Industry News, February 2019
TV and Movies News
Abuse Allegations and Separating Artists From Their Art
The Atlantic recently featured an article on the number of young men who have accused X-Men director Bryan Singer of sexual assault and examining the history of past allegations that have been swept under the rug in one way or another. On a related note, Constance Grady mused on Vox about whether it’s possible, or even desirable, to separate an artist from their art, specifically in the context of her teenage love for Edward Scissorhands. The question will undoubtedly keep coming back up as the arts and society in general deal with questions surrounding sexual abuse, domestic abuse, and other forms of bad (and often illegal) behavior on the part of artists.
American Gods and Good Omens
Season two of American Gods will premiere March 10! This second season follows a critically-acclaimed first, but also the departure of the two original showrunners, Bryan Fuller and Michael Green, and then a third showrunner, Jesse Alexander, who took over after their departure. However, Neil Gaiman, the author of the original book, remains associated with the production, and he and the cast have made positive remarks about the direction of the show in season two.
There had been some discussion at one time of Gaiman himself taking over as a showrunner for American Gods, but he’s been too busy with the television series of Good Omens, which we recently learned will premier May 31 on Amazon Prime. Gaiman cowrote the book Good Omens, a comedic novel aboutan angel, a demon, and the apocalypse, with the late Terry Pratchett. The series will star David Tennant and Michael Sheen, with many others (including Nick Offerman and Benedict Cumberbatch) in smaller roles.
Comics on TV
The popular comic Y: The Last Man, which follows an apocalypse where all men but one were destroyed, is getting a TV series set to premiere on FX in 2020. Aïda Mashaka Croal and Michael Green are attached as showrunners, and Amber Tamblyn, Imogen Poots, Diane Lane, Lashana Lynch, and Barry Keoghan will star.
Movies Shorts
- Brie Larson is hoping to use her Captain Marvel press tour to draw attention to women behind the scenes of the film, and wants to establish a vocational school specifically designed to get people into filmmaking.
- Netflix and Nickelodeon are teaming up to make a new TMNT movie, with the intention that they will draw viewers to the TV series on Netflix.
- Longtime fan-favorite studio Laika is doing a new movie about the missing link, with a cast including Hugh Jackman and Zoe Saldana helping a creature named Susan to get to Shangri-La in order to unite with the Yetis there.
Publishing News
Romantic Plagiarism
This week the plagiarism hashtag #CopyPasteCris burst screaming into the
writing world. The controversy started when bestselling romance author Courtney
Milan accused Cristiane Serruya of being “a copyright infringer, a plagiarist, and an idiot,”
claiming that Serruya stole entire sections from Milan’s novel The Duchess War. As BookRiot reports, Serruya at first denied
this before saying it was her ghostwriter who committed plagiarism — evidently the same ghostwriter Serruya hired off Fiverr
— but that of course doesn’t change Serruya’s ultimate responsibility.
In response, the Romance Writers of America removed Serruya’s novel from one of their award contests.
This resulted in a major case of irony for the RWA because Milan had been
forbidden to submit the very novel Serruya had plagiarized to this contest.
Still shaking my head over that.
Soon others dug into all of Serruya’s
published books, with these amateur investigators reportedly finding that
"23 authors & 26 books have been plagiarized.”
As Kayleigh Donaldson on Pajiba wrote, this serial
plagiarism “exposes something the publishing world and Amazon have
struggled to deal with for many years now. Amazon’s algorithm screws over a lot
of authors, and it’s ripe for being gamed by click-farms, scammers and straight
up thieves. Plagiarism may be easier than ever to uncover but for every scammer
revealed, there are dozens more getting away with it because their business
plan has become too big to fail and Amazon, who remain the biggest name in
self-publishing, won’t clear up the mess.”
And the Publishing Controversies Go On and On
But the Serruya affair isn’t the only publishing controversy of recent weeks. There was also the outrage around new
author Amélie Wen Zhao, who canceled her YA novel Blood Heir after a social media storm
over accusations of racism and plagiarism. Author Heidi Heilig wrote a post describing what happened, which is an insightful read. And
Absolute Write has an excellent look behind the scenes of what happened and describes how some haters and bad actors
may have used the controversy for their own ends.
Other recent controversies include that surrounding
Jay Asher, author of Thirteen Reasons Why. After being expelled from the
Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators over accusations of
inappropriate sexual behavior, Asher filed suit against the organization. And
now it comes out there may have been a “hush-hush agreement” involved to keep all this
hidden.
And then there’s Woman in the Window
author and editor Dan Mallory, named by Vox as "publishing's biggest scam artist."
Mallory not only engaged in bad behavior in the publishing industry for decades
but was also well paid for it, as described in this excellent New Yorker article.
Problems with Curiosity Quills Press
According to Publisher's Lunch, Curiosity
Quills Press is behind on authors’ royalty payments and temporarily shutting
down print operations with the exception of middle grade novels. All authors
now have the option to terminate their contracts with “no strings attached.”
Press co-owner Eugene Teplitsky emailed authors and said anyone who
wanted rights reverted should contact editor@curiosityquills.com. Authors are
also being told they can shop their subrights around.
Most of the report at Publisher's Lunch is behind
a firewall, so for more info check out this Writers Beware post from 2018.
Authors Guild and Society of Authors take on Internet Archive
The Authors Guild and Society of Authors have filed suit over alleged copyright infringement by
the Internet Archive, which has been lending scanned copies of digital books.
I’m torn on this issue. While I think the
people in the Authors Guild and Society of Authors have their hearts in the
right place, I’ve also noticed they have a very restrictive view of copyright
issues which is often not in the public interest. For example, for a long time
the Authors Guild fought Google's attempt to make books searchable.
If the Authors Guild had won in that case they would have severely hurt the
ability of scholars, writers and average people to access information in out of
print or hard to find books.
Their complaint against the Internet Archive
strikes me as similar to their losing battle against making books searchable.
If these groups win I could easily see their next target being physical
libraries which lend e-books, an issue which has been controversial with some
publishers.
But that said, I also don’t believe the
Internet Archive should be lending e-copies of scanned books which are
currently being published and are easily available to the public (although it’s
not clear if they're actually doing this).
Instead of filing this lawsuit and maybe
creating bad legal precedence, I’d prefer the Authors Guild and Society
of Authors to find a way to work out an agreement with the Internet Archive
where everyone benefits. But for now that seems to be off the table.
Publishing News Shorts
- Alex Shvartsman wrote a great analysis of what the SFWA rate increase will mean for authors and magazines. Alex’s analysis is pretty in-depth and worth reading.
- According to Victoria Strauss, fee-charging publisher Calumet Editions is doing a “kickback scheme” where they call on agents to steer rejected manuscripts toward their partnership program in exchange for a cut of the royalties. Avoid this like the plague!
- When Remain Magazine first announced their new magazine of dystopian, apocalyptic and survival short fiction, they said they’d pay SFWA pro rates. Now, though, they’re saying they’ll only pay $10 per story. However, they did do the right thing after changing their rates by contacted authors who had already submitted stories to let them know of the change. Authors were then allowed to decide whether to continue submitting their fiction.
- Excellent article talking to women of color on what it's like working in the book publishing industry.
- Time for a little writerly perspective: More people read Costco Connection than Reader’s Digest, O Magazine, National Geographic, People, and almost any science fiction or fantasy magazine which has ever existed. Costco Connection has a circulation of 12 million a month, while O has a circ of 2.4 million. Details on the circs in this media kit from Costco (including ad rates for some of those magazines).
Video Game News
The Giant That Eats Studios
Heavy.com has written a fascinating piece on game studios that EA has killed. The list starts with Bullfrog Productions, founded in 1987 and acquired by EA in 1995, and continues up through the end of Visceral Games in October of 2017. If you want to know more about how this giant of games publishing throws their weight around in the industry, this is a good place to start. The author hopes very much that BioWare won’t be their next victim!
Upcoming Consoles
The PlayStation 5 has been announced. There’s no word yet on a release date, or even any solid specs or features, although one rumor is that it will include backward compatibility all the way through the original PlayStation, which would be a hugely popular choice among fans of classic games.
You May Have Missed:
- BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins is generally pretty highly regarded, but has a lot of bugs that players felt held it back from being all it could be. Fortunately, there’s a fan-made mod that fixes a whopping 790 bugs, as well as restoring hidden dialogue, story choices, and in-game items, and has continued to be updated following its June 2017 release.
Books and Authors News
Calls for Submissions
Uncanny Magazine: Disabled People Destroy Fantasy is open for submissions until February 28, 2019, so you still have a week before the deadline!
In Memoriam
Sci-fi author Carol Emshwiller died on February 2, 2019, and Betty Ballantine, longtime editor and cofounder of Ballantine Books and later founder of Rufus Publications, died February 12, 2019.
Throughout a long life of publishing, Carol Emshwiller won the Philip K. Dick Award for The Mount, the World Fantasy Award for her 1991 short story collection The Start of the End of It All and Other Stories, and two Nebula short story awards. The World Fantasy Con presented Emshwiller with a lifetime achievement award in 2005, and according to the above remembrance, Ursula Le Guin said that she had “one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction.”
Betty Ballantine established the American division of Penguin Books with her husband, Ian Ballantine, in 1939, importing British paperback editions to the United States, starting with The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells. Paperbacks, selling at just twenty-five cents a book, made books and reading more easily within the reach of the working class at a time when hardcover books sold for around forty-five dollars in today’s money. The two later went on to found Bantam and Ballantine Books together, as well. As an editor, Betty nurtured authors and “sought out the pulp writers of science fiction who were writing for magazines and said she wanted them to write novels, and she would publish them,” according to her nephew in her New York Times obituary. Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany are among the authors whose careers she helped to launch.
The Hugos and Worldcon 2019
Worldcon and the Hugos are coming up soon! This year they will be hosted in Dublin, Ireland, on August 15–19. Want to know how Hugo nominations work? Check out this video, where Claire Rousseau explains the whole process. Cat Rambo has put together a roundup of eligibility posts to assist nominators in finding all the eligible works available. You must have joined Worldcon by December 31, 2018, in order to nominate for the 2019 Hugo Awards, and nominations close March 16, 2019.
Nebula Finalists Announced
The 2018 Nebula Finalists were announced on February 20. Awards will be presented during a ceremony on the evening of May 18, 2019. In addition to familiar categories such as novel, short story, novella, and dramatic presentation, a new category has been added for Game Writing this year, with inaugural finalists including Black Mirror's "Bandersnatch," the most recent God of War game, and The Road to Canterbury, an entirely text-based game/choose-your-own-adventure novel by Kate Heartfield.
Podcasting News
Spotify, the streaming music service that has recently moved into streaming podcasts as well, has purchased Gimlet Media and Anchor in an effort to move further into providing podcasts to their audience. Gimlet is well-known for shows like StartUp and Reply All, while Anchor is more of a service provider, claiming to power more than 40 percent of the industry’s new podcasts. What this will mean for the larger landscape of podcasts has yet to be seen, but it definitely indicates that larger companies are seeing the opportunity for money in the medium, which may eventually lead to difficulties for independent artists and providers.
Industry News, January 2019
TV and Movies
Comic-Related Movies and TV
Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse made comics fans proud on Golden Globes night by breaking
Disney and Pixar’s rarely-broken strangle-hold on the category and swooping
away with Best Animated Picture.
In other news somewhat related to comics, the
director of Deadpool is teaming up
with the director of Seven to produce
an animated anthology series called Love, Death &
Robots, comprised of 18 shorts running between 5 and 15 minutes each,
from different filmmakers and directed at adults. The individual shorts will
showcase different styles of animation, and a handful of stills are available at
the above link to give a hint of what they’ll look like.
Netflix Original Series and More
Netflix’s acclaimed sci-fi horror series Stranger Things will return July 4
with a new season focusing on the familiar characters. While the teaser trailer
that’s been released doesn’t offer much in the way of plot hints, it does
suggest that at least some of the action will center around a new Starcourt
Mall arriving in town, and a new character played by Maya Thurman-Hawke, who
will sell ice cream in the food court along with Steve (Joe Keery). Francesca
Reale (Haters Back Off!), Carey Elwes
(The Princess Bride fame) and Jack
Busey (Starship Troopers) will also
appear, and a three-book
prequel series and behind-the-scenes book are also in the works, if you can’t
get enough of the creepy world of Hawkins.
And in their continuing search for new series, Netflix has ordered an original Shadow and Bone series based on Leigh Bardugo’s bestselling Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows Grishaverse fantasy novels. The series will be run by Eric Heisserer, the writer behind Bird Box, and Shawn Levy, the executive producer of Stranger Things. Netflix is clearly banking on the fact that viewers can’t do without their content – on Monday they made the largest increase to subscription costs since opening the streaming field more than a decade ago, raising prices 13-18%. Whether or not this change will sit well with the audience has yet to be seen, but the stock market certainly approved of the change.
Netflix is clearly banking on the fact that viewers can’t do without their content – on Monday they made the largest increase to subscription costs since opening the streaming field more than a decade ago, raising prices 13-18%. Whether or not this change will sit well with the audience has yet to be seen, but the stock market certainly approved of the change.
TV and Movie Shorts
- Io9 offers their list of movies to look out for in 2019.
Publishing News
Short Story Markets
With so many writers focusing on New Year's resolutions around
writing and publishing, I thought I'd mention a bit of good advice for writers
at the start of their careers: Submit to genre short fiction magazines and
markets.
In the interest of disclosure, I give this advice because I love
short fiction. But I've also found short fiction markets to generally be very
open and supportive of new writers.
For example, editor C.C. Finlay recently said that
Fantasy and Science Fiction "published
63 stories in 2018 (3 novellas, 21 novelets, 39 shorts). 22 (more than a third)
were by writers making their 1st appearance in F&SF. 5 were by writers
making their first pro genre sale." And Finlay added the numbers
from 2017 were almost identical.
Asimov's Science Fiction is another pro-level SF
magazine which publishes a good number of new writers each year, as does Beneath
Ceaseless Skies. Both Asimov's
editor Sheila Williams and BCS
editor Scott H. Andrews are known for reading every submission they
receive and for encouraging and publishing works by new writers.
Two other magazines I urge new writers to consider are Interzone
and Black Static. While these
magazines don't pay pro rates, they're known for their high quality stories and
for the attention their authors receive. Editor Andy Cox has an excellent
ability to find stories by new writers in his slush pile. Each year Cox
publishes (by my estimate) a dozen or more new writers who are receiving their
first publication in one of his magazines.
Genre magazines can also be more open to diverse writers and
stories than traditional publishers. For example, over two-thirds of the
original fiction published by The Dark
last year was written by women and people of color. The Dark, like many other genre magazines, is also open to translations
of genre stories from around the world.
And those are only a few of the genre magazines which actively
seek out stories by new writers. Others worth checking out include Uncanny,
Apex, Clarkesworld, and Nightmare,
but there are too many to list all of them.
One reason short fiction markets are so receptive to new writers
is that many writers turn to longer works such as novels as they advance in
their careers. So short fiction magazines have a much larger level of writer
churn than book-length publishers. This means good short fiction editors know
they must continually seek out new writers – which is great news for those
writers.
New Publisher for Space and Time Magazine
Last year Space and Time Magazine said
they would
be closing after 52 years of publication. However, the magazine
rang in the New Year with the announcement that Angela Yuriko Smith will
take over as publisher beginning with the next issue (#133), tentatively
scheduled for late spring/early summer 2019.
Space and Time Magazine was launched in 1966 by
original publisher and editor Gordon Linzner. The magazine faced a potential
shutdown 13 years ago until Hildy Silverman took it over. Now, as the magazine
states, history has repeated itself with another new publisher stepping up to
keep it going.
Beware of Morality Clauses in Author Contracts
Judith Shulevitz offers an
interesting
look at the morality clauses many publishers are trying to insert into their
author contracts. As an example of these clauses Shulevitz describes the
contract used by Condé Nast
magazines, which states that if in the company’s “sole judgment” the writer “becomes the subject of public
disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals,” Condé Nast can terminate the agreement.
As Shulevitz explains, this clause means
“a writer need not have done anything wrong; she need only become scandalous.
In the age of the Twitter mob, that could mean simply writing or saying
something that offends some group of strident tweeters.”
Authors should definitely
beware of these clauses and strongly push back on them.
Publishing Shorts
- The Flip is a new e-newsletter focused on female leadership in publishing. The first issue goes out January 28. Subscribe here.
- The UK magazine Harper’s Bazaar recently announced a short story competition which sounded exciting until authors realized that merely entering the contest meant they lost the copyright to their stories and all other rights. Authors strongly pushed back on this and, within a few days, the magazine rescinded this rights grab. For more details on all this, check out Writer Beware.
- The Hugo Awards are now open for nominations. Must be a member of Dublin 2019 Worldcon or last year's Worldcon to nominate.
Video Game News
Fallout Creators Go to The Outer Worlds
On the heels of significant backlash against Bethesda over the release of Fallout 76, the original creators of Fallout and the developers behind Fallout: New Vegas have announced a new game titled The Outer Worlds. Based on the trailer, the new game would seem to be combining stylistic elements familiar to players of Fallout with a science fiction space setting in a universe where corporations have pushed colonists to the very edges of the universe. No release date has been announced yet, but based on what we’ve seen so far, fans of space RPGs and the Fallout universe will both find something worth looking into here.
Procedural Content Generation
And if you are a game developer, you may want
to read Gamasutra’s piece discussing with a number of developers why
and how to best use procedural content generation, and how to avoid its misuse.
Gamasutra also offers
a 2018
year in review with their “top games, devs, events and trends.”
Books and Comic Books News
Kamala Khan Gets a New Creative Team
G. Willow Wilson will be passing the Ms. Marvel torch on to Eisner Award-winning writer Saladin Ahmed. Wilson has written the series since Kamala Khan’s debut in 2014, to great popularity and critical acclaim. There’s little doubt that Ms. Marvel will be in good hands, however – in addition to winning the Eisner Award, Ahmed’s Black Bolt series for Marvel was a finalist for the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story, and he has recently been writing for Miles Morales: Spider-Man.
SFWA Awards Announced
SFWA has announced William Gibson as their 35th Damon Knight Grand Master for his contributions to the literature of Science Fiction and Fantasy. The award recognizes “lifetime achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy.” In addition, science fiction author and astrophysicist Gregory Benford has been awarded the 2019 Robert A. Heinlein Award, “bestowed for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space.”
Podcasting News
Parsec Awards Respond to Complaint
The Parsec
Awards committee has responded to a complaint alleging that one of their
2018 winners had “a history of extremely disturbing behavior” with a statement
that the unidentified winner can keep their award and that the committee feels
the 2018 awards were judged in accordance with stated policies and procedures. “It
is the goal of The Parsecs to judge solely on the merit of the content,” the
committee continued, “and not on gender, heritage, religious belief, sexual
orientation, politics, or other factors not in the podcast as presented to the
audience.”
You Might Have Missed
- Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders have a podcast about SF and Science.
Conventions News
According to Amanda Cherry's Twitter account, Emerald City Comic Con will have a "Consent is Sexy" panel featuring Meg Elison, Jasmine Silvera, Seanan McGuire, Joseph Brassey, Liz Argall, and herself. Emerald City Comic Con features a mix of guests from comics, entertainment, and the literary world, and will be held in Seattle, Washington (USA), on March 14-17.
Industry News, December 2018
Beware of Bad Clauses in Literary Agent Contracts
Recently, a literary agent was criticized online for including this clause in his contract:
"Please note: in the event that the agent sells the work to a publisher who provides no cash advance payment, the author agrees to pay $500 to the Agency in advance of signing the contract - an amount that will be reimbursed through future royalties."
Obviously this clause causes concern because money should flow to the writer, not from the writer to their agent.The clause could also cause a serious conflict of interest for the agent, who might be willing to make a deal not in the author’s best interest because the agent would still be paid by the author.
I tracked down the agent who had included the clause and asked him about it. The agent said he included it because “I have recently sold two books to publishers who do not offer a cash advance but, instead, have slightly higher royalties. The $500 clause simply assures that we are paid for our time and if the book does receive royalties - the author gets paid back in full.”
To the agent’s credit, he decided shortly after we spoke to remove the clause from all his contracts. However, I’ve heard of similar clauses being included on a few occasions in other agency contracts.
Authors should always push back on clauses like this. While publishing is continually changing, with more publishers offering deals that do not carry up-front cash advances, that doesn’t mean authors should pay their agents in such cases. Paying your agent is a slippery slope our genre’s authors do not want to find themselves sliding down.
Pyr Sale
Prometheus Books has sold its two genre imprints, including Pyr, to Start Publishing. Start Publishing is a decade-old press which got its start by licensing Warren Lapine's digital backlist and also by purchasing many of the assets ofNightshade Books when they went under. The company has since grown quickly by purchasing other imprints, a process Start calls "strategic acquisitions."
Some authors are not happy with the deal. One author (who wished to not be named publicly) complained on Facebook about their publishing rights being subject to this secondary sale. However, it appears that there’s nothing authors can do to stop their books from being taken over by Start Publishing.
Beyond how this deal affects authors, I'm curious about Start Publishing's long-term plans. The press appears to be running their business by essentially buying up SF/F works from other publishers, while also releasing a limited number of new books. So far this appears to be working for them, but what their long-term publishing goal is remains to be seen.
What Do the Recent Changes at Tor Mean?
Tor Books has seen a lot of changes this year, with Devi Pillai being named vice president and publisher while Patrick Nielsen Hayden was named vice president and editor-in-chief. In addition, Tor founder Tom Doherty stepped down from his role running the overall company in charge of the publisher.
With Tor being one of the science fiction and fantasy genre's most influential and important book publishers,these changes raise the question: is Tor changing course on what they publish?
In general, the answer appears to be ‘no’. However, it does look like that Tor has reworked how they consider and accept books, with editors having to make more detailed commercial cases for the books they want to accept. Authors should definitely make note of this.
For more details on what all this means and the process by which Tor now considers the books they accept, read this in-depth report.
Book Smugglers Publishing Shifts Focus
In sad news, starting December 31st, Book Smugglers Publishing will shift their business away from selling short stories,novellas, and novels. Run by Thea James and Ana Grilo, Book Smugglers was founded in 2014 and had released a number of highly regarded books over the years. According to the statement released by James and Grilo — who essentially do all the work at Book Smugglers, including reading submissions, editing manuscripts,and publishing and promoting their books — they have decided to focus instead on Book Smuggler’s strengths as a website and as a publisher of short fiction.