Category: News

I won’t say that I’m not an elitist — why wouldn’t anyone want to consider themselves elite? — but I still deeply believe that the books that I love are intrinsically wonderful, and that enjoying them is something that any half-smart and basically literate person should be able to do.

Unfortunately, the world does not want to agree with me; I’ve just seen that Harry Connolly — whose novel Game of Cageswas one of the best things I read last year, and whose [[[Circle of Enemies]]] I’ve been holding onto for an upcoming vacation — has  just been told that his current publisher willnot be buying any more books in that series, for what seem like eminently sensible falling-sales reasons. (I’m in the business; I can access BookScan.)

This is not the first time, of course; one of my other favorite writers, Matt Hughes, had two “Big Six” publishers shot out from under him in three books — three wonderful, amazing, lovely books, let me emphasize — but has since gone on to write a number of excellent books for smaller houses.

And there are plenty of others — Elizabeth Willey, the only writer I’ve ever found who can do pseudo-Zelazny Amber, and did it well, disappeared after three novels. Before that, there was a writer who had two screamingly funny Bertie-Wooster-as-a-ghost-hunter paperbacks (and whose name I can’t remember), and she also disappeared without a trace.

I know you people — the ones reading these words now — must be the exceptions, but the world, more and more, seems to be filled with people whose tastes are just inexplicably horrible. Luckily, I still harbor hopes of becoming Emperor of the Literary World one day, and then I will make everything Right.

For right now, good luck to Connolly — and, if you’ve been putting off grabbing his books, do it now, since low-selling books are the ones that it’s murder to find later on — and to all of those other absolutely amazing writers whom it seems that only I like.

Sometime in the late 1970s, there was a show in New York where DC Comics actually had a booth and I got to wander over as a fan and chat casually with president Sol Harrison. It was the earliest memory I had of a publishing taking booth space on the convention floor. Before then, the tables were given over to fanzine vendors, back issue and new release dealers and that was about it. Little in the way or merchandise and even less original art was being sold.

Fans and creators could mix in the aisles, chat in the lobby, and talk before and after panels. It was a far smaller, more collegial atmosphere and certainly formed relationships with people I still have today.

By the time I joined staff at DC in 1984, the major publishers had been taking booth space with increasing regularity at shows from coast to coast. These were standard trade show booth designs that were decorated with the company’s wares, maybe a TV monitor with a video tape playing but that was about it. Editors and creators sat at tables and signed comics, did sketches, and handed out sampler comics or buttons.

During the 1980s, things continued to grow and more customized booth set-ups were showing up but fans could still walk into a publisher’s booth and talk to editors and talent. That began to change in 1992-1993 when Image arrived with show biz razzle dazzle and DC, flush with Death of Superman profits, gave us a mammoth booth dubbed Wayne’s World, nicknamed after Bob Wayne. Since nature abhors a vacuum, this new space filled with a growing number of fans, but patient ones could still talk to staff and freelancers.

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Perhaps someone more plugged into this particular format war can comment, but, for myself, I’ll just mention the two things that happened over the last week in the world of ebook formats.

First, EPUB 3.0, the next generation of the format used by most electronic reading devices, was officially made a Recommended Specification at the Frankfurt Book Fair by the IDPF.

A few days later, Amazon — which is the sole user of their proprietary, competing format, derived from a format invented by Mobipocket — announced a new generation Kindle format for their devices, without mentioning EPUB or the growing global standard.

There had been chatter that Amazon was going to converge to EPUB — or, at least, allow EPUB files to be read on Kindle devices — sometime late this year or next, but, from this evidence, that does not seem to be coming any time soon.