted with my entry placed 1st in Writers of the Future couldn’t have hurt    ).

The Red Baron is something that is better explained through example.

Say you are writing a WWI story. Your protagonist is fighting the Germans, but the Germans are a faceless bunch and therefore not particularly exciting. To add tension, you invent a Red Baron-type character. You take ONE German, humanize him, give him a history, give him panache… and then make him really skilled and awful (no idea if the original Red Baron was evil, this is just an example). To your readers, the Red Baron becomes a stand-in for “the Germans”, and if the Red Baron is evil, all Germans become evil. By contrast, your protagonist becomes “good”, which helps to generate sympathy.

The Red Baron makes your story go from a hero fighting a nameless, faceless enemy, to a pitched battle between well-developed, gripping characters.

Now, there’s probably a literary term for what I’m describing. If there is, please leave the name in the comments. Otherwise, it shall be forever known as “The Red Baron”!

EDIT: Okay, forever is pretty damn short. Andrew LeBlanc shortened it to A Red Baron in this article, which is well worth reading. Now what are the rest of you waiting for? Let’s popularize this thing!

The whole article is illuminating, funny, and depressing. A weird combination, but it’s worth the read.

As long as I’m talking about Baen’s Universe, I have to mention my experience in their “slush pile”.

They have two slush piles. They accept stories that are submitted to them like many other magazines–through a web form. This is method number 1. Method number 2 consists of a private forum where you post your work and ask for comments. Great stories get comments, and may draw the attention of Gary Cuba, Edith Maor, or Sam Hidaka, who are the assistant editors. One of the best things about the bar is that if a story doesn’t cut the mustard, you can rewrite and resubmit it. My current submission is in its fourth (and hopefully final) revision. The fact is that it simply wasn’t ready for primetime when I first submitted it, and now it’s much, much better. Who knows? It might even make it into the magazine. A man can dream, can’t he?

Baen’s reserves two to four “Introducing” slots an issue to beginning authors. This means you can actually get into the magazine through the slush since you aren’t competing with big names for these spots. The requirements are the same for WotF, and since that publication is my only major credit (Sails & Sorcery paid pro-rates, but I doubt the print run was 5K), I’m good.

My experience at the bar has been extremely positive. I feel like I’ve really learned some lessons about craft from the guys (and gals) there. I’d recommend the experience to anyone.

The story itself is very well written with compelling characters, but didn’t really do that much for me because the plot is linear (by design), and the protagonists passive. It’s merely an execution story on a grand scale, which we get TONS of in the slush at EDF.

The Big Rip, the driving force of Baxter’s tale, has now been proven false, in the same year Baxter wrote his story. How’s that for bad luck?

Universe Today reports:

Previously, it wasn’t known for sure if dark energy was a constant across space, with a strength that never changes with distance or time, or if it is a function of space itself and as space expands dark energy would expand and get stronger. In other words, it wasn’t known if Einstein’s theory of general relativity and his cosmological constant was correct or if the theory would have to be modified for large scales.

But the Chandra study strengthens the evidence that dark energy is the cosmological constant, and is not growing in strength with time, which would cause the Universe to eventually rip itself apart.

That’s why I’m leery about writing near-term science fiction. Sometimes the science just works against you.

I recently ran across this thread at SFReader.com. In it, Edward Knight literarlly begs for speculative fiction readers to buy his new anthology Unparalleled Journeys II. By doing so, he had just guaranteed that I, for one, won’t be reading.

There is a definite stigma in our industry against publishers who solicit authors to buy their own work or the work of authors they know personally. This marketing ploy has be employed (effectively, unfortunately) by vanity publisher PublishAmerica, who, as you can see from the link I’ve provided, has acquired a reputation as a scam publisher.

Why does this stigma exist? Well, it boils down to what kind of services publishers provide. In these days of easy Print On Demand publishing, where authors can literally have their books in their hands without any outside help within a week, a publishing house has to add value in order to remain pertinent. In theory, that value comes in the form of selling your books. By going through a publishing house, an author should be able to sell more books than if they had self-published (or else what’s the point?).

Now, an author can easily sell to their friends, and doesn’t have much difficult selling in the tight knit speculative fiction community. So where does that leave the publisher? Well, responsible publishers try to sell to the general public, either on much trafficked websites or in bookstores, and some do so very successfully. Those who don’t berate potential authors for not promoting or buying books they have no interest in.

It’s a bad sign that Journey Books Publishing feels that they have to beg for readers. I wish Edward Knight all the luck in the world, but I, for one, will not be reading.

Music to write by: “Just Because” by Jane’s Addiction

First novels advances are notoriously low these days, yet new authors still have dreams of being able to quit their day jobs. Story of six figure advances abound, but how much, really, are new authors making? Tobias Buckell has compiled a list of first novel advances and nicely categorized them into sections (such as agented and unagented) and genre. He’s been doing this for a couple of years and amassed a pretty accurate picture of the kinds of advances being doled out. He’s currently soliciting more stats, so if you’ve recently recieved your first advance, drop by his blog and let him know.

According to Tobias, the average first novel advances break down thusly:

Career Advances are a little better:

*Extrapolated

Brenda Hiatt has done virtually the same thing for romance novels, but she’s broken it down by publisher. She’s got a clever trick which prevents me from deep-linking to the list, but it’s highlighted on the left side of her blog under the title Show Me the Money.

Looks like Pocket and HarperCollins are tops in Romance at 15,000 and 13,500 respectively with advances ranging all the way down to zero (Wings E-Press).

What does this mean for us? Don’t quit your day job. Of course, you could always hope you get lucky. Stephen King’s “Carrie” sold for 200,000 back in the 70s. Who knows? That could be you!

Music to Write By: “Superman’s Dead” by Our Lady Peace.

Still in moving mode, so this will be another brief one.

Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” has just won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I talked about this novel in a previous post. Basically, I said the book was really good, but I objected to McCarthy abusing the English language and grammar in general to appear more literary.

So the most prestigious award in the world (barring, perhaps the Man Booker Prize) has honoured McCarthy. Having read a few Pulitzer Award winning novels like House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday and The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, I can tell you that often books are picked, not for merit, but because they add something to the tapestry of English Literature. If you follow the link, you’ll see that House Made of Dawn was honoured because it was written by a Native American author about the plight of Native Americans. The book is experiemental, switching from 1st to 3rd to 2nd person POV. Is it well written? Well, it’s competent, but not on the order of “Regeneration” by Pat Barker or The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, both Booker Prize winners.

Is this the case with The Road? Was it honoured for successful experimentation rather than a beautiful story? I don’t think so. McCarthy has mastered the sympathetic character in his protagonist “the man” (never named). The book is stunning in the depth of emotion you feel for its characters. The guy is a talented author.

Still, the Pulitzer commitee doesn’t honour authors simply for writing a great story. They obviously thought McCarthy’s book added something to English Literature and I agree. Though I despise the grammatical trickery McCarthy chose to use, he got the literary community to notice a sci-fi novel. The book has done a lot for the genre. He should be congratulated.