It took me a long time to get through Crowley’s book, and I’ve got one more novel to review for the World Fantasy Awards. While I’m working on it, here is some commentary on the Locus Reading List that is one of the major feeders into the SFF awards.
For the last couple or three years Natalie Luhrs has done an analysis of the Locus Reading List, checking the gender and race breakdown. Here’s her analysis for 2017, and here’s the one for 2018. In the 2018 conclusions section, she’s noted that the list is important because the effects go way beyond just recommendations on what people should read. It’s also about how readers draw from lists like this or sites like Rocket Stack Rank, for example, to make their nominations for the awards.
Luhrs’ results for 2017 shows a slant toward male writers and a tendency to repeat the same person-of-color (POC) writers across categories and years. The analysis for 2018 shows the list achieved closer gender parity as a whole and slightly expanded non-binary writers, but actually fewer POC were included than in 2017. On the positive side, in 2018 Luhrs found a few additions to the list of favored POC.
Luhrs then went on to complain that “We don’t have nearly enough women or POC editing anthologies.” I’m suspecting this could be a mistaken assumption. Locus listed only three, but if you check, there are a bunch of female and POC editors out there trying to do it. The problem is that the Locus List hasn’t recognized the women and POC who are editing anthologies.
So what does this mean? Is the perception that women and POC can’t edit good quality anthologies? Are their anthologies actually substandard? Do these editors/publishers struggle to get professional quality submissions because they’re not considered competent? Do they struggle to get professional level review?
I’ve had the conversation with Greg Hullender of Rocket Stack Rank about how “quality” is defined in the SFF community. This boils down to accepting that the most successful magazines, publishers and editors get the best works, and you can make a list of the “best” by reading just these magazines and looking at the releases of these publishers or these few recognized editors. This system further promotes the sources, of course, which means they become more successful and continue to shut out minority editors struggling to be found in the small press. That’s why the same people appear on the Locus Reading List every year. The system is self-perpetrating.
If we really want to achieve something more than tokenism, shouldn’t we look for another avenue for editors to make it into this system?
Sep 26, 2018 @ 00:41:13
“I’ve had the conversation with Greg Hullender of Rocket Stack Rank about how “quality” is defined in the SFF community.”
Indeed. “Quality” is that term which really means “Leftist and Literary” with a very narrow set of themes, characters and plots that will be included. Really its more about what will be -excluded-, namely anything that smacks of admiration for Western civilization. Or non-Leftist thought, for that matter.
So, we end up with grey goo being nominated for awards. Horrible people doing horrible things in a horrible world, with finely crafted sentences. That pretty much captures all the books you’ve reviewed for this Fantasy Award season.
Therefore, the POC who get nominated are the ones who best promote their grey goo, and most closely write to the template. I would guess (having no direct knowledge, because didn’t read them) that the 3 anthologists you mentioned were producing Locus-approved goo and possibly the others are not.
Or, lets imagine The Hobbit was released this year. Does it make The List, or more likely is Tolkien getting shirt-stormed on Twitter for not having a gay/trans/POC hobbit in there?
Take it back a couple more steps, would Tolkien even get published this year? Would he even get an agent?
I’m of the opinion that JRR would be self-published on Amazon if he released The Hobbit this year, he’d be getting a Book Bomb from Larry Correia, and he’d be looking at a Dragon Award.
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Sep 26, 2018 @ 09:05:20
There’s definitely a depressive trend for the World Fantasy Award. Someone (Cora?) pointed out that it was the same for the Hugos, but I didn’t notice it so clearly for that ballot.
The fact that POC reduced when non-binary increased suggests the Locus List has only a certain percentage of slots allotted for the combined demographic. As for repeats, it’s easy to read only the authors you read last year, and call them the “best” again.
I do find the reigning definition of “quality” vaguely troubling. Stories are “the best” solely because they appear in the “best” magazines? Actually the most creative and avant garde work generally takes place on the fringes.
Isn’t The Hobbit a children’s book? That means JRR probably wouldn’t have made a ripple in the adult market.
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Sep 27, 2018 @ 00:07:10
I said somewhere that darker works are perceived as more serious and therefore tend to have an edge over lighter works come awards time. Hence, the darker and more serious “Broken Earth” trilogy beat lighter works like “Provenance” by Ann Leckie and “A Closed and Common Orbit” by Becky Chambers (both of which actually have quite a lot to say in spite of being lighter works) or “The Collapsing Empire” by John Scalzi (which – sorry – wasn’t very good). Is this what you meant?
But then, the tendency isn’t limited to SFF awards. Just take a look at how difficult it is for a comedy, no matter how good, to win an Oscar. Besides, lighter and humorous do get Hugo nominations and even win on occasion. “The Tomato Thief” by Ursula Vernon was anything but grim and “Murderbot” wasn’t particularly grim either. Ditto for “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “The Good Place”, which is actually a sitcom. Okay, so it’s god-awful, but it is a comedy.
As for whether “The Hobbit” or Heinlein or Zelazny whoever would be published today, the question is moot, because if J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert A. Heinlein or Roher Zelazny were alive and writing today, they wouldn’t write the exact same books they wrote 80 or 60 or 50 years ago, because they would be living in a completely different world with completey different influences.
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 09:09:11
Cora said: “I said somewhere that darker works are perceived as more serious and therefore tend to have an edge over lighter works come awards time.”
You know what’s funny, Cora? If you change the word “darker” with “leftist and literary”, you are in 100% agreement with The Phantom. If a story doesn’t have suffering and Socialism baked into it, the story is not “serious” and is therefore not “quality.”
This is a thing. Its a big thing. It is in fact a huge bias built into the awards culture. Its one of those “water to a fish” things.
The real difference between you and I is that you think this is a good thing and I don’t.
Are POC tokens in such a culture? Yes! Because unless they are deliberately writing -to- the selection bias, their “unique voices” that y’all constantly yammer about will actively de-select them from consideration for awards. Thus they lose out on any promotion value of the award process, and moving back up the chain they don’t make it out of the slush piles, they don’t get an agent, they don’t get any encouragement in writiers groups etc.
Because they’re not writing to the “serious” template. They are doing what -they- want to do, which is probably different. Hopefully different, actually.
And that is most likely why we see the same POC names popping up in awards all the time. They’re the ones who figured out the template and deliberately wrote to it. Or, to put it more unkindly, they stepped out of their own culture and wrote to the Awards Culture, because they perceived that their culture wasn’t going to be well received.
I know how they feel. I’m a WASP, mine is not well received either. Anything to do with WASP culture must be done ironically or it will be reviled, no matter who writes it. Witness the constant surf-noise of complaints from the Lefty lit-crit side about Tolkien. Too White. Too Male. Too Straight.
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 11:06:28
A few people have suggested that a conservative non-activist bent is one reason why Hispanic/LatinX authors are so underrepresented in both publishing and in the awards. Female activist black authors are often over-represented, at the expense of other groups like black male writers. This also suggests there are only so many spots reserved for “diversity” in something like the Locus List.
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 13:57:43
“A few people have suggested that a conservative non-activist bent is one reason why Hispanic/LatinX authors are so underrepresented in both publishing and in the awards.”
These days I expect it is getting hard to find a Hispanic writing in English who checks off all the approved boxes. For one thing, most of the ones not born in the USA have seen Socialism “red in tooth and claw” and are unlikely to write approvingly of it. They also tend not to be big on feminism, orientation/gender “variety,” and similar. Macho is a thing with those guys. Men are men, women are women, and so forth. Like a WASP really, but with a tan.
Witness the MexicanX effort at WorldCon this year. After pre-criming a Mexican American author and kicking him out of the con, a big official effort was made to make it look like Mexicans were super-duper welcome. Done to avoid the accusation that Del Arroz was ejected because of racism, which everyone knew was 100% untrue.
We all knew that, it was patently obvious. Race had nothing to do with it. He was ejected over politics. Trump voter in San Francisco? He’s gotta go!
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 16:52:02
I think they overreacted–I believe it was a mistake to ban him–but they didn’t ban Jon for his politics; they banned him for online harassment of people. I realize he just does it to sell books–he doesn’t really mean most of it–but it causes a lot of hard feelings. In particular, he should have known that if you accuse people of supporting pedophilia, they will never forgive you as long as they live–no matter what your politics are.
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 17:26:31
Greg Hullender said: “I think they overreacted–I believe it was a mistake to ban him–but they didn’t ban Jon for his politics; they banned him for online harassment of people.”
They banned Del Arroz for on-line harassment? But they gave floppy camel dork a Hugo nomination this year for doing the same thing to the Sad Puppies. China Mike has 287 Hugos, that’s all he ever does these days. Harass people.
I have to tell you, Greg, that having read all the alleged Del Arroz “harassment”, its pretty tame compared to what floppy camel and China Mike do all the time. floppy has been going after Sarah Hoyt, calling her a racist and a Nazi when she’s posting about being sick all the time and needing surgery. There a new witch getting burnt at Vile666 every week. Last week it was some poor woman who -volunteers- at Goodreads. Once it was some guy named Greg Hullender, if I remember right.
They banned him because he’s a Conservative, and because he didn’t lie down and shut up when they told him to. Anybody who buys their story, I’ve got this bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell them.
Its a pattern that keeps repeating over and over, Greg. The WorldCon was in Silicon Valley, the culture there is overwhelmingly political, they invented an excuse and they banned him. Same thing that Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google are doing. Even Amazon, your old company, banned Roosh V’s book about how to pick up girls. That’s what’s up these days.
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 17:51:59
@Phantom
“China Mike”? Harasses people?
I’ve got differences of opinion with Mike, both large and small.
But those two right there are utter nonsense.
Regards,
Dann
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 18:32:45
Dann665 said: “But those two right there are utter nonsense.”
I’d like to be able to agree with you Dan, but sadly can’t.
China Mike scrapes the comments sections of blogs he’s banned from for gossip and scandal, and posts out-of-context comments made by people like myself as features on his blog. He deletes comments (like mine), he makes comments on the blogs of people that he’s banned/deleted (like mine), he links to people that he has banned (like me), and so forth.
That’s just my personal experience. Others have longer, better stories.
Because of this behavior he’s managed to get himself banned from Mad Genius Club, According to Hoyt and Monster Hunter Nation. The only other person I can think of off hand that has managed the full hat trick is floppy. None the less they persist, and shows no sign of stopping.
If that doesn’t meet the criteria for the word “harassment” then maybe I could compromise and call it ” a great deal of unwanted attention from people who are not friends”.
He earned the name China Mike when it was revealed (by him, by accident) that most of his traffic is Chinese web bots. He’s linked to my blog before, as has floppy camel brain, and I can tell you there was zero change in traffic from either of them. I get a noticeable pop when MGC or Sarah links one of my rantings, for what that’s worth. So either they have no readers, or those readers don’t ever follow links.
As to the people who comment at that bog, I’ve got entire posts dedicated to a few of them. They’re pretty “special” in a riding-the-short-bus sort of way, some of the things they say are simply amazing.
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 20:25:51
Just for the record, when File770 links to Rocket Stack Rank, we get a pretty good pop, depending on the topic. As many as 351 unique visitors, and they tend to stay on the site a long time, averaging about three minutes.
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 18:58:30
@Phantom —
Thanks for your three sterling examples of the GIGO principle I’ve mentioned previously. You managed to write three whole posts with hardly a single factually accurate statement between them. Congrats!
I’m going to combine responses to those messages here.
“Are POC tokens in such a culture? Yes! Because unless they are deliberately writing -to- the selection bias, their “unique voices” that y’all constantly yammer about will actively de-select them from consideration for awards.”
First, you seem to not understand what “token” means. By claiming that they are getting selected for their politics rather than their color, you are undermining the very definition of tokenism (which would claim that their color is paramount).
Second, you are conveniently forgetting that these supposed “tokens” are actually selling tons of books. Look at the numbers I already posted for Jemisin. Go look up the numbers for Tomi Adeyemi, who already won the Dragon YA award, and is getting tons of buzz for the next Hugo YA. Go look up the sales numbers for Nnedi Okorafor. These supposed tokens of yours are actually incredibly popular authors. You may not like them personally, but lots of other people do.
“And that is most likely why we see the same POC names popping up in awards all the time.”
Again — Tomi Adeyemi is a brand new author. Nisi Shawl was a brand new author in 2016. Yoon Ha Lee wrote his first novel in 2016. Carmen Maria Machado published her first collection of short stories in 2017. There are tons and tons of new POC authors who have been winning and/or getting nominated for literary awards.
“I know how they feel. I’m a WASP, mine is not well received either.”
You might like to hear what another broadly respected WASP has to say. Brandon Sanderson, one of the whitest of white bread sff authors and a good Mormon, made these very wise statements:
“Over the years, I’ve grown more and more aware of how the tone and biases of one like myself (white, male, straight) can itself be part of the problem.”
He also said, “a lot of religious people seem to want to ignore that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people exist, which I think is inherently evil. It is immoral to banish an entire group of people, and to pretend that they are not good people with good arguments, and lives and passions. To not represent that in my fiction would be something deeply immoral”.
You could learn a lot from Sanderson.
“These days I expect it is getting hard to find a Hispanic writing in English who checks off all the approved boxes.”
GIGO, Phantom.
Just a few currently successful Hispanic authors of spec fic getting considered for and/or winning awards:
Carmen Maria Machado
Daniel Jose Older
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Malka Older
Ty Franck
Juno Diaz
Manuel Gonzalez
There are more, of course. Try Google sometime if you want to actually learn something.
“After pre-criming a Mexican American author and kicking him out of the con”
Yeah, no. As has already been pointed out to you many times, JDA was booted because he had been acting like an ass all over the internet. Don’t forget his lovely tweet announcing “Commence Operation Troll the Shit Out of SJW Sci-Fi Authors On Twitter. If you want to participate, ping me.”
“Trump voter in San Francisco? He’s gotta go!”
You keep conveniently forgetting that the Prometheus Awards are handed out at Worldcon every year. You know, the **libertarian** sff awards? You can bet a lot of those guys are NOT dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. And yet, somehow, they manage to get into the con every year!
“They banned Del Arroz for on-line harassment? But they gave floppy camel dork a Hugo nomination this year for doing the same thing to the Sad Puppies. ”
Yeah, no. Posting a blog is not at all the same thing as trolling and harrassing people. I’m not really surprised that you refuse to see the difference, though.
And please, try to keep up. He’s going by Contentious Flumadiddle these days.
“China Mike has 287 Hugos, that’s all he ever does these days. Harass people.”
ROFLMAO.
That’s a fine lather you’ve worked yourself into, but it’s completely divorced from reality.
The latest File770 post? A long recap of one man’s Worldcon experience, including a bunch of pics of Amazing Magazine covers and pics of friends and similarly horrible harrassment of….. gee, nobody much.
The post before that? A celebration of the 10-year anniversary of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
Oooooo, how DARE Mike post such awful things??
Reality, Phantom. Give it a try sometime.
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 20:52:12
I generally get a good bump from a link from File 770, too. I think Mike has an interesting group to ride herd on.
About the direction of the discussion: Let’s please not put people down who aren’t here to defend themselves. There is a huge divide in the SFF community these days, and it would be better to make comments that bring people together.
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 23:54:47
Phantom, I made the observation that darker and more serious works tend to have the edge over lighter works at awards time. The doesn’t mean I agree with it. And in fact, I ranked the lighter (though not lightweight) “Provenance” and “A Closed and Common Orbit” above the very grim “The Obelisk Gate” and “The Stone Sky” respectively.
And while there is a real risk of minority authors being pushed to write stories that match a certain stereotype, note that the two Hugo nominated stories by Singaporean writer Vina Jie-Min Prasad were both fairly light (and one came in second in its category) and not particularly linked to her ethnicity or nationality. “A Series of Steaks” was set in Asia and has Asian characters, but the setting and ethnicity of the characters isn’t all that important to the story (unlike “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience (TM)”, where the protagonist’s race and ethnicity were extremely important). Meanwhile, the protagonist of “Fandom for Robots” is a robot and the ethnic background doesn’t play any role at all.
Also while I’m not always happy with the Hugo winners (this year, there were two winners I no awarded), I am a lot more happy with the overall quality of finalists than I was ten or fifteen years ago. This has less to do with politics than with the fact that the nominated works match my tastes more closely.
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Sep 29, 2018 @ 00:06:50
Linking to people’s own words on your own blog, which is what Mike and Cam do, isn’t harrassment. Or would you say that you harrassed the person who felt that John W. Campbell was the root of everything wrong with SF, because you linked to her post and disagreed with her?
However, sending e-mails and constantly tweeting at people after they have told you to stop is harrassment and that’s what JDA does/did. Also announcing that you want to cause trouble at an event you plan attend (which JDA did) is the sort of thing that will get you banned.
And while I don’t know about you, I don’t normally go around and tell people who I voted for at SF conventions. Last year’s WorldCon took place about a month before the German general election and I bet no one I met there could tell you who I voted for, because it just didn’t come up. So how would anybody even have known who JDA voted for if he hadn’t insisted on telling everybody?
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Sep 29, 2018 @ 01:00:59
Cora said: “Or would you say that you harrassed the person who felt that John W. Campbell was the root of everything wrong with SF, because you linked to her post and disagreed with her?”
I linked to her article and quoted exactly what she said, in context. And I did it once. That’s reporting.
But how about if I do it every couple of weeks for the next five years? Just follow her around the web and pounce every time she or anyone she knows makes a spelling mistake?
Not really reporting anymore, is it?
Cora also said: “Phantom, I made the observation that darker and more serious works tend to have the edge over lighter works at awards time. The doesn’t mean I agree with it.”
No? Good. That puts you in even closer agreement with The Phantom. A disquieting thought! ~:D
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Sep 26, 2018 @ 02:16:35
Tolkein had academic respectability. But Zelazny? Vet, into martial arts, went to bullfights, wrote about pale kings and princesses- he’d be in the outer darkness with Correia and VD.
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Sep 26, 2018 @ 09:18:53
Zelazny was already discredited by the late 80s (though still winning awards). I was surprised to see a review about that time that called his style “overwritten,” or something like that. As I recall, there was a strong push about that time to make everyone write in simple sentences to increase sales to poor readers. Hm.
Zelazny was actually an odd case. He did fall on the entertainment side of the community, but his style was also very literary. Then there’s the bullfight thing. All that would make him really hard to classify these days.
I guess you’re a fan? Me too. 🙂
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Sep 26, 2018 @ 10:03:53
There’s a lot of people who wouldn’t even get an agent these days. How about John W. Campbell?
Have you guys seen this? http://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/2018/09/everything-wrong-with-sff-in-one-post.html
Quote:
“Which is why I can’t help be reminded of the whole World Fantasy Award H.P. Lovecraft bust… thing that went on a few years ago. And, well… I’m not saying that maybe it’s time for a similar conversation about the Campbell, but…
Maybe it’s time for a conversation, y’know?”
There’s a whole industry of witch hunters out there looking for the next witch they’re going to burn. That’s one real reason why there’s no black authors and anthologists making The List. They don’t want to be “That Shirt!!!” guy.
The other reason is Return On Investment. What’s the payout on a Big Five published anthology that gets “push” to the retailers? You spend hundreds of hours over the course of a year pulling together an anthology, I’m going to take a wild guess and say you’d be lucky to make a dollar an hour take-home on it.
What’s the payout on an indy anthology with zero publisher input, zero push, only grass-roots marketing? I expect it would have a negative balance.
That’s the other reason. The number of people willing to swim upstream through a lava flow, just to self-publish stories for no money, is very small.
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Sep 26, 2018 @ 13:40:22
“What’s the payout on an indy anthology with zero publisher input, zero push, only grass-roots marketing? I expect it would have a negative balance.
That’s the other reason. The number of people willing to swim upstream through a lava flow, just to self-publish stories for no money, is very small.”
In my experience, the super-low overhead on an indie anthology means they are usually profitable, especially if they fish the KU pond for a 90-day period.
Separately, re: non-male POC editors: I have exactly one data point, so this is anecdotal, but here it is. I recently met a POC woman writer who’s won dozens of awards, including some really major ones. She was (she said) talked into editing an anthology, and now she says “never again. Too much trouble, too much headache, too much distraction from writing.”
How is that any different from finding white males to do the same job? I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t any different, except the numbers. I can’t be confident in generalizing from this one admittedly splendid example, but I still have a sneaking suspicion that there’s something to it. Where are they looking for these NMPOC editors? If they’re looking among NMPOC authors, they’re by nature competing with the work of writing that these authors really would rather do, I suspect. If they’re looking elsewhere–from some kind of editor track or pipeline?–then obviously the problem starts years ago, at the beginning of the track.
I’ve seen this with large organizations or communities trying to cope with sudden changes in society. There’s an outcry to get more NMPOCs into various positions to rectify perceived or real imbalance, and suddenly everyone’s competing to hire from the same small pool. It takes years to grow a good editor.
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Sep 26, 2018 @ 15:44:41
Okay, I looked to see who they were. As far as I can figure (across 2 categories) here were the women/POC:
Black Feathers, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Pegasus)
The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories, Mahvesh Murad & Jared Shurin, eds. (Solaris US; Solaris UK)
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2017 Edition, Paula Guran, ed. (Prime)
Datlow and Guran are both professional editors with long resumes. Guran has worked for Prime and also reviews for Locus (oops, conflict of interest there). Murad looks to be a young upstart, but Shurin is well-established.
I see a couple of three of these types of co-op projects around, where an older male editor picks up a rising star, likely to attract a particular audience. It does provide an avenue for new editors to get a foothold in professional circles–it’s the fast track, where all those other gals are struggling along in the shadows.
Neil Clarke and Jonathan Strahan both appeared twice in this list. Doesn’t Strahan write for Locus? Another conflict of interest?
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Sep 26, 2018 @ 16:02:08
Humans are creatures of habit. IMHO, it is one factor for this year’s three-peat* at the Hugos. It is also a factor for why The Collapsing Empire made it as a finalist where there were many other worthy works published last year.
I’m going out on a limb and predicting that the second novel in The Interdependency series makes it on the short list next year.
*I helped with the three-peat as I put at least two of those books first on my ballots at least a couple of times.
Regards,
Dann
I don’t think I’ve met anyone with a stronger work ethic than Ray Charles. – Clint Eastwood
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Sep 26, 2018 @ 16:57:04
@Dann —
“Humans are creatures of habit. IMHO, it is one factor for this year’s three-peat* at the Hugos. It is also a factor for why The Collapsing Empire made it as a finalist where there were many other worthy works published last year.”
I know I’ll regret jumping in here — but it’s a rainy day, and I’m avoiding things I should be doing, so….
It’s worth pointing out that all three of Jemisin’s Hugo novels, as well as Scalzi’s nominated book, are still vastly outselling folks like Correia. And we’re now a year to three years out from their publication dates, so that’s an impressive sign of their staying power. And Jemisin and Scalzi are both also ranked far above folks like Correia on the Amazon author rankings, as well. So there’s really no surprise that these books got nominated — they are all exceptionally popular.
As it happens, I recorded some of these rankings for several days back in May, and then again starting a couple of weeks ago. These are all from the “Paid in Kindle Store” category, no subcategories. I didn’t record all the books every time (Target-Rich Environment wasn’t published until Sep. 4, and Monster Hunter Saints wasn’t published until July), so you’ll see a few missing data points.
May 08 —
The Collapsing Empire — #784
The Fifth Season — #2,176
The Obelisk Gate — #2,918
The Stone Sky — #2,784
Monster Hunter Siege — #11,765
Monster Hunter Files — #15,687
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners — #29,082
May 16 —
The Collapsing Empire — #5,104
The Fifth Season — #2,440
The Obelisk Gate — #3,131
The Stone Sky — #3,658
Monster Hunter Siege — #11,865
Monster Hunter Files — #14,924
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners — #31,995
Sept 15 —
The Fifth Season — #757
The Obelisk Gate — #1111
The Stone Sky — #1447
Target-Rich Environment — #2498
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints — #12,475
Monster Hunter Seige — #21,071
Monster Hunter Files — #36,072
Sept 16 —
The Collapsing Empire — #151
The Fifth Season — #863
The Obelisk Gate — #1349
The Stone Sky — #1794
Six Wakes — #10,411
Provenance — #15,039
Target-Rich Environment — #3009
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints — #10,446
Monster Hunter Seige — #20,282
Monster Hunter Files — #39,835
Sept 17 —
The Collapsing Empire — #39 — yes, really, 39!
The Fifth Season — #843
The Obelisk Gate — #1332
The Fifth Season — #1519
Six Wakes — #11,792
Provenance — #13,780
Target-Rich Environment — #3139
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints — #11,538
Monster Hunter Seige — #17,668
Monster Hunter Files — #36,911
Sept 22 —
The Fifth Season — #952
The Obelisk Gate — #1659
The Stone Sky — #1726
Collapsing Empire — #1933
Six Wakes — #16,972
Provenance — #18,875
Target-Rich Environment — #4594
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints — #18,182
Monster Hunter Seige — #20,882
Monster Hunter Files — #33,824
Jemisin author rankings:
— Science fiction — #21
— Fantasy — #25
— Science fiction & fantasy — #38
John Scalzi rankings:
— Science fiction — #38
— Fantasy — doesn’t make the top 100
— Science fiction & fantasy — #87
Correia author rankings:
— Science fiction — doesn’t make the top 100
— Fantasy — #90
— Science fiction & fantasy — doesn’t make the top 100
Puppy types keep trying to claim that nobody reads Hugo-nominated books, or Hugo-nominated authors. But as these rankings show, that’s an obvious lie.
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Sep 26, 2018 @ 20:58:23
Contrarius, I suspect you’re putting too much emphasis on the Amazon rankings. They have to do with velocity, for example, as well as sales figures. In other words, an author that sells books at a faster rate will have a higher ranking. Winning a recent award would cause greater velocity.
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Sep 26, 2018 @ 21:14:01
@Lela —
“They have to do with velocity”
Well duh, Lela, that’s the point. Scalzi and Jemisin are both selling books at a much higher rate than Correia, and have done so consistently over a long period of time.
“Winning a recent award would cause greater velocity.”
First, they were selling at a much higher rate before the awards as well as after them. Second, we frequently hear from puppy types that the Hugo awards no longer have any effect on sales. So do they, or don’t they? You can’t have it both ways, Lela. 😉
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Sep 27, 2018 @ 00:18:05
I was disappointed by how weak “The Collapsing Empire” was (and I have liked other Scalzi works), but apparently plenty of people enjoyed the book. And yes, there were IMO better books which tackled similar themes, but Scalzi has a huge following and is popular.
And yes, I also fear that the sequel might make next year’s Hugo shortlist, especially since I can’t see all that many strong contenders this year. “Revenant Gun” by Yoon Ha Lee, “Trail of Lightning” by Rebecca Roanhorse and “The Calculating Stars” by Mary Robinette Kowal are likely contenders, maybe “Record of a Spaceborn Few” by Becky Chambers or “Vengeful” by V.A. Schwab as well (though Schwab has never had a Hugo or Nebula nomination before and the book is a sequel). But otherwise, I don’t see all that many likely contenders, so Scalzi might well make the ballot again.
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Sep 27, 2018 @ 01:03:35
IMHO the main weakness of The Collapsing Empire was way too much bitter snark. I think there were good bones underneath there, and I’ll be interested to see what he does with #2. Likewise Trail of Lightning IMHO is more promising in its indication of potential for future books in the series than as a standalone award contender. I haven’t read Calculating Stars yet; although I like Kowal’s writing well enough in general, her narration tends to give me hives, and since I do most of my “reading” through audio, I’ve been avoiding it so far.
But remember, there’s several months left in the year yet. I’ve got a buncha 2018 books I’m looking forward to trying, like Rosewater (not sure about this one’s eligibility for Hugos), Foundryside, The Philosopher’s Flight, Spinning Silver, The Poppy War, Circe, The Moons of Barsk, Cold Iron, Thin Air, The Iron Season (Helene Wecker’s book 2!), and several others. So many books, so little time!
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Sep 27, 2018 @ 07:45:31
@Contrarius
Note I used the phrase “one factor” in relation to human habits in general and reading books specifically.
I generally enjoy Mr. Scalzi’s work. I enjoyed The Collapsing Empire. Like others, I did not find it to be on the same level as most finalists; particularly this year.
Sales numbers are interesting, but they are not the only factor. A superior book can have lower sales because the author opted to self-publish or work through a smaller publishing house. IMHO, the Hugos should not be an all-star gala celebrating the works of the big 5. (I don’t think they are, for the record.)
I would gladly put all of my novel nominees up against the works that I put below No Award and believe that most voters would agree that they are superior. I don’t know that they would beat The Stone Sky or Six Wakes, but they are certainly at that level of writing.
For the record, I put at least two of N.J. Jemisin’s works at or near the top of my novel ballots. So I clearly enjoyed her work and found it to be superior to the other finalists.
@Cora
This is kind of illustrating my point. Absolutely all of those authors are known. They come from the same short list of authors that will always get reviewers eyes before a lesser known author such as Nicholas Eames, Damien Black, Emma Newman, or Sebastien de Castell. Time is finite. If reviewers are only going to read works from a limited number of authors, then we are less likely to read something from a new/fresh perspective.
—–
I’d like to give a shout out to Travis Corcoran for his The Powers of the Earth; this year’s Prometheus Award recipient. His novel was good, but not great. It was self-published. It shows.
Had he gotten a proper contract with one of the big 5…along with a good editor…this could have been a great novel easily worthy of Hugo consideration. He didn’t. It wasn’t.
In my experience, I see very few novels trading in the themes that Corcoran pursued in his novels coming from the big 5. They don’t seem to get as much play in the major reviews either.
The genre seems to be currently stuck in a rut that places greater emphasis on identity politics than other themes. IMHO, the result is that interesting works are getting less exposure due to the human habit of returning to the familiar.
Regards,
Dann
Progressives are not stupid and evil. Conservatives are not racists and misogynists.
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Sep 27, 2018 @ 10:46:31
@Dann —
“Note I used the phrase “one factor” in relation to human habits in general and reading books specifically.”
Absolutely. OTOH, if “habit” were truly much of a factor in getting books 2 and 3 awarded, then we should expect to have been seeing a lot more #2s and #3s awarded throughout the history of the Hugos. Instead, it’s actually quite rare. Orson Scott Card, for example. Lois McMaster Bujold.
“Sales numbers are interesting, but they are not the only factor. A superior book can have lower sales because the author opted to self-publish or work through a smaller publishing house.”
Again, absolutely. And again, this ties into puppy fantasies. I spent time debating with a puppy-type a couple of weeks ago who actually insisted that the only goal of an artist (writer or otherwise) should be to sell books as quickly as possible. In fact, that’s why I was looking up those Amazon sales numbers. When I pointed out that, by his standard, Correia was much more of a failure than either Jemisin or Scalzi, he shut up remarkably quickly.
But we know that in reality popular sales are only one measure of any book’s “value”.
“IMHO, the Hugos should not be an all-star gala celebrating the works of the big 5. (I don’t think they are, for the record.)”
I absolutely agree. In fact, I have suggested multiple times that adding an award for self-pubbed works might be a good idea. That or some other means of increasing exposure for self-pubbers would be a good thing!
“For the record, I put at least two of N.J. Jemisin’s works at or near the top of my novel ballots.”
For the record, I only voted her #1 for one of the three years, IIRC — and it wasn’t the first year.
“@Cora [….]”
“Absolutely all of those authors are known.”
Oh, cmon. Roanhorse only won the Campbell this year — she’s a complete newcomer! I can’t see that book getting nominated, but We Shall See.
“before a lesser known author such as Nicholas Eames”
Seriously? Eames’s books have been fun, but not awardable. In fact, I’m in the middle of Bloody Rose right now.
“Sebastien de Castell”
Same as above. Though his YA books may be good for the Lodestar. I’ve only read book 1 in his Spellslinger series so far, but I liked it a lot. 🙂
“If reviewers are only going to read works from a limited number of authors”
I’m rolling my eyes at you now.
You know which author seems poised to win the YA award this coming year? Tomi Adeyemi. You know how many novels she’s published so far? Exactly one.
Nonetheless, I agree with you that any efforts to increase the exposure of new authors is a Good Thing.
“The genre seems to be currently stuck in a rut that places greater emphasis on identity politics than other themes.”
Every social era has its favorite themes. Free love, Vietnam war, Communism, whatever. Civil rights and diversity happen to be the themes for the current period.
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Sep 27, 2018 @ 21:24:24
@Contrarius
I’d forgotten about “The Poppy War” and “Spinning Silver”. “Spinning Silver” is definitely a likely contender and R.F. Kuang is at least a likely Campbell contender, whether “The Poppy War” makes the shortlist or not. “Foundryside” may well be a contender as well, since Hugo voters seem to like Robert Jackson Bennett.
I also agree that the constant snark undermined the good ideas underlying “The Collapsing Empire” (and I normally like snark). It also doesn’t help that K.B. Wagers did “Unwanted daughter inherits galactic empire and has to deal with massive crisis and assassination attempts” so much better in the same year.
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Sep 27, 2018 @ 21:53:27
@Dann
Yes, several of these authors are known and popular with the Hugo electorate, plus their books got a lot of buzz, which is why they’re likely contenders. However, as Contrarius pointed out, Rebecca Roanhorse is a new author and Trail of Lightning is her first novel. And while Mary Robinette Kowal has won the Campbell and a short fiction Hugo, she has never yet had one of her novels nominated.
Two of my 2018 best novel nominees, Provenance and Raven Strategem, made the Hugo shortlist. Like you, I also think that my other three nominees would have been just as deserving, but they didn’t make it. Ada Palmer’s Seven Surrenders at least made the longlist, Beyond the Empire by K.B. Wagers and Breach of Containment by Elizabeth Bonesteel didn’t even make that. And while K.B. Wagers at least got some buzz, hardly anybody even seems to know that Elizabeth Bonesteel exists. We can’t expect that the Hugo electorate shares our tastes in every respect. And every year there are works on the Hugo ballot that make me groan “Oh dear, not him/her/that again” or that make me groan “Oh dear, so and so has a book out, so I’ll probably have to suffer through that on the Hugo shortlist, because they get nominated every time”. But other people obviously like those works.
I don’t think that Nicholas Eames, Sebastien de Castell or Emma Newman are particularly obscure. Emma Newman actually did win a Hugo for best fancast and was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, so she’s hardly overlooked. And Eames and de Castell write epic fantasy of the grim and gritty type, which isn’t all that popular with Hugo voters. They’re more of a fit for the David Gemmell Award.
Regarding this year’s Prometheus winner, if that’s the book I’m thinking about, I checked out the blurb and was immediately put off by a case of really bad science (using rusty seas-going vessels to transport tunnel boring equipment to Mars or the Moon or somewhere – nope, this won’t work). The Prometheus Award often does transcend its rather narrow political scope, e.g. the Johanna Sinisalo novel that won last year was quite interesting. This one, however, just sounded painful.
For the record, all three installments of N.K. Jemisin’s Hugo winning trilogy landed somewhere in the middle of my ballot.
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Oct 02, 2018 @ 10:44:17
@Cora
Again, I think you are supporting my basic contention. Eames, de Castell, and Newman all lack one thing; repeated exposure by influential reviewers. While some of that is “luck”, some of it is a product of the genre currently favoring themes and/or authors that are not Eames, de Castell, and Newman. (FTR, Ms. Newman’s work would probably resonate well with current trends.)
While I am usually satisfactorily resigned to the opinion that my preferences just aren’t shared by the rest of the nominators, this year was particularly bad. A more widely read group of nominators would have come up with a better group of finalists. It takes a certain amount of dedication to break free of the habit of reading a subset of genre authors and encounter a broader range of the genre.
That better group of finalists need not include anything I like, but a broader reading range is required.
I focused on the novel, graphic novel, and fancasting categories. 2018 was definitely a step backward from 2017 in all three categories.
You are correct. That book was The Powers of the Earth. The old sea-going vessels were used as a sort of camouflage and a way of getting the tunnel boring equipment off of the Earth without the interference of various port authorities.
The largely unexplained engines used gravitational fields to propel the ships from the Earth to the Moon and vice-versa. The ships have small maneuvering engines, but not enough horsepower to make big changes to their trajectory. That has an impact on the story as when the ship leaves the Earth (or Moon) impacts when it arrives at the Moon (or Earth).
Given how often FTL drives are presumed in sci-fi, this actually was a step up.
However, it did have other painful elements in it. A good editor might have been able to help the author go from “good” to “great”.
Regards,
Dann
The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing. – Isaac Asimov
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Oct 02, 2018 @ 15:28:02
@Dann —
“Eames, de Castell, and Newman all lack one thing; repeated exposure by influential reviewers.”
I am mystified by your apparent leap from “the Hugo voters didn’t vote for Newman, Eames, or de Castell” to “the Hugo voters didn’t read Newman, Eames, or de Castell”.
Eames in particular was a sensation last year amongst the reading folks I hang around with on the net. Kings of the Wyld has 9680 reviews on GR. Lots and lots of people read him. Similarly with the Greatcoats books, though in his case it was book 4 that was published last year, and books that far into a series very rarely get nominated. But as Cora already noted, those are both somewhat grim fantasy sword-and-sorcery type books, and those just aren’t a fit for what Hugo readers are usually looking for — with or without reviews. As she also noted, they are much more suited to something like the Gemmell awards.
Newman is a different case. I haven’t read her work yet, but she did get some mentions on File 770 discussions. It looks like she’s been a busy bee in terms of publishing, but she has the huge problem (in terms of Hugos) of being British. Despite the Hugos being presented at Worldcon with the implied “World” inclusiveness, you and I both know very well that they lean heavily American. Also, her 2017 books were not highly rated on GR. The highest did pass 4 stars, but again that was a book 5 — late in a series.
“A more widely read group of nominators”
Claim not at all in evidence. You seem to be assuming that people who didn’t vote for these authors didn’t read these authors, but your conclusion does not follow from your premises.
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Oct 02, 2018 @ 15:54:11
@Contrarius
My claim is that those that read those authors are not Hugo nominators and that the awards suffer as a result.
IMHO, a larger group of nominators will strengthen the short list.
Regards,
Dann
I am the American Dream. I am the epitome of what the American Dream basically said. It said you could come from anywhere and be anything you want in this country. That’s exactly what I’ve done. – Whoopi Goldberg
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Oct 02, 2018 @ 16:30:40
It’s a good question how many people quit nominating for the Hugo’s as a result of Fandom’s reaction to the Puppy Slates. My guess is about 100, since that’s the number that were voting Vox Day #1 for Best Editor, but that’s little more than a guess. A group of 100 people nominating very different works from everyone else could certainly add a work to the list of finalists, especially under EPH.
It does look as though the net effect of the whole affair was a significant increase in the number of people who nominate for the Hugos.
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Oct 02, 2018 @ 16:42:52
@Dann —
“My claim is that those that read those authors are not Hugo nominators and that the awards suffer as a result.”
Well, I for one handily disprove your claim on two of your three named authors. 😉
And if you ask around places like File 770 that contain a high percentage of Hugo voters, I bet you’ll find that a lot of them have read all three.
“IMHO, a larger group of nominators will strengthen the short list.”
On this, we absolutely agree. For one thing, it irritates me that there are often so many more voters on the final ballot than on the nominations — get out there and nominate, people! But this is an entirely different issue than unsupported claims about nominators who supposedly haven’t read widely enough.
(As an aside, I wish we could make enough time in the year-long voting schedule to have two rounds of nominations — there are just too many books out there to reasonably narrow down the finalists from a bazillion books to six in one round of voting.)
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Sep 27, 2018 @ 12:01:05
With the SFF magazines, there’s a natural filtering process whereby authors submit stories to the best magazine first and work their way down the list until someone accepts it or until they stoop to submitting it to a non-SFWA-qualifying magazine. The result is that if you try to start a new magazine, you’re going to get the stories that everyone else has passed on.
For the top-tier magazines, I recommend about 1/6 of the stories, recommend against about 1/6 and call the other 2/3 “average.” But if I regularly reviewed the other magazines, I’d typically recommend against 1/2 to 2/3 of the stories, and I’d rarely recommend any of them. (I’ve tried the experiment a couple of times now.) It would look like I was picking on them.
I encourage magazines (or readers) outside our list of 12 to draw my attention to special stories–ones they think are outstanding. If I have time, I’ll read them, but I won’t post a review if it’s not at least 3 stars. This is more or less how we expanded our original list of 5 magazines to the current 12. But it’s been a year or so since the last time I even got such a request. (Maybe I should post an article about it reminding people.)
That means it’s very, very hard to start a new SFF magazine and make it competitive with the top tier. Maybe if you paid 25-cents a word or more you could do it. That doesn’t mean the system excludes black editors per se–it pretty much excludes all new editors.
I do think it’s possible to imagine an alternative system that wouldn’t work that way, but it would be a radical departure from how magazines or anthologies work today. Maybe I should write an article about that too. 🙂
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Sep 27, 2018 @ 18:48:30
Thanks for checking in, Greg. I used to start with the pro magazines, but the slush piles are huge and the response time in many cases is totally unreasonable. Mostly I avoid submitting to them unless the story seems an unusually good fit.
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Sep 27, 2018 @ 21:57:09
That’s not necessarily a modern phenomenon, though. the reason John W. Campbell published so many of the top stories and writers of the 1930s and 1940s is not just that he was a good editor, but also that Street & Smith paid pretty well and – more importantly – promptly, whereas e.g. Amazing and Weird Tales paid only when they felt like it. So of course, Campbell got first pick.
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 09:32:58
Cora said: “…Street & Smith paid pretty well and – more importantly – promptly…”
You mean that when an editor and a company act in a businesslike fashion, they get the best stories? Yeah. That would seem to be a thing.
My experience of the publishing industry so far is that they don’t answer their phones or their email. When they do, it is only to take your money. They treat authors like sheep to be fleeced.
It is no surprise that Indy is flourishing.
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 22:52:49
Just for fun, I converted Contrarius’s numbers from sales ranks to relative sales using a variation on the method I explained elsewhere. I changed any rank smaller than (i.e. better than) 1,000 to 1000 because the formula breaks down at the top of the range, so this calculation disadvantages Scalzi and Jemisin.
These are only relative sales, so I summed all the Correa books together and set that to 1.0. So these numbers are all multiples of Correa.
The Collapsing Empire 8.70
The Fifth Season 6.07
The Obelisk Gate 3.97
The Stone Sky 3.04
Six Wakes 0.08
Provenance 0.06
Monster Hunter Siege 0.10
Monster Hunter Files 0.05
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners 0.01
Target-Rich Environment 0.76
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints 0.08
So assuming these points are representative, 75% of Larry’s sales in this period came from one book: “Target-Rich Environment.”
Jemisin outsold Larry by a factor of over 13. Scalzi’s “Collapsing Empire” alone outsold him by a factor of more than 8. (Likely much more, since, as I mentioned, I had to truncate the formula.)
“Six Wakes” and “Provenance” were relatively unsuccessful–they were just as bad as “Monster Hunter Files” and “Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints.”
Of course, to do this right you’d want to track books daily from their first day on sale and then sum over hundreds of data points. You’d also want some actual sales numbers for a few books so we could calibrate and get actual sales numbers, not relative ones.
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 22:59:55
@Greg —
That’s cute, but if I understand what you’ve done it’s pretty much meaningless. For one thing, you’re comparing sales of five books against individual books; and for another, Larry has more books than that available for purchase. I only included his most recent four books to show his highest sales rankings.
It would be more relevant to pick his single highest selling book and compare the others to that — or take all his books together, and compare them to all the books written by Jemisin and all the books written by Scalzi. Lafferty and Leckie are fairly new authors, so they don’t have a big back catalog to compare to.
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 23:17:36
Oh it’s definitely not meaningless. 🙂 It shows the relative sales of the books listed on the days you recorded them totaled across the period. (I’ve got them per day too, of course.) I could easily rescale it to make Target-Rich Environment = 1.0, but, of course, you could do that too with the data above.
The question is whether is shows anything interesting, and I think it does: what it shows is that, for the dates you looked at and the books you looked at, Scalzi and Jemisin were selling at a far greater rate than any of the others, and any error in the calculation will have made them look less successful than they really are. These numbers are conservative.
Assuming there was nothing special about the dates and that these really were Larry’s best-selling books at the time, it definitely destroys the claim that Larry gets bigger sales than Scalzi and Jemisin. Jemisin’s three-year-old book was beating the snot out of Larry’s latest.
Sure, if you went all the way through Larry’s backlist, you’d definitely scare up more sales. But if these were his most-popular books, then I wouldn’t expect that to add even 30% to his total, given how fast they drop off.
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 23:30:07
@Greg —
“Oh it’s definitely not meaningless. 🙂 It shows the relative sales of the books listed on the days you recorded them totaled across the period.”
I think the part that was really making me squint was when you started saying things like:
1. “75% of Larry’s sales in this period came from one book: “Target-Rich Environment”
— Well, no, because Larry was selling several more books than just those four/five.
and
2. “Jemisin outsold Larry by a factor of over 13. ”
Well, no, you can’t say that from these numbers — because both Jemisin and Larry have more books available for sale than the ones I listed.
And so on.
“Scalzi and Jemisin were selling at a far greater rate than any of the others”
Well, yes, but we already knew that from the original numbers. 😉
“it definitely destroys the claim that Larry gets bigger sales than Scalzi and Jemisin.”
But again — we already knew that from the original numbers.
“Jemisin’s three-year-old book was beating the snot out of Larry’s latest.”
Which I found quite amusing. And again — the original ranking numbers already told us that.
Also, did you notice how quickly the sales for Target Rich Environment seem to be dropping?
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Sep 28, 2018 @ 23:45:56
Yeah, the broader claims would need more data to substantiate them. They’re things the data suggests and which would be worth exploring in more detail, perhaps.
I don’t think most people have an intuitive feeling for how big a difference the sales ranks imply, so I think the sales numbers (even relative ones) are valuable.
I measure the drop-off in sales of “Target-Rich Environment” as follows:
9/4/2018 Published
9/15/2018 1.00
9/16/2018 0.73
9/17/2018 0.67
9/22/2018 0.35
9/28/2018 0.26
David VanDyke might be able to tell us if that’s surprising or not. I’ve been wondering where pre-orders go, and I’ll bet they result in an initial bump in sales rank that takes about a month to go away, so that may be all we’re seeing here. It’d be a good question whether it continues to decline through October.
Past October, we’ll start to see the Christmas effect. Larry’s book may not be a big Christmas item, but the Christmas surge is likely to mess up my algorithm for at least a few weeks.
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Sep 29, 2018 @ 10:41:22
@Greg —
“I’ve been wondering where pre-orders go”
I think they’re reported as regular sales at the time of pre-order, aren’t they? That’s how we get phenomena like the book Fear getting to #1 even before it’s published — the pre-orders got it there.
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Sep 29, 2018 @ 10:50:46
Speaking of new releases, Martha Wells must be killing everybody with the Murderbot Diaries. Exit Strategy is due out October 2 and the Kindle version is sitting at #1 in “hard SF”, audiobook at #12 and the hardback at #16. This regardless of a pretty high price.
The different formats and categories is another complication on figuring sales ratings. For example, The Stone Sky comes in four different formats and is ranked differently in each. I notice independent authors tend to have repeated releases for these different formats because of the way sales tend to drop off sharply.
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Sep 29, 2018 @ 11:04:11
@Lela —
“Speaking of new releases, Martha Wells must be killing everybody with the Murderbot Diaries.”
It kills me that Amazon is expecting us to pay the full novel-length price for these novella-length stories. I’m waiting for sales, but I may have to give in eventually. I’ve read #1, of course.
“Exit Strategy is due out October 2 and the Kindle version is sitting at #1, audiobook at #12 and the hardback at #16. This regardless of a pretty high price.”
Errr, no they aren’t.
Remember, when I posted those book rankings I was listing all of those numbers from the same category — “Paid in Kindle Store” — with no subcategories.
Under Paid in Kindle Store: Exit Strategy — #1452 (the hardcover is #6544 in books)
We have to be careful to compare books using the SAME category across the board, so we don’t get into an apples/oranges problem.
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Sep 29, 2018 @ 11:41:36
Yes. The only category that my algorithm works with is the one called “Paid in Kindle Store.”
Murderbot looks good today (I see what you mean about the preorders; somehow I never noticed that before.)
All Systems Red 881 (53%)
Artificial Condition 2,041 (12%)
Rogue Protocol 2,015 (13%)
Exit Strategy 1,452 (22%)
(I’ve estimated the relative sales as a percentage of the total for all 4 Murderbot novellas.)
The first one is the cheapest ($3.99 vs. $9.99 for the other three) so that partly accounts for the bigger sales, but I think it’s a good sign for her that so many new readers are starting her series.
Given the pricing, she must be making a killing. A novel this size might go for $9.99 but she’s collecting over three times that. (Worth it for Murderbot, but still.) I’ll bet there’s an omnibus edition next year for $9.99 though.
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Sep 29, 2018 @ 11:31:51
@Lela —
You edited your post to read: “Exit Strategy is due out October 2 and the Kindle version is sitting at #1 in “hard SF”, audiobook at #12 and the hardback at #16. ”
This edited statement is still inaccurate.
The book is listed at #1 in NEW RELEASES in hard sf — meaning it is only looking at books released within the last couple of months. That’s quite a different thing than “hard sf” in general, and totally different than looking at all the paid books in the Kindle store.
Again — we need to be really careful when comparing books to compare them all in the SAME category across the board.
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Sep 29, 2018 @ 12:07:34
@Cathodus. Thinking about “Target-Rich Environment” again, given what we know about the pre-orders plus the fact that sales rank is averaged over a period of (I suspect) about 4 weeks, that suggests that most of the people who wanted it, pre-ordered it.
Today’s rank of 5245 corresponds to about 20% of the sales for “Rogue Protocol” (MurderBot #3) which sells for the same price but has been out for many months now.
We should watch how Exit Strategy does over the next few weeks.
If you want to do estimates yourself, today’s formula (in Excel) is
=EXP(LN(sales_rank)*-1.7203+30.0188)
For 5245, that should result in 4344312.147. Again, don’t worry about what the absolute value of the number means; just use it for relative comparisons.
The formula does change from day to day, but usually only a little. (Yesterday it was -1.7332 and 30.2058.)
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Sep 30, 2018 @ 15:48:12
A few additional rankings today — as always, Paid in Kindle Store. The first group is a few Hugo (incl YA) hopefuls by women and POC, plus Scalzi; the second group is some Hugo, Nebula, and Locus (incl YA) nominees from last year by women and POC, plus Scalzi and Jemisin; the third group is Correia’s five latest books.
**Hugo Hopefuls for 2019**
Circe, Madeline Miller — #965
Artificial Condition, Martha Wells — #1,865
Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi — #2,015
Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells — #2,133
Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik — #3,578
Night and Silence, Seanan McGuire — #3,858
Vox, Christina Dalcher — #6,241
Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse — #6,478
The Flowers of Vashnoi, Lois McMaster Bujold — #9,665
European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, Theodora Goss — #11,020
The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal — #12,152
The Cruel Prince, Holly Black — #12,239
Binti: The Night Masquerade, Nnedi Okorafor — #13,977
Head On, John Scalzi — #14,117
Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee — #18,566
The Poppy Wars, RF Kuang — #20,965
The Girl in the Green Silk Gown, Seanan McGuire — #25,191
Space Opera, Catherynne Valente — #36,079
**Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Nominees from 2018, plus Jemisin winners**
The City of Brass, SA Chakraborty — #927
All Systems Red, Martha Wells — #1,060
The Fifth Season, NK Jemisin — #1,113
The Obelisk Gate, NK Jemisin — #1,646
The Stone Sky, NK Jemisin — #1,727
Persepolis Rising, James SA Corey — #3,649
The Collapsing Empire, John Scalzi — #5,364
Behind Her Eyes, Sarah Pinborough — #8,419
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, Theodora Goss — #13,292
Binti: Home, Nnedi Okorafor — #13,925
Provenance, Ann Leckie — #15,148
Autonomous, Anna Lee Newitz — #15,959
Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty — #17,744
Jade City, Fonda Lee — #25,773
Raven Stratagem, Yoon Ha Lee — #26,437
The Black Tides of Heaven, JY Yang — #28,489
The Changeling, Victor LaValle — #34,214
Winter Tide, Ruthana Emrys — #37,848
Summer in Orcus, T. Kingfisher — #44,586
**Most Recent Books by Larry Correia**
Target-Rich Environment — #7,452
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints — #11,701
Monster Hunter Files — #21,118
Monster Hunter Siege — #25,138
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners — #39,464
Please, let’s not hear any more horsehockey about supposed tokenism and about how award-favored works supposedly don’t sell in the real world. Of course, not ALL of the nominated books sell well — but obviously, a lot of them do, including a lot written by women and POC.
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Sep 30, 2018 @ 16:36:32
As I count it, there are ten POC in this list of about 40 books, mostly the same POC this year as last. Just because N.K. Jemisin appears in the list three times and Yoon Ha Lee twice doesn’t mean there’s diversity.
Here’s the definition from Wikipedia: Tokenism is the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to be inclusive to members of minority groups, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of racial or sexual equality within a workforce.
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Sep 30, 2018 @ 19:02:32
@Lela —
“As I count it, there are ten POC in this list of about 40 books”
So what? After all — if POC represent 50% of the population, we wouldn’t call them minorities. 😉
In order to even START supporting your claim about tokenism, you first must prove that POCs form a lower percent of the nominee population than of the overall sff writing population at large. But, of course, you have shown us no evidence of that whatsoever.
Then, AFTER you do that, you must also prove that these supposed “tokens” are being picked for their identities rather than for their success. And I’ve already helped to disprove that one for you — these nominees are actually quite successful.
Keep trying, Lela. But remember that pesky GIGO principle — if you start with garbage, then garbage is all you’ll end up with.
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Sep 30, 2018 @ 20:07:34
Current US demographics are about 60/40. This is a little hard to interpret because Hispanics may or may not be classified as white, and Arabic peoples are classified white, even though they’re often considered POC.
I agree there should be studies that check not only the demographics of writers but also readers. After complaints a couple of years back that publication of black authors should match their demographic, nobody really knew what that was.
I don’t understand your last point about identity and tokenism. I just asked whether Luhrs’ observation is an indication that its going on in the SFF community, and especially in the awards cycles.
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Sep 30, 2018 @ 21:20:37
@Lela —
“Current US demographics are about 60/40.”
US demographics are irrelevant here. After all, a bricklayer or street sweeper isn’t going to be nominated for an sff award (unless they write on the side, of course). The relevant demographics are specifically **sff writer** demographics — and you haven’t provided any of those at all.
“I don’t understand your last point about identity and tokenism.”
That does not make my point less valid, of course.
“Tokenism” means that the supposed “token” has been chosen for their identity rather than for their ability. But I have already shown you that these writers are very capable — they are good sellers. Therefore, there is no sign that they have been chosen for their identity as opposed to their ability.
“I just asked whether Luhrs’ observation is an indication that its going on in the SFF community, and especially in the awards cycles.”
So far as I can see, Luhrs didn’t say anything about supposed “tokenism” at all — merely that the field of sff as a whole still needs to work harder to encourage women and POCs in the field. There’s nothing surprising about that.
As for known writers reappearing in the awards — well, sure. That’s been true since the beginning of awards. Heinlein, Card, Bujold, and so on and so forth — the most prominent writers in the field do tend to reappear, whatever race or gender they may be. That has nothing whatsoever to do with tokenism.
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Sep 30, 2018 @ 21:27:02
I’m glad to hear you’re not concerned about it. Everything is fine, right?
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Sep 30, 2018 @ 22:38:19
Now you’re just making stuff up, Lela. Please stop that.
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