Things I Learned (and Gained) from Bundoran Press, 4th and last Part

Lots of good things happened during the eight years I was running Bundoran Press.

Let me talk for a minute about Mike Rimar. I had met Mike at a con or two in passing but I was surprised when he came up to me and asked if he could invest in Bundoran Press. I sort of laughed and said there were a lot better places to invest his money – in fact most places were better. He insisted, said it was something he really wanted to do and, then he repeated it when we were both sober. His persistence and humour both impressed me so I asked if he wanted to buy part of the company and be a partner. At least, that way, he’d get a title in exchange for his cash. Which is how Mike Rimar became a partner in The Press.

Mike did his share of the heavy lifting – literally when it came to moving boxes of books but in a lot of other ways, too. He manned the table and proved a surprisingly good salesman. He produced our book videos as well as a series of interviews as Bobby Bundoran. When I asked him to go outside his comfort zone and speak at book launches, he stepped up to the mike (or mostly just shouted since we usually didn’t have a sound system).

We eventually edited two anthologies together: Second Contacts and Lazarus Risen. It was an interesting process. We agreed on an evaluation system before we even saw a story using a rubric which measured both the quality of the writing and story-telling and the adherence to the anthology’s theme. We evaluated every story separately and then averaged the ratings (which were sometimes quite divergent). That made it pretty easy to identify the “must have” and the “no way” stories. As for the ones in the middle, we reduced conflict by giving each editor an “editor’s choice” option for one story per anthology. It must have worked – both anthologies were nominated for Auroras and Second Contacts won, so Mike got a title and an award for his money. Plus my undying friendship.

Mike wasn’t the only one who stepped up to help the Press. We had a number of people who gave money on a monthly basis through our Patreon account and many more who contributed to the four fund-raising campaigns we conducted for our anthologies through Indiegogo. I was never short of people who would volunteer to help us at conventions, whether it was working at the table or helping to set up launches or clean up after parties. I had several people take on small projects as interns in exchange for recognition and a modest honorarium. I tried to make sure that the latter matched the former and always refused offers of more substantial work if I couldn’t afford to pay.

Lessons learned: Work hard and with integrity and help will arrive in unexpected forms from unexpected places. Accept it graciously but never assume it is owed to you.

It is a common theme that you need to have book reviews and ratings on Amazon to sell books. I suspect this idea is mostly spread by book reviewers, book publications, Goodreads and of course Amazon itself. The evidence that either make a difference is scanty.

The best-selling book we published had exactly one rating on Amazon and it was 1-star. We had several books reviewed in places like Quill and Quire and Publisher’s Weekly as well as some moderately popular reviewing blogs. Some were positive, some less so but none seemed to increase or diminish sales in the weeks or months after they appeared. The one real study of reviews, done some years ago, suggest that the only thing that matters is if the review appears in a prestigious and widely read source like the New York Review of Books where even a negative review will generate book sales (so few books get reviewed there that the assumption is that the book must be noteworthy even if the reviewer didn’t like it).

Of course, we did promote any reviews we did get, at least we did if they were positive because it couldn’t hurt and even if we only sold a few more books as a result, it was a plus. And the good reviews made the authors happy – a bonus to make up for the limited money they got.

On a seemingly unrelated note, I was always gratified when a book or story I had rejected found a home with another publisher. Two of the fantasies for which I had reverted rights got published in new editions by others. Two books that had come close to being offered contracts before I decided they weren’t right for Bundoran wound up with other houses. I also know of 4 or 5 stories, rejected for our anthologies that subsequently sold to good markets.

Lessons learned: Not every book is for every person or every publisher. As long as you believe in your work, you’ll find your audience eventually.

It is important to know that a publishing house is not one person or even a team of three and a few volunteers. Virginia O’Dine, the original publisher of the press, remained under contract to design our books and provided excellent work at a reasonable price (I suspected a family and friend discount but never asked). Whenever I wanted a specific design option, she always found a way to accommodate my requests.

Dan O’Driscoll had been the artist for my three novels published under Virginia’s management and he became the house artist for all our books, demonstrating a range of styles and techniques. Dan always read the entire book before creating the cover art, bringing his own vision to bear while still being open to suggestions from me or the author. He was recognized by winning a number of Aurora Awards

Ryan McFadden maintained our website for years and produced our ebooks as well. I eventually learned how to do the former but he did the latter right until the end (which were his own two novels, The Venusian Job and the ironically titled Corona Burning, which went to the printers just before COVID was a thing).

All three remain my friends and I trust they always will.

But what about my third partner? You mean, my partner for life, my support and foundation? Well, Liz was there by my side for the entire journey, giving sage advice (which I sometimes took) and endless unconditional support. She worked at the tables, charmed everyone in sight, read slush and proofread manuscripts for publication, helped with my sometimes-crazy marketing schemes, calmed me down when I was doing the books and generally made it possible for me to keep Bundoran Press together for eight years. We survived, no thrived, during all that and COVID, too. We even managed to write a few stories together so it must be the real thing. Now, on to the next adventure.

Lessons learned: Follow your heart and do what you love. You may not get rich but you might well make memories and friends that will enrich your life.

One final note. Nothing will ever make you happier that the look on an author’s face when you hand them the first copy of their book.

Photo by Natalie Pedigo on Unsplash

What I Learned from Bundoran Press, Part 3

How do you effectively market books if you are a small traditional publisher or for that matter an independent author? If I knew the answer to that question, I might still be in publishing.

Even big publishers only do so much marketing and not nearly as much as they used to do. Sure, if you are Stephen King or James Patterson or Nora Roberts, you might see your books advertised on subway cars (like any of them ride the subway) or plastered across the book sections (do those exist anymore?) of major newspapers but most traditionally published authors today are lucky to get a few targeted ads, a book video on YouTube and perhaps a budget for a small book tour. Or maybe the publisher will pay the chain bookstores to display your book at the tables near the entrance (yeah, that’s how that works). The reality is the budget for promoting your next book is directly tied to the sales of the last one.

But none of that matters anyway. Bundoran Press had no money for pricey ads on subways or anywhere else for that matter. Advertising is expensive and, what’s more of limited value unless you can saturate the market. If you have one ad, the chances are that no one will see it. Nonetheless I did try some targeted ads in a few locations I thought science fiction fans might notice. The authors appreciated it but I saw no particular impact on sales. We also hired a publicist to help coordinate our social media campaign and get some guest blog appearances. Again, it is hard to say if it directly sold books but it did help get the word out about our work so the indirect impact may have been there.

We did try book videos, produced by Mike Rimer and broadcast on his YouTube channel and advertised using Twitter and Facebook. They were clever and increasingly professional looking but seldom garnered more than 30-40 viewers. I like to think it raised awareness of the brand but I have to admit I never actually had any one come up to me at a convention and saw they had seen the video (other than the author, of course). Another effective campaign involved sending book postcards to specialty science fiction stores across North America. It sold more books than the campaign cost but it only worked once.

What did work? I did a lot of book launches, both at conventions and in book stores. They had mixed success and eventually we learned to pick our venues and time slots carefully to avoid competing with other authors or presses. I wasn’t being nice; there are only so many customers for SF books and you don’t want to divide the audience. It was important to engage the author in the process and, if possible, hold the launch in their home city so their family and friends and, hopefully, friends of friends could show up. Friends of friends are important because that is how you generate real word of mouth which seems to be by far the most important aspect of selling books.

Book launches obey the law of diminishing returns – you need to spend enough money on food and drinks to attract a crowd but not so much you mainly attract freeloaders. I remember, at one launch, hearing a young woman complain to her friends that we weren’t giving out single malt scotch. Neither she, not any of her friends, bought a book that night.

The press often had a table in the dealer’s room but I soon discovered that I didn’t have the right personality for selling books—too dour looking, I guess. However, Liz and Mike both had better chemistry with customers though in different ways: Liz, all smiles and pleasant chatter and Mike, with a kind of curmudgeonly sense of humour. Best of all were the authors, although some were better than others.

Word of mouth is funny though. One book sold so well as an ebook on Amazon that the author earned out his advance in a couple of months (and immediately got a contract for a second book). But when I asked him how he had done it (because I had done nothing out of the ordinary), he said he didn’t know how it had happened. The second book sold well but not as well as that. Amazon algorithms are mysterious things.

The best thing that happened to us in the market place came by way of StoryBundle, a web-based seller of e-book bundles with a solid and reliable fan base and a reasonable presence on social media. We did two book bundles grouping a half dozen Bundoran books with backlist books from writers like Robert J. Sawyer and Tanya Huff. In the end, it was StoryBundle that allowed a number of authors to earn out and get additional royalty payments.

Lessons learned: Marketing is hard and your money is best spent on making sure you got the easy sales (family and friends of the author and hard-core SF fans). Advertising money was best spent on posters for launches and ads in the program books of conventions you were attending.

The most important thing to learn about marketing is that it is only going to do so much. Keep your expectations and print runs low and you’ll have more success.

A final word about distribution, the supposed Holy Grail of publishing, especially for small publishers. Most distributors won’t take small presses. Some require a backlist of 25 books before they will even answer your query. Others are more open but you have to be wary. I got a distributor early on through a friend of friend. Initially it seemed great. Books were sold and that encouraged me to send more books as cheques began to arrive. Then the cheques stopped as books were returned by stores at a much greater rate than I had been “guaranteed” would be the case. After nine months, I never saw another dime. Did I make money? Some, but as my balance grew farther into the red, it was clear it was a money sink as the distributor took a cut when they sent a book out, took another percentage when they got it back (often to send it out again) and charged for books that remained in their warehouse. When I didn’t renew the contract after 3 years, they returned the books at my expense. Most arrived so damaged, they were unsellable.

I later had a distributor for ebooks – no worries about returns there and promises of getting access to libraries. So, for 7 months they had the exclusive right to sell our ebooks but no money or sales reports arrived. I started calling and emailing but they kept putting me off, saying they were behind in their accounting. Then they disappeared without a trace and I was faced with the task of getting Amazon and KOBO to remove their versions of our books from the market. Because I thought it unfair for authors to suffer from my mistake/their duplicity, I estimated sales based on previous months and ascribed royalties accordingly.

Lesson learned: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Most companies that feed off the book industry are more than willing to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

But it wasn’t all bad news but that has to wait for the next blog.

Now buy a book.

Photo by César Viteri on Unsplash

What I learned from Bundoran Press, Part 2

Editing willing authors is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. Editing unwilling authors is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

Fortunately, most authors are not only willing but eager to be edited, provided the edits serve their interests rather than the editor or the publisher or the marketing team. Happily, I was all three though I did get a lot of help with marketing from my partners—but they didn’t have a say about the editing process. That’s not strictly true; Mike Rimar and I worked together to edit two anthologies, one of which won us both an Aurora Award (more on that in another blog).

The first thing I would tell authors is that (almost) all my suggestions were optional. I had bought the book based on the draft they submitted and I was going to publish it. I would make no changes without their consent except copy editing to our manual of style (Chicago in case you were wondering). Even then they could argue against specific copy edits if it served the book.

The second thing I said was that I wanted to make their novel not the best one I could edit, but the best one they could write. My goal was to help them achieve the vision they had when they first started to write. In every case, my suggestions were rooted in the text they provided. I trusted writers to know at a deep level what they wanted to say; I understood it was sometimes hard to actually say it.

Having written a number of novels myself, I knew how easy it was to lose your way in the months and sometimes years that you had spent working on it. My job, as I saw it, was to get the author back on their “true path.” Sometimes, they had started the novel too soon, other times they had failed to find the satisfying ending, sometimes they had a beginning and an ending but only a muddle in between.

In one, I found a branch in the road where the author had clearly (based on the foreshadowing and character development earlier) intended to take one path but somehow had chosen the other. I simply asked him which branch he thought was more interesting and he went away and produced a much more interesting book.

In another, I pointed out that the male protagonist was entirely reactive and all the action was driven by the main female character. Again, it was there in the draft and once pointed out, it resulted in a much more interesting novel. In both these cases the authors seemed happy with the result. In a third case, I told a writer that the writing was beautiful but there was too much of it and they needed to cut a third of the first half of the novel. None of the beauty was lost.

On another occasion an author’s response on Twitter to my editorial suggestions, was: Why didn’t I just write a better book in the first place? One of the things I had suggested was to change the book from first person to third person. He felt it was stronger in first and then proved he was right by incorporating many (though not all) of my other suggestions in a first-person narrative that was both powerful and charming. Another author needed to give her main character more agency, which ramped up the narrative tension and made the book more engaging.

Some authors required less editing than others but even then, I could suggest ways for them to strengthen the work. In every case, it was their choice to accept or reject or sometimes to find a third option that satisfied us both.

It’s not that there was never a conflict with a writer – but it was restricted entirely to short stories we bought for my anthologies and almost always by authors for whom it would have been their first or second sale. I say “would have” because in one case, when I suggested, perhaps, they would prefer to withdraw their story rather than make the changes necessary for it not to be somewhat incomprehensible, that’s what they chose to do. The author is always right (though in that case, I was secretly relieved as it was the last story selected for the anthology and losing is saved money without damaging the book). In other cases, changes were completely resisted but the stories were publishable as is, so I published them. However, I swore never to work with them again. Editors are people too and really don’t need the abuse (unless the writer is a genius whose work makes it worthwhile).

Lessons learned: The relationship between author and editor should always put the author’s work front and centre and it should, as much as possible, be both pleasing and professional. Most importantly, I had to make sure I didn’t invest too much of my ego in the process.

It’s a lesson that served me well in my free-lance editing career, which, by the way, is also over.

What I Learned from Bundoran Press, Part 1

There have times in the last few years when I’ve asked myself the question: If I could do it all over again, would I have taken over Bundoran Press and run it for eight years?

My answer is a qualified yes. I’d do it again but I might not do it the same way.

It’s not about the money, though you may as well know that my partners and I lost roughly $60,000 during our run. We’d all love to have that money back, I’m sure, but none of us are at risk of starving because of it. But we knew going in that publishing—especially traditional publishing with a small press—was not a money-making venture. Still, we all thought it might do better than two (barely) profitable years out of eight.

But enough whining. We were adults and we knew that going into business always entails risk.

So, what would I have done differently and what do I suggest to anyone else thinking about venturing into the publishing trade?

I put together a business plan of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. I budgeted for losses in the first three years, with an expectation of profit in year 4. But then I let sentiment cloud my judgement.

I knew I was only going to publish science fiction but much of the back catalogue was fantasy, which I did not read and was not going to consider for future books. But it would have meant orphaning the third book of Neil Godbout’s trilogy and disappointing a number of authors. I should have bit the bullet and stuck to my vision with a laser focus. A year later I reverted rights on all the fantasy books.

All I should have acquired were my three novels, Matthew Johnson’s Fall From Earth and two anthologies, one of which I edited. It would have felt a bit like a vanity press but since I got accused of that anyway in my first year, no big deal.

Lessons one and two: Refine your vision to a pin point and don’t let anything move you off it.

Of course, the best laid plans gang aft agley or if you prefer, they seldom survive contact with the enemy.

I had been too optimistic (emotions again) about the costs and too hopeful about potential sales. I should have doubled my estimates of expenses and pushed off my expectation of profitability to year five (the first year we made a miniscule profit). Maybe if I had done that, I wouldn’t have made the mistake of buying all the back catalogue. I would certainly have reduced the size of the print runs.

I might have also reconsidered the size of advances, which were not large except by small press standards, and royalty rates, but I don’t think so. The two parts of my vision that I did adhere to firmly was I wanted my press to be as author friendly as I could make it (both in terms of money and editing practices) and I wanted to attract a few writers with a track record. Don’t get me wrong, the previous publisher, Virginia O’Dine ran a very author friendly company; I just wanted to take it one step further.

Lessons three and four: Hope for the best but plan for the worst and always make the decisions that adhere to your original values and objectives. At least, I got the second one right without having to learn it from bitter experience.

The final thing I would change is I would have taken longer to make the decision and spent that time learning more about what was entailed with running the peculiar business called book publishing. But it was buy now or see the press fold so I guess I can’t beat myself up too much over that one. Still…

Lesson five: You can never be too prepared – though even if you are, circumstances always change, so be prepared to change with them.

Thus endeth the lesson for today.

P.S. There is a thing called a long tail which you can wag by buying some of the Bundoran books whose rights I still own here.

Photo by Sinziana Susa on Unsplash

Retirement

In two weeks I will be retired, or as a friend of mine wisely calls it, refocused. Still it will be a strange thing not to work for someone else. I took my first paid job when I was fourteen (though I did freelance for a few years before that as a lawnmower and snow-shoveller and berry-picker). I still have the pay-stub from my first regular job. It was for $4.65 for 3.5 hours work. That was obviously a long time ago.

Since then I’ve worked for a lot of different people and organizations – mostly on regular salary though sometimes on contract. It has been a varied life. I’ve worked as a library assistant, a gardener, a chemist, a research manager, a house painter, a labour negotiator, an actor, a bartender, a pizza cook, an arts administrator, a policy advisor, a medical researcher, a telemarketer, a political assistant and several other professions I now forget.

During that time I did work for myself as well. I spent my teenage years selling greeting cards door-to-door and, later, took research jobs on contract. Of course, I’ve been a freelance writer for more than  25 years and, most recently, an editor and publisher for my own company.

I expect that I’ll keep writing on a regular basis and I hope to even make some money in the process. But it’s not the same as having to go to the office every day. I only have myself to answer to and only I can make me sit at the computer and work. I expect to be a pretty easy going boss. Although I intend to write a novel between now and the end of September, that’s only about 900 words a day of new prose. I can generally do that in an hour or two. There will be research, of course, and re-writing and editing, not to mention the publishing company, but still, I don’t plan to write every day and I don’t plan to work any more than 4 hours in any given day.

But what will I do to fill the time? After spending most of my life working 8 or more hours a day – for someone far less easy going than me – what will I do to stop from being bored?

Even to ask that question suggests you don’t know me very well. I can’t stand being inactive – it doesn’t just bore me it makes me grumpy. So I will read and walk and talk and party and cook and travel and photograph and think and watch and listen and play and dream up adventures to do or write about.

Retirement? I don’t think so. Refocus – it is a wiser term.

And that’s ten minutes.

Regarding Taste

The Romans would say: De gustibus non est disputandum. The French might shrug and murmur: À chaque, son gout. In English, we might argue: To each their own or more cuttingly, there’s no accounting for taste.

These thoughts struck me yesterday when I was adding a couple of books to my Goodreads account. Some of them were new acquisitions and another was an older book I’ve just started to read because the author, whose other books I’ve admired, recently died. I thought it was time to explore one of his few novels that I hadn’t yet read. What I noticed was that the book had middling reviews on Goodreads – or rather it had wildly divergent reviews gaining almost as many one star ratings as five.

Was it a case of you either love it or you hate it or was there something else at play? Certainly, it has been shown that nothing more negatively affects a book’s rating on mass reading sites than for it to win a major award or otherwise be subject to public approval. A positive review in The New York Times might do the trick.

There are, after all, hordes of trolls who are never happy unless they are crapping on what other people do or love. Or perhaps it is the response of the high school student who comes to hate novels because too many teachers have told them they are ‘good for them.’ What more damning praise could an author ever ask for?

To me, taste is indeed as the Romans, French and English all agree: an unaccountable and individual thing. Our language is full of such expressions. One man’s meat is another’s poison. Your trash is my treasure. We acknowledge it and yet grow rancorous when someone disagrees with us about this being the best book ever written and that being the most incredible film of the year.

Taste is not a matter for elites – read it to make yourself a better person or, better yet, read it to see just how stupid and without perception you are – nor for democracy. Popular is not a measure of quality simply of, well, popularity. Some popular things are, of course, of the highest quality and some things are ignored because they deserve nothing better.

And who is to say which is which? History perhaps decides what has lasting value – or perhaps not. It is estimated that only 10% of every film ever made still exists today. Recently a cache of old silent movies were discovered frozen in Dawson City, Yukon. Of the hundreds recovered only a few existed in other prints. For many of the rest, there wasn’t even a list somewhere or a newspaper article archived in a dusty vault to record their existence.

Besides who has time to wait on history? I know what I like and need neither the experts nor the masses to tell me if I’m right or wrong. I guess what is really driving this blog is all the reading I’m doing as a publisher. Some of the things I like I realize others might not find to their taste; things I reject, many might love. But as the publisher who pays the tab, whose taste should I obey if not my own?

And that’s ten minutes.

 

No End in Sight

I talk a lot these days about retiring. What I’m really talking about is moving from one occupation to another. Frankly I’m tired of working in a regular job – getting up every day to someone else’s schedule and trundling off to an office where my activities are constrained by those around me and the systems in place to manage the work.

I’ve never been keen on systems. I didn’t mind school but found plenty of ways to circumvent or at least ameliorate the rules. It was not a case of rebelling – I was a radical but not much of a revolutionary – but of co-opting them to my own interests. Being smart and working hard can buy you a lot of freedom. It helped that the high school I went to had 2000 students and my university only 1300. You could choose to be invisible if you liked – or you could stand out in ways that seemed to buy into the system while secretly subverting it.

Good times.

Real life was never so easy. Governments and corporations have had a lot of practice shackling their employees, locking us into the iron cage of bureaucracy. Small businesses – unless you happen to be the owner – are nothing but arbitrary fiefdoms where employees are treated like family – in the worst sense of the word – and expected to work like slaves.

Work – the curse of the drinking class.

But, having been smart enough and lucky enough to work in a place that offers a defined benefit pension plan (indexed to inflation) means that soon I will celebrate, not freedom 55 but freedom 61 or 62 (the timing remains uncertain). I will have an income free from any obligation.

It’s as if I was suddenly a member of the gentry in a Jane Austin novel!

But as they say a man with an income is soon in need of, well not a wife – I have one of those – but an occupation. Something useful – at least to them – to fill the hours until happy hour. Without it, happy hour may start to come at 10 in the morning.

But what to do? Fortunately I’ve been planning for these days for a very long time and have plenty that will fill my hours with interesting tasks while still leaving me free to pursue my real hobbies of traveling and sampling all the various foods and drinks the world has to offer.

I have my publishing company and my writing. I don’t see giving up the latter – ever – and as for the former, well, that depends upon other people, those who choose to buy or not buy the books I publish. But for now it continues to beckon me. After all, writing and publishing have their own benefits and not merely in terms of being engaged in a creative process but in being engaged with creative people.

That’s what keeps your mind young even as the rest of you ages into decrepitude. Even after my body stops moving my mind can journey to far shores.

I’ve seen the alternative and it isn’t pretty. Wasting away in body AND mind. No, I’d rather go out like Robertson Davies, starting a short story on the morning of my death at age 90.

But that’s ten minutes.

David G. Hartwell

As I write this, David Hartwell is hovering on the edge of death. He suffered a massive brain bleed yesterday and is not expected to survive.

David, for those of you not in the field, was one of the most influential editors in the history of science fiction. He was responsible for the careers of many who work in the field today. And he was especially interested and generous to Canadians.

Unlike other public figures many of us have been mourning this month, I knew David. Not well, but well enough to say that I liked and respected him and always looked forward to seeing him at science fiction conventions we both attended.

I knew David as an editor before I knew him as a man. His collection of the Year’s Best SF was always the one I turned to first. We had similar tastes, I guess, and thinking about it, I would have to say that he influenced my own style as an editor and anthologist. How sweet it is to remember that David was the one who handed me my Aurora Award for editing the anthology, Blood and Water. I recall that his smile couldn’t have been bigger and warmer than if he had won the award himself.

I suppose I first met David in Chicago in 2000 at the TOR party at the World Science Fiction convention. It was a brief introduction and we hardly spoke but we met again off and on over the years. And more and more we would find time to talk – about books, about the progress of his young children through school, about whatever topics came up.

I’ve never been much of a note taker – even in university – so when I tell you that I often wrote down things that David said on panels or on those occasions he gave a lecture about the history of SF or the process of editing, maybe it will tell you how much I admired his intellect and his erudition. What David didn’t know about SF may not have been worth knowing.

Anyone who spent even a few minutes with him will remember David’s kindness, his curiosity, his subtle wit, his intelligence or, if nothing else, his wild taste in neckties. In fact, David’s neckties were so famous that they actually created an exhibition of them for the art show at the World SF convention in Montreal.

The last time I saw David in person was in Ottawa at the end of October. He had decided to drop in at the local convention, coming all the way up from New York to be with us. David was one of those people who was as much a fan as a professional and I think he genuinely loved to be with those of like mind and spirit. We chatted for a good half-hour beside the Bundoran Press table in the dealers’ room. Again if was a wide ranging and happy talk – despite some personal troubles David was going through.

If I had known it was going to be the last time I would speak to him, I would have told him how much I admired him. I can’t do that now so I’m telling you.

And that’s ten minutes.

A Final Pitch

There’s only twenty nine hours (and counting down at a regular pace) to fund our Bundoran Press Anthology, Lazarus Risen. You can find the Indiegogo page here.

Thanks to the generous support of a wide range of people — including some regular readers of 10 Minutes of Words — we’ve reached the point where we can pay writers 3.5 cents a word. For a five thousand word story, that’s about $175, not bad but I’d like to do better.

Writers struggle to make any kind of a living from their work. Even another $25 or $50 for a short story can make a real difference. So if you like science fiction, why not pop over and give us a look? Even a $10 donation gets you a copy of the e-book; $25 gets you the e-book and a print book.

Give a bit more and there are some other great perks — including some critiques by some well-published writers. Even if you don’t write yourself, you probably know people who do and those critques — solid writing advice — make great Christmas gifts.

So that’s less than ten minutes — why not use the remaining time to go make a donation? And you could share this blog and the Indiegogo page around while you’re at it.

Losses

Last weekend I attended SFContario where the annual CanVention – the national SF con – was also being held. Each year they give out the Aurora Awards and this year I was nominated in the category of Best Related Work for Strange Bedfellows. I would have liked to win as I am very proud of that book – an anthology of political science fiction. I didn’t, which was a bit disappointing especially when I discovered that I was in first place until the final round of balloting. Such is life with preferential ballots.

Still, I could hardly gripe. I did finish second to a very deserving OnSpec magazine. Given that I support them every month through Patreon, I obviously think they are worthy. And there is always next year.

Meanwhile, on Monday the NWT territorial election was held. I had a number of friends running – most of whom did not win (though some did). My boss’s son was one of the losers and though he finished respectably (almost) tied for second, I’m sure he is feeling disappointed. I know the experience from my own electoral career and suspect he is probably second guessing himself now. What could I have done differently? Why didn’t people support me? Whose fault is it? His disappointment is significant – it feels like a personal rejection – but may be less severe than the incumbent MLAs, including two Ministers, who lost their seats. It is well known that losing your seat can lead to depression, though it usually passes in a year or so.

And, in any case there will be another chance to run for office. In a democracy it happens with great frequency at one level or another.

To put all this in perspective:

On the Friday evening before SFContario, I learned that Barry King, an SF writer and organizer had died suddenly from complications of pneumonia. He was in his forties and I had seen him only a few weeks before, when he seemed in perfect health. I didn’t know Barry really well. We had met half a dozen times and I had recently bought one of his stories for my latest anthology, published in October. He had invited me to take part in Limestone Genre, a new SF gathering he had helped organize last year in Kingston.

I had got to know him well enough to know he was a smart witty man, a good writer, and was well loved by his friends and of course his family. Their sense of loss makes anything I or my political friends experienced in the last week completely trivial. For Barry, for Barry’s family and friends, there is no next year, there is no future opportunity. There is only the permanence of loss and grief.

My heart goes out to them but in the end only time and their love for each other can heal the loss they have experienced.

I was once told that when a bad thing happens to you, you should ask yourself if it will matter one year or five years from now. Losing an award is a transitory thing, losing an election is forgotten in five years. Losing someone you love never goes away. Perspective.

And that’s ten minutes.