I dunno if this is BS or not, but I saw it on Twitter, so here it is. Make of it what you will. Self-insert jack-off harem fic with LitRPG overtones sells hundreds of copies, so I kinda find this hard to believe. Or did, until I realize how awful the current state of woke pubishing is.
Twitter /
Archive
View attachment 2892817
View attachment 2892824
Any idea where the original post the Tweet shared came from?
Surely
There was a Bookscan post going about on the Patrick Tomlinson/Lindsay Ellis threads that expanded to include some other authors including CR. This figure is the same, so the info is from the one source. I don't think it's a leak so much as open source info that sort of has to be accessed via a paid subscription. Everyone is just riffing off
@Boston Brand's leak.
(Anyone can get Bookscan, but it's so expensive it's more of a thing companies buy).
Apparently Bookscan doesn't collect Walmart, mailing list, book clubs or direct sales, which given CR's current market placement and emphasis on hand selling to die-hards I suspect is what her main focus is at the moment.
If you ever want to know why SFWA has cratered it's reputation in the past decade, the fact that the only person they've elected President in the past decade whose work is even mildly commercially successful is John Scalzi,
whose tenure marked the start of its downward slide, and if SCALZI is your benchmark for success...
Well, much like whatever idiot at Tor gave him a seven figure contract, you're already in trouble. The last person to lead SFWA that was actually commercially successful beyond a few flukes was Catherine Asaro, and she was President from 2003 to 2005.
They've fallen a long way from the days of being led by Ben Bova and Joe Haldeman, much less the glory days of Jerry Pournelle or Norman Spinrad.
Whats so frustrating about this is the line people aren't reading just isn't true people are reading more than ever they just aren't reading stuff traditionally published.
Oh, they're still reading stuff that's traditionally published. Just not the kind of trad published stuff pushed by SFWA or the Hugo Awards.
SFFWA is the biggest grouping of pedophiles, dog fuckers, and deviants outside of a lolicon furry convention.
Most of them write terrible bullshit.
The fact that "Cat Rambo" sold 12 books is surprising since they're the President of the org.
I figured they sold none and were just really good at sucking Tor's dick.
When I was a baby writer it was almost the holy grail of acceptance - sell three pro-paid short stories or a novel and you could wear your SFWA badge with pride (especially since it became so easy to upload a phone book and 300 pages of Lorem Ipsum onto Amazon and call yourself a “published writer” - there has to be SOMETHING to prove you weren’t a flake)
But as soon as I became eligible for full membership, you could see there was no “there” there. Not even the forums are interesting, or helpful. I think the only thing that the SFWA can be commended for is chasing dodgy publishing contracts, and it’s only a secondary feature of a very closed “in-group” looking after each other and helping others accidentally.
I actually still urge authors to aim for qualifying for SFWA as a bench mark of success, mostly because making three pro-sale short stories is a damned hard feat to accomplish... even if you don't plan to be a trad published author, if you can pull that off, you've got the writing ability to stand head and shoulders above every Tom, Dick and Harry who self-publishes every stupid thing they crank out. Helps you polish off your rough edges and hone your voice, find an audience and all that.
Beyond that? There were days when SFWA did a lot of good for its members - contract negotiations, estate planning, bargaining over pay rates, etc. The medical fund for years was a great resource for older authors without a support network, though its largely a relic at this point.
Now that the inmates run the asylum? It's good for exactly two things: the member directory, and voting in the Nebula Awards, the latter of which is why I'm a member, because my publisher literally requires us to have membership so we can vote for our books... thankfully, votes are secret ballot, so I vote for whatever the most reactionary work I can.
Which is a goddamned shame. Both because of the formerly impressive pedigree of SFWA, and an organization repping authors and editors could do the field so much good, if it was more focused on those interests, rather than leftist naval gazing.
Wait, so let me get this straight. So theoretically you can query an American/British agent even if you don't live in either of those countries? A bit of PL, but I've been thinking of finishing my novels and sending query letters, but I live in neither of those countries so I don't know whether or not they're willing to accept me
Yup! MOST traditionally published authors in the SFF field in (PL Shitty Country) have either a US or British Agent. (Or they sell their books as magic realism/literary and go down that path where there are more agents)
The only issue is tax though, you technically get "paid" by your agent (as all the book royalties go through them), and the money will be taxed by the IRS or Her Majesties Income Thieves before it's posted to you.
Tax treaties with the other country usually mean its about 5%, but STILL that can be a couple of thousand at minimum for a bog standard Big 5 book contract
Thanks for answering. That is actually very reassuring for me since I've been wondering if I wasted my time writing my book. That's a big worry off my shoulders, and I can finish my project without any shred of doubt. The info about tax is actually a news for me, since I don't really know how taxes for this sort of stuff works
Yup. It's actually become a roadblock facing many newbie American authors - many publishers have quotas to meet on how much stuff is non American, so if you have the crap luck to submit something great, but come from the USA or UK, when they need something from non-Anglo countries... well, sucks to be you.
Actually works out pretty well for writers overseas, thus the boom in Asian and African fiction markets, and though publishers will never admit it, they love it in part because these authors are much cheaper than their Yank or British counterparts. 8 cents a word for a 5k word short story makes an author $400, which is pretty shit in the states, but can be several months salary for most of the rest of the planet, and even a small novel advance can last years even in mid-development countries.
I know this is unrelated, but your post made me decide to check on Thomas Covenant and I can't believe how much similar it is to Isekai novels, at least from what I can gather. Not only the "transported to another world" and worldbuilding aspects, but also the Narou-kei element of Isekai stories. The genre awareness, the cynicism, it's so like Isekai. Hell, the first book even has the "got hit by a bus/truck/vehicle" trope
Yup. What Japan dubs "Isekai" have another name in the Western fantasy canon: portal fantasy.
It was, pre-Tolkien, the most popular type of story in the genre, from where we get Alice in Wonderland, John Carter of Mars, Wizard of Oz, Narnia, the works.
More modern works include Thomas Covenant, Outlander, The Magicians, 1632, hell, pretty much every alternate history novel centered on someone or a group sent back in time.
Hell, I know from shop talk that Baen is even in negotiations with some manga publishers to see if they can't get manga/light novel adaptations of some of their portal fantasy... an idea I tried to pitch to my own publisher to little success. The first American publisher to tap the isekai market will strike a potential gold mine.
Long story short? I would love a Thomas Covenant anime, just because it takes the piss out of many of the portal fantasy/isekai cliches, odd given it predates many of them. I might be willing to settle for a 1632 anime though.