A style sheet is a document the copyeditor prepares that lists the grammatical conventions, characters, places, unusual or made-up words, and the distinctive treatment of words (capitalization, hyphenation, favored spellings, etc.) within a particular text. My style sheets are very thorough, because every decision I make is a deliberate one, and I’m often leery that an overzealous proofreader will come along and try to change things.

Style sheets are useful in a number of ways. First, they help the copyeditor maintain consistency. I’ve heard other copyeditors say that they prepare the style sheet once they’re done with a book, and I cannot imagine how that works for them. I refer to the style sheet constantly as I copyedit, because despite having a freakishly good memory for what I’ve read, even I cannot keep track in my head of the hundreds (literally) of possibilities that alternate spellings, hyphenation, and capitalization produce in any book.

For fantasy and science fiction, style sheets are particularly important for a number of reasons: First, SF/F books often come in series, and a thorough style sheet is important for maintaining continuity from one book to the next. Second, these books generally contain a large number of made-up places and terms–the authors are often fantastic world-builders–as well as very unusual names. In any genre, it can be difficult to remember the exact spelling of the name of a minor character you haven’t seen in three hundred pages–Was it “Frederick” or “Frederic”?–but in SF/F you might have an alien proper noun with seven consonants and an apostrophe. Unless you’ve already written it down and can refer back to your list, you’re going to have a hard time maintaining consistency. (And incidentally, the complexity of the world-building and its attendant vocabulary is one reason many copyeditors don’t like to take SF/F–it’s a lot of work that way.)

Style sheets are often provided to the compositor, too, and the compositor can then use them while setting the book to verify that something was indeed done intentionally.

And style sheets are always provided to the proofreader.

As an aside, proofreading (which is comparing the set proof against the manuscript) requires less knowledge than copyediting. Therefore it pays less, partly because proofreaders don’t have to make decisions about how to apply styles and so on: They’re just supposed to make sure the styles the copyeditor decided on were followed. That doesn’t stop some proofreaders, however, from deciding that the copyeditor should have followed strict CMS (Chicago Manual of Style, the basic publishing Bible) and altering things accordingly. (I personally think that authors should always be able to see the proofreader’s alterations, and many publishers don’t show them outright, though they may send along second proof with the changes already incorporated.)

As I’ve noted elsewhere, I dislike CMS for fiction; it is geared toward nonfiction. And despite the fact that some production editors like copyeditors to follow strict CMS, I’ve yet to talk to a single editor (and I’ve talked to many about this) who feels the same way. Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden, for instance, agreed with me about that in this thread, calling strict CMS “potentially disastrous” for fiction. CMS’s rules on hyphenation, for instance, drive authors insane if you follow them exactly, and with good reason: The rules often make fiction less readable. (And yes, I know I’ve promised a post on hyphenation; I’m just really skeptical that I won’t bore people to death with it.)

So my style sheets contain a lot of items in which I’m instructing the proofreader to leave things alone: “Fragments are acceptable with this author’s style” and “Split infinitives are acceptable with this author’s style” and “Please follow style sheet for hyphenation.” (I detest the “never split an infinitive” rule, btw. Everyone knows that the only reason the rule came into being is because some bishop looked at Latin and decided that since Latin didn’t split infinitives, English shouldn’t either, right? And Latin can’t split infinitives, because they’re all one word. Argh. Drives me nuts. Following that rule can result in the most unnatural-sounding sentences. There’s a detailed discussion here if you’re interested. )

I also put into the style sheet things I need to keep track of: Does the author prefer to lowercase or capitalize a full sentence after a colon? What is the author’s preference for showing the possessive of proper singular nouns ending in “s” or “x”? How does the author treat titles? Some publishers have particular house styles they want copyeditors to follow for those rules, and if so I note those on the style sheet.

And of course I put in all the character names and nicknames and epithets and titles. I put in the names of the characters’ pets or horses, and what color and sex they are. I note all the place names, and whether they take a “the” in front. I note the names of wars and laws and the titles of books to which the characters refer. I note the author’s preferred spelling for any words for which there are alternatives. For all of those, I put in the page number for the first time I saw each item.

It goes on and on. I want to be consistent, and if I make a change, I want it to make sense to the author. The book is their baby, after all. By maintaining a thorough style sheet, I am able to have a particular page to show the author if I query or change something in order to produce consistency. To me, that’s just common courtesy.

—

Reprinted with permission from the author’s website.

Deanna Hoak is a freelance copyeditor specializing in fantasy and science fiction. SF/F novels she has copyedited have been finalists for (and have sometimes won) the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, Endeavour, Golden Spur, John W. Campbell Memorial, Quill, Locus, Philip K. Dick, British Science Fiction, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. In 2007 she became the only copyeditor ever short-listed for a World Fantasy Award.

So you open a search engine–Google, let’s say–and type “publishers” into the search box. Here’s what you get.

The two top nonsponsored listings are for Random House and HarperCollins–big names that you may recognize. You navigate through their websites for submission information…bummer. In your genre, they won’t look at any manuscript that doesn’t have an agent.

The sponsored listings look a lot more encouraging. Instead of “Agented submissions only,” they say things like “We Want to Read Your Book!” and “Get your book published today–the industry leader for new authors!” and “The only choice for new authors.” There’s just one problem. Of the eleven listings, ten are for fee-based publishers (though you may not realize that right away, since some are less than candid about the fact that you have to pay) or self-publishing services. The eleventh is for a “publisher search” website that includes no real publishers, only vanity publishers and self-publishing companies.

Suppose, instead of Googling “publishers,” you’d Googled “book publishers.” Here’s what you’d see, and it’s just as bad. Of the nonsponsored listings, Random House is first…and PublishAmerica is third. Again, there are eleven sponsored listings–ten for fee-based publishers or publishing services, and one for another faux publisher search website, this one registered to Author Solutions, parent of self-publishing services AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Xlibris, Trafford, and WordClay. Guess which publishers it suggests?

Just about any general search you may do–”novel publishers” or “find a publisher” or “getting published” or “how to get published”–is fraught with similar perils. Of course, the search pages also throw up helpful links–to Absolute Write, or Publishers Marketplace, or Publishers Weekly, or Harold Underdown’s tongue-in-cheek but very helpful how-do-I-get-it-published quiz. But I’ve gotten enough email over the years to know that many inexperienced writers look no farther than the highly-visible sponsored links.

All of which underscores the need for caution on the Internet. (Yes, I know I’ve blogged about this before, but it’s such a consistent issue for the writers who contact me that the point can’t be made too often.) Don’t get me wrong–I love the Internet, and can’t imagine my professional life without it. It’s an invaluable research resource, offering unprecedented access to a treasure trove of information, enabling knowledgeable writers to fine-tune their agent- and publisher-quests as never before. For new writers, however, it can pose substantial hazards, since there’s at least as much bad information as good–not to mention all the people who want to sell you something that may not be good for you. Even so-called professional resources aren’t always reliable–the writing and editing question forums at LinkedIn, supposedly a place for business and professional networking, are absolute pits of bad advice and misinformation–and as for writers’ message boards, it’s a good idea never to forget that people who know nothing are as eager to opine as people who know something.

Unless writers are able to filter the information they find online, they’re at risk of making bad decisions or falling victim to predators. In other words, writers need to know something about publishing before they start searching for publishers (or agents). Rather than plunging in and attempting to learn on the fly, it’s a much better idea to first take the time to build a knowledge base. There are many ways to do this, and it doesn’t have to be tedious. My blog post, “Learning the Ropes,” offers some suggestions.

Trust me: it’s one of the best investments in your future career you’ll ever make.

Originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Spring 1995. Copyright © 1995 Terry McGarry. Reprinted with permission.

Many copyeditors prefer to spell the word “copyeditor.” I laughed when I got page proofs of a short story I had written about a copyeditor: the anthology’s copyeditor had changed my character into a two-word protagonist. As author, I could have stetted my spelling, but I deferred to house style.

After you have delivered a finished manuscript, and usually after your editor has gone over it, your publisher’s managing editor assigns it to a copyeditor.

The copyeditor prepares the manuscript for the typesetter, proofreading for typos and keying design elements. She also styles the manuscript, making sure that its spelling, punctuation, usage, and fonts are internally consistent and follow the publisher’s house style. She checks for faulty grammar. Depending on the latitude afforded by the publisher (and whether the editor requested a light or medium copyedit–fiction never gets a heavy copyedit), she will either recast grammatically incorrect sentences, shuffling the words into syntactic order without changing them, or she will suggest possible fixes in a query. And she keeps an eye out for errors of logic and continuity, querying things that seem physically impossible or that violate the internal logic of the book’s universe.

The copyedited manuscript is usually reviewed by people at the publishing house–the editor, the managing editor’s staff, or both. Often the author gets to see it as well. The copy editor’s queries are answered (called “deflagging” if queries have been written on Post-it Notes stuck to the pages), and if she has made changes the author or editor objects to, those changes are changed back. The manuscript then goes to a type house, where typesetters generate galleys or page proofs; these are read against the copyedited manuscript by one of the publisher’s freelance proofreaders.

Your copyeditor should not be rewriting your sentences for political correctness or because she thinks it sounds better her way, or rewriting ungrammatical sentences that are complex enough to require a phrasing decision. (One of prose’s beauties is its infinite malleability, the myriad ways in which a thought can be expressed, and even the most basic grammatical error can have several potential solutions.)

The freelance copyeditor gets two or three weeks to prepare a manuscript. She works at home or in a private office rather than in the publisher’s offices. She sits down with the edited original (or sometimes a photocopy of it); a sharp colored pencil (everyone who works on a manuscript uses a different color, so that marks can be identified); a copy of the publisher’s house style sheet, if one is provided (these can run from two to twenty pages); and the publisher’s preferred dictionaries and style manuals (usually Web 10, Web 3, and The Chicago Manual of Style). She has no idea, aside from genre, what kind of book this will be; unless the book is one of a series or written by an author whose work she’s familiar with, she comes to the writing style and the imagined scenario completely cold.

Her library usually includes a hodgepodge of reference materials–medical dictionaries, foreign-language dictionaries, dictionaries of quotations, encyclopedias, other style manuals, books on sports and fashion and the military and science, atlases, city street maps. The cardinal rule of copyediting is Look Everything Up. The copyeditor must know where to look things up, and how to find out where when she doesn’t know. She’s not far from a phone, so she can make fact-checking calls as the need arises. She looks up every compound word, every brand name, every geographical and biographical name. If the book describes routes through existing cities, she makes sure the streets are contiguous; if the routes are through imaginary places, she’ll sketch a little map. She will check quotations, foreign words and phrases, even such things as whether a constellation is visible from a certain point on Earth at a certain time of year.

She keeps several lists: one of design elements (front-matter heads, epigraphs, part and chapter heads, section heads, extracts, footnotes, tabular material, artwork, line-for-line settings), one of words (preferred spellings, invented words, foreign or alien words, specially capitalized words), one of proper names (characters, places, organizations, starships, pets and horses, alien races), and one of usage (which numbers are spelled out, whether the serial comma is used, how possessives are handled, whether a full sentence after a colon is capped). Every entry on these lists notes the page of first occurrence in the manuscript–and in the copyeditor’s working list, usually several pages of occurrence, in case the author later starts treating an element differently and she has to go back. When she is finished, she will alphabetize and type these lists and submit them with the finished job.

She usually also keeps several miscellaneous lists for her own reference, to keep track of what people look like, which starships are in which fleets, the complexities of tribal relationships–any of a thousand things that might pose problems.

She keys the manuscript as she goes, marking the design elements for the compositor, as well as qualifying dashes–em-dashes, en-dashes, end-of-line hyphens–and insuring that italics and small caps are correctly applied and clearly marked. She makes sure that quotation marks aren’t missing, that words or blocks of text haven’t been dropped or repeated.

She watches for typos, misspellings, and incorrect punctuation, as well as grammatical problems such as dangling participles, noun-verb disagreement, faulty parallelism, unclear antecedents. She also watches for unintentional puns, double entendres, or embarrassing mixed metaphors, and queries them; and she’ll query if a word or phrase is constantly repeated, on a page or throughout the whole book, listing all the occurrences.

Lastly, she reads for sense, continuity, and logical consistency, and queries anything that doesn’t seem to add up. She visualizes what’s going on, and applies common sense to everything as she reads.

Copyeditors must follow the publisher’s rules without compromising the author’s work–and without letting any mistakes get through. They are classic middlepeople. They have to please a publisher who wants an error-free book that conforms to house style, and an author who wants nothing changed but the mistakes (and assumes that the copyeditor will be able to tell a mistake from something intentional).

A copyeditor familiarizing herself with an author’s style is a little like a detective reconstructing motivations from a limited number of physical clues. From the printed elements in the manuscript, the copyeditor identifies the rhythms of the author’s prose, the way he uses modifiers, his punctuation preferences. She can thus avoid breaking the author’s style in imposing house style. Every page entails a dozen judgment calls, as the copyeditor weighs various style precedents against the book’s prevailing usage. While she may sometimes make the wrong decision, she is keenly aware of her responsibility to the author’s intent.

There are as many ways to fail as a copyeditor as there are to fail as a writer. Because copyeditors are trained for consistency, some become inflexible and allow the writer insufficient leeway for personal style and poetic license. Some copyeditors are too passionate about their political agendas and impose them on the author’s work. Some lack confidence and overquery; some could phrase their queries with more tact. But most copyeditors are careful people who got into their line of work because they love words and want to see a clean book.

Fiction copyediting requires a light touch, a fine sense of when to leave things alone, and an ear for style. Many journalistic copyeditors are extremely uncomfortable working on fiction; they’re afraid to change anything and they’re afraid that if they don’t correct what they perceive as errors they will have failed to do their job.

Speculative fiction is particularly challenging to copyedit. On the most basic level, it’s full of made-up words and unusual names. Most speculative fiction reflects the evolution of language: it will include new words, slang, and acronyms, words spelled in a new way, or even an entirely futuristic narrative voice. High fantasy will include archaic words and syntax and variants thereof. Alternate history and hard SF, because they manipulate established facts, require specialized fact checking.

On a higher level, SF is demanding on the copyeditor in the same way it is demanding on the reader and the author: each new novel presents its own custom-made universe, which takes time to understand thoroughly. The copyeditor must learn the details and limitations of that universe in order to be sure that the scenario’s own rules have not been accidentally broken. Think of how much work you put into world building–perhaps years of research and backgrounding. The copyeditor has at most three weeks to learn your world inside out, so she can double-check that it’s functioning just the way you want it to.

For these reasons, many copyeditors refuse to work on SF–and the ones who choose to work on it, because they care about the genre and their craft, are truly more inclined to be an author’s ally than her enemy.

Here are some things you can do to aid the copyediting process (not necessarily to make the copyeditor’s life easier and her work better, but to avoid misunderstandings that will aggravate you):

Keep your own lists of character and place names, invented or archaic words, and preferred spellings; print them out and submit them along with the manuscript. Proofread them carefully so that the copyeditor won’t wonder whether you decided to change a name when you wrote the list but didn’t mark it in the manuscript. By default, the copyeditor will choose the spelling that predominates in the manuscript, which may not be the one you really prefer, or will just stick with the way the first occurrence was spelled.

Submit a list of slang, jargon, acronyms, etc., and what they mean. For the reader, a gradual, unexpository introduction to the details of your world is part of the enjoyment, but it would help the copyeditor immeasurably to understand the details right off the bat.

Write a general note to the copyeditor. Try to describe your idiosyncrasies of style. Are comma splices an integral part of the rhythm of your prose? Point that out. If you have strong preferences regarding usage, state them, and she’ll incorporate them into the book’s style sheet. Let her know if you’re following a dictionary other than Webster’s–say, Random House or American Heritage.

Be aware of the rules of grammar and punctuation, and when you break these rules for a reason, put three dots under the occurrence, to indicate to the copyeditor, typesetter, and proofreader that you meant to do it this way and it should be stetted. New comment: Don’t put dots under every line of the entire manuscript. That won’t work. If you really feel that absolutely nothing should be changed–and be aware that that would include inadvertencies–discuss it with your editor; if she agrees, they’ll include a note in the copyeditor’s instructions.

When you’ve finished writing, go back to the beginning of your book. See if you took to capping or hyphenating or italicizing things later on when you didn’t start out doing so. (Do your characters wear grav boots in Chapter One, grav-boots by Chapter Eight, and gravboots by Chapter Twenty?) Writers often establish their distinctive style and treatment of words during the process of writing, and the preferred style dominates only toward the end, when the writer has settled into the work and made final–and possibly unconscious–style decisions. Some examples of decisions it’s helpful if you make early and stick by:

• Are you setting subjective, first-person thoughts in roman or ital?
• Are you capping the word “Human” as you do the names of your extraterrestrial or magical races, or would you prefer to keep “human” lowercase but uppercase “Terran” as the analogue of “Xerxian”?
• Are you using the serial comma or not? Do you prefer “gray” or “grey”? (House style may force the copyeditor to insert the serial comma or spell it “gray,” but in case you sell to a house that follows author preference in such matters, make your preference clear.)
• Do you want to set all non-English, non-Standard, non-Terran words in ital (which is what the copyeditor will do if you don’t specify), or do you want, say, just the first occurrence of such words to be italicized, but the words to appear in roman thereafter, to reduce their “alien” feel?
• If you are still using a nine-pin dot-matrix printer, and can possibly afford to upgrade, do so. It’s tough to tell an “e” from an “a” in nine-pin printouts, especially photocopies; and reading such printouts is taxing to the eyes, which means that the copyeditor, typesetter, and proofreader will miss things. Turn hyphenation off, so that if the copyeditor sees an end-of-line hyphen she will know that you meant it to stay in the word.
• Try not to succumb to the fun of fancy fonts or the elegance of paper-saving small fonts. Straightforward Courier 10 (Courier or Courier New, 12-point size) is the easiest to read, and leaves room enough for inserting marks. In smaller fonts like Times Roman, the correspondingly tiny punctuation is likely to be missed or misread (and is often overprinted entirely by underlining). Underline for emphasis rather than using an italic font; the copy editor will just have to underline all the ital text anyway, and in some fonts ital is tough to distinguish from roman, particularly for short words like “I.” Avoid sans-serif and condensed fonts, where some characters are indistinguishable (I and l and 1) or run together to look like something else (r + n = m). Turn right-justification off.

New note: Please go into Preferences in your word-processing software and turn off smart quotes, smart ellipses, smart em-dashes, and any other automatic format changes your software commits by default. Smart quotes aren’t; faux-typeset ellipses come out too jammed together to mark clearly for the typesetter; a typeset em-dash will come out looking more like a hyphen in Courier.

If, for some reason (e.g., a revised chapter that came out shorter), the manuscript’s pagination is not strictly sequential, make a note at the bottom of the page before the break: “p. 251 follows,” say, on page 234. Usually it’s apparent whether such gaps represent missing pages, but a note will save the managing editor a lot of scrambling after the copyeditor calls to ask for pages she hasn’t got.

Don’t go ballistic over stupid queries. It’s better to be safe than sorry, and it’s a brave copyeditor who risks exposing her own ignorance so a potential error doesn’t slip through.

Here are some mistakes often found in manuscripts:

• Commonly misspelled words misspelled. (There are lists of these in many reference books, but here are a few: accommodate, supersede, embarrass, harass, feisty, inadvertent, ophthalmologist, occurrence, camaraderie, desiccated, forgo [abstain from], millennia, liquefy, rarefied, fluorescent, inoculate, stratagem.)
• “Lay” used as a transitive verb in the simple past: “Yesterday he lay the book on the table.” He lay on the bed yesterday, but he laid the book on the table.
• “Lay” used as an intransitive verb in the present or progressive: “He lays down on the bed”; “He was laying on the bed.” He lies down on the bed now, he is lying on the bed; he lay down on it and was lying on it yesterday.
• Characters’ names, physical characteristics, or gender changing in midstory (not by marriage or witness-protection program or hairdresser or plastic surgeon or sex-change clinic); dead characters reappearing (not by cloning or reanimation or coroner’s error); unrelated secondary characters having the same first or last name.
• Incorrect subjunctives. The restrictive “that” and nonrestrictive “which” reversed. “Less” and “fewer” used incorrectly. Dangling participles and unclear antecedents. “Smile” or “frown” as a verb of utterance.
• Number of items or people changing for no reason (two horses plus five horses becoming a group of eight on the next page). Continuity errors (empty drinking vessels being picked up and drained).
• Third-person-narrative paraphrasing of thoughts underlined or italicized (with no emphasis intended).
• “He thought to himself,” “opening gambit,” and similar redundancies. (That telepathy might make it necessary to specify whether a character is thinking to himself or to someone else is a small example of how SF copyediting is different from general- fiction copyediting.)

There are, of course, more of these. But that’s why there are copyeditors. The more problems a writer can identify and fix before the copyedit, the better; but writers have other things to worry about.

Do copyeditors and writers have an intrinsically antagonistic relationship? From the stories that circulate at conventions and on-line, it may seem that way; but in fact they need not have. The copyeditor fulfills a support function–backing up the author. She’s on your side.

A writer, at least while writing, is concerned with plotting, characterization, phrasing. And the writer will always have blind spots about her own work. After I write, I do a second pass in “copyediting mode,” and I still miss things. Your workshop group or friendly second reader will also miss things, and so will your editor. Copyeditors read specifically for the nuts-and-bolts mistakes that are potentially the most embarrassing. And copyeditors, too, are backed up–by the publisher’s in-house editorial staff, by the typesetters, by the proofreaders.

A lot of people pull together with the aim of making your book perfect; yes, that’s our job, what we’re expected to do in return for a paycheck, but it should make you feel pretty good anyway.

Related sites:

The Slot: A Spot for Copy Editors
Copy Editor (link no longer valid)
The Editorial Eye (link no longer valid)
The Word Detective
Windhaven

Many of us know that publishing has changed considerably over the last 15 years. More titles see print every year, but the average title sells fewer copies, and goes out of print more quickly, than its late ’70s counterpart. Advances and royalties have dropped in inflation-adjusted terms. More books become insulation and other recycled-paper products earlier than ever before.

Many of us also know that one of the causes of this change was the Supreme Court’s 1979 ruling in Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue.

Still, over the last 14 years I’ve encountered a number of statements that demonstrate a profound failure to understand either the ruling itself, or its implications for the publishing industry.

The most common such statement says, “Thor Power puts a tax on inventories.”

This is not true. An inventory tax, like a property tax, imposes a certain number of cents in annual tax for every dollar of inventory, regardless of corporate profit or loss.

The Thor Power ruling does involve inventories as they relate to corporate income taxes, but it does not tax inventories.

A Little Background

Companies pay income tax on their profits. Put simply, taxable profits are what’s left after subtracting all legally deductible expenses from gross revenues. The tax that must be paid is a percentage of taxable profits.

    Gross Revenues
    - legally deductible expenses
    ------------------------------
    Taxable Profits
    x tax rate
    ------------------------------
    Income Tax Due

Clearly, higher deductions result in lower profits and, therefore, lower taxes.

One legally deductible expense is “COGS” (cost of goods sold) — the amount the company paid for the items that its customers bought. To determine COGS, many companies use some form of this equation:

              Yearopen     Additions   Yearend
    COGS =    Inventory  + To        - Inventory
              Value        Inventory   Value

American tax law lets a company set a dollar value on its inventory of either its actual cost, or its market value, whichever is lower. When the market value of an inventory item drops below its actual cost, the company can “write down” the value of its inventory to reflect the new lower value. This increases COGS, and thereby reduces taxable income.

Let’s put some numbers into the COGS equation. Assume you (1) start the year with $100 worth of goods in inventory, (2) buy $250 worth of stuff during the year, and (3) end the year with an inventory that cost you $200.

              Yearopen     Additions   Yearend
    COGS =    Inventory  + To        - Inventory
              Value        Inventory   Value

         =    $100       + $250      - $200
         =    $150

Now assume a different set of market conditions. Assume that even though you paid $200 for what you have in your warehouse on December 31, you can only sell it for $150. In this case, the law lets you write down your inventory. Doing this increases COGS:

              Yearopen     Additions   Yearend
    COGS =    Inventory  + To        - Inventory
              Value        Inventory   Value

         =    $100       + $250      - $150
         =    $200

Because COGS is a legal deduction, increasing it like this reduces taxable income by an identical amount.

Prior to Thor Power Tool, companies would often write down the value of slow-moving inventory, even when its market value had not dropped.

Their reasoning went like this: “We have 100 widgets in inventory. Each widget cost us $2. That sets the inventory value at $200. However, at the rate we’re selling them, we’ll only sell 75 widgets before they become obsolete. So, the real value of this inventory is $150 (75 x $2), because 25 of the widgets have no value at all.”

By writing down inventory, they increased COGS, and thus decreased taxable income.

The IRS did not like this, because lower taxable income means lower tax receipts. The IRS said, “Look, you still have 100 widgets. They cost you $2 apiece. The market value is over $2. Therefore, your inventory is worth $200. We will let you value it at $150 only if either (a) the market value of each widget drops to $1.50 or (b) you throw 25 of the widgets out. You can’t have 75 worth $2 and 25 worth nothing. Period.”

So they went to court.

The Supreme Court’s Decision

“In (Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue)…the IRS negated Thor’s practice of writing down the value of its spare parts inventory which it held to cover future warranty commitments. Thor contended that, although the sales price on the individual parts did not decline over the years, the probability of all the parts being sold decreased as time passed, and thus so did the net realizable value of the inventory as a whole. The IRS contended that a decline in inventory values for tax purposes must await actual decline in the sales price of the individual parts. The Supreme Court indicated that for tax purposes, the lower of cost or market method was to be applied on an individual item basis and that if no decline in sales price occurred, no loss should be permitted.” (Intermediate Accounting, Kieso & Weygandt, 4th Edition, John Wiley & Sons, 1983, pp. 392-393)

The Aftermath

Most everyone knows that Thor Power has had a major effect on publishing. Unfortunately, too few people know how and why the ruling changed the industry.

The short answer: Thor Power eliminated a tax dodge, and thereby made it more expensive for publishers to carry inventory from year to year. As a result, publishers have cut print runs in order to minimize inventory. They have also become quicker to dispose of inventory — i.e., pulp it — before the end of the fiscal year.

The long answer involves an example. Assume (purely for the sake of using round numbers) a publisher prints 80,000 copies of a book at cost of $1.00 per book. Assume the publisher sells 50,000 copies of that book at $2.00 apiece (we will ignore the problem of returns, here). Assume the publisher pays federal, state, and local income taxes at the rate of 40%. Remember that

              Yearopen     Additions   Yearend
    COGS =    Inventory  + To        - Inventory
              Value        Inventory   Value

Before Thor Power, the publisher would have said, “Well, we have 30,000 copies in the warehouse. We’ll never sell those at full price. Some, yes, but we’ll have to remainder some at 50 cents a pop, and we’ll have to pulp the rest. So really, on average, they’re only worth 50 cents each. That’s a year-end inventory value of $15,000.”

Since Thor Power, the publisher has had to say, “Well, we’ve got 30,000 copies in the warehouse. Each is worth a buck. That’s a year-end inventory value of $30,000.”

    ===========================================
    SIMPLIFIED INCOME STATEMENT
                      PRE-THOR        POST-THOR
    Inventory
         Year Open           0                0
         Additions  +  $80,000       +  $80,000
         Year End   -   15,000       -   30,000
                        ------           ------
    COGS               $65,000           50,000

    Revenues =        $100,000         $100,000
       -COGS            65,000           50,000
                       -------         --------
    Pretax profits  =   35,000           50,000
        x Tax rate         .40              .40
                       -------         --------
    Taxes           =   14,000           20,000
                       -------         --------
    After-tax profits  $21,000          $30,000
    ===========================================

But wait! Isn’t the publisher doing better under the Thor rules? After all, it’s now making $30,000 on a $100,000 investment, whereas before it only made $21,000.

Well…not really. It earns that $30,000 profit only if it manages to sell every copy in the warehouse for $1 apiece. From a cash-flow point of view, that book’s first year looks like this:

    ========================================
    CASH FLOW STATEMENT
                  PRE-THOR         POST-THOR

    Revenues     $100,000          $100,000
    Expenses
         Printing (80,000)          (80,000)
         Taxes    (14,000)          (20,000)
              ------------        ----------
    Change       $  6,000                 0
    ========================================

In other words, under Thor, the publisher has had to spend $6,000 more in the first year than it would have before Thor. Instead of showing an operating profit, it just breaks even.

On the balance sheet, it looks like this:

    =======================================
    BALANCE SHEET
                 PRE-THOR         POST-THOR
    ASSETS
      Inventory   $15,000           $30,000
      Cash          6,000                 0
    LIABILITIES         0                 0
    EQUITY        $21,000           $30,000
    =======================================

Again, one’s first reaction is, hey, Thor raised the publisher’s equity, so all the shareholders are a little richer. Isn’t this good?

Um…it would be — if it were true. But is it? Can the publisher actually sell all those copies for $1 each? (Maybe.) And even if it can, is $1 received in the year 2000 worth as much as $1 received today? (Absolutely not. Think Net Present Value — or compound interest in reverse.)

From the writer’s point of view, another danger lurks there: One measure that Wall Street uses to judge a company is Return on Equity (ROE — profits divided by equity). If the publisher’s ROE is low, by industry standards, then its stock price goes down. By raising net worth (equity), Thor has forced the publisher to earn higher profits just to keep its ROE (and its stock price) constant. Publishers thus become even more averse to “risky” books — like first novels, or works of high art and low sales.

So how have publishers adapted to Thor Power? By setting print runs closer to the level of advance orders, and by purging inventory. Here’s how the numbers look when a publisher prints 60,000 copies (instead of 80,000) and pulps the 10,000 it couldn’t sell before year’s end:

    ===========================================
    SIMPLIFIED INCOME STATEMENT
                  PRE-THOR           POST-THOR,
                                  FULLY ADAPTED
    Inventory
         Year Open           0                0
         Additions  +  $80,000       +  $60,000
         Year End   -   15,000       -        0
                        ------           ------
    COGS               $65,000           60,000

    Revenues =        $100,000         $100,000
       -COGS    =       65,000           60,000
                       -------         --------
    Pretax profits  =   35,000           40,000
        x Tax rate         .40              .40
                       -------         --------
    Taxes    =          14,000           16,000
                       -------         --------
    After-tax profits  $21,000          $24,000
    ===========================================

By printing fewer copies, and physically destroying any it couldn’t sell, the publisher has locked in a profit of $24,000 and reduced future costs (primarily warehousing, but also including sales, distribution, and accounting). It has sacrificed potential profits, to be sure. On the other hand, it has improved its cash flow:

    ========================================
    CASH FLOW STATEMENT
               PRE-THOR           POST-THOR
                              FULLY ADAPTED
    Revenues     $100,000          $100,000
    Expenses
         Printing (80,000)          (60,000)
         Taxes    (14,000)          (16,000)
              ------------        ----------
    Change         $6,000          $ 24,000
    ========================================

By reducing print runs and inventory, the publisher has deposited an extra $18,000 into its checking account. It has also strengthened its balance sheet with hard cash, as opposed to hard-to-move inventory.

    ========================================
    BALANCE SHEET
               PRE-THOR           POST-THOR
                              FULLY ADAPTED
    ASSETS
      Inventory   $15,000                 0
      Cash          6,000            24,000
    LIABILITIES         0                 0
    EQUITY        $21,000           $24,000
    ========================================

And now comes a real kicker for writers: Because this book is out of print, the publisher has an opening on its list, more cash to invest, and a serious need to replace the steady (if small) income stream that book would have generated. So the publisher must release not only the new title it would have published anyway, but a second new one, to make up for its lack of a backlist.

This results in title proliferation, which itself promotes both lower advance orders on the part of major buyers, and a higher return rate. That means writers must write more, and sell more often, in order to survive.

Is There A Solution?

Although rewriting the tax code to permit writedowns of slow-moving inventory would make maintaining a backlist slightly more attractive to publishers, we cannot return to the old ways. Title proliferation, competition for rack space, and a product life cycle measured in weeks have forced publishers to focus their resources on the future. Only a savage, industry-wide cutting of new releases and strong consumer demand for backlist titles will change things.

I am not optimistic.
____________________

Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. has been selling words since he graduated from Yale in 1972. Periodicals ranging from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to OMNI have printed more than seventy of his shorter works, a number of which have also been anthologized, both in the United States and overseas. A member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, he has published ten books in America, and has been reprinted in Britain, France, Israel, the Netherlands, Spain, and West Germany.

Copyright © 1993 by Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. First published in the Bulletin of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Spring, 1993 (Volume 27, Issue 1; Whole Number 119).

Julius Epstein, who co-wrote the screenplay for Casablanca and has not received a cent of royalties over the past 54 years, recalls something the producer Irving Thalberg is purported to have said. Writers, confided Thalberg, are the most important people in film, “and we must do everything to keep them from finding out.”

As decisions that affect writers and editors increasingly seem to be made at remote corporate levels, it’s no wonder that many authors, including some science fiction and fantasy writers, suffer from a sense of helplessness. A publisher’s freeze on buying new books, decisions on whether to keep your backlist titles in print, the size of your next book’s print run, or — given the recent cancellation of over 100 books by a major publisher — whether your novel under contract will even be published: these variables can leave writers feeling like very small cogs in a very big and intimidating machine.

This state of affairs is, of course, one of the big reasons for an organization such as SFWA. For all the legal paperwork, a publishing house or corporation is essentially a collection of people whose power comes from working in a cohesive fashion towards certain commercial goals. So too can SFWA derive power from working collectively. It was through this “collective power” of SFWA, for example, that we were able to persuade Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books to pay each author a compensation fee on English language export copies of past Star Trek titles and to insure that the publisher will pay a percentage on English language export sales for future Star Trek books. The agreement was worked out in an amicable fashion, to the benefit of all parties involved.

And it is precisely because the voice of a collective body carries weight that I agreed with those who thought it important to raise objections with the publisher when Star Wars royalties were threatened.

But let’s return to the “State of Publishing” theme: what’s the book market like these days? For me, the short answer is: better in ‘98 than it was in ‘97 — and surprisingly healthy, considering 1) the staggering devastation of the wholesale market for paperback books; 2) the mergers which have led to downsizing lists as well as people; and 3) foolish financial and marketing decisions made by publishing managers who focused on celebrity books and ignored both midlist and backlist, which in truth represent the backbone of American publishing.

Well, the short answer isn’t much fun, but now I get to give the long answer.

If the question is, are people still reading in large quantities, still buying books, my answer is yes. According to The Wall Street Journal, from 1991 through 1996 annual book purchases rose to $26.1 billion from $20.1 billion, an increase of about 30%; Barnes & Noble sales for October ‘97 were up over October ‘96. It’s a natural tendency for people to recall the past as a Golden Age, to mourn that publishing isn’t what it was 6 or 7 years ago. Has the market for books declined? according to the publisher-supported Book Industry Study Group, the annual number of book units sold peaked in 1994 and has declined since then. Still, the number of book units sold in ‘96 is higher than that sold in 1991 (substantially higher for paperbacks, about the same for hardcovers). Book unit sales were highest in 1994, but the paperback revenue in 1997 (actual dollars received from paperback sales annually) climbed a slight 1.8% (excluding children’s books) from ‘96 to ‘97. Hardcover sales revenue for ‘97 fell 4.4%. Let’s consider these two figures separately, first the mass market paperback’s slight revenue increase, then the hardcover revenue decline.

The paperback market’s revenue increase is reassuring if a bit surprising, when you factor in the damage done to wholesale distribution by consolidation: over 250 small distributors, who knew their local markets (e.g. where to stock romances, where to stock science fiction) were thrown out of work. Solid writers who are not regular NY Times bestsellers — which would include many sf and fantasy authors — saw their print runs cut in half. This way of introducing an author to new readers has been severely curtailed, as supermarkets, drug stores, one-stop shopping stores and the like now carry less variety and display books by fewer authors. I’d mentioned the ID consolidation in last year’s Nebula speech: now here are a few specifics from a recent Wall Street Journal article to bring home the human cost in terms of lost jobs: “During the past couple of years, Kroger Co., a Cincinnati-based chain of roughly 1300 stores, has gone to 5 distributors from 95; Albertson’s Inc., a Boise, Idaho chain of 800 supermarkets, to 7 from about 100, and Walgreen Co., a Deerfield, Illinois company that has more than 2,000 drugstores, to 6 from more than 100.” The fact that mass market revenue climbed at all during this period of upheavals shows the strength of American readership, the success of well-run bookstores, and the success of online ordering.

Trade hardcovers had a decrease in sales, and returns were 35% (up from 32% the previous year). One recent article commented, “It has been a bad year overall for book publishers, which have paid multimillion-dollar advances to star authors, many of whose books have not sold well.” A film studio executive who became chairman of a major publishing conglomerate stated categorically, “You don’t build books anymore.” As one reporter noted, “That Hollywood-style approach — in which books that don’t ‘open’ big are quickly abandoned — is whipsawing publishers and wreaking havoc on their finances.” I am hopeful that after so many financial baths, with heavy hardcover returns, those publishing houses who have strayed from long-term nurturing of talent and supporting their midlist, will return to their core business.

Publishing has always required flexibility, and the role of imaginative publishers and editors is often overlooked. The force of the personalities involved, not just national economic indicators, tell us how healthy the publishing market really is. Bookselling can flourish in hard times, as it did during the 1930’s Depression, when Bennett Cerf was building his Modern Library list and founded a new line called Random House.

If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to take a moment to note and to honor the first printer and publisher of books in the English Language: William Caxton.

Caxton was born in Kent around 1422, studied and apprenticed in London, where he rose in the merchant’s guild and became a successful wool merchant. Appointed by the guild to a governorship in Bruges, Caxton traveled to several European cities where he learned about the movable type developed by Gutenberg. Caxton bought a printing press and published the first book printed in the English language: his translation of the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye in 1474, followed shortly thereafter by his translation of The Game and Play of Chess.

Caxton returned to England with his printing press and soon set up shop near Westminster Abbey under the heraldic banner “The Sign of the Red Pale” — the closest we can come to the name for the first English language publishing house. There he published the first books printed in England, including the first dated book (1477), The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, translated from the French by his friend and patron Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, brother-in-law to Edward IV. The next year Caxton published another translation by Woodville, as well as Christine de Pisan’s The Moral Proverbs, the first printed book in the English language by a woman author. That year he started publishing works by his favorite English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer — the first printed edition of The Canterbury Tales. Caxton had a passion for books. Oral language, he noted in one of his Prologues, is “perishing, vain and forgettable,” but “writings dwell and abide permanently.”

This was a time of horrendous bloodshed in England. Caxton’s patron Anthony Woodville was beheaded at the order of Richard III for trying to secure the crown for the late Edward IV’s son. To have survived these violent times with his printing press unharmed and his head still attached to his shoulders, was a feat in itself. In an age that had not yet evolved the novel but enjoyed French “romances,” Caxton published a large amount of fiction, including The Chronicles of England in 1480. Filled with fantastical stories of Merlin and King Arthur, of Albion and her wicked sisters, the Chronicles falls largely into what we would call the fantasy genre. Caxton reprinted both the Play of Chess and the Chronicles in 1482 — meaning that a fantasy genre work is likely the first English language book — and certainly the first English language book of fiction — ever to go back for a second printing.

What an exhilarating time for that first English-speaking generation able to buy and read stories, poems, histories, books on medicine, etiquette, philosophy! Thanks to William Caxton, English language publishing was set on its fiery course.

Every so often, writing styles and publishing undergo rapid changes, and the connection with adventurous publishers is no coincidence. Skipping ahead about 400 years, we find a colorful group: the publishers, editors and tramp printers of the Old West. There were successful ones like the pistol-packin’ editor Colonel Dan Anthony (brother of Susan B. Anthony), interesting failures like the tramp printer Alfred Runyon (father of Damon Runyon). These printer/publishers/editors delighted in tall tales, sentimental stories and, most assuredly, the hyperbolic insult. Their insults make some of the recent skirmishes in the Forum regarding Star Wars royalties look positively civil. For example, an 1889 Kansas newspaper called the editor of a competing paper a “lop-eared, lantern-jawed, half-bred and half-born whisky-soaked, pox-eaten pup who pretends to edit that worthless wad of subdued paper known as the Ingalls Messenger.” A gubernatorial candidate lambasted his opponent in print as “a servile, self-asserting and stupid upstart,” and the editor of The Kansas Constitutionalist called his colleague at a rival paper “cross-eyed, crank-sided, peaked and long razor-nosed, blue-mouthed, … soft-headed, long-eared, crane-necked … squeaky-voiced, empty-headed, snaggle-toothed filthy-mouthed, box-ankled, pigeon-toed, hump-shouldered” — among other names.

In this century, of course, the Western frontier gave way to the frontier of space, and those of us who have followed the ups and downs of the science fiction and fantasy market can marvel at the way a few energetic editors and publishers have made a profound impression on the sf market. Any crystal ball gaze at what publishing will be like in the near future must acknowledge that the direction and scope can be altered unexpectedly and dramatically by individuals: how could you predict ahead of time the influence of John W. Campbell or the founders of Del Rey, Baen or Tor Books?

So, barring the unexpected, what will publishing be like as we slouch towards the millennium? Well, I think we’re seeing a lot of shifting of roles in publishing and changes in bookstores. On-line author and publisher links to stores — both to giants like Amazon or Barnes & Noble, or to the specialty stores — facilitate the process of buying books and are creating a brand new kind of book browsing experience in cyberspace, not to mention chat rooms, clubs, and hangouts like Callahan’s Bar. Random House currently offers on-line ordering, and Bertelsmann has been touting its soon-to-be-unveiled cybermall. For out-of-print backlist titles, a few stores have stepped into the breach. The Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, Arizona has published worthy out-of-print mystery books. Recently the owners of Hungry Mind Bookstore in St. Paul, Minn. have started publishing books they’d like to sell. Another bookseller who has also turned printer is The Rue Morgue Bookstore in Boulder, Colorado. The number is doubtless increasing.

In the science fiction and fantasy fields, I’d like to see the large publishers pay more attention to specialty stores. I’ve heard grumbles from publishers that half these stores are behind in paying their accounts. Well, that means half are not behind: the glass is half-full, not just half-empty. These specialty store owners for the most part have the kind of dedication that helps keep this business alive. In the long run, no bookstore or publisher can be truly successful if run by an accountant whose only oracle is his computer’s sales data. Our business needs practical folk but also booksellers fired with a love of books, people who recognize the profound cultural need served by good stories. The proliferation of printer booksellers, small presses, specialty bookstores and online marketing by the giants are all good signs for a diverse and flourishing book business.

A glance at recent fiction hardcover bestseller lists show you that just about half the titles involve historical themes. Scratch the surface of almost any science fiction or fantasy writer, and you’ll find a history buff or even a full-fledged historian. Science fiction, of course, is history — future history, alternate history, a futuristic story based on an historical analog or a fantasy that evokes a bygone age — which is one reason why the sf backlist has always been strong. Popular demand for your stories, your histories and worlds, makes you, as individuals and as a group, the dynamic repository of historical perspectives: past, future and, if you will, sideways.

I hope SFWA, in the year ahead, can help achieve more general recognition of science fiction and fantasy and will continue to benefit its members. For example, the SFWA-inspired project of the Grand Masters volumes, edited by Fred Pohl, that Tor Books will be publishing, should attract significant attention and bring together in these volumes the legacy of this SFWA achievement award. A portion of the royalties goes to SFWA’s emergency medical fund.

In one of his epilogues where he justifies printing so much fiction, William Caxton wrote, “The terrible feigned fables of poets have much stirred and moved men to pity and conserving of justice.” Your stories provide pathways to empathy with different, sometimes alien views, perspectives that weigh the moral balance — William Caxton’s pity and justice. That is part of what — collectively and as individuals — you offer the world, and it is no small thing.

[Special thanks to Penninger's Caxton's Chronicle Histories, Edmund Child's William Caxton: A Portrait in a Background, and David Dary's Red Blood and Black Ink: Journalism in the Old West.]

It has become a tradition at these annual meetings for SFWA’s agent to speak on “the state of publishing.” Publishing is in an intense state of flux–which means no one has a clear handle on how to best publish books, what distribution will be like in two years, or what unexpected corporate shifts and mergers will transpire.

Most of you have probably heard how slow the market is, about cutbacks in the number of science fiction and fantasy titles per month. Some may have been affected by the skittishness of editorial heads and marketing people if the returns on your latest book were unusually high. Bookstore chains cut back on initial orders–Waldenbooks, which used to make initial orders based on an estimated eight weeks of sale, has shaved that to three!

Some of you may know the Safeway story–how one large Seattle based customer triggered a desperate free-for-all which decimated the number of independent companies that distribute books to non bookstore outlets such as drug stores, supermarkets, etc. (the so-called ID sales). Stated briefly, Safeway announced it would no longer do business with its numerous book wholesalers–only one distributor would now handle its book business. This meant breaking the “exclusive territory” franchises distributors had respected. The rules were broken, and other major accounts soon followed suit, some selling their book rack space to the highest bidder. Smaller companies were forced out, and one publisher told me that whereas there were 350 ID distribution companies in 1995, now there are less than 70. That means, for the moment, publishers can’t count on the level of ID sales they had in the past, and so print runs for most paperbacks are now smaller.

Between the ID disaster and merger mania, which after more than 15 years shows no sign of abatement, it’s no wonder that authors–and agents–look at “the state of publishing” with some degree of trepidation.

Despite the upheavals, I take an optimistic view and see present and near-future changes that are both exciting and profitable.

First, let’s look at some encouraging statistics: total sales of books in this country are up. From 1990 to 1995 total book sales rose 32%, from $19.04 billion in 1990 to $25.04 billion in 1995. Bookstore sales rose 4.1% in 1996 to $10.69 billion, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Barnes & Noble and Borders have reported substantial increases in net income for 1997. This sales increase is led by its superstores, where sales have risen 38%. Borders gave a 12% gain in earnings in ‘97. According to Publishers Weekly, this increase is due to the superstore division.

Superstores are opening at a fantastic rate. Barnes & Noble plans to open 90 each year. Borders is opening about 40 annually. According to a Prudential Securities analyst quoted in The Wall Street Journal, this growth should continue at least through the year 2000, and the U.S. can support at least 1500 such superstores. And while Barnes & Noble and Borders are engaged in turf wars, both chains are profiting from what one journalist described as America’s “surging appetite for books.”

It’s true some small independent bookstores have suffered, and the chains, starting in 1994, now account for over half of publishers’ bookstore business. But one reason for the superstores’ success can be traced to growing changes in the nature of book buying. Bookshopping for many is no longer a dry transaction of finding the book you want on the shelves, paying for it and leaving. An increasing number of stores have made buying books part of a larger social experience–a pleasant place for browsing, for stopping with a friend for coffee and enjoying a delightful cafe atmosphere. Many stores feature book-related events which amount to evening socials. A recent article on Long Island and dating–called “Your Bookstore or Mine?”–is indicative of this rising trend.

It is, actually, a return to one of the earliest forms of commerce for books–the circulating libraries of 18th century England, where people paid a fee to rent out a book. These circulating libraries also sold small items such as trinkets, lottery tickets and so forth, and people came to them as a means of social interchange–in our parlance, to “hang out.” In fact, these places grew to be such fountains of local gossip that English playwright William Sheridan remarked, “A circulating library in a town/Is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge.”

To my way of thinking, this is all to the good, when book buying becomes part of America’s social fabric.

Technological advancements are helping to keep books alive–or at least to enjoy a longer shelf life. A publisher at Avon mentioned how it is now easier to go back to press on a book: whereas before it took at least 2-3 weeks and small reprint numbers were costly, the turn-around now can be as little as 4 days and, at least for the smaller printings, less expensive. Another science fiction publisher acknowledged his reorder numbers were up. Clearly he can benefit from such advances, as can those publishers who have successfully reissued classics in trade paperback and are introducing a whole new generation of readers to works by writers such as Alfred Bester, H.P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick.

Another very encouraging sign is the way companies are using computer technologies to track inventory in a cooperative manner. An executive at Ballantine Books explained their cooperative venture with the huge distributor/supplier Ingram. Each day the computers track stock, so that if the copies in stock on a book go down at one of the Ingram warehouses, the information is immediately and automatically relayed to the Random House warehouse, and the order to fill the stock will take place right away–no long waits for the publisher’s salesmen to get around to checking on a title. Effective cooperation with linked computers is fairly new, but as publisher/supplier partnerships grow, our country’s distribution system, often accused of being sluggish, should be improved greatly.

And since Ingram seems to be one of the big suppliers for Amazon.com, that leads me to another heartening portent for publishing: Ordering on-line. As people grow increasingly comfortable about ordering a book over the Internet–including giving your credit card number–the volume of sales will increase. For those couch potatoes who don’t want to put on their shoes and walk or drive to the nearest bookstore, ordering on-line from companies like Amazon.com is about as easy as turning on the tv. An increasing number of smaller bookstore companies (as well as the giants like Barnes & Noble) are setting up shop on the Internet. Bookwire, which you can hop to from sites such as Tor’s or Del Rey’s, provides links to over 40 independent stores on-line where you can browse and shop for books. One Web analyst states that for on-line bookstores and magazines with realistic expectations, the news is good; as one indicator, retail advertising on sites is on the increase. Some publishers are gearing up to offer secure on-line ordering, others are waiting to see how the competition fares. On-line newsletters from several sf publishers describe new books, list author signings, refer you to forums; some link you to sample chapters, author sites, and generally are getting the word out where it wouldn’t have been possible before the Internet. With the disappearance of some outlets for book reviews (Publishers Weekly, for example, now reviews almost no original mass market science fiction), we’re fortunate that Internet postings, chatrooms, recognitions such as Compuserve’s HOmer Award, can serve to alert readers to new books. The financial rewards are just now beginning to sink in for many publishers–and I believe the next few years will find publishers scrambling to set up special accounts for on-line stores and generally paying them the kind of attention currently reserved for the chains. As one letter to The New York Times put it, “We are in the midst of a revolution no less historic–economically, socially and politically–than the one Gutenberg started when he worked out the major bugs in movable type 500 years ago.”

According to Nielsen Media Research, almost one in four people over age 16 in the U.S. and Canada use the Internet (more than twice the number who were on-line 18 months ago); that’s about 50.6 million people on the Internet, about 37.4 million now using the Web. And that, of course, is just on this continent, not the English-speaking world where an estimated 1.4 billion people speak some form of what Samuel Johnson called “our copious and disorderly tongue.”

For all this, we know how difficult the day-to-day efforts to be creative and make a living by writing can be. As one 19th century American writer mourned, “There is probably no Hell for authors in the next world–they suffer so from critics and publishers in this.” Still, I see the “state of publishing” as in a wild and interesting period of expansion, with book buying assuming a vital place in our society.

Gardner Dozois says, “I take membership in a professional organization like SFWA or HWA as an indication that I should pay more attention to the story. Having ‘member SFWA’ on your story will be enough to get you out of the slush pile and into the semi-professional pile at Asimov’s, and in fact at most other places that I’m aware of.”

Michael Swanwick says, “About two or three weeks ago I was in New York, and I dropped into Asimov’s offices, and I was talking to Gardner Dozois. He was going over a slush pile. As we were talking, he went through four inches of story, glancing at them, writing a number down for which rejection slip to give them, the number one slip or the number two, one of which encourages you to send more stories, and one of which does not. We were talking about what takes you out of the slush pile, and he said that a simple declaration, just a little line, ‘member SFWA’ or mention that you had attended Clarion was enough to get them out of the slush pile and into the ’slightly better chance pile,’ where the editor would spend a little bit more time reading it. So Riddell’s statement, in this case, is literally not true.”

Ellen Datlow said of her policy while at Omni On-line, “Stating that someone is a member of a professional writing organization usually gets the submitter out of the slush pile. It won’t get an editor to buy the story, but she will probably pick it up to look at herself rather than give it over to a first reader.”

Gardner Dozois adds that while at Asimov’s, “None of this [professional affiliation on a letterhead] guarantees anything. There can be very good things by non-SFWA members in the slush pile, and there can be crappy stories by SFWA members, but it’s an indication I think, that if a person can sell enough to get into SFWA that he’s got something going. That’s certainly more than is true for most of the people who fill up the slush pile.”

Randy Dannenfelser, editor of Adventures in Sword and Sorcery, says, “Seeing SFWA or HWA indicates at least the person has a certain minimal level of ability. The story probably is not absolutely crap.”

Algis Budrys says, “Well, in the first place, the very fact that a guy is in SFWA or a member of any writer’s group or something like that doesn’t mean anything. That’s just so much window dressing. What counts is the story. A story may be good, it may be bad. I’m probably too old to consider that anything about a manuscript marks it as good or no good until I read it. I don’t see the relevance.”

Stanley Schmidt at Analog, says, “I judge a story entirely by its contents. I’m not positively or negatively impressed by anything in the letterhead. If I see SFWA up there it only means that someone has sold something in the past. This story in front of me may or may not be what I am looking for.”

Gordon Van Gelder at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction says, “A good story speaks for itself. I generally don’t pay much attention to the miscellaneous organizations that a writer cites on his/her cover letter.” Paula Guran at Wetbones, Teresa Keene at Keen Science Fiction, Mark Rainey at Deathrealm, Greg Meronek at Little Green Men, Patrick Swenson at Talebones, and Meg Thompson at Blood & Midnight, agree with Budrys, Schmidt and Van Gelder.

Paul DiDomenico, at Black October Magazine goes so far as to say, “As an editor, I think to prejudge any manuscript before reading . . . is a failure in carrying out the responsibility of being an editor.”

Edelman says, “Obviously when Robert Silverberg sends me a story, he does not have to say on the cover letter, I’m a SFWA member, in order to cover himself with some kind of glory that SFWA gives. There are those that seem to feel the need. I don’t think of it as saying horrible things about the manuscript, because the people who get to that level have climbed out of some portion of primordial ooze that the rest of the people are in.

“When you get to the point where you don’t need it anymore [SFWA on the letterhead], then you don’t need it anymore. If you think you need it, you need it, and if you think you don’t need it, you don’t need it. From the editor’s standpoint, a story’s got to stand or fall on its own. I’ve rejected a ton of stories from SFWA members, and I’ve bought stories from non-SFWA members.”
_________________

James Van Pelt teaches Creative Writing at Mesa State College and Fruita Monument High School in Grand Junction, Colorado. His short fiction has appeared in Pulphouse, Adventures in Sword and Sorcery, Analog Science Fiction.

Excerpts from taken from “Paul Riddell Revisited: Placing “SFWA Member” on Your Cover Letter” which was first published in Tangent and Copyright © 1998 by James Van Pelt. Reproduction and distribution specifically prohibited. All rights reserved.