Van Halen, M&Ms, and Accessibility Policies

Van Halen famously had a rider on their touring contract that stipulated there must be a bowl of M&Ms backstage -- with all the brown ones picked out. But despite appearances, this wasn't ego run amuck. That contract rider also had complex technical specifications for electrical systems, clearance, even how much weight the girders must be able to support.

Once Van Halen arrived to set up a show, any brown M&M was a quick red flag that the venue hadn't read the contract carefully, and so probably wasn't complying with those detailed technical requirements, either. And while a brown M&M might not be poison, those technical requirements were literal showstoppers. Electrical fires are not rock 'n roll.

This brings me to accessibility policies, and more specifically to Mary Robinette Kowal's pledge not to go to a convention that lacks such a policy. Seriously, stay with me.

Some years ago, John Scalzi made a similar pledge regarding harassment policies. At the time, I worried that participating would be damaging to my career -- when you're a tiny fish in a wide blue ocean, you have to take all the publicity you can get your grubby mitts on.

I've been to a lot more conventions since then, and here's what I've learned: the sort of convention that can't be bothered with a harassment policy is likely going to have serious organizational problems, weird politics, dull programming, or some combination thereof. It's true I'm very early in my career as an author, and I can't afford to miss out on promotional opportunities. 

But the flip side of that is that as an early-career author, I pay my own way to conventions. I have only so much time and money to give, and there are so many, many conventions. So I need to budget carefully to make sure I get the most bang for my promotional buck. I really can't afford to go to a lousy convention.

Which means harassment and accessibility policies are increasingly important to me -- not just because they're morally right, not just because of my leftist SJW politics. Even if you're not worried about harassment yourself, even if you're not worried about accessibility yourself, if those policies are missing, that should be your brown M&M. The sign that what you're dealing with is very likely to be a shitty convention. 

Sign the pledge.

Awards Eligibility 2015

We have entered the time of year in which authors make lists of which works of theirs are eligible in which awards categories. I consider it a feminist act to promote myself and my own work, and so nothing short of an obligation. Accordingly, here are my awards-eligible works for 2015.

Novel
Revision

Short Story
In Loco Parentis
Children of Rouwen
Antaius in the Heavens Among the Stars
The McKinnon Account

This was my publishing debut year, and so I am also eligible for the Campbell Award for New Writers. This may come as a surprise to long-time readers, since I've been a professional writer for many years now. But none of those works count as publication under the Campbell's rubric, because every scrap has been for a game, marketing campaign, self-published, or non-fiction. None of those works start your Campbell clock. But now? Tick-tock, friends.

Revision: An Artist's Statement

As of today, Revision has been out for six months. OMG! Has it been that long? ...Has it only been that long? 

To celebrate, I wanted to do two things. One is announce a price drop! Revision ebooks are now $4.99, available for Kindle, iOS, Nook, and Kobo. Maybe buy it if you haven't? Maybe leave a review? 

Beyond that, this seems like a good moment to reflect on how Revision has been received, how I feel about it, and a little bit about what I was trying to accomplish creatively.

First: reception. I really couldn't have asked for a better set of reviews. I got a freakin' star in Publishers Weekly! NPR Books liked it! Even Kirkus was super positive! This was very much the best-case too-good-to-really-hope-for scenario. 

The book hasn't made me wealthy, mind. It's selling persistently, which is really wonderful; if I'd self-published, sales would have stopped dead about five months ago. Nonetheless, a debut author and a debut press with limited marketing bandwidth can only do so much, so selling hundreds of thousands of copies was never plausible. We're definitely punching above our weight class, though, and I am very pleased all around.

And now, if I may, something in the way of an artist's statement. In particular, I'd like to address the most common topic in reviews of Revision: whether or not Mira (the protagonist and narrator) is likable.

I started writing Revision in 2009 during the throes of Racefail, and my subconscious was steeped in the scorching hot issues of race, class, gender, sexuality. The subconscious, it leaks into your work, it turns out. As such, Revision is very much a not-even-that-thinly-veiled metaphor about coming to terms with the ugly fact of your own privilege, even if you don't want it. How you can't walk away from it, even if you're trying.

A lot of reviewers weighed in on whether Mira is likable or not; and many of them further noted that the requirement for a female protagonist to be likable is a little sexist. I have realized, with great soberness, that likability of my female characters is something I'll have to consider more thoughtfully in the future, with an eye to selling more widely.

But this book in specific couldn't have come from a likable place, or been about a likable person. The emotional arc of Revision is very much about how someone who has advantages in life has the power to ruin everything for the vulnerable people around her, while remaining personally more or less unscathed. It's not a kind story or a nice story or a fuzzy story, but it's a human story: the paths people take to noticing the suffering around them. The way someone might need to suffer a little first to be able to recognize it in someone else.

It's a very honest book. Honest and painful and yeah, probably unflattering.

Beyond that, there are other things I was trying to do, like paint only in shades of gray. Nobody in this book is purely evil, nor purely good. Truth and morality are ambiguous creatures anyway -- human constructs that don't exist outside of our minds.

And in a move that I was afraid would make nobody ever buy the book or take it seriously, the voice embraced a downright aggressive femininity, and I tried to be brutally honest about what it's like to be a woman in the world, too. It was important to me to include friendship between women. Bad, complicated relationships. The terrible decisions people make out of fear, convenience, comfort, simple short-sightedness. 

There is some wish fulfillment about burning down a server closet.

It's a book with a lot going on under the hood, is what I'm saying. And the kicker is, it's not at all on purpose! For all that I'm telling you what the book is about now, that was all the doing of my busy, busy subconscious. I 100% thought I was writing a fluffy action novel in that first draft. I imagine you can read it purely as an action novel, too. But then I guess you... might not like Mira so much. She's not really a model human being. Though who among us is, in our heart of hearts? 

Anyway. It's a book! I am very, very proud of it. I think it's solid work. If you haven't picked it up yet, well! It officially costs only as much as the proverbial latte these days. Give it a shot?

Reading Habits Survey 2015

I have some, shall we say, strong reading preferences at this point -- in particular, I tend to prefer shorter books, and books that aren't a part of a series. But I am only a single data point, and in conversation with the clever and thoughtful Sunil Patel, I got to wondering how representative of current reading tastes I am.

So I thought I'd ask.

The survey asked only seven questions, and I put the call out on social media, so I can't guarantee that the self-selected set of respondents here, who are all connected to my own social network at some degree of remove or another, are representative of all readers. Summarized here are the data I collected. (Pardon the inconsistent chart formats -- some are SurveyMonkey screen shots, and some I built separately in Excel.)

First off, unsurprisingly, basically everyone who participated in the survey considers themselves to be a book reader. Out of 505 responses, only 15 people answered "no" or "not sure."

So just about everyone self-defines as a reader, but what does that mean in practical terms? How many books are we talking? Or more specifically: how many books did you read last year?

How many books did you read in the last 12 months? The X axis is books read last in the last year; Y is how many respondents answered for each range.

...Wow. People who read, it turns out, read a loooooot of books. Roughly a third of our readers went through between one and twenty books last year, and another 40% read between 30 and 100. And a shocking-to-me number of people reported reading 100, 200, even 300 books in a year. The maximum number reported -- and not a unique one -- was 500. Respect. Where do you find that much time?!

Next, I thought I'd ask about ebooks. What percentage of the books you read last year were ebooks? So this was interesting -- unsurprisingly, a large number of readers won't touch ebooks. A much smaller number read ebooks exclusively. Zero-ebooks brought 97 respondents, and only 50 said 100 percent.

What % of books you read in the last 12 months were ebooks? (in # of respondents)

It bears noting, though, that a lot of books simply aren't available in ebook format, and sometimes pricing is prohibitive on one format or another, so a cost-conscious consumer may flip back and forth. And yet! Very, very few people are comparatively willing to read either format equally. Notice that dip in the middle. The majority of readers responding want their books the way they like them. So much for the death of print, huh?

Next up was an analysis of what genre our readers prefer. I'd expected a majority of science fiction and fantasy readers, since I put the call for survey responses out on Twitter and I run in a lot of circles that skew toward those genres. But in fact our reading tastes are deliciously promiscuous.

In retrospect I might have found better results for the later questions about series by limiting the responses to genre fiction, but frankly I was curious how much nonfic and literary fiction crossover reading occurs. It looks like... quite a lot.

And that "other" category proves some substantial oversight on my end, or at least grounds for debate about what makes a genre. Of the 112 respondents answering "other," 40 wrote in some version of Young Adult. Other genres often mentioned include religious, erotica, and historical, and quite a few respondents used that space to specify very specific subcategories of readership ranging from steampunk to sewing. A very few respondents chose to mention non-genre-specific reading preferences, too, like seeking out black novel protagonists, YA books including trans characters, or Canadian authors.

And now we get on toward the initial questions I had when I started this endeavor -- of all of those many, many books being read, what percentage of them are in series?

What % of books you read in the last 12 months were part of a series? (in # of respondents)

It's hard to come away with a solid conclusion out of this one. Roughly 10% of our readers didn't read any series at all, and about 60% say that series books make up half or less of their reading material. I'd interpret this to meant a slight preference against series works -- but given that many of our respondents read lit-fic, nonfiction, and other genres in which series are not a widespread practice, it's difficult to determine what this means in actionable terms.

So why don't we ask about that directly: how do various factors affect your decision to begin reading a book or not? Note that we're specifically not asking about marketing nor economic concerns -- I didn't want to muddy the waters, but in the long run it's likely that considerations like price and word-of-mouth trump other considerations entirely.

We see few surprises here. Around 88% of readers are more likely or much more likely to read a book if it's part of a series they've read already, and very, very few people say otherwise. This is especially interesting considering that series attrition is a known phenomenon -- people definitely do stop reading series in the middle, and many a series has never reached completion as a result. This may well be a case where what we think we would do is at odds with what we actually do.

Moving on, there's a slight preference toward a book that is the first in a series, but it's only around 5%. There's a much stronger preference toward the first book in a completed series; about half of readers are more likely or much more likely to read the first book in a series after the last book has been written. So people... like series, basically. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise; they wouldn't be published if nobody was buying. 

In retrospect, I should have asked separately how people feel about standalone books in particular. I originally thought that more/less likely to read a book in a series would make that answer visible in the negative space, but I don't think the data is clear enough to allow any such conclusions to be drawn.

And then there's the length question. I may be unusual in preferring standalone books, and roughly two-thirds of readers don't care one way or another how long a book is. But of that third that care, it looks like there is indeed a bias away from longer works. about a quarter of readers say they're less likely or much less likely to read a book over 500 pages, where only about 12% say they're more or much more likely.

There is a slight bias toward shorter books, on the other hand. Around 15% of respondents say they're less likely to read a book under 300 pages, but around 20% say they're more likely. That's not enough to commit to writing shorter books alone, but it certainly does mean there's space in the market for quicker reads.

The self-pub question was an afterthought. It looks like some stigma remains, and over half our readers are less likely or much less likely to read a book that's been self-published. On the flip side, only 12 readers out of 507 said they'd be in any way more likely to read a self-published book. But the bright side here for our direct-to-reader authors is that 43% of readers simply don't care how you were published one way or the other.

A more mathematically savvy analyst than I might be able to look at those responses and determine if there is a relationship between readers who are willing to give self-pub a shot and those who prefer ebooks. If you'd like to look at the data and run that analysis (or any other), shoot me a line and I'll give you the raw data -- minus the email information for people who wanted to be contacted when this post goes up, of course.

And finally a gimme: are people more likely to buy a book if they know the author on social media? Heck yeah, they are -- 4% of people said they were less likely, but a whopping 70% said they were more and much more likely. So it looks like all that time spent nattering around on the Facebooks and Twitters really does get you in the door.

Annnnnd that's the 2015 Reading Habits Survey. Some surprises, some really not surprises, and a whole lot of "result inconclusive, ask again later." Which does, at least, answer my original question -- my preferences aren't common, but I'm not alone, either. Readers are a diverse bunch, and like a whole lot of different things. And I find that a comforting piece of information: there's plenty of room in publishing for all of us.

Agent'd!

Here's another piece of news I've been sitting on for... quite a while, actually, because it still doesn't feel entirely real and I have representation trauma or something. but! Guess what! I have a new agent! I am beyond delighted to say I am now represented by Zoe Sandler at ICM.

You guys. You guys. This has been a revelation for me, because Zoe is straight-up excited about the fiction I'm writing and the ideas I have. I showed some comments she'd given me to an author friend, who commented they wished they got emails like that from their own agent. Sparkles! Joy! I don't feel like talking to her is begging favors or imposing, you know? 

I'm pretty sure this is what an excellent agent-author relationship is supposed to look like.

And not just touchy-feely, either -- it's working on the business side. So far she's sold Taiwanese rights for A Creator's Guide and negotiated some work for me with Serial Box, the details of which are still shhhhhh very secret, we'll be talking about that more later. And we'll probably be putting a new novel manuscript on the market in the next couple of months. Editors, keep your eyes peeled. 

So going forward, if you want to hire me to design games or marketing work, you should still talk to me. But if you'd like to publish my next novel, make an audiobook for Revision, option Lucy Smokeheart to make an animated series, or translate A Creator's Guide into Finnish, talk to Zoe. She's awesome! It will be terrific.