I’ve been trying to write adequate responses to the fabulous comments I’m getting on my first post in this series, a very brief manifesto. And, as I rather feared, my responses are growing into blog posts. So here we go.

Eric A. Kugler writes in his comment:

I think the problem comes down to the human need to label and package everything and put it into its proper place. Genre is simply a way for people to keep track of stories. The literary is simply another genre to those of us who simply read books, rather than publish them.

To an extent, I agree. Genre is quite artificial, relatively recent, and obviously confining. I do believe the current “literary novel” is a genre in itself. Witness my “literary is a genre” tag here, and my literary-is-a-genre shelf on Goodreads¹.

I wouldn’t suppose, however, that literary isn’t a genre in the mind of those who publish books. I very much believe it is. Because genre is about marketing. Genre is a way of classifying books so that you can sell them more readily. While I haven’t read a history of genrefication, I’d imagine it’s a consequence of the number and diversity of books that existed, say, in the mid-twentieth century, widely distributed. Some system for determining which titles were of interest to which readers was a public good. A system for telling a reader who enjoyed The Puppet Masters they might like Dune probably seemed logical, even helpful to the consumer (as well as to the publisher.)

Genre, we all know, isn’t just a category on a library’s card catalog. It’s a way of marking things. Covers with rockets or exploding spaceships, in the 1950s and today, mark a book as science fiction. Look at the original poster for Star Wars: A New Hope. If you’d never seen that movie, you’d know the genre instantly, from a dozen details (including those that don’t entirely represent Princess Leia as she appears on film.)

So genre allows a product to reach its desired audience, the publishers sell books, what’s the trouble? Two sources of trouble to start with. In another comment to my first On Genre post, Philip Palmer writes “there’s a tendency to assume that labelling the genre of the piece is a black & white/either-or process. But most novels belong to SEVERAL genres.” The strict genre system serves these novels poorly, as it does books which are hard to place firmly in any genre at all. When you use marketing to shape readers’ expectations, betraying those expectations is a bad idea. So you may end up with frustrated readers who bought the cover and don’t like the book, or a great book may languish unpublished or poorly marketed because it didn’t fit neatly.

The second big problem, I’d say, is that ‘literary’ has become, as we said above, a genre. Maybe it wasn’t in the mid-20th century, but now it is. While it’s more subtle than an exploding spaceship, I can tell you without having read the two books at right that they are the same genre. I could have found a much closer match if I’d looked further. Why is “literary” being a genre a problem? Because “literature” is also a pursuit and an ideal. “Literature” is a laudatory term, and having a genre name that’s a value judgment is a disaster. Just try discussing whether U2 makes “rock music” with someone who hates U2 and thinks “rock” is a laudatory term. It also has to do with marked/unmarked status, I think, but that discussion’s too big to add into this already epic post.

“Literary” has two meanings: One, high-minded, pursuing the act of writing as an act of art, trying to increase understanding and beauty in the world. Two, realistic or occasionally surreal, written with attention to language, telling a story that could happen, using a minimum of adverbs. The confusion of the two is poisonous, and leads to moments like the one I touched on in my first genre war post, when a young English teacher told me that “science fiction isn’t literature.” He didn’t think science fiction was high-minded and artistic (except when he did) so we stood there, me listing work after work whose merits he could not deny: Brave New World, 1984, Lord of the Rings; and he insisting these were not science or speculative fiction. This is exactly what another of the commenters, Casey Samulski, noted: “…a critic will retroactively reclassify something as ‘not SF’ when it has reached a certain status, thinking it impossible for the two to inhabit the same space.” Circular logic, faulty thinking.

I said then, as a teenager (even though at the time I believed that by this age I’d have a doctorate in paleontology and only be writing science fiction on the side) that one of my life goals was to take some bricks out of that wall, the wall between the literary and the science-fictional.

There is good news about that wall. While Margaret Atwood did, as Philip Palmer notes in his comment, say some abrasive things about science fiction, she does admit to writing “speculative fiction”, which is a distinction even SFF grognards might make. Michael Chabon’s stunning The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which I lauded here, joins other works by him in receiving praise and readers from both sides of the wall. He seems to embrace both sides of his literary heritage. More and more, the surreal and the speculative is creeping into the ‘literary’ mainstream. While there are aspects of this I find troubling and appropriative (more, perhaps, on that later), it may be, as a very smart friend of mine (an academic and spec fic fan) has predicted, that the Hemingway/Carver era of literature is at an end, and only the speculative can ask the questions literature wants to ask next.

I’d like to tie that possibility back into my discussion of genre as marketing earlier. You’ll notice that the situation has changed a lot since the days of the simple genre division and the rocket on the cover. We have even more books, even more widely available. In spite of tax codes in the U.S., we have a Long Tail of books still being sold that were published decades ago, as well as new books coming out all the time. The publishing world seems largely to be adjusting to this by continuing to split. We have more subgenres now, like urban fantasy (tattooed woman with weapons on the cover), literary science fiction (trade paper back, abstract cover), et cetera. The mix of small categories and large can be confusing to consumers — while I won’t link it, I recently saw a reader complaining that there were “too many female writers in sci-fi” because when he clicked on “sci-fi/fantasy” he saw mostly urban fantasy covers.

I’d argue that it’s time to move away from genre and subgenre, even in an economic sense. They may still be useful if we make them less restrictive: as Philip Palmer points out, novels can have many genres. Sure, let’s label books, but let’s not put them in exclusive parts of the bookstore, segregated by shelf. I’ve waxed rhapsodic about folksonomy before, so I’ll keep it to a minimum here, but tags add information instead of reducing scope. Tags are freeform and encourage creative thinking. Lets use genre and subgenre as tags, not categories.

Which brings me to my final point. People are always talking about the effect of the internet on publishing, but often in terms of physical books vs. digital media. I have to care about that because I hope to have my own books published in the future, but I’m more interested in how the internet will affect how we choose and discuss books (which in turn affects marketing). I am a member of LibraryThing and Goodreads, and I am delighted by the rich social exchange over books that I see on those sites. I can see what my friends are reading, what they think of it, read reviews they’ve written. I can get a sense of people’s tastes, how well or poorly it aligns with mine, and let that figure in to how I choose books. It’s not about genre. It’s about the individual reader and the individual book. Publishers do use the individual book in marketing — look at how many books have covers reminiscent of Twilight‘s admittedly beautiful cover design — but I hope that in the future they’ll do so even more. The information readers can add to the system – tags, reviews, personal recommendations to friends – is precious.

Marketing’s never going to go away, as long as it works. (And it does work. I wanted to buy Indigo Springs as soon as I saw that cover, though I suppressed the urge until I met and liked the author, too.) But I hope in the future, restrictive definitions of genre — and especially value judgments based on it — will take a backseat to a web of preference, similarity and serendipity.

Serendipity and possibility have always governed my reading. That’s the feeling that makes me tingle when I walk into a vast bookstore. The knowledge that half² the books I love are in the Yellow Room and half in the Blue? That makes me feel something too, but it’s definitely not a tingle.

¹ I have put books in this category which I feel guilty for shelving so: I can’t help but feel that Dickens, and even Fitzgerald, shouldn’t be drawn into a fight that is rather after their time.

² This is figurative. I don’t know actual percentages, and I love a fair number of nonfiction books too.

I’m absurdly tickled to discover that you can now pre-order Is Anybody Out There? from Powells.com. This is the anthology edited by Marty Halpern and Nick Gevers I mentioned in November, in which a story I co-wrote with Leslie What shall appear. “Rare Earth” is my first story in an anthology, my first work in a permanent book of any sort. Having it available from Powell’s, even just for pre-order, feels like an arrival.

Words I wrote…in a book! When it comes out in June, you know I’ll haunt the shelves at Powell’s downtown and take photos of it. Because that is how ridiculous I can be.

Writers tend to be self-employed, and are often “their own brand”. This can mean the lines between promotion of work and promotion of self are blurry, especially as more and more people are active on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, or more niche sites like Goodreads.

My writing career is pretty young, so I may be an odd person to listen to about marketing. However, thinking about my future as a self-promoting writer has colored my experiences as a reader, consumer and user of social networks. These are the rules I’ve internalized. I say they’re “for writers” but I suppose they’re for anyone who is their own brand — anyone who finds the personal and the promotional mixing in social networks, and doesn’t want either to suffer as a result.

1. Don’t do anything that makes you uncomfortable. I hear people talking about the sites they use as if they are giant chores, or acting as if sooner or later someone will force them at gunpoint to sign up for Twitter. They won’t, and you can live your life and have your career, I’m fairly certain, without having a Twitter account. You have to decide what you’re comfortable doing, not just now but longterm. Everyone’s different. If using Facebook, or even blogging, is a chore and you think it’s eating away your creative time, don’t do it.

2. Remember these are social networks. Even if your primary reason for being on a network is business, you’re surrounded by people who are doing it for fun (okay, not with LinkedIn.) Their expectations for the network are social, and if you only use it for promotion, they’ll feel used and turned off. If you occasionally mention your books and stories, but also post silly anecdotes and links, you’ll come off a lot better than someone who is only posting promotional info. Another way of being social: engage in genuine conversation with others and comment on their links and doings. If doing the social stuff seems like too much of a chore, consider #1. Those networks may not be a good fit for you.

3. Offer information, don’t demand attention. There’s a natural order of obtrusiveness in communication, something like:

• Dropping by
• Phone call
• Text message
• Instant message
• Email
• RSS feed
• Posting on the web and hoping they read it.

Twitter and Facebook status updates are somewhere between RSS feed and posting on the web. They’re mostly passive. It’s up to the other person whether they want to check the site, and whether they pay attention to that particular item, gloss it over, filter that sort of content, whatever. That’s pretty unobtrusive. Many people have, say, Twitter direct messages or Facebook messages set to notify them by email, which demands more of their attention. So use messages, or event invitations, more sparingly than you do wall/status posts or tweets. (This is especially true of Facebook messages to multiple recipients, as even if a user deletes the original message, he or she gets all the replies. Facebook’s suggestion for dealing with this is to educate your friends about using ‘reply’ rather than ‘reply-all’. Oh, that sounds fun.) I don’t mean you should never send out email or email-level communiques: just that you should remember you’re being more demanding of your audience, and reserve their use for more important occasions.

4. Avoid multi-posting. There are limits to this. If I subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed, follow you on Twitter, and am friends with you on Facebook, I expect a little overlap. But you should also be aware that that overlap exists. Consider it before implementing reposting software, for example, and also consider whether the place you’re reposting content has robust filtering (Facebook has decent filtering; Twitter doesn’t unless you use some of the most cumbersome third-party software.) Consider this most strongly before multiple-posting something on the same network. Sure, a double-post for time-zone reasons might be reasonable. But repeating much beyond that, you run the risk of the reader seeing that bit of self-promotion three times on Twitter, another two times on Facebook, one time aggregated on your blog, another time when the blog post is piped into another site…the last thing you want is your potential readers — especially people who know you and should be rooting for you — tired of you.

5. Opt-in, not opt-out. If you want to use more aggressive tactics than I’ve discussed above, consider using an opt-in system: for instance, making a “page” for yourself on Facebook. “Profiles” have friends. “Pages” have fans. While you still don’t want to spam people continuously, if people sign up to be your fan, they explicitly want to hear about your career, and you don’t have to worry about #2. It can be awkward for someone who values you as a friend to have to opt out of your marketing efforts. You don’t want to put them in that situation. Using a different medium, like a fan page on Facebook, an author page on Goodreads, or a group e-mail list, allows your friends to opt in if they’re interested, instead of assuming your social network also wants to be your marketing network.

I’m occasionally asked why I care about the struggle of speculative fiction to gain recognition in the literary world, which I call the Genre War. For one thing, I’ve been fighting since before I knew anyone else was, since a time when my sci-fi community was just me and my parents. For another, I have allegiances on both sides. I’m an English major and hold a Master of Fine Arts. I believe in the high artistic ideals of the literary tradition, and it saddens me to see them clouded (again, and still) by parochialism. The simplest, most primal reason is that I believe that the speculative and the literary enrich each other.

Since I was a teenager, if not earlier, I’ve been insisting that science fiction can tell us things about the human condition that realism cannot, because it places humanity into impossible situations. It tests the boundaries of identity and consciousness. It creates other sentient entities, which almost inevitably reflect our humanity back to us. Fiction is many things, but the loftiest goals of literature tell us that fiction is a way of making meaning, of expanding the reader’s understanding of what it means to be human, mortal, alive. To me, that project obviously includes the tools of speculative fiction. If literature is supposed to ask the great questions, why shouldn’t one of those questions be “What if?”

→ On Genre, Part II: The future of genre

Edition Française.

I often regret, as I go through my life, the absence in English of the word “bouleversé”. Often, “bouleversée”, since I want to say it about myself, and a female subject dictates another ‘e’. In an otherwise English sentence, I feel my mouth forming itself for French. “It was a simply incredible book,” I say. “I was…” and I feel the lack of that word, the fact that saying it will, in all likelihood, confuse rather than communicate. Then I remember that there is an analogue, and I finish my sentence, belatedly, “bowled over.”

“Bowled over” is what it means, knocked over by a ball, and I have gone through this cycle of reaching, regret and replacement a hundred times. Still I feel something lacking, despite the perfectly adequate phrase “bowled over.” And I think I know now what it is.

It’s the sound. “Boule”, intense and self-contained, barreling through the vowel without deviation or dipthong, and then “versé”, “turning”, turning outward, the sound itself an opening, a release. “Verser” means to turn or flip, yes, but also to pour, and that word captures so perfectly the experience of being shaken, awakened, and changed. The projectile of the first syllable shattering your preconceptions like a glass pitcher, so you are poured out to find a new shape, shattered and made new. I love that word.

I’m not behind at all. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Peanut Butter and Chocolate Cream Pie

Like most of my Homemade Pie of the Month entries, I made this from a recipe in Ken Haedrich’s Pie: 300 Tried-And-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie. It has Nutty Graham Cracker Crust made with peanuts!

I’m not a terribly decisive person, as anyone who can remember movie reviews here, which used a scale from 1-10 in half increments can attest. Thus it should surprise no one that I had a tie for “favorite book” of 2008, between The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I rather like the two-spot system. It allows me to be indecisive, and after all, rating books is so vicious. Reviewing them is hard enough — rather like trying to capture the taste of a fine coffee in words — but rating them is so final and arbitrary. Choosing two is perhaps no less arbitrary than choosing one, but it seems more friendly. And, in theory, two favorites allows me to have variety in my choices (although 2008’s two lushly penned literary novels about characters’ hidden internal lives may not prove that point.)

You may wonder why I am posting 2009’s favorite books in February. But since, as I posted yesterday, I don’t read in a timely fashion, my posting habits should shock no one.

Last year, my two favorites were:

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon.
This is the first thing I’ve read by Michael Chabon, tho’ several of his works are on the list. One of the things I loved about this book is how it started small, acquainting me with the details of the alternate-history setting, and reveling in the synergy of hard-boiled style with Yiddish words and fatalistic humor. Then it opened out, and out, and out.

It works as a murder mystery, and an alternate history. It’s well-paced, beautifully built, and has an ample helping of intrigue and danger. But by the end the stakes are higher, and the meaning greater, than I ever would have guessed from the simple joys of the first few chapters. It had me weeping. The characters, even archetypical Detective Landsman, are vivid and likeable. The writing is witty, if occasionally over the top. It’s just a splendid, unique story.

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks.
This is the second book I’d read by Iain M. Banks (now I’ve read three) and it really cemented his place in my esteem. It’s a smart, almost virtuosic science fiction novel set in his Culture universe. It’s about societies, the power of culture and language, and yes, games. The writing is very precise, the characters believable even when they are unpleasant. The settings are imaginative — in one case, both giving me my first suspicion that Iain M. Banks is a fellow geology geek, and one of the strongest attacks of sensawunda I can readily recall. (Banks’s work is fairly sensawunda-intensive, I’d say.) Most of all, it is, as I said, smart. The plot, themes and subtext are all honed and working together. It’s as impressive as it is enjoyable.

I was actually rather shocked to realize this book was written in 1988. I didn’t notice anything that dated it at all. I’m pretty sure this book — its layers of meaning and insight, its intricate plot, the mindblowing settings and sense of scale and space — will stick with me for years to come. Thank you to Michael for recommending it to me and Ryan, and to Ryan for buying it and leaving it within easy reach.

Postscript: Man, look at those covers. Different, striking, communicative. I especially love the Banks cover.

I’m planning, tho’ it’s February, to blog about my two favorite books of 2009. I found myself about to confess my love of an award-winner from several years ago with the words “I’m a bit late to this party”. But I can’t really apologize for being a late reader with any sincerity, since it’s something I don’t plan to change.

My list of books to read, housed at Goodreads and LibraryThing, is well over 200. Those lists, while they capture all the recent additions, probably miss a few books tucked on shelves that I’ll “get to eventually”. I have a daunting, delicious heap of books to read, many of them already made manifest through the cunning use of Powell’s gift cards. Therefore, I’ve a natural reticence about adding to the list.

It usually takes more than one ‘strike’ for a book to get added to my list, unless the strike is a doozy (recommendation comes from great authority, I need an audiobook and it’s on the library shelf, et c.) I wait for a general impression to accumulate: people whose taste I tend to share say ‘yea’ (often I couldn’t even tell you who by the time I get the book), it’s a Powell’s staff pick, the blurbers are writers I admire, the premise is interesting, and so on. The thing about my accumulation system is that it takes a while. Rave reviews when a book is fresh don’t count as much with me, subconsciously, as continued mention a few months down the road, and even my early-reading pals take a while to work through a book and share their opinions. I don’t tend to buy new books, or even put them on my list.

This puts me at odds, I think, with Jo(e) Q. Public, and even with my younger self, who counted her allowance money and waited with anguish for the latest Mercedes Lackey book to come out in paperback. My reading is more erratic and my choices more eccentric these days, but it’s making me happy. I very seldom read a book in paper that doesn’t, at very least, entertain me. My delayed reading system probably contributes quite a bit to that.

That doesn’t make it any less embarrassing, though, when my favorite books of 2009 were published in 2007 and 1988, and my 2008 picks were the 2000 Booker winner and a masterpiece from 1925.

Do you read a lot of new releases? How long is your list?

I’m a little disappointed to see only writers and publishing industry folks talking about Amazon’s dispute with Macmillan. Short version: Amazon has a dispute with Macmillan Books over one small aspect of their business (ebooks) so they pulled all their paper books from sale. They are throwing their weight around in a maneuver straight out of the WalMart Monopolist’s Handbook.

I know the previous #amazonfail furor was over social justice, and this is “just business”. A lot of readers also have a personal pocketbook-pug in the ebook-pricing dogfight. But publishing is the business of selling ideas, and that makes it everyone’s business. I’m by no means saying everyone needs to delete their Amazon account as a few authors have done. To be honest, I’m not doing so. I haven’t bought a book from Amazon in a long time because of their strong-arm tactics toward publishing companies (they did something almost identical to a UK company) and print-on-demand sellers. I intend to continue that policy.

All I’m hoping is that some folks outside the publishing industry — readers, consumers who are affected by this — read about this and think about it. Books are the lifeblood of our civilization, the strongest thread connecting past and future. I’m not gnashing my teeth with anger over this dispute, and I’m not asking you to do so: I’m just saying that, given Amazon’s powerful place in the bookselling industry, this is an important conversation, and one everyone who reads and loves books, paper or digital, should pay attention to.

Here’s some reading:

• Just the facts Friday, from the New York Times.


• Macmillan’s statement yesterday.


• Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing post.


• Tobias Buckell on this situation, and e-book pricing in detail (long, quite thorough) (Mirrored on SFWA’s blog).


• Live feed on the #amazonfail twitter topic. Tweeters who’ve been voluble include the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and Tor author Jay Lake.

If you decide to do something, here are some ideas:

• Buy a Macmillan book (Tor, Forge, St. Martin’s, Picador, Farrar Straus & Giroux, et c.) from another retailer, like Powell’s, this weekend.


• Commit to buying all your books from another retailer.


• When you link books from your blog or website, link to another retailer (I use Powell’s: their Partner Program is nice.


• Write an email to Amazon, telling them if you disagree with their actions. If you’re taking any business elsewhere, you can tell them this way.


• Blog about this, delicious links about it, whatever comes naturally.


• If you’re on Twitter, retweet messages and links about this.


• If you’re on Facebook, post links or update your Facebook status so your friends hear about this.


• If you belong to Flickr, take a photo of any number of Macmillan books and contribute it to my new group, “Amazon won’t sell these books”. I love taking photos of books (weird, I know) and I hope this will cause some conversation.

Thanks for reading!

Update, 3:18pm, 1/31/2010: Amazon has announced they will acquiesce to Macmillan, in a post on their Kindle fora. The tone of the announcement, I feel, is very misleading. It paints Amazon as the victim of Macmillan’s strong-arm tactics, even while it admits Amazon pulled the books. Choice language: “…Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.” They don’t mention that Macmillan wanted to charge as little as $5.99 later in the book’s life cycle.

So now that I’ve read their spin, I have a correction to make to this post: I wasn’t angry. Now I am.

Amazon hasn’t said when they will restore the books, and I would still love to see your Macmillan books added to the Flickr group “Amazon won’t sell these books”.

I noticed it’s been a long time since I posted photos of my monthly piemaking. Now, there’s been no groundswell of public protest to this pie paucity, and for all I know my readers are sitting at home rejoicing that they don’t have to look at my pies every month. But I have no data either way, and besides, it’s my website. I’ll boast if I want to.

Here is, ahem, December’s pie. Since obviously I made it last month, I must have been delaying this post for a long time! Look at those Christmas decorations! That’s an old picture!

Chocolate Cream Pie with Cinnamon Meringue

This pie, like most of my Homemade Pie of the Month entries, is made from a recipe in Ken Haedrich’s Pie: 300 Tried-And-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie.

This is the last pie of 2009, but I gave Ryan another round of Homemade Pie of the Month for this year. So you may have to endure more of these posts.