Electronic Ink

Today is a special day.

It is the day when we feral colonists engage in some bizarre traditions. There is ritual avian slaughter, a parade of ceremonial effigies, and several rounds of bloodsport practiced by some of our nation's finest (winners bathe in Gatorade from the sacramental fount; losers are sacrificed and served in mincemeat pie).

At least, that is what I suspect it looks like to Angry Robot, but they may be too polite (and too British) to say so.

While I am getting debauched on green bean casserole and cranberry sauce, they are hard at work, and they've announced their purchase of my first novel, The Buried Life, and its sequel, Renaissance Land.

In addition to everything else I'm thankful for (too much to list here), I'm thankful to join so many wonderful, talented people on their list of authors (just how did I get here?!), and I'm thankful to work with such delightful, innovative folks to get these books published.

It's always interesting to hear about literary trends--what's in, what's out, what's on its way in one direction or the other.

It's not surprising that when books about vampires and werewolves are selling by the dozen, agents and editors are inundated with queries about the same. However, chasing a trend is hard. If it's recognizable, it likely means that market saturation is nigh.

Between Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy, Marie Lu's Legend series, and the Divergent books by Veronica Roth, dystopia appears to be having its day in the sun.

Jennie Goloboy of Red Sofa Literary makes several important points about dystopia in fiction. I think the heart of her post is that you can't really tack a popular trope onto a manuscript and expect it to work. If there's an evil government, there must be good reasons and logical mechanisms. If the star-crossed lovers are supernatural creatures, it should be so because that was the best way to develop those characters, not because it seemed like a hot trend.

What's even harder to discuss is the next million dollar idea. Since there isn't a crystal ball for that kind of thing, it's a good excuse to worry less about what's going to sell big and more about writing whatever story you're most excited to tell. I have a feeling that's what most of today's best-selling authors were thinking about at the time, anyway. 

The lovely librarians of Stacked are challenging the oft-repeated claim that women dominate YA. I've heard it (and readily believed it), and you might have, too. Yet they break down the numbers for the New York Times Best Seller lists for Young Adult for roughly the past year (ever since the creation of a separate list for YA), and any way they cut the numbers, this assumption is not merely false, but staggeringly so.

It turns out that male authors and their books consistently outnumber and outrank their female counterparts on the NYT list. In fact, looking at the analysis, I felt downright silly for having thought that women were leading the genre. So why do we so commonly hear that this is the case?*

• J.K. Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, and Suzanne Collins. It's true, the data for the last year doesn't reflect mega-hits in the Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games series. While these are arguably the best-known YA titles, their exceptional success does not likely reflect the status of most women writing YA or of the typical gender distribution among YA bestsellers. Veronica Roth is probably the closest to this category of super-selling women, but even she's only held the top spot for four weeks, and that followed significant publicity for the film adaptation.
• Adult women make up a large share of YA readership. I've heard this many times, too, and now I'm also wondering whether this assumption is suspect. 
• Women writers more actively engage with other authors and readers. I don't know if this is true, but I wonder if it's also a perception. Who wants to do the research? (I call "not it.") 
• The New York Times list is a flawed metric. Criticisms of the NYT's methods and metrics abound, but there's no denying that it's a common benchmark for success, nor that books that appear there are likely to sell even better simply for making the list.

You can usually time NaNoWriMo discussions by the appearance of Halloween decorations on store shelves. When the first ceramic pumpkin or wireframe black cat debuts at Walmart, some writer somewhere is talking about his NaNoWriMo plans.