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A Few Hard Truths for the Troops

ONE: There is no substitute for personal editorial contact in this business, particularly at the outset of a career. It is easy enough to sell short stories by mail, but in order to sell them in any quantity the editors should be met; it is ten times easier to sell a first novel to an editor who knows you. Shortly after the initial sales, therefore, it is imperative for a new writer to come to New York (wherein work almost all the editors), or, better yet, to attend the science fiction conventions. The editors go to them. There are at least five conventions a year—the world convention, the West Coast convention on the July 4 weekend, the New York convention in the spring, the Philadelphia and Cincinnati conventions—at which half the editors or more are present. Although a new writer should not become obsessed with convention attendance, at least six should be attended in the year after the first sale (assuming any professional ambitions and spare funds at all), and at least three a year thereafter.

It is possible to run a career from a post office box—James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) is the most notable recent example as Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) was of the past—but only a couple of such careers exist during any given writing generation (which according to van Vogt, and I agree, is just about ten years). The rest of you—the rest of us—are like it or not going to have to make the changes, work the scenery. Ten years ago or more a young writer would be best advised to come to New York to live for a while, but New York is now such an expensive and (for many) fundamentally untenable place that it is no longer necessary. With writers scattered throughout the countryside, editors have a good excuse to spend expense account money to go to conventions to see them and editors have no objection to this.

TWO: Reviews have almost no effect upon the sale of a science fiction book. Prepublication reviews in the trade journals are meaningless; reviews in the professional and amateur magazines appear so long after publication that the fate of a book has long been decided by the time they appear. The only factor affecting the sale of a science fiction novel from the point of view of the publisher is print order; a book that prints more will sell more, assuming a certain rough fixed percentage of copies printed as sales, and therefore the destiny of a book has been resolved before it is even out of manuscript. Print order is in itself determined by the amount of the advance—the more a publisher has paid the more he must print in order to retrieve the advance—and the advance depends upon the reputation of the writer, editorial caprice, the editorial-book interface, the general state of the market and so on. (Merit except for a rare case or two has no effect upon the advance.) There have been cases in which books for which large advances have been paid have had small print orders and failed dismally; this is either because the editor has, in the interim, lost his job or because others in the hierarchy are out to sink him. There are even fewer cases in which books with small advances have had large print orders, but here venery and caprice are the only applicable factors and it is impossible to do anything about them.

THREE: Although matters have changed somewhat in the last half decade, science fiction is still regarded by the nonspecialist publishers as a minor category and the science fiction editor is low in relative standing; this means for all intents and purposes that if a writer's editor is fired or quits his job, the writer is finished with the publisher . . . the writer simply has no individual cachet for the publisher; he is an anonymous part of someone's "science fiction list." Accordingly one does not cultivate publishers but editors, and if one is fortunate, one's editor will remain at a post for a long time acquiring autonomy and prestige, or will go onto other publishers at an increasing level of responsibility, finally achieving a position of full autonomy.

FOUR: There is no point in trying to construct a saleable novel by studying and then reproducing material which (even if recently published) is already on the stands or in the bookstores; the reality of publishing, because of the nature of the production and editorial processes, is at least two years ahead of books being published today (and the books two years behind). Attempts to reproduce the mood, subject, or style of freshly successful writers is only to remind the editors of what naïfs they were a couple of years ago, and besides, they already have published stuff like that. You are far better off trying to reproduce the sense, subject, and style of much older work, the forties and fifties novels; that is where the field reposes and probably always will. (You are almost certainly doomed if you attempt at the beginning of your career to do truly innovative, original work. You will not sell it. You may scatter a few such short stories here and there but the novel market is blocked to you. The time to do innovative work if you are fool enough to want to is after you have sold a few novels, have some kind of cachet in the field, and have enabled the publishers to presume that you have an audience which is looking for your work and which you can take along with you. The publishers are wrong in this judgment, but they are wrong in most of their judgments, and simple, vulnerable, hapless creatures are not necessarily to be condemned for that.)

FIVE: Never try to sell a novel to a publisher on the basis that although another publisher has rejected it, it has done so with a "good," i.e., glowing, letter of rejection extolling the merits of the proposal and regretting only its inappropriateness for the particular list. Publishers tend to believe one another (otherwise why would they hire the same editors, publish the same writers, work from the same pool of freelance artists and copy editors), and a letter of rejection in any guise is nothing more than that. The only way to sell a novel in early (and usually in late) career is to represent it as new work, never offered to the marketplace before.

SIX: On balance, and taking everything into account, including the residual rights, the small notoriety, the sexual prerogatives occasionally available at conventions, the shelf of collected works, and the feeling of accomplishment, not disregarding all of this but putting it in the balance, you would be better off going to law school . . . or if that is not your thing, becoming a temporary typist.

 

1980: New Jersey

 

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