Inhuman Swill

How Bookstore Returns Forced Me to Rethink My Publishing Strategy

2021-11-11T00:59:30Z

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

There is no feeling quite like seeing your book displayed on a bookstore shelf. If it seems miraculous, that’s because it is. A remarkable chain of events had to transpire to make this happen. You spent months or years nurturing a fragile idea and rendering it into words. You managed to get those words in front of an editor, who was moved or excited enough by them to champion your work to more people. A book was designed, art commissioned, a marketing plan devised. A sense of your book was communicated via advertising, catalog, sales rep or simple word of mouth to a bookstore, where the buyer figured there was a reasonable chance a customer might be interested in it. And then the bookstore bought your book. Yes, that’s right. The bookstore didn’t borrow your book or receive it on consignment. They bought it. They paid money to your publisher to have a copy or two on hand, on the chance they could resell it to someone walking in off the street. Like I said, it’s miraculous. It’s also a risk for the bookstore, who put up their own money on a bet they could move your book. But what if no customer completes this chain of miracles and actually buys it? Let me tell you what happens, and how it bit me in the ass. Deciding to self-publish In 2015 as I was preparing to self-publish my memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, I put myself through a crash course on the business end of the industry. Self-publishing was not my first choice, but after years of trying to sell my book to traditional publishers, and much soul-searching by me and my agent both, I realized it might be the best option I had left. I believed in my book deeply. If someone picked it up in a store and started leafing through it, I did not want to give them a single reason to suspect it wasn’t the product of a traditional publishing process. This meant a lot of work on my part, not to mention a significant investment in editorial guidance, production software, and more. It also meant getting my book into stores in the first place. That process alone could fill a couple of essays, but it boiled down to finding a printer and a distributor. To keep my start-up costs as low as possible, I chose a print-on-demand solution from Lightning Source, a division of the book distributor Ingram Content Group. The supply chain In traditional publishing, a publisher will, through a distributor, take orders from bookstores for its upcoming titles. It will hire a printing company to produce enough books to fill those orders, and the distributor will make sure those books are delivered to the stores. In this model, the publisher pays all the costs of printing the book up front. With all my other production costs, I could not afford to place a large print order in advance. Lightning Source was a good solution for me because it combines printing and distribution under one roof. When orders come in for the book, Lightning Source prints only as many copies as are needed and delivers them directly to the stores. As the publisher in this scenario, I don’t need to keep any inventory on hand. This is good for me and my bottom line, since I’m not paying money to print books that might never end up in a store. But. Discounts and returns This is where my interests as a publisher begin to collide with the interests of the bookstore. What incentive does the bookstore have to pay for a copy of my book without being sure someone will buy it from them? If it’s a hot book everyone’s talking about, no problem. Chances are good someone will come in looking for it. Chances are good, in fact, that many someones will come in looking for it. But if it’s not a hot title, the bookstore is taking much more of a risk. Publishers do two things to make this risk more palatable to the bookstore:

The publisher sells the book to the store at a discount — usually 55% off the cover price, and rarely less than 40%. The bookstore can then sell the book at the full cover price or even offer it on sale and still make a profit.
The publisher allows the bookstore to return unsold books for a full refund. This theoretically reduces the bookstore’s risk to zero, since if they can’t sell the book, they can get their money back.

This is great for the bookstore but not so great for the publisher, since the publisher needs to keep enough cash on hand to repay the bookstore if necessary. Also, it’s easy for the publisher to get stuck with a bunch of returned books they paid to have printed but that never sold. But we were talking earlier about print-on-demand. You would think print-on-demand reduces the risk on the publisher’s end, since they’re not paying in advance to print some possibly excessive number of books. It doesâ€Š—â€Šbut only to a point. I’ll get back to that in a bit. Setting a price When adding my book to the Ingram catalog, my job was to work out an optimal retail price. This was not a straightforward task. Ingram is the largest wholesale book distributor in the world. When your book is listed in their catalog, it can be ordered by just about any bookstore or library anywhere. One important factor in whether it will be or not is, of course, the price. Too high and no one will want to buy it. Too low and you won’t make any money even if they do. Unboxing the hardcover edition of my memoir. (Photo by William Shunn.) The wholesale price of your book — what the bookstore pays the publisher — must be higher than the cost of printing your book. The hardcover edition of my memoir, for instance, is a 448-page book with a full-color matte-finish dust jacket. The print cost is $13.37 per unit (though this would be lower if I were printing in bulk). So, my wholesale price had to be higher than $13.37 in order for me to make any profit. After playing around with various numbers, I settled on a retail price of $27.95. This was roughly comparable to similar hardcovers coming out at the time, and I was afraid to go much higher for fear of turning off potential buyers. The problem with this price was, at the standard 55% discount, bookstores would pay only $12.58 per unit — less than the cost of printing. Though I knew it would probably hurt me with some retailers, I gritted my teeth and set the discount at 40%, the low end of the generally accepted range. This would make the wholesale price $16.77. I would reap a hefty profit of $3.40 per unit, and the bookstore would still stand to make $11.18 at the cash register. I hoped that would be enough to convince a few stores to take a chance on my book. (I should clarify here, that $3.40 profit is what the publisher receives in this transaction. In traditional publishing arrangements, the publisher would pay a portion of this amount, probably 10% of the cover price, to the author as a royalty, and would have other costs to cover as well. In my case, since the publisher and the author are the same entity, the entire $3.40 goes into my pocket. As for the bookstore’s $11.18, a portion of that might be owed to a wholesaler, which in some arrangements acts as a middleman between the distributor and the store. Things can get complicated!) Using similar reasoning, I set the retail price of the trade paperback at $15.95. The print cost of $6.72 and wholesale price of $9.57 would yield me a per-unit profit of $2.85. Soon enough, publication day was upon me — Tuesday, November 10, 2015. Time to kick back and watch the money roll in. Right? In rolls the money! My book didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but it wasn’t a complete dud. My Lightning Source wholesale compensation report from December 1, 2015, indicates I sold 72 hardcovers and 16 trade paperbacks to U.S. retailers through the end of November. This totaled $1,360.56 in raw sales and $290.40 in net publisher compensation. There were a handful of sales in Canada and Great Britain as well. Not a bestseller by any stretch, but nothing to sneeze at either. This momentum continued unabated through December. In the middle of January I gave a Google Talk in New York City on the topic of self-publishing The Accidental Terrorist. I was particularly excited when I arrived to see that a nearby bookseller, Posman Books, had a table in the small auditorium with at least two dozen copies of my book available for purchase. Later that month, I found myself in the same part of Manhattan with time to kill, so I popped into Posman Books to do some browsing. I was thrilled when, in the nonfiction section, I spotted a copy of my book. There it was on the shelf! Right there with all the real books! I remembered the huge stack of copies from my talk at Google, and part of me wondered idly what had become of them all. Had they been sold? Were they stashed somewhere for future restocking? I was curious but managed to put the question out of my mind as I took my own stack of purchases to the cash register. (I can’t walk into a bookstore without buying something.) As it turned out, my sales numbers for January were not very strong. February and March were worse. Still, by the time April dawned I had sold a total of 217 books through Lightning Source, racking up $661.96 in publisher compensation. For a small, self-published memoir, I figured The Accidental Terrorist wasn’t doing too badly. Then, at the beginning of May, my report for April arrived. Paying the piper At first as I looked over the April numbers, I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. My total units sold for the month came to -52. That’s a negative 52. My sales totaled -$877.40. What kind of nightmare joke was this? Digging through the report, I began to understand what had happened. I had sold another four copies of the book in April, but at the same time 56 copies had been returned by the bookstores that had originally ordered them. These stores were then entitled to a refund of what they had paid. For 33 hardcovers and 23 trade paperbacks, that ran to $885.52. And I was on the hook for it. Lightning Source had printed those 56 returnable books, you see. Someone had to pay for them. That someone was the publisher. Me. Soon after, 56 books arrived at my door, and the charge for $885.52 showed up on my credit card. I was suddenly $215.44 in the hole! The modest profit I had made on 221 copies of my book was obliterated by the return of just 56. I had made an average profit of $3.03 on each book I sold, whereas each return cost me $15.81. Despite my intellectual understanding of how returns worked, I was shocked and gut-wrenched. It was hard to wrap my head around these numbers. I had let myself forget that, under optimal circumstances, the cost of printing was hidden from me, invisibly squared away before I ever saw my small per-unit profit. I had let myself forget that, in the end, it had always been me who was paying the printer. Of course, it wasn’t a complete loss. I did have the books themselves, after all, which were not worthless. I could resell them online, or give them away as gifts and promos, which is what I did. But this experience did, unfortunately, force me to rethink my book’s relationship with brick-and-mortar stores. The point of no return Realizing how much I stood to lose if this happened again, I logged into Lightning Source and updated my pricing structures. I reduced my wholesale discount to 30% and, more importantly, marked my books as nonreturnable. I understood this action would deter most bookstores from keeping The Accidental Terrorist in stock. That’s what I was willing to trade to prevent another unpleasant and costly surprise. I didn’t want to do it, but I literally could not afford to take a similar hit. (Even so, it was more than four years before my print sales crept back into the black.) I love bookstores, especially independent bookstores, and it makes me sad that I may never again have the experience of stumbling across my memoir somewhere on their shelves. It also makes me sad that the publishing ecosystem is set up to leave small publishers so vulnerable to the whims of the marketplace. But there’s a silver lining. My book is still part of the Ingram catalog. When someone asks me the best way to buy a copy, I tell them to ask their favorite local independent bookstore to special-order it for them. A bookseller may not want to take a chance on stocking a nonreturnable book, but they will almost certainly order it for a customer who asks. It’s the best way I have of looking out for myself while still doing what I can to support independent bookstores. It’s your call If you’re producing physical books as a small publisher or a self-publisher or both, the question of whether to list your books as returnable is one to think long and hard about. Do your research and go in with your eyes open about the potential rewards and potential costs of both approaches. Don’t wait to be faced with a hefty surprise bill, like I did.

You Can’t Spell “Preventable” Without a Bee

2020-08-13T21:03:08Z

The New York Times Spelling Bee is a daily online puzzle that presents a set of seven letters and challenges players to construct as many words as possible using them. There’s always at least one word—the “pangram”—that uses all seven letters. One letter is designated as the “center,” and that letter must appear in all the solutions. I starting playing the Spelling Bee in the fall of 2018, and I quickly became fascinated with it. Before long I’d started building a little web tool to help me find solutions to the puzzle when I got stuck. All this was in service to my quest to achieve “Queen Bee” status—meaning that you have found every answer that the Times deems acceptable. Because that’s the other thing about the Bee—each day’s puzzle comes with a definitive list of acceptable answers. For some people, part of the fun and frustration of the Bee is arguing online about words that weren’t accepted in the puzzle but should have been, or that were accepted and shouldn’t have been. You’ll find endless examples of this exercise in the comments section of the Times Wordplay blog, or under the #spellingbee hashtag on Twitter. Sometimes a word that the editors once deemed unacceptable, such as “annal,” will suddenly end up whitelisted after much lobbying from the Bee community. Sometimes other words, which may have been deemed too obscure or unintentionally offensive, will make the reverse migration to the blacklist. Another thing the editors do with some frequency is to repeat a set of seven letters (or “hive”) after it has already appeared in the Bee. What keeps this from being too repetitive is that the designated center letter will be different. The pangram will be the same as before, but the differing center letter means there will still be some new words to find in the solution set.

Over time I kept tinkering with my solver, adding new features, automating others, and generally sprucing up the layout. Gradually other players found it, and it now attracts more users to my site than even my manuscript formatting guide. Enough people use it that I’m fanatical about correcting any problems as soon as inhumanly possible. There was one problem in particular that I knew might crop up one day but had not yet—what would happen if the editors ever decided to repeat one specific puzzle, hive, center letter and all. I wasn’t sure my solver would know the right way to handle this situation. In the back of my mind I knew I needed to shore things up against that eventuality. But I knew it would also take time and hard effort, so I kept putting it off. I shouldn’t have. Because early this morning my nightmare scenario came true. On this day of infamy, August 13, 2020, the Spelling Bee editors for the first time repeated a previous puzzle using the exact same center letter as before. Not only that, but they did it barely five weeks after the original version had appeared! The diabolical twist that really caused me such a headache was that the solution set for today included just ONE EXTRA WORD that had been disallowed in the previous incarnation of the puzzle, increasing the number of acceptable answers from 26 answers to 27. I woke up early this morning, as usual, intending to get an hour or two of writing done before work. Unfortunately, I had several messages waiting from folks letting me know that my solver’s solution set for the day was not getting them all the way to Queen Bee status. With dawning horror, I realized that, while I did have all the day’s correct solutions in my database, my solver, confused by the identical letter set, was offering players the solution from July 8 instead. So, instead of working on my novel, I added a message of apology to the site and set to work. I got the problem fixed before I had to start work for the day, but it was a close thing. Hopefully now I’m prepared for when this happens again, as it surely will. I’m relieved that it’s taken care of, but I sure wish I’d gotten it done sooner. At least it happened today and not tomorrow on my day off, which is also my birthday and is reserved for socially distanced cocktails and other diversions. It would have been awful to have slept in only to awaken to a mess like this morning’s. The moral of the story is, when you see a problem coming, take care of it right away. Don’t wait for it to sting you between the eyes. The Boy Scouts were wrong about a lot of things, but they were right when they taught me, ahem, to “bee” prepared.

Photo by USGS on Unsplash

My Story “Last” Will Close Out Season 2 of the DUST Podcast

2020-04-08T12:47:15Z

I’m delighted to report that my short story “Last” will close out Season 2 of the top-rated DUST podcast. If you’re not familiar with it, DUST is an audio anthology series dramatizing science fiction stories. While the first season, Horizons, offered an eclectic mix of new and classic stories, the new season, Flight 008, presents selected stories from the recent XPRIZE anthology, Seat 14C. These episodes follow the lives of passengers on an ANA flight from Tokyo to San Francisco that passes through a wrinkle in spacetime and lands twenty years in the future. The talent assembled for this new season of DUST is stellar, including performers like Dan Stevens, Calista Flockhart, Danny Trejo, Keith David, and Alfred Molina, and writers like Nancy Kress, Charles Yu, Justina Robson, Daniel H. Wilson, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and Kevin J. Anderson. Flight 008 kicked off with two big episodes on March 25th, and the productions so far have been fantastic. New episodes drop every Wednesday until May 27th, when my story “Last” brings the season to its finale. Watch the series trailer below, and I hope you’ll subscribe and join us for the entire journey. We’re saving a seat for you. Visit DUST online at watchdust.com/audio and scroll down to find all the ways you can subscribe and listen for free. And for more info about the series, see SYFY WIRE.

November's Mix of the Month

2019-11-26T23:23:03Z

My mix of the month (not on CD) for tonight's long-awaited November meetup is You Don't Say. This one's a collection entirely composed of instrumental tracks.

My Body Math Index

2019-10-15T12:52:23Z

Here is an actual thing that happened yesterday at LabCorp, where I went for a routine biometric screening for health insurance purposes. Tech: How tall are you? Me: Five-eleven. Tech takes out phone, taps a while at the screen, writes a number on the form, then goes out of room. Me looks at the form. Me's height is written as 61.3. Tech returns to room. Me: Is that supposed to be in inches? Tech: What? Me: My height. Tech: It is. Me: Five-eleven is 71 inches. Tech: No, it's not. Me: Yes, it is. Five times twelve is 60, plus eleven is 71. Tech. Oh. [pause] I timesed by eleven. Me drives self crazy trying to figure out how multiplying any reasonable operand by eleven yields 61.3, must be restrained.

Update: A Facebook friend points out that 5.11 x 12 = 61.32. Mystery ... solved?

Hear My New Short Story Tonight at Liars’ League NYC!

2019-10-02T13:13:50Z

If you’re in or near Manhattan tonight, I hope you’ll drop by KGB Bar to hear fiction by me and a few other excellent writers, in support of an excellent cause . . .

Wednesday, October 2: 7:00-9:00 pm Liars’ League NYC presents Accident & Emergency KGB Bar, 85 E. 4th St., Manhattan At this long-running series, original short stories are read by professional actors. My new short story “Harper’s Guitar” (a self-contained chapter from my crime novel in progress) will by read Mark Woollett. Also featured are stories by Rachel Lyon, Katherine Shaw, and Arthur Longworth. Tonight’s event is part of the Break Out movement from PEN America and the Poetry Project, a push to (re)integrate incarcerated writers into the literary community in commemoration of the Attica Riots. I really hope to see you there!

Hear Me Read Tonight at Write This Down in Brooklyn!

2019-09-30T13:13:48Z

If you’re in or near Brooklyn tonight, I hope you’ll drop by Branded Saloon to hear personal essays by me and some other excellent writers and storytellers . . .

Monday, September 30: 7:30-10:30 pm Write This Down: A Creative Nonfiction Reading Series Branded Saloon, 603 Vanderbilt Ave., Brooklyn At the “Back to School” edition of this new nonfiction series, I’ll be reading “Words and Phrases You Must Never Use in Utah,” a personal essay about my time as a novice cusser at the Clarion Workshop. Also appearing are David Lawson, Rhonda Hansome, and David Rothman. I hope to see you there in Prospect Heights!

Catch Me in New York City on September 30 and October 2

2019-09-26T14:56:15Z

New Yorkers! I’m participating in two events next week that I hope you’ll be able to come out and see: Monday, September 30: 7:30-10:30 pm Write This Down: A Creative Nonfiction Reading Series Branded Saloon, 603 Vanderbilt Ave., Brooklyn At the “Back to School” edition of this new nonfiction series, I’ll be reading “Words and Phrases You Must Never Use in Utah,” a personal essay about my time as a novice cusser at the Clarion Workshop. Also appearing are David Lawson, Rhonda Hansome, and David Rothman (a couple of whom you might have caught at Line Break). Join us in Prospect Heights. Wednesday, October 2: 7:00-9:00 pm Liars’ League NYC presents Accident & Emergency KGB Bar, 85 E. 4th St., Manhattan At this long-running series, original short stories are read by professional actors. My new short story “Harper’s Guitar” (a self-contained chapter from my crime novel in progress) will get the Liars’ League treatment. Also featured are stories by Rachel Lyon, Katherine Shaw, and Arthur Longworth. Join us in the East Village. I hope to see you on one or both nights!

Tour an Alternate 21st Century Through Six Near-Future Fictions

2019-09-03T09:54:43Z

After the July republication of Cast a Cold Eye (the spooky novella I co-authored in 2009 with Derryl Murphy), I’ve been inspired to continue our stroll down Memory Lane with a rare little number from 2007.

That was the year John Klima’s Spilt Milk Press brought out a chapbook of six of my stories under the title An Alternate History of the 21st Century. This little collection of near-future science fiction included four reprinted short stories and two original novelettes. One of those original stories, “Objective Impermeability in a Closed System,” went on to be reprinted in Hartwell & Cramer’s Year's Best SF 13. The other, “Not of This Fold,” has only ever appeared in the chapbook, but was still called out favorably in my entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. That little book also included whimsical illustrations by Mattias Adolfsson and a very kind introduction by Cory Doctorow (which, though not included in new edition, happens to be available to read at Boing Boing.) Copies of the original edition are pretty hard to find these days, but An Alternate History of the 21st Century is now available as an ebook, with a spiffy new cover. Get yours now! It’s even cheaper than the paper version was! Choose a seller below to get reading.

An Alternate History of the 21st Century

Stories

By William Shunn

“William Shunn is one of those SF writers who, because they specialize in short fiction, are not given quite the recognition they deserve—no novels, no mass-market publication, so only the plaudits of the cognoscenti of the short form. Yet Shunn is a fine writer; ingenious, stylish, closely in touch with current global trends and expert in producing thought-provoking near-future SF, and at last he has a collection to show off that keen ability . . . including two impressive original novelettes.”

—Nick Gevers, Locus Magazine

A presidential inauguration in a fascist America eerily similar to our own. A man who broadcasts his every sense and emotion to a national audience. A space station unequipped to deal with alien visitors. Welcome to an off-kilter 21st century as only Hugo and Nebula Award nominee William Shunn could envision it.

From time travel to nanoterrorism, Los Angeles to Lagrange Point 2, the six stories in this collection—originally published by Spilt Milk Press in 2007—span not just the length of a century but the breadth of a unique and provocative imagination. Step inside, settle in, and discover a world that’s always surprising but never unfamiliar. Discover the 21st century.

“[These stories] tellingly and concisely ironize the clichés and tropes of genre SF, but without destroying their use as toolkit.”

—John Clute, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

“[William Shunn] has the sure instincts of a twenty-first century science fiction writer. He is keenly attuned to the present (in the twenty-first century, there’s no point keeping track of the future). He recognizes those truly present-day moments that could only come now, today, in this futuristic present that we swim through without ever really seeing. This extraordinary book is a journey through our present. From the bitingly political (‘From Our Point of View We Had Moved to the Left’) to the sad and personal (‘Not of This Fold’—a gorgeous novella about faith and humanity that could only have been written by a lapsed Mormon sf writer), and everything in between, this collection is the kind of thing that you can never unread, a book that will awaken you to the present all around you.”

—Cory Doctorow

A Coney Island Poem for the 4th of July

2019-07-04T12:14:08Z

Today is America's day, and what's more American than Coney Island? I have a poem for Coney Island, so, by the transitive property, this poem is also for America. And like America, it perhaps contains some bad words.

Coney Island Lifeguard Blues (live at HiFi Bar) / William Shunn

0:00

/2:37

(It’s also for Throwback Thursday, since it was recorded live, complete with rhythm section, at the HiFi Bar in Manhattan on October 11, 2015. Happy 4th.)

Cast a Warm Eye on "Cast a Cold Eye"

2019-06-28T12:13:13Z

Cast a Cold Eye is back! It was a mere— Oh, good lord. Has it really been sixteen years since this project started? Apparently so. According to my records, it was June 7, 2003, when Derryl Murphy dropped me that fateful email:

I’ve had this idea rattling around in the back of my head for few months now, but the starts have been all false, and a little voice has been telling me for a while now that I should contact you. You interested in doing a short story together? It involves photography and spirituality, sorta, which might make for a nice blend between us.

Except for one very short story almost a decade earlier, I had never collaborated, so I had some reservations. I honestly wasn’t quite sure how to collaborate properly. But I decided to give it a try anyway—and I’m glad I did.

We hammered out a basic plot, based on Derryl’s initial idea and some moody photographs he had taken of graveyard statuary. Then we started tossing the manuscript back and forth via email. Sometimes the work went quickly. Other times it languished for months while we both worked on other projects. In the process, what was supposed to be a short story grew longer and longer. By the time we finished our final draft in 2007, four years later, we had a 24,000-word novella on our hands. That was a problem. There are only so many markets for a tale of such an intermediary length. We tried a couple of the major magazines without success. Ellen Datlow asked to see the manuscript and really liked it, but she didn’t have a project going that it would work for. Still, her enthusiasm gave us hope enough to prompt Derryl to send a query to PS Publishing in England. An acceptance soon followed. Two years after that, in 2009, our long-gestating story manifested in the form of a very beautiful limited-edition hardcover. Actually, there were two editions of the book. One was an unjacketed hardcover, limited to 500 copies. The other was a signed, numbered, jacketed hardcover, limited to a mere 100 copies. What’s more, the book included a lovely introduction by Charles de Lint, who, among other kind things, wrote this:

The authors know how to tell a story. They have good narrative drive, they deliver strong characterization without a lot of exposition, and the supernatural elements of the story are inventive, building one upon the other. . . . Cast a Cold Eye is one of those stories that work on many levels. I’ve reread the manuscript a few times since I first received it, and every time I do, I find another layer waiting for me. It’s past time for you to discover its treasures for yourself.

Well, the hardcovers sold out completely, and Cast a Cold Eye has only been available from used booksellers for most of the past decade—sometimes going for as high as $75 a pop! Clearly there are collectors willing to pay that much, and that’s a fine thing, but Derryl and I are also interested in letting as many people as possible discover and read what we think is a pretty special story. That’s why Sinister Regard will be releasing Cast a Cold Eye as an ebook on July 30th, and that’s why you’ll be able to purchase a copy for just $1.99. As we were preparing the ebook for release, Derryl reached out to several colleagues to see who might be interested in giving the manuscript a read. That’s how this very nice quote from no less than Harry Turtledove came to appear on the cover:

A genuinely spooky story that lies somewhere near the place where fantasy, horror, and science fiction meet.

What more can I tell you to encourage you to preorder Cast a Cold Eye? Well, I could tell you that some critics compared it favorably to a certain other work of midwestern American fantasy. Here’s something Paul Witcover wrote in his March 2010 Locus review:

Any fantasy of a certain ambition set in the American Midwest in the late 19th through early 20th centuries must reckon with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, book and movie both, and Shunn & Murphy do so squarely, not only in the situation of their main character Luke Bryant, an orphan living with his aunt Maura (Auntie Em, indeed!) and uncle Roy, but in his perceptions—as the title, drawn from Yeats’s epitaph, implies, perceptions, or ways of seeing, matter in this novel.

Believe me, Derryl and I were both more than a little bowled over when we read this. I mean, we hadn’t intentionally riffed on Baum or the best-known film version of his work, but we also couldn’t deny that the resonances were there. (I can’t get into most of those elements without entering spoiler territory, but I will say that much of the magic in our book takes place in a photographic darkroom—“behind the curtain” as it were. And Paul wasn’t alone in seeing these connections. John Clute also brings up the topic in my entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.) Finally, if I haven't yet convinced you to preorder Cast a Cold Eye, I'd like to call out the evocative photograph Derryl created for the cover of the new edition. In another nod to Oz, he’s gone black-and-white where our original cover artist, Steve Leary, went full Technicolor. Which do you prefer? Me, I love them both. And I hope you’ll preorder the ebook.

Reading at Lyrics, Lit & Liquor This Wednesday Evening

2019-05-13T12:33:27Z

Bill will be one of more than half a dozen artists appearing at the upcoming edition of the Lyrics, Lit & Liquor perfomance series, at 2A Bar in Manhattan's East Village. He will read an excerpt from a new short story, "This One's Easy." Also appearing are Colin Dodds, Stacy LeVine, Christie Grotheim, Ron Kolm, Cassandra Nemzer, and Becca Bernard & Ian Goldstein. Admission is free.

Wednesday, May 15, 7:30 pm
Lyrics, Lit & Liquor
2A Bar
25 Avenue A
New York, NY 10009
2abar.com Lyrics, Lit & Liquor is a bimonthly literary/music/performance series with original trivia which exists to celebrate artists, build community, and lift spirits. Hosted by Amanda Miller. Trivia by Amy Dupcak.

Calamity

2019-03-25T12:28:57Z

Last January I staggered and collapsed. I landed flat on my back, snapping my scapula. But I can't be that mad. After all, assonance will happen.

February's CD Mixes of the Month

2019-02-07T18:43:12Z

My CD mix of the month for tonight's February meetup is A Hip-Hop Primer, with A Hip-Hop Companion thrown in as a bonus. The first is a mix I put together to provide a friend's teenage son with an intro to hip-hop (he's a guitarhead who thinks rap music sucks and is beneath his attention), while the second is a companion disc for further study. The tracks on each are arranged in chronological order, but perhaps these playlists might work as well or better on shuffle.

January's CD Mix of the Month

2019-01-27T22:52:11Z

My CD mix of the month for January is Struts & Frets. It's a (mostly) instrumental collection of many tasty and virtuosic varieties of (mostly) acoustic guitar music.