Warren Ellis interviews William Gibson

[thewayne]

Authors interviewing authors are frequently good things. Sadly, it's only three questions. One of these days I'll read more Gibson.

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/15-08/pl_print

Comments

[silveradept]

Neuromancer was the Gibson offering I read in my science fiction class, and it was a good read, but I haven't gotten around to reading more. Perhaps because his books are packaged in rather unattractive dust jackets with unappealing quotes.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I find that, overall, I prefer Baen books. They generally don't have reviews on the back or inside front cover, just summary stuff on the back and direct quotes in the front. I hate it when you pick up a book off the rack that you don't know anything about and all you have on the inside cover are things like "I laughed! I cried! It moved me! --An Author Whom I Do or Do Not Know".

I WANNA READ PART OF THE BOOK, FIRK-DING-BLAST IT!

[silveradept]

That would require good selection of the material in the book to the point where the blurb wouldn't give everything away, but want you to read the book. You'd have to have someone read the book and make that selection. Such effort, you know.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Baen has done an excellent job on Weber's & Ringo's books, so to me, it looks like the other publishers are less confident about their writers and they think that they need these glowing superlatives immediately apparent in order to sell their books.

Weak. (IMO)

[silveradept]

Quite weak. But how else are you going to sell a nobody to the public at large, convincing them to buy a book they haven't read? If they were all available in some Baen-like manner, that would be fantastic for the reader, of course. But for the average bookstore buyer, how do you convince them what's inside is a good book?

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

It's worse than that— more than 50% of books in the US are not sold in bookstores, they're sold in supermarkets (including places like Target.) So you're not aiming for the typically literate bookstore types; you're competing against magazines and shiny impulse purchases.

This was the explanation I received for why science fiction and fantasy covers are the way they are in the US, as opposed to the more moderate covers you see in Britain. They all have to scream "ME! ME! BUY ME!"

[silveradept]

Ooog. Really? It's not bookstores, but those piddling offerings on supermarket shelves that get bought? That's kind of sad, considering of what I usually see there, most of it looks to be the long harlequin romance type of stuff. If we could just get them into a library...

...but that does help explain why covers are the way they are, yes. Explosions, creatures, or improbably-constructed wo/men in equally improbably-constructed costuming seems to be what people think will sell a book.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Makes sense, specially since the #1 supermarket is unfortunately Walmart. Come to think of it, as a kid we used to shop at a store chain called Fed Mart, I don't know how big they were, but I don't think they really survived into the 80's, at least in Phoenix. I clearly remember buying my first Fred Saberhagen there, "The Dracula Tape" (I still have it). It had to be very early 70's. At the time I really didn't know SF, I shortly started buying used copies of Analog magazineby the (paper) grocery bag-full. That began introducing me to a wider range of authors and began refining my SF interests.