The Spindle's End

The Science Fiction Writers of America presented this year’s round of Nebula Awards and a few unrelated awards over the weekend in Cape Canaveral.  The winners were:

All of these awards deserve some talk, but I’m going to narrow my focus now to the Andre Norton Award because this year’s winner was such a game changer.  A few years ago Valente had just started making a living as a full time writer when her husband lost his job unexpectedly due to the recession.  A few months later, she decided to be innovative and daring.  She announced that she was writing a book that would only appear online, for free, with a donation button so that her readers could pay what they felt like for it, hoping to add at least a little extra cash to help pay the bills.  There was no editor involved, no agent, no publishing house.  Just Valente and her audience.  These sorts of projects are known as crowd funding, and until now they’ve received very little attention or recognition.  Not only did Valente find a significant audience for her work online, but she just won the premiere award for teen/young adult science fiction and fantasy in the country with it.  It is believed that hers is the first such work to win any major literary award.

Not only is it interesting to see a crow funded project like this rewarded, but it’s also one of the rare times a self published work in any medium has been so successful and rewarded.  Valente, whether she set out to or not, has proved that the publishing world is changing.  Now, she herself has said that she does not think that agents, editors, and publishing houses are going to go away because the fill very needed roles.  But Fairyland has illustrated just how powerful the web is.  I should also point out that Valente had much better odds of pulling this off than the average joe doing crowd funding.  Valente was already a traditionally published author with several books under her belt when she started this project.  She had an established blog and a community of fellow bloggers to rely on to spread the word of her new book.  Most people don’t have that.

And while I’m going on about how publishing is changing, I’d also like to look at two of the Solstice Award Winners, which honors those who have had a significant impact on science fiction and fantasy.  Tom Doherty is the founder, President and Publisher of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, which publishes books under the imprints Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape and Tor Teens.  Now a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck Publishers, Tor is one of the largest publishers of SF/F, and has published more award winners in this category than any other house.  Mr. Doherty previously worked at the publisher at Ace, another premiere science fiction/fantasy publishing house.  Donald A. Wollheim helped develop Ace as a paperback science fiction house until starting his own house, DAW.  Both Ace and DAW are now owned by the Penguin Group.  As an editor, Wollheim worked with such giants as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, Ursula K. Le Guin, Phillip K. Dick, Robert Silverburg, and Jack Vance to name a few.  As a publisher, he started the careers of C. J. Cherryh, Tanith Lee, Jennifer Roberson, and Tadd Williams, again, to name a few.  Most infamously, he published an unauthorized edition of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings while at Ace.  While later found to be illegal, this edition popularized Tolkein in the United States and helped to create a huge fantasy audience.  Mr. Wollheim passed away in 1990.  His daughter Elizabeth Wollheim is a current publisher with DAW.

Valente is also up for a Hugo award this year for her traditionally published novel Palimpset.  Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl and Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker (which I’ve reviewed here) are also nominated.  Those awards are currently in the voting process, and will be announced at Aussiecon 4 in Melbourne, Australia in September.  The Hugo is award by the World Science Fiction Society.

The Girl Who Navigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making will be published by Feiwel and Friends in May 2011, and upon the request of the publisher, the final act is no longer available online.

This weekend I attended Penguicon, which is an interesting convention held in the Detroit area of MI.  It started with a group of Linux users who made an open source convention.  Since Linux users (at least the ones who started this con) tend to also like Science Fiction and Fantasy and Anime, and a whole host of other things, people started volunteering to run panels on those topics.  Following the open source model, the con has grown into something rather hard to explain, but typified by the fact that the con mascot is a penguin wearing a Star Fleet uniform.

There’s a large Literary/Writer’s track at Penguicon, which is the reason it first popped up on my radar as something I’d like to go to.  Saturday I spent a good eight hours in panels, and learned some things that I can apply to my writing ambitions.  So expect to see a much more regular schedule for this blog (I haven’t decided exactly what schedule, just that I need one), and some more streamlined content.  I will also be double posting in both Blogger and in Live Journal.  They have the same title and username, so they’ll be easy to find.

On another note:

Cathrynne M. Valente is publishing an initially crowfunded collection of short stories on Lulu from her Omikuji Project.  This collection was before available only in installments to subscribers.  While I’m not a great fan of short fiction, I find some of the things Valente is doing to make money as a writer interesting.  She does, in fact, have traditionally published work that has been critically successful and has contracts for more such work.  However, unless you are a bestselling author, it’s very hard to make a living as an author in the traditional industry.  So, Valente has branched out into crowfunded projects and done some experimenting.  Recently, her YA novel, available online in its entirety for free, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Fairyland for short), has received a Nebula/Andre Norton nomination and will be traditionally published by Feiwel and Friends in 2011.  Fairyland is, to date, the most successful crowfunded project in SF/F.  The Omikuji Project predates Fairyland, but is a subscription only service, and only the handful of people who got in on it at the beginning have the whole collection (other than Valente herself).  Cycle One, or the first two years of the collection, is available in an anthology called This Is My Letter To The World on Lulu and will soon appear on Amazon.  For more information on Cathrynne M. Valente and her work (both traditional and crowfunded) take a peek at her website http://www.catherynnemvalente.com.  If your interested in the book itself, the cover art above is linked to the Lulu page.