Our Pious Hope

Marketing, Counter-marketing, and Transcendence

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. In science fiction, everybody talks about marketing and commercialism as the enemies of art—or worse of art as a parasite upon profitable publishing. But controlling the science fiction marketplace is seen to be as difficult as controlling the weather. Publishers attempt to dress up their books for the market weather in brightly colored covers, sometimes embossed, sometimes foiled. But too often lately we observe that publishers are foiling the Book as such, not merely its cover.

This problem is not unique to science fiction. As Lewis Coser, Charles Kadushin and Walter W. Powell remark in Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing, “The tendency in trade lately has been to eschew the role of books as a specialized medium and to market them as a consumer product for a very wide market—an approach that leads to many of the absurdities we have described.”1 But because it’s a category literature, science fiction is particularly vulnerable to this kind of thinking on the part of publishers and those in their employ.

There has been considerable discussion of the problem that the marketplace presents for science fiction in the sf small press magazines. The three leading forums for discussion of these topics in print are Charles Platt’s Science Fiction Guide,2 Steve Brown’s Science Fiction Eye,3 and Mark Van Name’s Short Form.4 We do a certain amount of such discussion in The New York Review of Science Fiction,5 but surprisingly little in comparison. As a judge of this past year’s Readercon Small Press Awards, I had the opportunity to survey a majority of the small press and amateur publications relating to science fiction and to meditate upon their rationales for publishing in the face of the commercial publishers.

This paper embodies the results of my meditations and my further research into the current state of science fiction publishing.6 As an editor of commercial anthologies and an idealist, I find myself in the position of having to do something about the weather—about market realities, in order to be able to live with myself while pursuing my work.

I. Marketing

As I have argued elsewhere,7 the most extravagant and outrageous attempt to make science fiction books into interchangeable product was the Laser Books series put out by Harlequin and edited by Roger Elwood. The selling point of the whole line of books was that the books would be as alike as possible. A Vice President of Harlequin (one Mr. O'Keefe) said in the 1970’s8 that wholesalers “treat books like cabbages” and that “they don’t care what’s in a book;” that although the books were intended to be very much alike that “to talk about them as formula novels is not quite right. They are criteria novels.” He justified the effect of the Laser series on the science fiction field by saying they Harlequin would “use it [the series] to expand science fiction into areas where it is not usually read.”

Commercial failure killed the series although it was very widely distributed. But had the books sold, the series would probably still be alive today, and might, in fact, be dominant in the sf marketplace, as Silhouette and Harlequin romances are in theirs. This was, as Mr. O'Keefe put it, Harlequin's “pious hope."

The most glaring and financially successful example of the “criteria novel” in science fiction was the Del Rey book under the leadership of Judy Lynn del Rey. Judy Lynn del Rey was the first editor in science fiction to make the great transition from regarding the audience for the book as readers to regarding them as consumers.9

She became able to convince her sales force that the books were proper criteria novels. Because of the success of the Del Rey line—which may originally have had more to do with Judy Lynn del Rey as a charismatic leader of sales forces than with the books themselves—editors at other companies are strongly encouraged to take a similar attitude toward their books and establish criteria that might encourage salable product.

Once the market is trained to believe in her strategy, it no longer matters whether it is the books that sell, or the belief of the industry that the books will sell that sells books. The net profits are their own proof. No one has to think about which books to stock or read. In fact, they are encouraged not to.

Judy Lynn del Rey was training publishers, her sales force, book stores, and ultimately consumers to determine the value of a book using a set of simple mating signals by which the raw genetic materials of words and trees could be as rapidly as possible transformed into dollars. And one gathers that she truly believed that this was a good thing.

The Del Rey book became a dependable product that looked the same, read the same, and sold the same (until the next month's releases). The profit comes up front. And this was accepted as good. (This new process circumvents the normal though complicated and time consuming process by which fictional ideas are translated from writer to reader; similar to the process that Weyerhauser uses to grow the trees to make the paper on which all these interchangeable books were to be printed.)

This is not to say that the author of this month's lead does not write books with unique literary virtues, books wholly dissimilar in their real meaning from those of other authors in the Del Rey list.10 Rather the goodness of the book is made irrelevant to the process. Only its adherence to the criteria is important. If unique quality were a prerequisite, the product would be unreliable. If unique quality were important, the editor, the publicity department, the sales force, the buyers, and the book store would have to think of a new way to sell the books every month. If unique quality were important, why, they would have to think hard.

There are those who have figured out the set of simple mating signals which editors try to use to entice the market place, and have therefore made the transition from treating editors as readers to treating them as consumers. Again, the sincere and piteous ghost of Roger Elwood appears to moan and clank its chains. He was the most extreme example, and again, his methods were too extreme. And so he failed.

Over the course of a two year period he was able, by giving all the right 'pheromonal' signals to editors, to consummate contracts for more than two hundred original anthologies. He actually turned most of them in, although many were never published because he had already flooded the market. And, although he earned a couple of hundred thousand dollars doing this, he killed the anthology market. Before this, the average original anthology sold substantially better than the average first novel and was considered a viable commercial property. Today one of the phrases that might be found in the Phrase Book for Young Editors is “Anthologies don't sell.” Elwood did it by treating editors as consumers whether he realized what he was doing or not.11

Despite the wreckage of the anthology market and Laser Books, some people seem to think that Elwood had a few good ideas, ideas that just might work if carried out in moderation. And surprisingly, most sf editors will still let themselves be treated as consumers. Among the several people who are good at catering to this weakness are Martin Harry Greenberg and Byron Priess. And one can make the argument, as Mr. O'Keefe did, that they are expanding the science fiction market by selling books to people who don't read sf. They are merely filling an ecological niche, and are by the way increasing sf's market share. More than a decade of experience has shown us that as the market has expanded the quality of the audience has been compromised. So long as the market is expanding, they don't drive out the good books. But as soon as the market begins to contract, the good–but–not–criteria–oriented books are the first to go by editorial triage. This is the long-term future of publishing lines run by editors who think they can publish bad books that will ‘sell’ to support good books that ‘don’t sell’.12

Editors want to get their more tiresome obligations to their employers over with so that they can be allowed to publish books they really love. Greenberg, Priess et. al. give the illusion of providing books that will serve this purpose as quickly and painlessly as possible. Without editing.

What, in fact, is the case is that this transaction reduced the apparent skill level of the editors and therefore reduces their authority to select good books. Packagers give editors what they want, or think they want. Packagers give editors a set of signals that they can take to higher ups and to sales conference to show that the editor in question is doing books that are really commercial. (And this translates all the way through the system ... everyone at every level of the process can take these signals and pass them on. Press the bar and get an M&M.) The books give the desired signals and promise more. But more they don't deliver. The signals are the message.13 These are the bower birds and peacocks of sf publishing. The tail isn't actually good for anything, but it sure is nice to show your boss.

Providing the publisher with a good marketing hook and an okay book to go with it is simply not enough. The lack of aesthetic ulterior motives is actually damaging to the marketplace for good books, allowing an increasing incursion of ‘non-books’ which “are to real books what frozen TV dinners are to homecooked meals.”14

Marketing15 in its ultimate form is death to literature. If the marketing people really figured out how to sell books without matters of content or quality entering into it, they wouldn't need authors. And publishers wouldn't be able to resist. They could turn out mass produced books without troublesome and unnecessary craftspeople.16 Only sentiment would prevent them. And while sentiment has sometimes slowed the process of mechanization and of rationalization of production, it almost never stops it. Books would become like cloth. Like shoes. Like furniture, and window panes, and canned vegetables.17 The author could go the way of the smith, the cobbler, the weaver, the seamstress. Perhaps there might be a few “hand-crafted” books around, but most books could be manufactured. The “hand-crafted” books would be one of the guilty pleasures of the people who worked in the marketing departments and of the editors who acquired the books from computer firms and put them into production. This is how the could appease their love of books after the Death of Literature. The books that everyone else read would all be written by computers. In automated prose factories. Think of that.

The grim future I have forecast is a world in which 99% of all books are written by computers;18 a world in which a few hand-crafted books—novelties, if you will—are still written by live human beings.19 And although these hand-crafted books may have the occasional flaw, they have a vitality that one just can't find in the cheaper though more perfect mass produced (computer–written) novels. They are bought by the nostalgic and the sentimental, (and often by those who work in publishing.) No one else much cares about the difference. Is that so bad? Not as bad as some futures of which we might conceive. But still, it would be a tragedy.

II. The Fall

Science fiction and fantasy bring in more money for the New York publishing industry than they ever have before, and yet there is a sense within the field that sf is a genre in crisis. The books that make the most money tend to be those for which we have the least respect.20 Even worse, magic realists have been encroaching upon the territory, collecting great arm-fulls of the affectionate attentions of big-name literary critics whereas sf has to be satisfied with, at best, back-handed compliments.21

Sf’s best writers yearn for audiences that dress better. And they have become shy of genre conventions, and, in science fiction, write almost without reference to science, past or present. These attitudes in the writers are encouraged by editors who publish the books as so good they’re almost not science fiction.

The ground is rumbling. The smell of smoke is in the air. A few people discuss who killed science fiction. Most of the rest of us feel that we’re not dead yet, but it may be that our Titanic has only just hit the ice berg, and all the rest is a matter of time. Dan Steffan of SF Eye asserts, “science fiction has become a form of kitch.”22 To quote Charles Platt’s recent article “The Rape of Science Fiction”:

This situation is no longer tolerable. It’s beyond cynical humor, even beyond one’s capacity for fatalism The body of literature that I loved has been doped up and defiled, draped in fake finery and turned into a flabby old hooker smelling of festering lesions and cheap perfume.23

In other words, the situation is serious. In fact, it’s a disaster.

To a calamity, a disaster, a catastrophe, an apocalypse a range of responses are possible. The religious response is cast in the terms of moral allegory, deriving its form from the Biblical account of God’s destruction of the cities of the plain—the victims of apocalypse were punished because they were bad.

Thus if sf goes down the tubes, it will be because someone was bad. Perhaps the authors wrote badly? That will certainly be part of it. Perhaps the reading audience degenerated into a bunch of illiterates watching MTV and playing computer games? Perhaps the publishers tried too often to make a quick buck? Perhaps the editors were more worried about their jobs than the quality of their books? Or worse, perhaps the editors had no faith that good books could make good money and thus proved repeatedly that bad stuff always outsells the good, leading publishers to require that they publish only the bad? In fact all of these are going on now. One head of an sf line has been heard to say that the stuff he doesn’t like sells much better than they stuff he does like, so, with rare exceptions, he tries to avoid buying books he likes.24

There is also the aesthetic response, cast in terms of romantic melodrama in which the event is raised to a level of sublimity, equally composed of horror, wonder, and intense emotional involvement: after the death of sf, or perhaps of the written word as a whole, the made-for-TV version of how and why it happened. Think in terms of The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, or the rise and fall of Roger Elwood: like the snail darter, the sf anthology was happy in its fragile ecological niche until Roger Elwood sold an awe-inspiring number of anthologies. The narrative emphasizes the sublimnity of matters of scale.

Charles Platt’s narrative of “The Rape of Science Fiction” falls into this class, and like all good melodramas it has heroes and villains. The heroes in his narrative are Brian Aldiss, Frederick Pohl, J. G. Ballard25, Norman Spinrad, Joe Haldeman, Venor Vinge, and Harlan Ellison; the villains, Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey, Isaac Asimov, Byron Priess, George Lucas, Stephen Speilberg, Charles N. Brown J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert Asprin, Joan Vinge, and L. Ron Hubbard.

With several exceptions, discussed in the first section of this paper, all of these people are allegorical figures of melodrama, rather than people personally responsible for damage to the field. In order to make his structure work, Platt must assert that the damage to sf has already taken place, because aesthetic responses to disaster can really only have their proper emotion effect after the fact.

The psychological response blames the victims of the misfortune for having the poor judgement to be in the wrong place at the wrong time: Didn’t they know that science fiction was about a future which has already happened? Were they so deluded as to believe that sf hadn’t been a genre of hacks all along? Couldn’t they tell that their little genre was doomed because the audience would move on from the future of the past to the future of the future? What made sf writers want to punish themselves that way? Or, approached from the writer’s point of view, didn’t the publishers know that if they kept putting such juvenile covers on my books that as the audience got older the books would stop selling and the company would lose money? How can my publisher expect my book to sell if there’s no advertising budget? Is my editor stupid? Or merely incompetent?

The rationalist response to disaster subsumes the event in a universal scientific system of causes and effects, rejecting the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds and the idea of divine protection.

This explanation of the demise of science fiction would focus on statistics, reserves for returns, distribution systems, demographics of the audience, demographics of the writers, displaying the anatomy of disaster in the manner of the 1929 Stock Market Crash, showing how greed, financial specualtion, and competition lead to disaster— those involved with sf, at every level, were venal and short sighted—a point of view not unlike the religious response to disaster.

My own article, “The New Generation: A Study of SF Writer’s Ages of Professional Entry into the Science Fiction Field for Six Decades of SF,” is a good example of the scientific attitude toward disaster. Its final paragraph reads:

Will science fiction become a literature by 35-year-olds for 35-year-olds? Will this alienate our source of new readers, namely twelve-year-olds? Should science fiction writers be trying to write for twelve-year-olds? ... Is this new generation gap between new readers and new writers a good thing, or a problem to be solved? Is it a sign of the science fiction field’s maturity, or of its demise?26

This view of the future of sf seems to me to have its roots in affect of the environmental movement of the early 1970s. In his introduction to The Ruins of Earth, Thomas M. Disch remarked, with regard to the environmental crisis, “Now, in 1971, it isn’t possible to look the other way.”27 The sf sections of our book stores are becoming clogged with dreadful stuff for which we can make no excuses.

It is ironic that at the same historical moment as market researchers in the broader world are begining to take on the “important but neglected topic” of “the role of the consumption experience” in consumer research,28 a topic of great importance and relevance to the arts in general and publishing in particular, the marketing types in publishing companies are rejecting notions of aethetics, subltlety, and individuality of books in favor of ‘guerilla marketing’ tactics better suited for waging the cola wars than for running a publishing company. Sooner or later the kind of thinking now going on in journals like Economic Psychology, Marketing and Psychology, and The Journal of Consumer Research will filter through to publishing executives. But by then it may be too late.

III. Counter-marketing

Among those within the sf field who acknowledge that the field is in some trouble because of the corrupting forces of the market, nearly all agree that the field is worth saving. Beyond that, approaches diverge.