YABookgate

Vril-Dame vom Aldebaran said:
I'm an active SF/F reader and have done some freelance work in the industry before. Cover design by big publishers is 100% based on market research, which means they copy whatever is popular right now. Therefore, all covers look the same. The two main styles are:
1. Some sort of emblem, like the coat of arms of the kingdom the book takes place in.
2. The main character's face or half-body set against a nondescript background without details. The character is usually a cosplayer's photo, not a painting.

It's boring, it's generic, but it's "what the audience expects". All the books that sell have these covers, therefore these covers sell books. Typical circular logic of market research. If there are no alternative cover designs, then of course all the books that sell will use either of those two styles.

Personally, I find them bland and generic and they never manage to catch my eye. I miss the days when SF/F books had gorgeous hand-painted cover art that showed an actual scene from the book. 70s and 80s SF/F covers were amazing, and I hunt for those in second hand bookstores just because I want to have that beautiful cover displayed in my bookcase.

There's a pulp revival movement in the indie author scene, and publishers there go for more traditional artwork. Anything published by DMR books, for example, has great cover art.
Check out their cover of the Renegade Swords anthology:
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Good stuff. Makes you want to pick up the book and read its tales of riveting adventure right away.
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DMR is among my favorite indies in the rising Pulp and Sword and Sorcery revivals for a reason.
 
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As far as cover artists that I can name off the top of my head I loved Nick Stathopoulos landscape and cover art from the early 1990s.

rynosseros-vol-1-72dpi.jpg


He's moved into fine art now - from what I heard from the horse's mouth, book cover art pays stupidly little for the amount of work you put in - all the Stathopoulos cover art in existence was from when he was still a hobbyist, and he was friends with both author and publisher.

As for YA/General Book Drama, there's not a lot out there.

1) There was a SFF Young Adult book festival in London over the weekend - unsurprisingly many of the books on offer were from the assorted publishers "Adult Imprint" - either any publicity is good publicity, or books these days are all aimed at children no matter what

2) 90% of the books on offer at the YALC were written by women. there's not a lot of outreach for young male readers, which is a shame because the S&S genre is popular ACROSS ALL CULTURES and I feel its going to explode into a huge thing very soon (gasps and runs off to take notes for myself)

3) My go-to sources for bitter gossip about publishing and the book community have been quiet. There might have been a blip about audiobooks counting as "real books" , and people leaving publishing. (And also the James Patterson "quote taken out of context" - see point #2

4) Book Tube - the YouTube book community is getting replaced by Tik Tok in the eyes of They Who Market Shit, so instead of 20 minutes of commentary on book/s, you just get 30 seconds of "How Many Books Can I Fit On My Head" to weird music
 
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Windows 10 Upgrade said:
4) Book Tube - the YouTube book community is getting replaced by Tik Tok in the eyes of They Who Market Shit, so instead of 20 minutes of commentary on book/s, you just get 30 seconds of "How Many Books Can I Fit On My Head" to weird music
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This sounds incredibly dumb and shortsighted, since I'm pretty sure people who use TikTok don't have the attention span required to actually read books in the first place.
 
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Fromtheblackdepths said:
Are there others?
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Vril-Dame vom Aldebaran said:
Cirsova magazine is excellent.
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Cirsova is superb, but on the indie side of things, the gold standard, even more so than DMR, is Tales from the Magician's Skull. It's pretty much everything the Weird Tales revival SHOULD have been.

On the trad pub side? If the rumored author signings I've heard are true, Baen Books is getting ready to make some big moves on Sword and Sorcery front. Won't name names, because it might out my source in the Baen offices, but they might have just added two of the biggest names in the subgenre to the company roster, and are hunting for more.

Be interesting to see if getting a trad pub invested super charges the s&s revival or proves its only sustainable on the indie level.
 
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Boston Brand said:
On the trad pub side? If the rumored author signings I've heard are true, Baen Books is getting ready to make some big moves on Sword and Sorcery front. Won't name names, because it might out my source in the Baen offices, but they might have just added two of the biggest names in the subgenre to the company roster, and are hunting for more.
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I seriously hope one of them is Schuyler Hernstrom, I fangirl for that guy so hard.
 
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What horrible things did the author of The Ones We Burn do? The usual suspects have been screeching about this for a few weeks now, but whatever the offenses are, they're too terrible to put into words, apparently. Possibly the bad guys are melanin blessed, but I'm honestly not sure.

Looks like the same sort of YA generic Fantasy squirted out of a tube the Big 5 grinds out like McDonald's does hamburgers. The author is apparently both "queer" (whatever the fuck that is nowadays) and brain damaged. Or something.

Twitter apology that I see going nowhere. (Issued yesterday.)
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Deleted review on Goodreads, that is somehow courageous for going along with what everyone else on Twitter is saying.
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etc., etc., etc. I could screenshot basically the same tweet a hundred times.

Might be of interest, might not be.

edit: This Twitter thread cracked me up. Its all about the Jews, all the time, always. Get with it, goy. This poor Rebecca Mix gal is somehow involved.

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Elwood P. Dowd said:
What horrible things did the author of The Ones We Burn do? The usual suspects have been screeching about this for a few weeks now, but whatever the offenses are, they're too terrible to put into words, apparently. Possibly the bad guys are melanin blessed, but I'm honestly not sure.

Looks like the same sort of YA generic Fantasy squirted out of a tube the Big 5 grinds out like McDonald's does hamburgers. The author is apparently both "queer" (whatever the fuck that is nowadays) and brain damaged. Or something.

Twitter apology that I see going nowhere. (Issued yesterday.)
View attachment 3485044
Deleted review on Goodreads, that is somehow courageous for going along with what everyone else on Twitter is saying.
View attachment 3485057

etc., etc., etc. I could screenshot basically the same tweet a hundred times.

Might be of interest, might not be.
Click to expand...
Retarded twitter slap fights are always worth following
 
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Elwood P. Dowd said:
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No clue what she did, but "authenticity reader"? Is that the new and cooler "sensitivity reader"? And who needs 4+ of them? If you are that scared of offending someone, just don't bother to write anything at all.

On a random (and Captain Obvious) note, I have been using Goodreads for 10 years to keep track of books and just browse to look for new and possibly interesting releases, but it's so very obvious these days that everything they promote has to fill some quota, everything is about minorities and everything seems to be written by women (or genderspecials). I just wanna read something good that has not been turned into bland word-oatmeal by "a group of diverse authenticity readers" or whatever and I have many favourite (old) white men authors, but those are clearly not allowed anymore.
 
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Der weiße Teufel said:
No clue what she did, but "authenticity reader"? Is that the new and cooler "sensitivity reader"? And who needs 4+ of them? If you are that scared of offending someone, just don't bother to write anything at all.
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I assume having an authenticity reader means that you got a 12th century samurai to read your historical fantasy and tell you if it's inaccurate.
 
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Elwood P. Dowd said:
What horrible things did the author of The Ones We Burn do? The usual suspects have been screeching about this for a few weeks now, but whatever the offenses are, they're too terrible to put into words, apparently. Possibly the bad guys are melanin blessed, but I'm honestly not sure.

Looks like the same sort of YA generic Fantasy squirted out of a tube the Big 5 grinds out like McDonald's does hamburgers. The author is apparently both "queer" (whatever the fuck that is nowadays) and brain damaged. Or something.
Click to expand...

It appears they wrote a story where some people with dark skin are part of an evil empire that's oppressing a fair skinned "blood witch." So, the author is being pilloried for indulging reverse racism by having some black characters oppressing a white character (although reviewers note that there are multiple ethnicities in the evil empire, it isn't just black people) and for anti-Semitism as having magic based on blood is apparently support of blood libel. That's the best I can find. It all appears to have come from one person's tweets on the subject. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's another trad. author going on the attack.

This book is apparently coming out in November. Four months of Twitter hate mob review bombing and frenzied posting for her debut novel!
 
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