Month: May 2025

Moving Parts

personby Madeleine Robins
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Publishing is a lot.

As a friend noted about her own book series, New York Publishing and I had kind of a breakup. Nobody’s fault: we just grew apart. Which is to say that after the publication of Petty Treason, the second of my Sarah Tolerance mysteries, my NY publisher decided not to pick up the third book. Write an historical, they suggested. So I did; Sold for Endless Rue. But I also finished the third book, The Sleeping Partner, which was published by Plus One Press. By that time I had a full time job, a kid who was having Hell’s own case of adolescence, and a sense of depression about my publishing prospects. I really wanted all my Sarah Tolerance books under one roof, as it were–and a roof that would not try to market them as romances (which they are not).

Time goes by. Much water under bridge. Lose one job, get another very absorbing one. Also get absorbed in work with the Book View Cafe writers coop. Child survives adolescence. I leave my involvement in Book View Cafe (again: nobody’s fault; we grew apart). Somehow manage to write a fourth book in the Sarah Tolerance series, and have ideas for a fifth and final book. And finally I retire, look around me, and realize that if I want these books done the way I want them done, I have to take on the lion’s share of publishing them.

At which point I considered hiding under the bed.

When I sold my first book there was no such thing as the internet, let alone social media. The idea was: you wrote a book. If a publisher liked it and bought it, you had some housekeeping things to do (revisions as requested, and reviewing the galleys, and if someone from the publicity office arranged an interview, you did that, too). But overall the job of the writer was to write the book, then write another book, etc., world without end. Well, times change, the internet and social media happen, and even if you have a NY publisher that’s not the way it works now.

In the 1990s I worked for a NY publisher. I am fully alive to the number of things that a publisher does. Acquiring books is only the tip of a significant iceberg. The editorial department does the acquiring, but also helps the author beat the book into publishable shape–which includes developmental editing, line editing, copy editing, and proof-reading. Editorial also helps get the marketing department going by writing (or causing to be written) sales copy, cover copy, and sales catalog materials. Production works on getting the book into physical shape–including working with Editorial on hiring and directing a designer for the cover. But also: getting the book interior designed and typeset and to the printer. Meanwhile, Marketing and Sales are getting the word out, both to the general public (via advertisements and reviews etc.) but to distributors and sellers.

It is a lot. Publishers have many people with skills and experience to do these things. I have… me. And anyone I can hire to take on some of the things I cannot do (it is a very good thing to know what your skill set is and what you cannot reliably do).

I’m not bad at some of the tasks small-press or self-publishing require: I can edit, proof-read and even copy-edit (although that’s generally something I do for other people). I can write cover copy and do cover design (although again, it’s easier when it’s not for my own work). What I find it tremendously difficult to do is the marketing/promotion side of the publishing process. And that is the stuff that many writers do for themselves: drumming up blurbs. Publishing and managing a newsletter. Fan management (a friend last week kept referring to “super fans,” and while I know such entities exist, I have a difficult time believing such people exist with regard to my work).

Take newsletters. I have a newsletter setup to go out Very Soon Now. I intend for it to be quarterly, because honestly I don’t think there’s that much news about my work even when there is news about my work. But there are people who send out newsletters monthly, weekly, even… daily. As one of my own daily chores is to clean out the Augean stable that is my inbox, I can’t imagine anyone would welcome that much contact. Perhaps the mystery inherent in a quarterly newsletter is a good thing?

Or Patreons. I admire the energy that many of my friends put into them, but when I start looking at what is required in terms of upkeep and production–not production of a book or short story, but special bonuses for the kind people who are enthusiastic enough about one’s work to support it… Again, I consider hiding under the bed.

Every writer I know has their own way of approaching promotion. I’m doing the newsletter. I’m not doing a Patreon. Or a kickstarter, at least not right now. The best use of my time is, I earnestly believe, writing. If I want my writing to be seen, I am willing to do some of the other stuff. Just not all of it. And I’m not above considering going back to traditional publishing when I complete the non-Sarah Tolerance book I’ve been noodling on. But that won’t happen until I get the Tolerances out the door.

Finally, results from Australia

personby Gillian Polack
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I intended to give you the results of the Australian elections today. I kept putting it off to see if we would know more but we don’t, so this the wider picture. These are the results, then… sort-of.

Labor had a small victory, that looked on paper like a landslide. They have the Lower House but not the Upper. They’ve gained quite a few more seats in the House of Representatives, but many of them were gained by slender margins and some of them (my own, for instance) are still borderline and the votes are still being counted. It’s as if most Australians looked at the candidates and looked at elections outside Australia and said “We’re going to make our preferences matter.” When a single electorate goes to layers of preferences, counting is slow and it has to be revisited when the seat is a close call. This is happening all over the place.

In the Lower House, we voted out the leader of the Opposition and quite possibly the leader of the Greens in his/their own seats, plus gave their parties fewer seat. Dutton (Opposition) gave a graceful speech to cede everything. Bandt (Greens) is still claiming a Greens victory. He has between 0 and 2 seats in the House of Representatives That Lower House), dropping from four, but he’s focused on the number of primary votes his party received over the whole country, I suspect. They’re down, but not by much. My assessment of this is that a large number of voters do not see the hate that I see. Enough do, and so the Greens are diminished, but, unlike the elves, they’re not so diminished they will not go into the west. The far right Trumpet of Patriots, on the other hand, got so few votes that I look at the data and think “Are there any far right politicians in this parliament at all.” Our far right is the right end of the US Republican or the UK Tories, if that helps.

As I read things, most of the controversial far right and left didn’t get enough votes to get lower house seats. This includes a handful of virulent antisemites. Those candidates trying to push extreme views (not just hate of people who happen to be Jewish) also didn’t fair as well as the pre-election polls said. Our House of Representatives contains far less hate than I had expected. This is a good thing.

While the same pattern applies to the Senate, the nature of the Senate vote (namely the quota system) mean that the changes are less. The far right is diminished, but not nearly as much as in the Lower House. Greens will still have a lot of power, and may be led by someone who really, really hates Jews. In some ways the Greens holding balance of power is good: if they vote wisely, they can be a curb on extreme policies by the government, and, if they go back to the roots they’ve been avoiding recently, will also push for environmental care and social justice. This is not, however, what they did in some significant votes in the past, so the Senate may become just a mess. Everything depends on the Greens paying attention to Australia and not their inner voices.

An update on antisemitism: it’s worse this week both on the right and on the left. Voters are not the loud voices in Australia, because of our system and because we’re part of the western world’s set of shouting matches between so many people who refuse to think for themselves. This hate is largely the usual mob trying to share their bigotry. The big thing is that Australia as a whole has voted against hate and also against a Trump model of government. We remain our ratbag and mostly centre-left self. We no longer, however, have a functional left wing party (Greens are now far further left than they used to be) and we don’t have any functional right wing party (the Coalition is very close to Labor in many ways and we did not put the far right in their place). The outcome of our next election may well rest on whether anyone’s clever enough to change this.

The path our voting took supports that sense reported on in newspapers of most parties sucking right now. It also supports my view of Australia, which is that the quiet majority do their own thinking and we will not know what that thinking is until election day. This time they’ve voted for social cohesion and stability. We often do that. What looks to the world like the left, is actually the most stable option for us.

If any of this appears self-contradictory, it’s because the big thing Australia has done is quite extraordinary. It has said “All the elections outside Australia are not our story.” Australians write our own story, it appears.

For me, this means, despite the massive increase in antisemitism, we’re not following the 1930s German route. We have a lively and dangerous far right and far left, and an enormous amount of antisemitism, but the voters have said, “Not in my parliament.” We’re not doing what we did in the Morrison days, and following the US path, either.

I don’t know where we are going, but that’s a big improvement on last week. Better not to know than to know that Jewish Australia is walking into hell. We are not. Not safe. Not comfortable. Not loved by extremists on either side. But we are part of Australia and Australia itself says so. Every single Jewish candidate received a normal level of votes. None in office was thrown out of office. The question now is will the far right and the Greens accept this and reduce their polemic. If they do, then the hate will reduce and Australia will be a lot safer and I can return to my own life. I have books to write…

A Meander from “AI” to People and Back Again

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The latest scandal to hit the science fiction community is the revelation that the people putting on WorldCon in Seattle are using ChatGPT to vet proposed panelists. Given that a large number of people who want to be on panels are published authors who are part of the class actions against the companies making these over-hyped LLM products, the amount of outrage was completely predictable.

A number of us also pointed out that the information produced by these programs is very often wrong, since they make things up because they are basically word prediction devices. As a person who is not famous and who has a common Anglo name, I shudder to think what so-called “AI” would produce about me.

But the biggest problem I see with “AI” – outside of the environmental costs, the error rate, and the use of materials without permission to create it – is that they keep trying to sell it to do things it doesn’t do well, instead of keeping it for the few things it actually can do. Of course, there’s not a lot of money to be made from those few things, especially when you factor in the costs.

We’re at the point in tech where new things are not going to change the product that much, no matter what the hype says. Exponential growth cannot last forever. If you don’t believe me, look up the grains of rice on a chessboard story.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all the ways people are trying to use “AI” or even older forms of tech to get rid of workers and the more I think about it, the more disastrous it looks.

We don’t need more tech doing stuff; we need more people doing stuff.

It’s not just “AI”. Just try to call your bank or your doctor, or, god help us all, Social Security or the IRS (now made worse by the Dodgy Minions). When we have issues, we need people – real people, who understand what we’re calling about and can solve our problems.

The “chat” feature on a website doesn’t cut it and an “AI” enabled chat feature is probably worse in that it might well make up an answer instead of just not knowing what to do.

I’ve been thinking of health care in particular. I’ve heard a lot of talk about how LLMs can read radiology films better than radiologists, in that they don’t get bored or distracted, so they can point to any things that look out of the ordinary in reference to the kind of films they were trained on.

But of course, what they’re really doing is flagging the problems for a radiologist to look at. They don’t replace the expert; they help them do their job. It’s probably useful, but it isn’t going to make radiology any cheaper, because you still need the person to look carefully at the films.

I don’t believe for a moment that LLMs will be better at diagnosing patients. Continue reading “A Meander from “AI” to People and Back Again”…