Skip to main content

fun and profit


«The most profitable trajectory for a successful science fiction novel in those days was for an sf book to start life as a magazine serial, move on to hardcover publication, and finally be reprinted as a mass market paperback. If you were writing a novel a year (or, say, three novels every two years, which was then almost what I was averaging), that was the only way to push your annual income up, at the time, from four to five figures—and the low five figures at that.» - Samuel Delany, in "Racism and Science Fiction", 1998.
I think this might be the piece of advice on publication strategies that I mis-remembered as "write the book before you seek an advance."  The above plan is reasonably consistent with that strategy however!

Another more contemporary take -- coming from a quite different perspective:
If you want to understand how to get a 7-figure advance in just a few lines, try this: understand how to explain your uniqueness; develop a compelling pitch around a single break-out concept; build and exhibit your massive network and platform; painstakingly detail your previous successes; present all of these things with an Alpha veneer of knowing that your stuff is awesome.
The pithy summary of this one is: “Your network is your net worth.”

There are a few similarities between these two pre- and post-internet strategies, but also plenty of differences.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Extra channels

In the following, I would like to clarify the connection between channel and context and concomitantly the difference between metachannel and parachannel . Paul Kockelman urges us "to notice the fundamental similarity between codes and channels" (2011: 725) but instead of that purported fundamental similarity points out the contrast between them. I argue that context , or objects and states of affairs (Bühler 2011[1934]: 35), demonstrate a closer relationship to channel than to code. This is largely because the first three fundamental relations, sender or subject , context or object , and receiver or addressee , belong to Bühler's original organon model while code , contact and message , which were previously implicit in the organon model, are made explicit as additions to the model by Jakobson (1985[1976c]). Thus the most productive approach would be to pair a component from the original organon model with an additional component in the language functions model.

RJ schematized

I schematized Roman Jakobson's definition of the phatic function, and upon looking at it for a while thought that I either drew a fish or a side-view of Jakobson's face, the left column being either a back-fin or Einsteinian scientist-hair, and the upper triangle in both cases serving as an eye. I'm slowly making progress with the paper on RJ's phatic function.

Metacommunicative cues

In the previous post on Extra channels I finished with a distinction between diachronic and synchronic metacommunication. In this post I'd like to respond to some comments by the co-author of this blog, Joe, in some of his previous posts, by invoking Jurgen Ruesch's concept of metacommunication . Gregory Bateson was interested in thinking about cybernetics, but didn't seem to feel constrained to think about it using a strictly computational or information-theoretic paradigm, while still being informed by the ideas. This gave him the freedom to talk about ideas like "context", "relationship", "learning", and "communication" without needing to define them in precise computational terms. Nevertheless, he handles the ideas fairly rigorously. (Joe, Phatic Workshop: towards a μ-calculus ) Gregory Bateson and Jurgen Ruesch, among many other notable thinkers, were part of the Palo Alto Group of researchers tasked to apply new methods (a