I wrote a posting called “Lame Responses to Rejected Stories” a couple of days ago that has caused way more angst than I expected from a 102 word posting. The problem arose from my choice of articles to which to link.

First, a little framing.

Nick Mamatas used to be the slush editor at Clarkesworld Magazine, one of the highest paying, and in my opinion, most literary of the pro magazines. It’s been one of my top markets to submit to for quite some time, and guided much of my professional development as a writer. Nick used to give personal and detailed feedback to every single submission, which was one of the main reasons I subbed to it.

Upon receiving one particularly positive rejection, I started a thread on SFReader “bragging” about it, since I felt like I was getting close to cracking the market. The thread quickly evolved from “congrats on the positive feedback” to “your feedback was much more positive than mine” to “Mamatas is a jerk”.

Several writers shared particularly caustic remarks that Nick had made about their stories and writing in general, and then in response to a posting where I said that I thought Jeff Vandermeer’s “Third Bear” was an excellent tale, Chris wrote this:

it seems like you’re saying that since he was a World Fantasy Award winner he wrote a great tale and it was accepted by Clarkesworld. I have a different take on it–I think that because he is a World Fantasy Award winner, that got his mediocre tale into Clarkesworld. I seriously doubt if a no-name submitted this story it would have been accepted

Nick Mamatas had been following the thread, or it might have come to him through a Google Alert or whatever, but he commented on his blog:

I enjoyed this thread about me, especially the thirteenth item, which complains about my acquisition practices by complaining about two stories I did not acquire — Sean Wallace acquires for the “prominent author” slot. Also hot, a later item in which it is declared that the story in question was only acquired because the author and I are friends. Finally, we get to the bit where someone says, inevitably, “I seriously doubt if a no-name submitted this story it would have been accepted…”

That’s probably where it should have ended. Mamatas is a guy who you tangle with at your own peril. Witness his dismantling of Luke Jackson, the guy who posted the rejection letter he received from Helix that sparked the whole William Sanders controversy, AND his dismantling of Sanders in the same controversy. Yeah, that’s right, he took apart two of the major players in the same controversy. I could post several more links where he has exposed hypocrisy or hidden biases quite definitively, but let’s just say he’s the Zorro of verbal sparring and leave it at that.

Chris ended up taking on Mamatas, and the results weren’t very flattering for anyone, as you can see from the link.

When I wrote my posting and wanted to link to an example of Mamatas’ zeal for verbal sparring and lack of filtering, I recalled that thread and found the link. I most certainly did NOT link to it to hurt Chris in any way, who is a writer I’ve known from SFReader for years. Once again, I linked to it to illustrate “Going Mamatas on someone”, and not to state that Chris’ response to a rejection was lame.

HOWEVER, as a result of my linking to that article, someone added an anonymous comment to that thread attacking Nick, who, as you might have guessed, is a dude I greatly admire. Anonymous comments are just cowardly. It’s worse than gossiping behind someone’s back, because it’s very public. Seriously, if you have something to say to someone, either have some balls and sign your name to it, or keep your mouth shut. End of story.

After all, Chris might have posted anonymously, but in the text of his comments, he identified himself. Chris is a writer who has balls. And you have to respect that.

Tags: Christopher Heath, Nick Mamatas, Rants

This… this defies imagination. There are six pages of people laughing at this poor guy. At least he’s a good sport about it!

Tags: Awesomeness

In my “money always flows towards the writer” post, I said that if your odds of winning a contest was 1% you had a good chance of winning over 100 tries. A few people took issue with that in the comments so I thought I’d explain the logic here with a fun example:

Your neighbour has two kids. One of them shows up at your door and it’s a girl. What are the odds that the other one is a boy? 50/50 right? R-O-N-G, wrong. It’s 66%. Wanna see why?

These are the possible combination of the sexes of your neighbours kids:

Boy Boy

Boy Girl

Girl Boy

Girl Girl

In our example, one of them is a girl, we know that, so the first one can’t be true. That leaves the other three. In two of them, the other one is a boy. So the odds are 66%.

Now, people say that the sexes of the two kids aren’t related to each other, and here is where we make an important distinction. If I’d said: The oldest one show up at your door and it’s a girl, then the odds would in fact be 50% that the other one is a boy, because at that point, these are the possible combinations.

Girl Girl

Girl Boy

See how that works? 50% chance.

Don’t believe me? You can test this quite easily at home with a couple of coin flip. Flip a coin three times. These are the possible combinations of flips.

H H H

H H T

H T H

T H H

H T T

T H T

T T H

T T T

In only one of those do you NOT get tails, right? So what are your odds of getting all heads? 1/8.

However, if you ask what are the chances of you NEXT flip being heads, it’ll be 50%. Every time.

Tags: Rants

This is almost certainly one of the worst movies ever. The cinematography is terrible, the writing is hackneyed and cliched, and the actors are chewing the scenery.

Worse, the concept is awesome, which means they’ve ruined it for everyone else, too.

Tags: Rants

The short answer to this question of course is: Yes. The longer answer, which we shall get to presently, is “Treat writing like a business and do a Cost Benefit Analysis”.

There are plenty of services that will take advantage of you otherwise. Literary agencies that charge reading fees, bogus fee-charging contests, and unscrupulous Vanity Presses are traps that immediately spring to mind. By adhering to this rule, the novice writer can avoid being bilked of both their time and their money.

Like any rule, though, if the phrase “Money always flows towards the writer” is adhered to too rigidly, it can actually hurt you. See, there’s actual intrinsic value to publicity. It’s hard to quantify, but put it this way, would you pay $50 to be a part of Oprah’s book club? Of course you would. No brainer. Of course, this situation could never happen, could it? Okay, let’s change it up a little. Would you pay a publicist $5000 to get you on the Today Show? Again, this should be an “absolutely”. But look! Money is moving away from the writer!!!

Further, agents charge you 15% of your fees. Just because they see it before you do, doesn’t mean you aren’t paying them that money. Money is moving away from the writer, but again agents provide a service with real value. No one objects to paying your agent, so why object to paying for publicity?

Now, in the YouTube video I linked to above Harlan mentions that the interviewer tells him that he should do the interview for free because of the publicity he’d get. Now, he’s freaking Harlan Ellison and he doesn’t need the extra publicity, but you do, and, if confronted by that situation, you should probably agree to do the interview for free.

Because of my Writers of the Future win, I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately, each of which has taken me a fairly substantial amount of time to complete or arrange, and as we all know, time is money. But how do you think Sirius Radio would have reacted if I’d asked for payment? Maybe I should have charged my good friend Dave Steffen for the time I spent on his interview at Diabolical Plots? No effen way.

See, what Harlan Ellison neglects to consider in his interview is that the relation of money to publicity is inversely proportional to your level of fame. When you’re a nobody, publicity is damn expensive.

What you need to do as a new author is price it out yourself. Treat it like any business investment, because remember, what you are running is a business. Should you pay $10 to enter a contest? Do a Cost Benefit Analysis. Try and calculate your odds of winning (look at previous winning entries, the number of entries received, etc, etc. Be as scientific as possibly). Then look at the amount of publicity you’d get from a win. Will you story be published by an online site with a massive circulation? Be in print? [Again, circulation is important. POD houses don't count (unless it's Cyberwizard Productions )].  Assign a dollar value to that level of publicity, say, $10,000 for a WotF win and maybe as little as $1 for a win at a smaller venue.  Now take your odds of winning as a decimal percentage and multiply by the amount of publicity you’d get to figure out if it’s worth your time to enter.

Let’s take a concrete example: The Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers.

Privately, I calculated my odds of winning at 1%. I’ve won a national contest before, this one is for new writers only, and I had a particularly strong story. On the other hand Glimmer Train doesn’t like Spec Fic, and while my piece was extremely literary, it still had a spec element.

Glimmer Train has a circulation of 5K, and these are all Wise Readers (Dudes that will nominate you for awards, or at least remember your name). So I figure a win is worth 1K in publicity (I’d have to pay a publicist that much to get a commensurate amount of fame). Add in the $1250 in prize money and you have $2250 in real value in a win.

Here is the formula again:

(Real Value) X (Odds of Winning) = (Maximum Fee Paid)

$2250 X .01 = $22.5.  The Entry Fee is $15, which is less than $22.5, therefore, my business sense tells me I should enter, even though I’ve calculated my odds of winning at 1%. This is a Cost-Benefit Analysis.

There is one writing rule that trumps all others (including “Money Always Flows Towards the Writer”), and that is “writing rules should be adhered to rigidly by the beginner, and treated as a loose guideline by the master”.

Tags: Contests, the business of writing