Salon Futura

Open For Business

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

One of the main strands of my business plan for Wizard’s Tower has been the need to have an online store where you can buy ebooks. Not just our ebooks, but a wide selection of good quality speculative fiction. The more good books there are, the more likely people are to check us out and spend their money with us.

Of course we can’t compete with the likes of the Kindle and iBooks stores, but we are a specialist retailer. We’ll only be stocking SF&F. What’s more, because the big publishers are unlikely to be interested in us, at least in the short term, we’ll be stocking only books from small presses. Hopefully that will make it a lot easier to find the books you want on our site than in any of the big online stores.

It has taken me quite a while to find an online store system that does what I want, and provides the sort of professional shopping experience people are going to expect. Hopefully what I have now mostly does the job. I’ll be doing some more serious PR later in the week, but before then I’m hoping that a few of you folks will take a look and let me know if you have any issues with the store. I can’t promise to do everything you ask for, but feedback is good. You can find the store here.

One thing the store doesn’t do is allow me to set firm prices in other currencies. Hopefully that will come at some point. Also I’m hoping to offer payment methods other than PayPal, but such things cost money and I need business in order to justify the fees.

As of now, we have all of the issues of Salon Futura and Clarkesworld that have been converted available, plus of course Dark Spires. I don’t have the MOBI files for Salon Futura yet, but they should be available soon.

You will notice, when you visit the store, that each product also comes with a donation option. That’s deliberate policy. It is an idea I got from Bandcamp.com (thank you, Amanda Palmer, for the tip). We hear a lot these days about how people are not prepared to pay “too much” for ebooks. But the meaning of “too much” can vary wildly from person to person, dependent on your financial circumstances and how much you like the author in question. So I wanted to give people an opportunity to not pay “too little” either. Think of it as a tip jar. And if you don’t know whether you want to tip or not, you can always come back later and make a donation when you have read the book.

100% of any money received in donations will go to the creators concerned. Of course they may have to pay tax on the income, but we won’t take any of that money.

Talking of taxes, the business is currently below the turnover threshold at which UK companies are obliged to charge VAT. That’s a good thing, because while paper books are zero-rated for VAT, ebooks are regarded as “software” and attract a 17.5% tax (shortly rising to 20%). Much as I’d like the business to grow, I’d like to stay VAT-free as long as possible.

If anyone out there runs a small press, or is an independent author who has made ebooks of their out-of-print back catalog, and is interested in having us stock their books, please get in touch (info [at] wizardstowerpress [dot] com). We will be selective about what we stock, and in particular we will insist on well-made ebooks (though we can help you clean yours up) but I very much want to see the stock grow. Also I want to talk to prospective partners about contract terms to make sure we come up with a deal that people are happy with.

Anyway, please take a look, and feel free to ask questions here. Tomorrow I’ll talk a bit more about what we have on sale.

Going Professional

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

Today’s Twitter feed brought up some interesting developments over at Escape Pod. What used to be just a podcast now has a monthly magazine containing the text of the stories that have been published in audio. There will also be book reviews. What’s more, they are clearly going for the semiprozine market as they talk about paying professional rates. Obviously they need donations, but they sound determined to pay their authors good money.

Yay!

Or almost. Because, as is depressingly the case, there is a catch. Being a suspicious type, I sent to look at the submission guidelines, and I found what I expected:

At the present time, EP does not offer payment for reviews.

So yes, they’ll be paying their authors, which is a wonderful thing to do, but only if they write fiction.

This is by no means an isolated occurrence. I don’t mean to dump on Escape Pod because they are only doing what many other venues do. One of the reasons I work for Clarkesworld and not for anyone else is because Neil is prepared to pay the same rate for non-fiction as for fiction. Other magazines don’t do that. Indeed, in the past couple of weeks I have caught a couple of people using the term “professional writer” to mean “professional fiction writer”. There’s a widespread view that even if non-fiction writers get the same money as fiction writers, they are still not worthy of being viewed as “professional”. SFWA’s membership rules don’t help here.

So it is all very well for people to complain about the quality of book reviews online (here and here most recently). But if there’s nowhere that recognizes that non-fiction is worth paying for, then there’s no real incentive for people to get any better.

Salon Futura #3

~ Cheryl

Issue #3 went online on Friday, but I haven’t had a chance to blog about it until now. Here’s what we’ve got.

The cover art is by Andy Bigwood. I have shamelessly lifted the cover art he did for Dark Spires in order to promote the book.

Leading off we have a review by Jonathan McCalmont of a book about prehistoric fiction. Yes, that’s right, Clan of the Cave Bear stuff. The reason this is interesting is that the way in which writers have portrayed Stone Age people has changed markedly with time. As with science fiction, prehistoric fiction is really about us.

Sam Jordison turns his attention to Michael Ondaatje and a novel that is all about the building of a massive public sewerage system in Toronto. It is man against engineering, much like in science fiction.

Jonathan Clements devotes his column to one of Japan’s foremost science fiction writers, Yasutaka Tsutsui, who turns out to be quite a feisty character.

My own column looks at a range of recent science fiction novels, all of which have their own take on the interaction between humans and computers. It includes the new Iain M. Bank Culture novel, and the fabulous debut novel from Hannu Rajaniemi.

This month’s podcast is all about gendered approaches to fantasy, and features Glenda Larke, Lou Anders and Tim Pratt.

Our interviewees for November are Seanan McGuire (looking fabulous in her Campbell tiara) and Colin Harvey.

If you haven’t done so already, please go any enjoy the contents. I have some ebooks to produce.

On Online Magazines

~ Cheryl ~ 14 Comments

First up, the boss man, Mr. Neil Clarke, has recently been interviewed by The Functional Nerds, a fine podcast. You can hear what he has to say here.

In addition Realms of Fantasy magazine has announced that it is once again closing for business. This is very sad, and as the official announcement says it is probably a result of the current economic downturn. However, I learned from Twitter that more privately (to his friends on Facebook) Warren Lapine has been blaming the fold on free online magazines such as Clarkesworld.

I’ve not seen what Warren actually wrote, and I suspect he’s mainly just a bit upset, but my own view is that if online magazines are doing better than print ones it is because they are more accessible rather than anything else. One of the main reasons that Clarkesworld has such good content is that we pay very well (and are picky about what we publish). And we are able to pay well because people give us money. It is a virtuous circle. The better the content you publish, the more money you get, and the better content you can afford.

That goes double for Salon Futura because we pay rather better for non-fiction than many print magazines. Often people who write book reviews get “paid” with the copy of the book they are reviewing. And I’ll never forget being told by the editor of one long-running print magazine that, as a fan, I should of course be happy to write for him for free. I hope that Salon Futura will establish that you can have good quality discussion of speculative literature online, not just the “my opinion” pieces we see from so many book review sites. Of course it will help if we get a few donations, because then we’ll be able to afford to pay better for the material.

Salon Futura #2

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Hey, we made it to a second issue! (And that despite Kevin and I spending much of the last month in Australia.)

So, issue #2 is now online. It features fabulous cover art by Ben Baldwin and a whole lot of other good stuff.

Jonathan Clements talks about a new anime movie that is, “sheer mayhem, as if the cast of Top Gear raced through minefields on the North Korean border, or the cast of the Cannonball Run took on Darth Vader.” Being Jonathan, he supplies a wealth of background detail about the influences on the film. It is only coincidence that some of the pitches tossed by Brian Wilson yesterday seemed to be in the air for half an hour. (Don’t know what I’m taking about? Go read.)

Karen Burnham’s column features three stories by Rick Bowes, Rachel Swirsky and Lucius Shepard. All three bring the tool kit of fantasy to bear on the difficult subject of child abuse.

I have been reading a lot of YA books of late, and talk about them here. If you haven’t tried Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy yet I can heartily recommend it (unless you prefer your fiction without politics).

This months Salon podcast features Nicola Griffith, Hal Duncan and Catherynne M. Valente who join me to talk about Writing LGBT Characters. The Salon is now available on iTunes for those of you who prefer to listen that way.

Our interviews for October are with Jay Lake and Pat Cadigan, both of whom provide excellent value. Finnish readers in particular should check out what Pat has to say.

Talking of Finland, this month’s Pipeline includes news of a new novel from Johanna Sinisalo. That will also be of interest to people from New Zealand, and anyone who loves parrots.

And finally we have news of Dark Spires. We are taking pre-orders now. If you want a paper copy, do let us know, we won’t be printing many to begin with.

Another Long Day

~ Cheryl

It has been another very long day in front of the keyboard. This time I have been working on the Wizard’s Tower Press website and on Salon Futura #2. I think I have everything sorted now, but I am very disappointed with the quality of ecommerce plugins available for WordPress. It looks like I will have to sign up with one of the stand-alone ecommerce solutions, which will further add to my monthly expenses.

Still, I did need to be up late anyway. The San Francisco Giants are now just 2 innings away from a place in postseason play. This is little short of a miracle. Excuse me while I stop looking at computers and stare at the TV instead.

Fitness For Purpose

~ Cheryl

Sure, it is a bad workwoman who blames her tools, but sometimes the tools do not behave themselves.

I am having “fun” today trying to get a version of Salon Futura that I can put on the Kindle. Mostly this involves stripping out all of the nice formatting and graphics from the EPUB version because the Kindle doesn’t support it. But one thing it is hard to get rid of is the need to highlight text in some way, for example when you include a quote.

The list of formatting commands that the Kindle supports is quite limited, but there are things you can do. Unfortunately the Kindle is also quite bad at supporting CSS, so most of your formatting has to be done by hand in the HTML. This is a pain in the butt.

Except that Sigil, bless it, knows better than you do. It doesn’t like inline formatting in the HTML. So if you add such commands to your source in Sigil then the program will create styles for you when it saves the source, and consequently the resulting code still won’t display properly on the Kindle.

Yes, there are ways around the problem, but really software should be better than this. No wonder so many ebooks are badly formatted.

Salon Futura Update

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The good thing about launching Salon Futura at Worldcon was that I could go round sticking my iPad under people’s noses and pestering them to read it. The bad thing about launching at Worldcon is that many of the people there had no internet access and therefore could not spend any time on the site. Also many of you were at Dragon*Con instead. Most people should be back home by now, so I thought I should do a quick reminder post.

Issue #1 is online here. I’m very pleased with the content, which includes the following:

  • Fabulous cover art by John Coulthart
  • An interview with China Miéville in which he talks about The City and The City, Kraken, and his forthcoming science fiction novel.
  • An interview with Lauren Beukes, who talks, amongst other things, about her script writer for the kids cartoon, URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika. Do check out the except from the series we included in which Lauren makes a cameo appearance as Rabid Rabbid.
  • The first in our regular series of podcasts, The Salon. In this issue Gary K. Wolfe, Nnedi Okorafor and Fábio Fernandes join me to talk about the changing nature of the science fiction field.
  • Sam Jordison claiming the high profile mainstream writer, E.L Doctorow, for steampunk.
  • Jonathan Clements bidding fond farewell to the manga and anime genius, Satoshi Kon, who died recently.
  • Karen Burnham highlighting some fine online short fiction
  • And my own column talking about how the real world keeps creeping into science fiction and fantasy literature.

In addition to being free online, the magazine is available as an EPUB download. The audio and video are not included as the files are huge, but the magazine looks utterly fabulous on an iPad. One of my jobs now I’m back is to get it into the iBooks and Kindle stores (though I have to say it doesn’t look nearly so nice on a Kindle).

Also now I am back, I need to get the news service up and running. If you have any industry news, please send it to me. That should make the magazine’s Twitter feed worth following.

Because Salon Futura is part of the Wizard’s Tower Press project, it has to be a paying venue, not a fanzine. I very much want to establish the idea that people who write good non-fiction are just as much worth paying as people who write good fiction. And of course if my UK company is paying America writers that will help my visa application when I am in a position to make it. We are getting some income from advertising, and ebooks sales will also help once I get the magazine into the stores, but as ever we are very grateful for any donations you see fit to make.

The Dead Critics Panel

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Yesterday I got to moderate a panel on literary criticism featuring John Clute, Bill Congreve and James Bradley. I’m pretty pleased with how it went, in no small part because it could easily have been taken as a manifesto for Salon Futura.

The title of the panel was “Is Criticism Dead”, the assumption being that because critics are losing their positions as gatekeepers of literary taste they no longer have a role in the world. Of course us critics are actually undead (and want your braaains!), but hopefully we still have a role in providing entertainment for the public.

The substance of the panel turned on making a distinction between criticism and reviews (and thanks to Peter Nichols for making this clear from the audience). We had, on a couple of occasions, tried to define criticism, and failed. However, we came up with a number of things that it is not.

To start with, as Peter so eloquently put it, criticism is not like writing for Which? magazine. We are not trying to tell you which book you should read next. Reviewers may try to do that, though I think it is a pretty foolish enterprise.

James noted that, especially in today’s online world, critics should approach works with an attitude of humility. We are not there to hand down judgment from on high. We are there to give our impression of the work. Clute added that we may well get it wrong on first reading, and should not be afraid to re-visit works at a later date. I added that even if we get it right for ourselves, other people may approach the work in a very different way. As I said in the first issue of Salon Futura, there is no one correct way to read a book.

Clute also noted that criticism is not spoiler free. You can’t talk intelligently about a book if you have to tiptoe around everything that happens in it. Reviews can try to be spoiler free. Blurbs perhaps should be but rarely are. Criticism, however, has to engage with the work.

Bill made some very interesting points about the nature of reading on computer screens and why the supposed short attention span of the online reader is more a function of font choice, line length and screen clarity than a dumbing down of people’s reading ability. I’d like to know a lot more about that and will try to find Bill to get references. This is relevant, because many online venues are uncomfortable with articles that try to develop an argument, as opposed to simply making points. Criticism should not be simply stating an opinion.

The rough conclusion that we came to is that the role of the critic as a gatekeeper who hands down judgment on books from on high may well be dead, but the need for critics is as great as ever and the new freedoms provided by the Internet, in which magazines like Salon Futura can find a niche without being beholden to the publishing industry, create plenty of opportunities for criticism to flourish.

Salon Futura #1

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

When the stars are right, the dread old ones shall return. Or so it says in the Necrofanicon anyway. Which is why there is a painting of R’lyeh on the cover of Salon Futura #1. Yes, the first issue is now live. You can find it here. I’m very pleased with it. We have articles, we have a podcast, we have video, and we have the aforementioned amazing John Coutlhart cover. Let me know what you think.

Long Day

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I have spent most of the day working on Salon Futura. We should at least have the web version ready to go in a day or so, but I’m hoping for at least the EPUB as well. In the meantime I am making this entirely gratuitous blog post to test a new plugin.

Adventures in EPUB

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

I have spent most of today working on an EPUB version of Salon Futura. I have been playing with EPUBs for a while now, but this was the first time I have tried to do anything clever with them (as opposed to just entering and formatting text).

One of the problems with ebooks is that both the tools and the standards are very much in a state of flux. There are very few specialist tools for ebook editing, and I wouldn’t call any of them professional. By far the most useful is Sigil, which allows direct editing of the EPUB file, and has tools for editing the meta data and ToC file, but as an HTML/CSS editor it is pretty sucky.

I found this out the hard way today when I entered an HREF tag that Sigil thought was invalid. To my horror, it not only flagged an error, but refused to display any code in that file from the error onwards. As far as I can make out, it deleted the rest of the file. Fortunately it only did that in memory, and I could recover a version at the last save by exiting the program, but even do that’s pretty dumb operation.

Of course no decent code editor should ever alter your code without permission. Sigil does it all the time.

The error, by the way, is rather interesting. I pasted in a URL that queried some PHP code. So it included a ? followed a bunch of parameters. Something in the XHTML validation doesn’t allow more than one “=” in the SRC field of an HREF tag. And I don’t think it is just Sigil. Other editors objected to it as well, though they handled the error much better. This seems very odd to me. It isn’t like such URL syntax is at all unusual.

Meanwhile I have been looking at alternative tools. I need an HTML/CSS editor that won’t mess with my code without permission, but will have good source highlighting, will validate my code and so on.

I used to use Dreamweaver a lot before I started using WordPress to build web sites. My old copy still works, but it is poor on CSS because it is very old. So I checked out the latest version. Annoyingly upgrade pricing isn’t available for my version. Worse than that, however, Adobe have made the program so bloated and complicated that it needs 1Gb of disk space to install and won’t run on my laptop because the machine doesn’t have good enough screen resolution. That’s just silly.

Fortunately there are plenty of alternatives. I have checked out quite a few. The best I have found so far are TopStyle and phpDesigner (thanks Kyle!). The latter looks very impressive, and I would be interested if I didn’t already have a PHP editor. TopStyle, on the other hand, is more of a specialist HTML/CSS editor, which is pretty much what I needed. Hopefully I can do most of my editing in that, and only drop stuff into Sigil when it is ready.

More On Podcasts

~ Cheryl ~ 11 Comments

The podcast field is expanding rapidly, I suspect in no small part due to the success of StarShipSofa in the Hugos. The latest site to get in on the action is SF Signal. They have their debut episode up here. There are a couple of things of particular interest to me in it. Firstly one of the people in the first half of the podcast is my friend Karen Burnham, who will be reviewing short fiction for Salon Futura. And secondly the other half of the podcast is an interview with the very wonderful Lou Anders of Pyr. Amongst other things, Lou talks about which conventions he thinks are most important to attend, and about the forthcoming books from Pyr.

Talking of podcasts, I asked the other day on Twitter for recommendations for a microphone (the one I have on my headset produces lousy results when a Skype call is recorded). I got a lot of helpful responses (and one arrogant male who firmly informed me that there was no point in asking about microphones unless I had something worth podcasting, presumably because as an airhead female that would never have occurred to me). Pretty much everyone recommended Blue, but opinion was divided as to whether I should get the Snowflake, Snowball or Yeti. I’ll be using it mostly at home with very little ambient noise, but if the Snowflake can do a decent job, and work on the road, and is cheapest, it may be the best bet. Thoughts?

Also, if anyone out there has any suggestions as to where I can find good intro/outro music without having to pay a fortune for the rights…

Clarkesworld #47

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Yes, it is a new month, and therefore a new Clarkesworld hits the aether. What have we got for you this month?

Our lead fiction is from the very wonderful Catherynne M. Valente. From the title, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time”, you might deduce that Cat is writing science fiction, and in a way she is, but the story is mainly about a science fiction writer, and therefore about writing science fiction.

Cat’s story is, of course, also available as a podcast narrated by the wonderful Kate Baker.

The second story for August is “Messenger” by recent Clarion West graduate, Julia M. Sidorova. Julia has a PhD in molecular genetics, but the story is about something very different. This one will be podcast in a couple of weeks time.

Our regular interviewer, Jeremy L.C. Jones, has something slightly different for you this month. It is a group interview with members of the Altered Fluid writing group, including N. K. Jemisin, Matthew Kressel, and Saladin Ahmed. This should be absolutely fascinating for any young writers out there.

The cover art is “Watcher of Merlin” by David Melvin who is mainly a special effects guy but clearly has a lot of talent as an artist as well.

There is no non-fiction article this month. The simple reason for this is that if we don’t have anything we think is worth publishing then we don’t publish anything. Clarkesworld is, after all, paying for these articles. I’m very happy to work with authors to help get the sort of article we are looking for, but at the same time Neil expects me to keep up a standard. As someone who wants to pay for good quality non-fiction, I find it quite distressing that there is so little interest in providing it. I really don’t want to have to go the route of commissioning all the articles several months in advance just to make sure we have something good.

The good news is that in place of the non-fiction Neil has done a fascinating editorial about electronic publication and what it means to be a “magazine”. Traditional definitions are very much going by the wayside because of the new technology, and people who rely on categorization of publications (for example the cataloging work that Locus does, or awards such as the Hugos) are going to have to be flexible to keep up.

On the subject of electronic publication, Clarkesworld is now available in both EPUB (iBooks) and MOBI (Kindle) formats. #47 will be purchasable from the Wyrm Publishing store very soon now. We know that the magazine is available for free online, but if you would like to take it away on your portable reader we hope that $2.99 is a reasonable price to pay. Also that money helps us pay the many fine writers that we publish. (And UK readers, if you buy from the Kindle store you’ll get charged VAT on that, because our stupid government classes ebooks as “software”. Wyrm does not have to charge VAT. Also buying direct means that more money goes to our writers rather than to Amazon.)

Finally, as this month’s issue features a Cat Valente story, I should also mention that Cat edited the latest issue of Apex magazine, which features fiction from Nick Mamatas, Theodora Goss and Jeff VanderMeer. On Twitter Lavie Tidhar noted that it really doesn’t make sense for so many online magazines to target 1st of the month publication, and I think he has a point. Salon Futura #1 needs to be out in time for Worldcon, but after that I think I may drift towards mid-month publication so as not to cause too much of a reading log jam.

One Giant Leap

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

As you may remember, in order to get back to the US (go to conventions, see Kevin, etc.) I need to be able to get a visa. The only way this is ever likely to happen (short of miracles) is if I have a business that requires me to go to science fiction conventions. So I have started one.

This is doubtless going to get me into all sorts of trouble, but hopefully it will also do a lot of good. Much of the thinking that went into it was along the lines of, “if I have to start a business, how can I do most good for the community with it.” Bearing in mind, of course, that I don’t have huge sums of money to invest and lose.

The thing that is likely to attract most comment is the magazine, Salon Futura, which is scheduled for launch at Worldcon. This is not a re-launch of Emerald City. It is very much a paying venue, despite being non-fiction. I have always believed that people who write non-fiction well deserve just as much payment and adulation as those who write fiction well. Also, if Wizard’s Tower is to be a credible business, it has to pay people good money.

Note that the payment rule doesn’t apply to me. I will be writing material for Salon Futura to begin with, but I don’t see it as an exercise in self-publishing and will happily step aside for others if what I do isn’t popular and we can afford someone better. I very much hope to make money from the business in the long term, and the UK tax authorities will be upset with me if I don’t, but the first priority will be to pay other people.

Talking of which, some of you very kindly offered to give me money to help pay for an immigration lawyer. I turned that down because the sums involved were way too large for that sort of appeal. It would be more than enough money to run Salon Futura for a whole year. On the other hand, having the money to pay for the first issue or two would be very handy. Also, while that money indirectly helps me because it helps establish the business, it doesn’t go directly to me. So if you do want to help, we have a startup finding appeal.

We are open to submissions, and I’ll write more later about the sort of thing I am looking for, but for now I have Finncon to attend to. I’m scheduled pretty much solidly today from noon until I get to bed.