Alex Jackson's Blog

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There's a nice fork in the road playing out between books and comics at the moment. Books seem to be as exclusive a market as ever, hand-picking their products to sell with great care. Comics meanwhile just seem to be throwing everything at a wall in the hope some of it will stick. Who has the better scheme? Eh, it may not be the glamorous answer but it's books. One of those mediums is haemorrhaging money and it isn't books. Complain all you like about their priorities but it's clear they're doing something right.

Ideally I would love to give my books away for free permanently, but I can't do that without giving up all the resources I have at my disposal. Understandably I can't be on Amazon giving my books away for free (bar one promotional week a year), but leaving there will leave pretty much all reach I have. Not much point giving stuff away if you're exiled in a dark corner of the web no one really goes to. Not sure what to do from here. Any tips would be appreciated if anyone has them.

Y'know, for all I moan and criticise about the fantasy genre and community at large I'll give credit where it's due: I love the passion it has. There's no money in this genre. Even the ones who get publishing deals don't seem to make a huge amount outside of a select few, and yet there's still no shortage of people writing and publishing stories, even if it's off their own dime. People don't do this for money, quite the opposite. They do it because they like writing stories and sharing them with the world beyond their door. Just thinking of that makes me feel a little better.

Hugo noms are out again. Quelle surprise, it's another Tor/Orbit love-in, not that I expected owt else. Then again it's naive of me to expect awards of any kind to be anything other than a cliqueish love-in. Play on, Worldcon, and throw an award at Wonder Woman or Doctor Who or some other mainstream series to distract from the backslapping session the novel categories are!

The state of this country makes me sad, to be quite honest. It'd be too long a blogpost to adequately cover all the reasons I feel that way, but it's been exacerbated in recent days by the fact that we as a people stand for nothing. Our forefathers spent years fighting and dying for our rights, and this generation is quite happy to throw them all in the bin because said rights also benefit people they don't like. We have a gang of crooks ruling over us, but they're enabled by increasingly reactionary regular people to strip us of the freedom we have to push back against them.

Oh, I'm also giving away free ebooks at the moment, if you're into that sort of thing.

Pondering doing another giveaway in the near future. Not immediately as I have some issues at my end to sort out first, but soon, maybe next month or so.

If any of you have a preference for what you'd like me to run a giveaway for, do let me know.

I don't think I'll have a new book out this year, barring miracles. I'm a bit indifferent to my latest manuscript, and even if I do knock it into a shape I like there's all the expense of publishing and promoting a book when there's other things I'd rather spend money on. All of this said, I'm an impulsive guy, so maybe I will end up publishing something, but it certainly won't be until the second half of 2018 if at all. Regardless of what happens I think I want to use this year primarily to develop my ideas and explore some new ones.

So Ursula K LeGuin has died. It's kinda weird - she's revered across the fantasy genre (and rightly so), but I never saw her books in any bookshop I went into. Maybe it's just a case of she never got a decent distributor in the UK, or maybe it's the grim reality of genre fiction: because you're the life and soul of one room doesn't mean everyone knows you're in the house. Not that I think she would care, though. I imagine she made a decent living from dominating that one room, and even if she didn't IIRC she was an ardent leftist so I doubt a lack of material wealth bothered her all that much. At the end of the day I bet her legacy is the only legacy she wanted. RIP Ms. LeGuin.

First off, Happy New Year.

Second, it's becoming apparent to me that SFF has hit a crossroads. I've said for years there's no money in genre fiction anymore and if you want coin you're better off going into screenwriting, but I think it's becoming more and more apparent. The disconnect between what is popular and what is pushed is huge. It seems to me that publishers in SFF don't push what they think will be huge, but what they want to be huge. It isn't working.

Go on the Fantasy subreddit and the same names come up time and time again: Martin, Hobb, LeGuin, Pratchett, Sanderson, Tolkien and a few others. These aren't the people currently winning Hugos and Nebulas. Someone like NK Jemisin only ever gets namechecked for Hugo noms or some article she's written in the NY Times. In other words, Tor and Orbit are trying to construct an idea of who is big in Fantasyland, but a cursory glance shows that people at large aren't buying it.

It's like there's (suitingly) two worlds in SFF: fantasy and reality. The Fantasy being constructed by Tor through rigging the Hugos so the people they want to be stars win it, and the Reality of the authors that people are actually buying and reading. It can't - and won't - last.