Mike Resnick

NOTE: this article first appeared in Speculations #19 — January, 1998

Most editors tell you up front that they won’t consider simultaneous submissions.

Fine and good.

But every contract — even implicit ones like this — has two sides to it, and the flip side is that if you are required to give them an exclusive look at your submission, they can’t hold it for an unreasonable period of time.

A writer’s one irreplaceable commodity is time. It is unconscionable for an editor to hold a short story for seven or nine or twelve months. But a lot of them do.

So I’m about to suggest publicly what I’ve told many new writers privately:

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NOTE: this article first appeared in Speculations #18 — November, 1997

It’s a jungle out there. Especially these days.

A number of science fiction authors, including Hugo winners and national bestsellers, have gone on the various networks and the Internet lately to tell their unhappy stories. One finds his advances cut almost in half. Another finds a publisher unwilling to honor a signed contract. Still another finds that, far from having the security a lifetime’s work would seem to have granted him, he’s unable to sell to anyone.

During private conversations at recent conventions I have confirmed that those writers are just the tip of the iceberg, that all across the field well-known long-established authors are finding out that the careers they’ve built over a decade or more are not the sturdy structures they had thought they were.

It used to be that once you broke in and sold half a dozen books and maybe won an award or two, you were set for life as long as you didn’t produce too many obvious turkeys. That’s no longer the case, so what do you do nowadays to try to preserve your career? How do you anticipate the damage so you can apply damage control before it’s too late?
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BWANA 17

NOTE: this article first appeared in Speculations #17 — September, 1997

Just got back from Worldcon, where a lot of writers seem to be undergoing a lot of grief. It’s tough to break in, tough to sell, tougher than ever to get your price up, and some of the publishers are playing some nasty games with contracts.

In the midst of all this, an old friend walked up, smiling like he’d won the lottery, and told me he’d just changed publishers, and gotten a bigger advance, a better cover artist, raised metallic type on the cover, some dump displays, the whole bit.

I congratulated him and suggested that he had every reason to be smiling. Oh, no, he corrected me — the deal was set a month ago; the smile was because he had just told his former editor what an asshole he was and how glad he was that he was never going to have to deal with him again.

Well, he probably won’t have to deal with that editor again — and if he’s exceptionally lucky, it’ll be his choice and not the editor’s. But it does bring up a point that bears mentioning.

When I broke into this field lo these many years and decades ago, almost all of the editors were writers who’d taken an editorial job so they could have a steady paycheck for a year or two. As soon as their bills were paid, they were gone, back to freelance writing.

That’s not the case these days. Not a single editor of a major paperback or hardcover line has ever earned a living as a science fiction writer, and none of them ever will. For better or worse, we’re stuck with them from now until the day they retire. When they leave a job, it’s not to write the Great American SF Novel; it’s to take a similar or slightly higher-paying editorial position with another SF publisher.

Which means that if you stick it out as a writer until you retire, and they stick it out as editors until they retire, the chances are that you’re going to want to (or have to) do business with them a few more times before you’re both safely drawing social security.

And that in turn means that it’s never a good idea to tell an editor what an asshole you think he is, even if you’re right. You think hell hath no fury like a woman scored, and nothing has a memory like an elephant? Try an editor that you abused the last time you dealt with him.

Okay, on to this issue’s questions:
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