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The Subway Test

~ Joe Pitkin's stories, queries, and quibbles regarding the human, the inhuman, the humanesque.

The Subway Test

Tag Archives: marketing

An Anthological Appeal!

04 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by Joe Pitkin in My Fiction, Stories

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"best of" anthologies, marketing, sci-fi, that strumpet Fame

Happy New Year, gentle readers!

As many of you know, my work will be coming out in three anthologies over the next few months: Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy and Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction; both of them are anthologizing my story “The Daughters of John Demetrius.”

ECLECTICA LOGO

 

The third of the anthologies is a different case: in honor of its 20 year publishing history, Eclectica magazine is publishing an anthology of the best speculative fiction to appear there–including my story “Better than Google.”

Eclectica’s publisher, Tom Dooley, is hoping to move beyond the print-on-demand market and actually place the book in bookstores. To that end, he has a Kickstarter campaign to gin up support. If you are a fan or a generous well-wisher, please consider contributing!

The part that blows my mind is that Eclectica is a magazine that has been published online since 1996. I was getting on the internet using a 14,400 baud modem back in those days. Eclectica was some of the best literature around, all at 14.4 kilobytes (yes, kb) per second.

I’ve still been sitting through a dry spell with my new material–it’s been several months since I’ve had a new story picked up. But keep watching the skies–I’ll have more stories out soon.

 

Building Worlds

05 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Dungeons and Dragons, Musings and ponderation

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Tags

fantasy, maps, marketing, mythopoesis, sci-fi, utopia

When I was  in sixth grade, I made a map out of my imagination. I drew it in colored pencils on six pieces of graph paper which I connected with masking tape, so that I could fold it like a codex or some mystical road map. While I’ve largely forgotten what it looked like, I remember that I had drawn a continent which clustered around an inner sea, a dragon-infested Mediterranean. The land was divided into kingdoms and empires, a crazy-quilt of realms filled with Dungeons and Dragons creatures, which is to say filled with a Lord of the Rings-fanboy descendants of Tolkien’s elves and dwarves and orcs.

map_of_earthsea

A Map of Earthsea, by Liam Davis, after Ursula Le Guin

 

What first drew me to fantasy and science fiction as a reader, and as a gamer and as a writer, was the world building. I’m reminded of the words of a friend’s son who said that you can tell if a book is going to be good if there’s a map at the beginning of it. When I read fantasy as a kid, I could put up with a lot of weak writing–poor characterization, wooden dialogue, tedious exposition–if there was a map in the book that represented a world that I would want to exist.

And yet, a map is also judged by its verisimilitude. Middle Earth, Earthsea, The Hyborian Age all drew me in with their plausibility: however oddly shaped the continents, those drawings seemed like maps of the actual world from a much earlier time, or a map of what might be the world. A map with no connection to a world that the reader does know is a useless map.

That’s the tricky thing about world building. There is no building a truly new world, untethered from any human world. Every map we draw, every pantheon of ancient deities we imagine for a game world or a novel, is a variation on a theme that was laid down in the real world. The Shire looks a lot like rural England. Earthsea is an imagined Bronze Age for the San Juan Islands. Gormenghast is the drama of a noble English house played out in Beijing’s Forbidden City. The City in Little, Big is New York City. The challenge with such world-building is to arrange these oddly-lensed realities into a world which seems totally distinct.

There’s a tension in fantasy and science fiction–as there is with all art–between the craving for the new and the comfort of the familiar. Audiences long for the new world, that giddy disorientation that comes from reading of an unfamiliar hero or a far country and knowing that these people and places fit into a coherent world that the book is slowly uncovering. But readers also crave the comfort of recognition, in the original sense of the word recognize: to know again. That is, readers are still happy to pay for something that reminds them of Lord of the Rings or Alice in Wonderland, no matter how many others complain about how much derivative fiction is out there. A book with a map that looks something like the real world is far likelier to appeal to readers than a book with a map of a totally new place, a place so different as to be unrecognizable. But some, thank goodness, can’t rest until they find the totally new place.

 

 

Anthologies to Watch For

23 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by Joe Pitkin in My Fiction

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anthology!, marketing, sci-fi

I may be having trouble getting my new work picked up for publication, but I got news yesterday that my already-published work will be coming out in two different anthologies. Gardner Dozois has decided to pick up “The Daughters of John Demetrius” for The Year’s Best Science Fiction #33, and Tom Dooley will be using “Better than Google” in Eclectica Magazine’s 20th anniversary speculative fiction anthology. Seriously, there’s an online magazine celebrating its 20th anniversary next year.

I’ll post more particulars as the dates approach–thanks for reading!

The Banality of Self-Promotion vs. the Bogosity of Being Too Cool

15 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Uncategorized

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Tags

fandom, marketing, self-googling, that strumpet Fame

Photo credit: David Goehring

Photo credit: David Goehring

I’m a writer. Becoming a writer was actually a lot simpler than I had imagined when I was a youth: basically I just wrote and read and wrote until I felt ok calling myself a writer. I’ve had a few minor crises about it–a crisis of genre, a struggle coming to terms with rejection–but becoming a writer was actually a breeze in most ways.

One way becoming a writer hasn’t been easy, though, has been learning to backburner a whole skillet of other interests in order to make time for writing. Making music, playing sports, continuing education, gaming–all these activities are sadly diminished for the time being and possibly for a long time to come, so that I can scrape together a few hours per week to write. But I’m even ok with that–being a writer means writing, after all, so to call myself a writer I do have to actually make the time to write.

And here’s the part about being a writer that I struggle with still: striking a balance between writing and self-promotion. I don’t have an agent. I don’t make enough from my writing to pay an agent. So if I want anyone to read my work, I have to send it out to magazines, or read it to people, or have someone want to read it for their podcast. And that takes a lot of time, time that I’d love to spend on the actual writing.

I do want people to read my stuff–I’m not Emily Dickinson. It took me a while to realize that the desire to have readers is different from (or at least doesn’t have to be the same as) the desire to be famous. I’m not nearly as interested in being famous. But I do love to have readers. As one of my ESL students wrote in an essay years ago, “when I am writing to you, I am saying please understand me.”

How much time should an artist spend on self-promotion? I’ve just spent a whole weekend sending stories out, trolling through Duotrope, writing a blog post about self-promotion. And not writing stories. How much time do you spend at your work (not necessarily your job, but your work)? How much time do you spend talking about your work?

On Rejection

05 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Uncategorized

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marketing, prom dates, that strumpet Fame

I have an account on Duotrope that keeps tabs on how frequently magazines and websites pick up my stories for publication. Depending on where I’ve sent stuff and how recently I’ve gotten a story accepted somewhere, my acceptance rate oscillates somewhere between 5% and 15%. Which is to say, from a glass-half-empty angle, that 17-19 out of every 20 submissions I make get rejected.

And that’s ok. It took me 2687821250_097aee5078_ma while to understand that rejection is the typical outcome for submissions, even for writers much better than me. I know that every book and class on creative writing includes that warning early on: get used to rejection. But, like a lot of people, I saw those warnings (maybe 34 of those warnings) and yet still harbored the sneaking suspicion that my work was so special that somehow I wouldn’t need to get used to rejection.

I can say now that I have been used to rejection for a good long while. The part that I didn’t anticipate, though, is that you can get used to rejection and still find it painful. Having a story rejected is a little like being told “no, I will not go to prom with you.” The nineteenth time I hear that isn’t nearly as painful as the first time I heard it, but I still really hoped that the nineteenth person was going to say yes.

All of this is a long way of saying that I understand why people self-publish. I’ve sure considered self-publishing, too. But why not? What do I lose by forgoing the rejection process? What do I gain by sending work out to gatekeepers I don’t know and who are almost certain to reject it?

And you, reader? What do you lose? What do you gain?

Is Birdman Sci-Fi?

25 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Uncategorized

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Tags

marketing, sci-fi

Birdman has had quite an effect on me since my wife and I saw it last week. While it didn’t quite hold together as totally as I’d hoped, it’s a truly ambitious movie. See it if you want to watch some very talented artists really putting themselves out there.

The movie got me thinking (again) about genre: is Birdman a sci-fi movie? I’ll avoid dropping any spoilers, but much of the movie seems to deal with what Philip K. Dick scholars call “The Reality Problem.” I spent a long time wondering whether Michael Keaton’s character, Riggan Thomson, was delusional or whether the reality being presented to the audience—Riggan’s powers, his visions, his constant companion and interlocutor—should be taken at face value. And is a movie only science fiction when the character really has telekinetic powers? If we decide Riggan was delusional, does Birdman become an art film instead?

I know terms like “science fiction” and “art film” are really marketing categories designed to sell movies to target demographics. And I hate how habituated I am to those categories. But that doesn’t mean the categories are meaningless: there is such a category as “science fiction.” Where does Birdman fit? And what other recent movie seems this hard to categorize?

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