An interesting interview by Jeff VanderMeer with James & Kathryn Morrow, editors of The SFWA European Hall of Fame, about the process of editing an anthology. (David and I are reprinting a couple of stories from the book in our Year's Best SF.)
See also VanderMeer at Omnivoracious.
The LOCUS poll closes April 15th. Vote!
From Motoko Rich's article in today's New York Times, New HarperCollins Unit to Try to Cut Writer Advances:
Typically, authors earn royalties of 15 percent of profits after they have paid off their advances.
There are a couple of errors in this sentence, astonishing from someone who covers publishing for The New York Times.
Here is the table of contents for the forthcoming Year's Best SF 13 edited by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer:
Baby Doll • Johanna Sinisalo
Aristotle OS • Tony Ballantyne
The Last American • John Kessel
Memorare • Gene Wolfe
Plotters and Shooters • Kage Baker
Repeating the Past • Peter Watts
No More Stories • Stephen Baxter
They Came From the Future • Robyn Hitchcock
The Tomb Wife • Gwyneth Jones
An Evening's Honest Peril • Marc Laidlaw
End Game • Nancy Kress
Induction • Greg Egan
A Blue and Cloudless Sky • Bernhard Ribbeck
Reasons not to Publish • Gregory Benford
Objective Impermeability in a Closed System • William Shunn
Always • Karen Joy Fowler
Who's Afraid of Wolf 359? • Ken MacLeod
Artifice and Intelligence • Tim Pratt
Pirates of the Somali Coast • Terry Bisson
Sanjeev and Robotwallah • Ian McDonald
Third Person • Tony Ballantyne
The Bridge • Kathleen Ann Goonan
As You Know, Bob • John Hemry
The Lustration • Bruce Sterling
How Music Begins • James Van Pelt
Here is the table of contents of the forthcoming Year's Best Fantasy 8 edited by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer:
Paper Cuts Scissors • Holly Black
A Portrait in Ivory • Michael Moorcock
The Witch’s Headstone • Neil Gaiman
The Ruby Incomparable • Kage Baker
And Such Small Deer • Chris Roberson
Unpossible • Daryl Gregory
Winter’s Wife • Elizabeth Hand
The King of the Djinn • David Ackert & Benjamin Rosenbaum
Stilled Life • Pat Cadigan
Poison • Bruce McAllister
Who Slays the Gyant, Wounds the Beast • Mark Chadbourn
Under the Bottom of the Lake • Jeffrey Ford
A Diorama of the Infernal Regions, or the Devil’s Ninth Question • Andy Duncan
Don’t Ask • M. Rickert
The Stranger’s Hands • Tad Williams
Soul Case • Nalo Hopkinson
Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz Go to War Again • Garth Nix
Debatable Lands • Liz Williams
The Forest • Laird Barron
The Great White Bed • Don Webb
Dance of Shadows • Fred Chappell
Grander than the Sea • T.A. Pratt
Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon • Threodora Goss
On Saturday, we turned in the story notes for both our Year's Best Fantasy 8 and our Year's Best SF 13. Once we finish the permissions, I'll be able to announce our tables of contents.
I have been watching and occasionally assisting in the development of the Wikipedia entries on Hard science fiction and Space opera. Neither of these entries are terrible, nor — having watched them progress for a while — do I anticipate that either is going to get much better.
Since there are not commonly shared theories of literary genre underpinning the evolution of these articles, they tend to devolve into something reminiscent of the end game of a game of life when the little groups of pixel enter a repeating pattern; cycles of argument about whether a work or writer is or is not hard sf, as if this was as easy to decide as something like nationality; creeping expansion of the list of Space opera games, suggesting that regardless of what the main text of the article says, this was all just a prologue to an explosion of computer games. Which is to say, because the nature of literary genres is for the most part poorly understood, the real action on such subjects is the exploration of tangents.
While in some ways, this is like the many sf convention panels on such subjects, at the end of the panel, people leave and go off to do something else, whereas this progresses with no end in sight.
What we end up with is a kind of mushy, common sense-based set of definitions that are probably endlessly reused in high school and college class papers, but which don't really get one very far. One reason for this is that genre definitions are partly a function of competing strong points of view by writers and critics; such disagreements are a key element of genre definitions, and for the most part aren't represented in the Wikipedia definitions of genre.
UPDATE: The Wikipedia entry on the New Weird is left as an exercise for the reader.I've been following with some puzzlement the strange tale of millionaire businessman and art collector Stuart Pivar's lawsuit against science blogger PZ Myers claiming "Assault, Libel, and Slander" over Myers' negative review of Pivar's foray into evolutionary theory, a book entitled Lifecode:The Theory of Biological Self Organization, the only book published by one "Ryland Press, Inc."
I first read about the lawsuit on Making Light, but it has also been written up on Scientific American's blog, where Myers comments,
Huh. I'd heard some noise from Pivar threatening to sue, but this is the first I've heard of any formal action being taken. Since I'm a defendant (one who hasn't been notified of his status!) I suppose I should just shut up at this point and let justice run its course.
Since I'm a blogger, though, I can't completely shut up. I will just say that this is Pivar's attempt to squash a negative review of his book, which I posted here. Nothing in the review was motivated by personal malice, and I actually am inclined to favor structuralist arguments in evolution ... but I'm afraid my honest assessment of Pivar's work is that it does not support his conclusions. I still stand by my review, and now I'm a bit disturbed that someone would think criticism of a scientific hypothesis must be defended by silencing its critics.
One of the very first things I was ever told when my first book came out was never to respond to negative reviews. I have not entirely resisted the temptation, but have (I think) managed to limit myself to polite notes making what I felt were factual corrections. My first reaction, when reading about this lawsuit on Making Light was how much it reminded my of the Monty Python skit containing the line, He used sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire.
Of course, life is stranger than fiction; stranger, even, than Monty Python. I've spent most of the day reading for our Year's Best volumes, but spent a few minutes looking further into the discussion of the lawsuit, and found some really odd stuff.
Pivar, it seems, is used to being noticed and making waves, though in very different circles than biology or blogging. According to The New York Times (2004) he has a "long-running feud" with the New York Academy of Art which he helped found and where he alledges that "organized crime" has taken over.
In 2006, he alleged that Sotheby's showed negligence to its stockholders in relation a refund given a Japanese collector for a statue for which Pivar had obtained a 1 million dollar appraisal.
But the most interesting material relates to his friendship with Andy Warhol, which he wrote about for the Sotheby's Andy Warhol Collection 1988 auction catalog. The Warhol-Pivar relationship merited a really startling passage in an essay published by Artnet entitled "What Art Says about Money" by Charlie Finch:
That is the call of money, the fear of art as exchange value. Conversely, Claude Monet, the original Andy, would crank out his haystacks, take a small number to Marseilles, telling his buyers, "There are only a few, buy them while you can." Then he'd float another dozen stacks back in Paris.
This is more than making a living, or refusing to: It is the love call of currency at its most fetishistic. Steve Rubell famously showered Andy Warhol with buckets of bills at Andy's birthday bash. No artist was more the victim, and yet exploiter, of money lust than Warhol, wandering the souks of Soho with Stuart Pivar buying up everything in sight then dumping the unopened packages in his closets at night, full of unsatisfied shame. The pull of mammon was murderous even on someone so intelligent. For money is a form of behavior, abstract, hidden and irrational.
Here's more on the Andy and Stuart social scene from accounts by Heli Vaaranen, a Finnish model:
What united Stuart and Andy was that they appreciated success, and only it. If someone tried to get started with his or her career, Stuart and Andy were certainly the wrong persons to try to use. Stuart Pivar had a very exclusive taste in his social life. For instance, he used to arrange classical concerts once a week in his home, in which artists like members of the New York Philharmonic performed. Only the best was good enough for Stuart.
Both Andy and Stuart selected the company they associated with. Very carefully. Andy used to say that 'It's great to buy friends'. Vaaranen agrees that Andy's famous friends were bought with his fame.
In the past few days, there are any number of people who have called Pivar an idiot for filing this lawsuit. That seems to me too easy an assessment.
The truth seems to be much more novelistic in a Jamesian sort of way: Pivar strikes me as a feisty, confident man, a fighter, who has honed his tactics in intellectually and aesthetically complex circles, who is unable to understand why his visual sophistication is not taking him where he wants to go, and why money can't take him the rest of the way if visual sophistication isn't enough. (I hope for the sake of everyone involved that he is a quick learner.)
No one has centralized copies of the discussions of what "cyberpunk" should be. Bits and pieces exist in sources like Bruce Sterling's Cheap Truth. But the real discussion is mostly lost.
But electronic archives of the discussion of The New Weird do exist despite their disappearance from the Web a few years ago. There is a sad little "404 - Not Found" message at the pages where these discussions used to be, which has been there for a number of years. I've decided to host copies of the New Weird files that have been floating around in the aether.
So. HERE THEY ARE! (Back to haunt the lot of us.) The discussion happened in 5 segments:
The discussion is quite long and some of the formatting gets lost in translation, but I've included links at the top of each page to text files with better formatting.
At the time I declared the exercise "The Mad-Hatter's Tea Party of literary discussion" and vowed never to do such a thing again. For more on my thoughts about it at the time, see my New Weird category.
MEANWHILE, Jeff & Anne VanderMeer have an anthology coming out on this subject which is sure to straighten us all out on what all the fuss was about.
(I gather that a computer game of telephone has mangled China Miéville's name throughout. I'll try to fix that this evening.)
(New Weird polemicist M. John Harrison shown above. Photo by Pat Cadigan.)
Cory Doctorow blogs a book I need to buy, entitled The Case Against Homework by Sara Bennett & Nancy Kalish. Based on the book, Cory reveals some of the evils of No Child Left Behind that we just paid a lawyer to hear about. Our education attorney explained to us that there was no way no how I was going to be able to hold the school district to its own standards on limiting homework and that No Child Left Behind was to blame.
And so we have a 4th grader and his mom, pushed to our wits' end by excessive homework, and an assessment by someone we paid $300 an hour of my son's current educational situation that deploys the technical term "train wreck."
We are on the hairy edge of bailing out of our top-ranked school district for which we pay munificent taxes primarily over the homework issue. Our alternatives are not good.
I need this book.
From James Nicoll commenting at Cool SciFi with regard to anthologies published by DAW Books:
Mike Resnick & Martin H. Greenberg Christmas Ghosts ... I note that Hartwell and Cramer had an anthology of the same title five years earlier.
Here are the stories that David Hartwell and I selected for inclusion in the Year's Best Fantasy 7. They are listed alphabetically by author, rather than in the order that they appear in the table of contents:
"Hallucigenia" by Laird Barron
"Four Fables" by Peter S. Beagle
"Yours, Etc." by Gavin Grant
"Sea Air" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
"I'll Give You My Word" by Diana Wynne Jones
"The Bonny Boy" by Ian R. Macleod
"Ghost Mission" by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
"The Roaming Forest" by Michael Moorcock
"Show Me Yours" by Robert Reed
"Christmas Witch" by M. Rickert
"Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" by Geoff Ryman
"The Lepidopterist" by Lucius Shepard
"The Double-Edged Sword" by Sharon Shinn
"Pimpf" by Charles Stross
"An Episode of Stardust" by Michael Swanwick
"The Osteomancer's Son" by Greg van Eekhout
"Thin, On the Ground" by Howard Waldrop
"The Potter's Daughter" by Martha Wells
"Build-a-Bear" by Gene Wolfe
"Bea and her Bird Brother" by Gene Wolfe
You can compare contents in various year's best volumes at yearsbestsf.info. (The selections for our Year's Best SF 12 are here.)
Here are the stories that David Hartwell and I selected for inclusion in the Year's Best SF 12. They are listed alphabetically by author, rather than in the order that they appear in the table of contents:
“The Lowland Expedition” by Stephen Baxter
“Applied Mathematical Theology” by Gregory Benford
“Brother, Can you Spare a Dime” by Terry Bisson
“Silence in Florence” by Ian Creasey
“When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” by Cory Doctorow
“Counterfactual” by Gardner R. Dozois
“Quill” by Carol Emshwiller
“Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth” by Michael Flynn
“Damascus” by Darryl Gregory
“Speak, Geek” by Eileen Gunn
“Expedition, With Recipes” by Joe Haldeman
“The Women of Our Occupation” by Kameron Hurley
“Nano Comes to Clifford Falls” by Nancy Kress
“This Is the Ice Age” by Claude Lalumière
“Just Do It” by Heather Lindsley
“Taking Good Care of Myself” by Ian R. MacLeod
“Dead Men Walking” by Paul J. McAuley
“Heisenberg Elementary” by Wil McCarthy
“Rwanda” by Robert Reed
“Tiger Burning” by Alastair Reynolds
“Home Movies” by Mary Rosenblum
“Preemption” by Charlie Rosenkrantz
“Chu and the Nants” by Rudy Rucker
“Tin Marsh” by Michael Swanwick
“Moon Does Run” by Edd Vick
“The Age of Ice” by Liz Williams
We write three kinds of author bios in this household:
Because of my recent experience with Wikipedian "editing," I am considering releasing the complete set of author bios from the anthologies of both David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer to the Internet under Creative Commons in order to raise the level of author bio discourse. (There is a certain amount of hard labor involved in this, and I haven't figures out how to do it yet. Suggestions welcome.)
Since our story notes usually go with a particular story, I'm going to skip the discussion of how to position the story in the note, and instead focus on what information needs to be assembled about the author.
Here are the basic pieces of info we collect before writing a note:
Lists of authors' awards and complete bibliography are usually available elsewhere. Link to them. But if the usual sources are inaccurate, provide better info. And finally, cover good new writers and cover people no one knows much about.
The most important thing to understand about writing an author bio is that this is a form of literary characterization. Details that enhance the bio by making the author a more rounded character may be crucial even if not otherwise relevant.
Preface: In the olden days, before the invention of sliced bread and the can opener, those of us seeking info on science fiction authors on the Internet used to get it from the Internet Science Fiction Data Base (ISFDB). It was absolute hell when we anthologists were working on deadline writing story notes for a book and the ISFDB went down. And one of the things they used to have sometimes were author bios. And this was good.
For bandwidth reasons, I gather, the ISFDB abdicated this function to Wikipedia. I think this was a serious mistake which needs to be corrected. From the ISFDB FAQ:
The old ISFDB had a place for author biographies; where did they go? The ISFDB database layout is great for well-structured data like titles, series names, and ISBN's. It doesn't work so well for free-form text like an author biography. The ISFDB author biographies were always an area of great churn, and mediating submitter differences could be difficult. We're now relying on Wikipedia as the location for author biographies, and we formally support linking an author's bibliography to their Wikipedia biography.
Proposal: I propose that science fiction author bios be moved from Wikipedia to the ISFDB Wiki.
After a brief experience with Wikipedia, its editors strike me as a pack of officious trolls whose main concern is to make sure that you don't actually know the people you are writing about. The science fiction field doesn't work that way. I know hundreds (maybe over a thousand) science fiction writers, editors, and fans. Many, many of them could be described as my "associates." Am I connected to most members of the professional science fiction community in some way? You bet.
I've helped run a Hugo-nominated SF semiprozine for a couple of decades, I edit two year's best volumes, and am married to one of the most eminent editors in the field. But this connectedness holds true of really a lot of the people doing the actual biographies: Perhaps their connections are not so visible or so obvious, but the SF field is like one big extended family. We've all slept on each other's couches. We've bought each other drinks. We marry each other's daughters. . . . It's Clan Fandom.
And of those creating biographies that don't know their subjects, what they are mostly doing is lifting the ISFDB bibliographies wholesale and transplanting the content over to Wikipedia.
So lets have a revolution. Let's take the SF and fantasy bios over to the ISFDB Wiki and pull out of Wikipedia. Can we do this?
Or have I misjudged the Wikipedia sysops? Are they really reasonable people who will let people who actually know what they are talking about write there?
SEE ALSO: Jed Hartman's mediation on the state of affairs at Wikipedia: Wikipedia and sf. He provides an excellent example of exactly what I'm talking about:
Somewhat similarly, [Teresa Nielsen Hayden] wrote a great article at Wikipedia a while back, about Roger Elwood, that consisted mostly of personal anecdotes. It was well-written and full of personality (like some of the old Britannica articles by major authors once were), and I couldn’t bring myself to attach a note to it saying “This is, unfortunately, not the right style or approach for Wikipedia.” But, sadly, it wasn’t. And the article has subsequently been rewritten to fit Wikipedia better, though the current version (last I checked) contains a link to TNH’s version. The Talk page for that article is a perfect example of clash of Wikipedia culture with sf culture: TNH gave a long and impassioned and compelling argument in favor of her version, but unfortunately her approach was wrong according to established Wikipedia policy.
According to the rules and standards explained to me last night, none of the great living critics (TNH being one) ought to be allowed to write about sf writers.
Also, since ISFDB now has a Wiki, it makes sense to move the Wiki entries on its writers closer to the source from which many of the SF writer bios are lifted.
SEE ALSO, John McDaid:
Let's take a concrete example, an icon of the sf field, Damon Knight. A driving force in the Golden Age of science fiction, author, editor, founder of SFWA and Clarion, I mean, you just can't overestimate his impact on the field. Here's what he gets in Wikipedia.
What's not there is precisely the kind of insight offered by people who knew Damon.
See also Evil Genius Chronicles: Science Fiction Authors, Revolt from Wikipedia!
Although there is a lot to be said about the value of Wikipedia, the one time I got a glimpse into its governance, I was pretty shocked. When my bio was removed from there, the key question was whether or not Dave Slusher the podcaster was the same guy who did the radio show Reality Break in the 90s. The issue was solved when one of them concluded “that fact was not possible to determine.” Of course, the “above the fold” link from this blog (which hosts the podcast) to the radio show or the fact that searching in my search box turns up posts about me doing the radio show didn’t matter, that fact was not determinable. Umm, OK.
I guess I should add that I have two kinds of vested interests in the matter of where the authoritative author bios in SF reside on the web and that they are any good.
In terms of my ability to cite sources unacceptable to Wikipedia, I don't thing it would cut much ice in the troll cave to mention that I live in one of the best libraries of science fiction lit & crit in the country. We have -- you know -- books, actual books here. 30,000 of them.
UPDATE: So let's rally the troops and move it all to ISFDB Wiki if they'll take us back. Here's my favorite quote from the "editors" so far:
You shouldn't have created the page in the first place. If you are really notable, someone else would have done so.
This was a direct response to my complaint when she cut the citations to articles mentioning me in the NYT, Forbes, the BBC, etc.
UPDATE: See also the official blog of the Science Fiction Book Club and Mark Bernstein.
UPDATE: It is interesting to consider the issues raised by this situation in light of this blog post, Medias Bias vs. 'The Blog Mob', contrasting the main stream media and the blogging community. It discusses a recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed attacking blogging.
I imagine that’s one story the WSJ has been tempted to pull from their site - and the four comments they allowed through were likely just a smattering of the number they actually received in response to these elitist statements (my own at least, and those of several others I know, didn’t past muster). And, this is exactly where blogging has some substance and weight - as its very nature invites feedback. If technology has pulled people out of community town hall meetings, fostering television-fed apathy amongst its citizenry, then blogging technology is bringing them back.
If a blog has any kind of readership, incorrect or unbalanced reporting is quickly met with checks and balances, or even a scathing rebuke. If I put forward an unsound case, I’ll be dragged over the coals soon enough - having to reshape my views and restate my case. But that’s the aim - right? We live and learn.
[Link to the WSJ Op Ed., The Blog Mob "Written by fools to be read by imbeciles." ]
This current Wikipedia situation essentially cast me in the role of a dour member of the main stream media and the Wikipedians in the roll of the blogger. This strikes me as deeply ironic, since the Wikipedians accosting me were deeply contemptuous of blogs and bloggers.
But what, after all, is Wikipedia but the world's biggest group blog?
A further interesting note: BoingBoing shares a letter from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to Rick Jeliffe who is at the center of the "Wikigate 07" (teehee) controversey:
I hope you will publicly reject [Mircrosoft's offer to edit Wikipedia for pay] as being unethical. Point out to [Microsoft] that people have been banned from Wikipedia permanently for doing what they are asking you to do. We consider it a grave violation of community trust, and Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves for asking.
My personal take is that the Microsoft controversey, in which Microsoft attempted to engage Jeliffe to corrrect errors in Wikipedia on their behalf, reflects more on problems with Wikipedia than with Microsoft; Wales's own attitudes promote the kind of bureaucratic paranoia and suspicion of expertise I experienced.
In Wales's utopia, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. The elite of the WIkipedia editors, entrusted with special powers by Wales et al. act as a form of secret police—or if that seems too harsh a metphor, anti-bodies in the midst of a raging autoimmune disease—and, of course, the fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low.
Truth is not the point. The point is control.
Continue reading "A Proposal: SF Author Bios Should Be Moved from Wikipedia to the ISFDB Wiki" »
We just got a terrific review of The Space Opera Renaissance from Stuart Carter at SF Site. It begins:
A confession: before reading The Space Opera Renaissance, I honestly thought that space opera came to be called space opera because "opera," in my blissfully uninformed opinion, was the equivalent of the Hollywood blockbuster from before they had Hollywood -- big, brash, wide screen entertainment full of fickle gods, exotic foreigners, passionate lovers and mighty warriors, all mashed up into stories of inspired, over-the-top mayhem and exhibitionism, and topped with bellowing divas howling like Hurricane Katrina in a ball gown. . . . Fortunately for me, David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer are here to try and set straight idiots such as myself, and kudos is due to them both that, for the most part, they serve as knowledgeable and engrossing guides to this once-derided area of the genre. I found their commentaries on each author to be invaluable to my enjoyment of each piece in this hefty anthology, whether I agreed 100 percent with their assessments or not . . .
After setting up my AmazonConnect page last night, I looked around to see who else had one. I did find the official directory, but it is a horrible, unusable thing which took me quite a while to skim through. So I've made my own AmazonConnect Directory and put it in my right sidebar for all to see.
Suggestions for additions welcome. If I didn't notice your name when skimming down the list of names in the official directory, it doesn't mean I don't love you.
I just started an AmazonConnect blog in order to organize imformation about our books for Amazon readers and book buyers. (The AmazonConnect program is a blogging system available to authors with books for sale on Amazon; they have 26 entries for me.)
The instructions say it may take up to 5 days for them to verify that I am who I say I am, the Kathryn Cramer with her name on the cover of these books. So I'm not sure if you'll be able to see the blog until then.
A long time ago, I tried to have a separate blog for news about my books, and I neglected it shamefully. Maybe I'll be more interesed in shameless selfpromotion this time around.
Two years ago, we advertised on my blog for a home editorial assistant and had a nice guy named Carl come and help us for a while.
It is time for us to do this again.
David Hartwell and I are looking for an editorial assistant to help us with projects that we do out of the house (mostly anthologies). The position is in Pleasantville, New York. It includes room and board and a small amount of money and also editorial instruction. Also, minor amounts of childcare are also involved, usually when I'm home. Must be legal to work in the US; must drive.
If this opportunity appeals to you, email me at kathryn.cramer@gmail.com.
Just before the end of the year, Advanced Marketing Services (Pink Sheets: MKTS), a major book distributor (and owner of Publishers Group West), went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, taking with it a big chunk of US publishing's Christmas receipts. This household has been watching it closely, and this was something I didn't blog because I didn't want to spook anyone with half-baked info.
The New York Times finally got round to running a story on January 5th. Our Year's Best SF series is published by HarperCollins, so I pay particular attention to the line in the NYT piece:
“We’re exploring ways to keep working with them,” a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, Erin Crum, said.
Uuummm. Ooohhkaayy.
Of course everyone caught in this has one big question: Are we going to get paid?
But my bigger question, once I looked into the situation was not whether HarperCollins and a whole laundry list of publishers were going to be able to find a way to continue working with AMS, but rather why they were working with them in the first place.
The New York Times remarks, a little too tactfully:
Advanced Marketing Services’ financial difficulties were widely known in the industry, after an accounting scandal in 2003 resulted in the ouster of several senior managers.
Ouster? Ouster? Try criminal conviction! From the San Diego Union Tribune, dateline December 12, 2006: Former AMS exec sentenced to 3 years for role in fraud case
A federal judge yesterday sentenced the former vice president of advertising at Advanced Marketing Services to 36 months in prison for her role in falsifying earnings at the San Diego company.
Sandra Miller Christie pleaded guilty in 2005 to charges that she conspired with other former employees to defraud AMS clients and inflate the profitability of the company's advertising department. The scheme occurred from 1999 through 2003. . . . Two other former AMS employees were sentenced by Burns earlier this year.
So WHY OH WHY were so many publishers caught short using a company that has just had three employees criminally convicted of cooking the books? The NYT article suggests a possible reason:
The distributor has near-exclusive access to the discount retailers known as price clubs, including Costco and Sam’s Club.
In other words, the problem here is Monopoly Capitalism: there has been so much consolidation of the once-diverse distribution system that publishers are forced to use a distributor known to have major issues with cooking the books in order to reach significant portions of the market.
Hello? Department of Justice? Can we get some anti-trust litigation going here? (Well, at least the FBI is still interested!)
AMS has been in turmoil since 2003, when agents from the FBI raided its Sorrento Mesa headquarters.
Three former AMS executives were sentenced last year to prison after pleading guilty to fraud charges. The executives defrauded publishers of funds that were intended to market books, but retained to boost company revenues, according to federal indictments.
An investigation into the company’s operations remains open, federal prosecutors said.
In addition to the criminal probe, AMS hasn’t reported financial results for more than three years, and has yet to restate its financial results dating back to its 2003 fiscal year.
Publishers Weekly reports:
Several of the largest publishers feel betrayed by AMS—just days before the Chapter 11 filing, AMS had assured the major New York houses that everything was fine.
Publishers Weekly relays Costco's advice on the current situation:
A Costco spokesperson said that until further notice, publishers should operate "on a business as usual basis."
Pay no attention to those men behind the curtain. You are growing sleepy, very sleepy. These are not the accountants you are looking for . . .
Meanwhile, Costco's profits are up:
Costco, the nation's largest wholesale club operator, said Thursday its first-quarter profit rose 10 percent and said it would take a second-quarter charge related to stock option grants.
For the quarter ending Nov. 26, net income totaled $236.9 million, or 51 cents per share, compared with $215.8 million, or 45 cents per share, a year ago. Revenue climbed 9 percent to $14.15 billion from $12.93 billion last year. . . . In October, Costco said an internal committee and independent experts reviewing the company's stock option grant practices found no evidence of fraud, but did find "imprecisions" related to certain grants.
The distributors are much bigger businesses than the publishers and the big box club stores are in turn much bigger businesses than the distributors.
Does ANYONE at Costco or Sam's Club care that they are and have been forcing the entire publishing industry to do business with crooks? It would appear that the answer is no: that's how Costco keeps its prices down. Business as usual is business with crooks.
Meanwhile, perhaps the best we can hope for the Christmas publishing revenues is that they are having a nice holiday in the Cayman Islands.
I came across this collage this morning. I made it in 1994, I think at the year's end, as a kind of editorial cartoon on what was wrong with the publishing industry just then. Not much has changed, it seems. (One of my favorite items, you can't read very well without going to the larger version of the image: It is the book How To Do Automatic Writing.
That, for me, summed up the crux of the problem.
ALSO, further to the subject of casual art kicking around the house, I am quite fond of one of my earliest posts, Great Minds Sink Ships, a collection of refrigerator magnet poetry created by me, David Hartwell, and mystery writer Sarah Smith during a blizzard in February of 2003, and contains such lines as Beggars should not throw stones! and Those who live in glass houses make light work.
From Alan's Mystical Musings:
I'll start off with all the not-too-shabby things I got for Christmas:
4 CDs: Fear of Flying and Mooding by Mya, Can't Take Me Home and Missundaztood by Pink.
Year's Best Fantasy 6 (edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer)
2007 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market.
Little Gods (short story collection) by Tim Pratt.
The Empire of Ice Cream / The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories (ss collections), both by Jeffrey Ford.
Firebirds Rising (edited by Sharyn November).
Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt by Anne Rice.
Merry Christmas, Alan!
For those of us old enough to remember, in 1986, Tom Weller won the Hugo for the science humor book Science Made Stupid. (It appears here in abridged form (unfortunately lacking the illustration to which I refer), and here on Amazon, where you can buy the whole thing.) It featured a cardboard cutout called a "personal planetarium" that you wear on your head, with pinholes for stars, described here in a LiveJournal entry:
