In a web exclusive video, TVOntario’s Steve Paikin interviews Robert J. Sawyer about his summer at the Berton House Writing Retreat (click on “Web-Exclusive: Robert Sawyer).
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Coming in May 2008 to a bookstore near you:
Red Deer Press is releasing my second collection of short stories, Identity Theft and Other Stories, in May 2008 in hardcover and trade paperback.
At the same time, they’re issuing a new trade-paperback edition of my first collection, Iterations and Other Stories, which was first publised in hardcover six years ago this month by Quarry Press, and had a wonderful trade paperback later on from Red Deer. Both those editions have sold out, to my delight, and so Red Deer is doing a new printing, with a cover to match my new collection.
Between the two of them, these books collect all my short fiction to date. Each story is preceded by my own personal introduction, and the books have overall introductions by Robert Charles Wilson (to Identity Theft) and James Alan Gardner (to Iterations).
The books will be published by the Red Deer Press division of Fitzhenry & Whiteside, the company that also produces my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint.
The spectacular cover designs are by Karen Petherick Thomas.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I sent the first 207 manuscript pages of Wake — about half the book — to Barbara Berson, my editor at Penguin Canada, today (and I’ll be sending her and Ginjer Buchanan, my US editor, the rest next month). Wake is the first volume of my new WWW trilogy.
I note for the record that I have the best friends ever. I wanted to have some fresh eyes look at the material before it went to my editor, so on Thursday, January 10, I gave the latest draft of the first 174 pages of the book to some beta-test readers — and all these fine folks had detailed comments to me by Sunday night, January 13:
These fine folks dropped everything on incredibly short notice to help a friend in need, and I thank them profusely!
(That’s Herb Kauderer above, writing his own fiction on the balcony of my penthouse back in September 2006.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’ll be a guest on TVOntario’s flagship current affairs program The Agenda tomorrow, Monday, January 14, 2008. The Agenda is seen across Ontario at 8:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m., and also at 5:00 a.m. Tuesday morning, and will be available online. The host of the agenda is the always insightful Steve Paikin.
We actually recorded this segment on December 11, 2007; the topic is roboethics (the ethics of robots), growing out of my editorial in the November 16 issue of Science, the world’s leading scientific journal.
Above: science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer during an earlier appearance on The Agenda.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
One week from today I head off to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for Arisia, a four-day SF convention over the 2008 Martin Luther King Day holiday weekend.
Here’s my programming schedule:
Robert J. Sawyer Reading
Sat 11:00 AM 1hr
Hugo winner Robert J. Sawyer reads.
Trend? What Trend?
Sat 1:00 PM 1hr
Lauran Anne Gilman (m), Robert J. Sawyer
In a perfect world, your book about “X” hits the market exactly when the readership is saying, “We want a book about X!” But popularity can be a double-eged sword…. hear discussions on the pros and cons of being popular — and why sometimes being “in” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Science Fiction About “Touchy” Subjects
Sat 2:00 PM 1hr
Suford Lewis, Ken Gale (m), Aline Boucher Kaplan, Allen Steele, Robert J. Sawyer
SF these days is full of the moral dilemmas that the general public shrinks from. Why is science fiction good at talking about things people don’t want to address? Does SF deal with such matters directly or metaphorically (i.e., coded in the language of the genre)? Are those aliens really aliens or are they standing in for someone else?
SF Mysteries: Laughs, Blood, & Technomurder
Sun 12:00 PM 1hr
John Sundman, Barry Longyear, Melissa Scott (m), Robert J. Sawyer
Crimes picked apart, stabbed, strangled, and otherwise discussed by perpetrators of the subgenre science fiction mysteries.
In a very nice move, the con has made the full pocket program available in advance online right here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have just released their Preliminary Nebula Award Ballot. Here’s the list in the Novel category (under the SFWA “rolling eligibility” rules, a number of these books are from two years ago):
It must be something in the water up here, ’cause I note that four of the 13 novels are by Canadians (Czerneda, Hopkinson, Sawyer, and Watts — sounds like a law firm!).
SFWA members will now vote on this preliminary ballot, and the top five, plus optionally a sixth work not listed here that may be added by a jury, will constitute the final Nebula Award ballot.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Bookninja has it right: Raincoast casts off sheep’s clothing. The Canadian publisher of the Harry Potter books claims it’s too poor to do any domestic Canadian publishing. Yeah, right.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Carolyn and I are having a party at our place in Mississauga (Greater Toronto Area) on Saturday, February 9, 2008, from 4:00 p.m. to midnight.
This is a party for our friends in science-fiction fandom, and for fans of my books. If you fall into either category, and would like to attend, please send me an email at sawyer@sfwriter.com, and I’ll send you directions. :)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
… check out this one, from the British comedy series Dead Ringers, brought to my attention on my newsgroup by the beauteous and talented Bonnie Jean Mah. It’s just two minutes, and it’s a hoot.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Those savvy brothers Scott and Steve Pendergrast, who already run the best ebook store on the net, the venerable Fictionwise.com, have just bought the net’s biggest ebook store, eReader.com — and I’m delighted. eReader is a better format, in my view, than Mobipocket, with a much more livable DRM scheme. Very interesting times in the ebook world!
(Although I like the Amazon Kindle reading device — which uses Mobipocket — the best ebook experience in my view is still on a Palm OS handheld running eReader.)
The press release is online over at TeleRead.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Over on my Yahoo! Groups News Group, Steven H. Silver — a fine choice for the fan-writer Hugo, by the way — pimped this 8-minute Doctor Who special short, in which David Tennant’s Doctor meets Peter Davison’s one. It’s absolutely charming, if you’re a Doctor Who fan …
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
So, I saw out of the corner of my eye a promo for the new CBC TV series jPod today, based on the Douglas Coupland book, and I said to myself, “That can’t be Alan Thicke, can it?” So I googled, and end up at Thicke’s official website, and, indeed, it is Thicke, whom I’ve always liked, so I may have to give the show a try (plus, as you can see above, the show also stars Sherry Miller — every Canadian male of my generation had a crush on her from her sexy Spumante Bambino commercials).
But I was amused by this line in Thicke’s official bio: “Alan currently is married to Tanya Callau.” Ah, Al, you big romantic, you! Friendly bit of advice as we slide toward Valentine’s Day: drop the adverb. ;)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
This year’s finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award — honoring SF books first published in the previous year as paperback originals in the US — include my friend and fellow Canadian Minister Faust for The Notebooks of Dr. Brain.
The full list:
Many years ago, I was a Philip K. Dick Award judge. The previous Canadian PKD Award winners are Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984), and, in the year I was a judge, Mysterium by Robert Charles Wilson — long before we became close friends, I might add. :)
The copy of the cover of Minister Faust’s book that is kicking around online has a quote from Richard K. Morgan in the upper left, but the actual book instead has this blurb from me there: “An outlandish, outrageous tour de force by the most innovative prose stylist in the field.” –Robert J. Sawyer, author of Hominids
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
My friend Mark Leslie Lefebvre sent me an interesting question today:
I also had a question about remainders (since I know that some of your older titles or books that have gone into paperback have gone into remainder status — after an incredibly great run as a traditional trade book, of course). Remainders/Bargain Books are a win-win situation for consumers and for bookstores (lower retail, higher margins) but what about the author?
When Tor remainders your old stuff, is there any sort of compensation given to the author (ie, some sort of token royalty payment for that liquidated stock?) I’ve only seen this from a customer’s and a bookseller’s perspective, so was curious as to the author’s side of things.
A good question! Tor’s boilerplate remainder clause says this:
Remainder Sales. On copies of any edition of the Work sold in a remainder sale or a special stock reduction sale, a royalty of ten percent of the excess, if any, of the net amount received by the Publisher over the average cost of copies of that edition.
Now, let’s try to parse that out. Most Tor hardcovers have a cover price of US$24.95, and on copies sold in the US, authors get 10% of that on the first 5,000 copies (which is $2.50 a copy), 12.5% on the next 5,000 copies (which is $3.12 a copy), and 15% on anything over 10,000 copies (which is $3.75 a copy). The deal is similar with all other commercial SF publishers.
[On the other hand, it should be noted that very few SF novels sell over 5,000 copies in hardcover; for the majority of SF authors, the effective royalty on all copies sold in the US prior to remaindering is 10%.]
But what about those bargain-table remainders? Well, Tor sells the remainders of its US$25 hardcovers to whoever wants to buy them (and the author does get first dibs) at US$1.75 or so a copy. And what royalty does the author get?
Not 10% of cover. Not 10% even of that $1.75 (which would be 18 cents), but rather 10% of the amount by which $1.75 exceeds the average manufacturing cost of copies of the actual book … which, in my experience it never does. I don’t know what it costs Tor to print its hardcovers, but I do know from my experience editing RJS Books that we pay over $5.00 a copy.
Mark is right: Tor does remainder all my books (and all its other authors’ books) eventually; the average sell-through for a hardcover (the percentage of the copies printed that actually sell during its initial release) is only about 50%; there are always remainders — even of superstar authors like Stephen King and Michael Crichton. Tor even oh-so-helpfully remaindered Hominids the very month it won the Hugo.
And he’s right that bookstores love selling remainders, because although they’ve bought them up at $1.75 a copy or so (albeit on a non-returnable basis), they can sell ’em at whatever they like, and you’ll often see them sold for more than three times that much. A $5.99 remainder is $4.24 of profit for the bookstore (compared to the $2.65 the bookstore would pocket on a mass-market paperback priced at $5.99, assuming the store got a fairly a typical 44% discount from the publisher).
So, yes, remainders are good for bookstores, and they allow publishers to recover some of their costs, but, in fact, in most cases, the author doesn’t make a penny off them.
Just so you know.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’m going to be one of the participating authors at the Toronto Public Library’s third annual Book Lover’s Ball, coming on Thursday, January 31, 2008. It’s a swanky, black-tie, $500-a-plate fund-raising dinner for North America’s largest public-library system.
It’s also the event at which I will pass the torch of the Toronto Public Library Celebrates Reading Award — which I won last year — to this year’s recipient, my great friend, the wonderful mystery writer Peter Robinson.
I’m off to rent a tux this afternoon …
Above: Robert J. Sawyer and TV host Mary Ito at the 2007 Book Lover’s Ball
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
My Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint is published by Red Deer Press, which, in turn, is owned by Fitzhenry and Whiteside, a long-established, mid-sized Canadian publisher, run by Sharon Fitzhenry, daughter of co-founder Robert I. Fitzhenry.
Sharon’s dad just passed away. There would be no Robert J. Sawyer Books — and a lot less Canadian publishing in general — if it hadn’t been for him, and he will be missed. The Globe and Mail ran this brief obituary, with the promise that a full one is forthcoming:
Toronto — American by birth but Canadian by choice, publisher Robert Fitzhenry died at home in his sleep on Thursday, Jan. 3. He was 89.
A wordsmith and an entrepreneur, he moved across the border in 1966 and co-founded Fitzhenry & Whiteside, a significant distribution company that represented Harper & Row (now part of HarperCollins) and other American houses, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Mr. Fitzhenry published a number of Canadian reference books, including the Funk & Wagnalls Canadian College Dictionary and the Fitzhenry & Whiteside Thesaurus, Book of Quotations, Book of Canadian Facts and Dates and Trees in Canada.
He had been in ill health since suffering the first of two serious strokes in 1995. Predeceased by wife Hilda and daughter Bridget, he is survived by daughters Sharon and Hollister Doll (Holly) and three grandchildren. There will be a private family funeral followed by a public memorial service at a later date.
As another science-fictional connection, it should be noted that Fitzhenry & Whiteside used to be the Canadian distributor of Ace Books.
Rest in peace, Mr. Fitzhenry.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Speaking of Hugo and Aurora Awards, might I gently remind the world that my novel Rollback is currently eligible for nomination for both?
Rollback was published in hardcover by Tor in April 2007 (and was a Main Selection of the Science Fiction Book Club); the paperback comes out February 5, 2008.
Rollback is currently on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Preliminary Nebula Award Ballot. Others have suggested Rollback is worthy of awards consideration, too:
“Sawyer, who has won Hugo and Nebula awards, may well win another major SF award with this superior effort.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review, denoting a book of exceptional merit)
“An early candidate for sci-fi book of the year.” —Kansas City Star (which also included Rollback on its Top-Five SF Books of the Year list)
“Rollback gets my vote as SF novel of the year. A joy to read.” —Jack McDevitt, author of Odyssey
“I highly recommend Robert J. Sawyer’s Rollback. It’s a shoo-in to be short-listed for next year’s major awards.” —SciFiDimensions
Much more about Rollback, including sample chapters, more reviews, and a book-club discussion guide, is here.
(Yes, the full text of Rollback was originally serialized in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, the world’s top-selling English-language SF magazine, in the October 2006, November 2006, December 2006, and January-February 2007 issues, but it’s the date of the final issue that determines award eligibility. Rollback is a 2007 work and is indeed eligible for the Hugo and the Aurora to be given in 2008.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Nominating is now open for the Aurora Awards. For the first time ever, you can nominate online. All Canadians are eligible to do so, and there’s no cost to nominate.
And although the Canadian SF Works Database that Marcel Gagné and I founded provides a wiki list of professional works that are eligible for the Auroras (and other awards), there’s no central place on line that gathers info about potential nominees for Auroras in the three fan categories, and so I’m going to make a recommendation here.
The heart of fandom, in my view, is science-fiction conventions. Canada has fine ones in Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, and other places, but one of my very favourites is Con-Version in Calgary, and last year, when there was doubt about whether the convention would continue at all, the wonderful Kirstin Morrell stepped up to the plate, and chaired what was, by all reports, one of the best Con-Versions ever. She’s going to be one of my nominees for the Aurora this year, and I urge you to consider making her one of yours.
Kirstin is eligible in the category “Fan Achievement (Organizational) – 2007” as “Kirstin Morrell, chair, Con-Version 23.”
Pictured: Kirstin Morrell. If you look carefully in the background, you will see two of her favourite things: the starship Enterprise and bottles of wine … ;)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
This year, 2008, is the 30th anniversary of Stanley Schmidt becoming editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Despite Analog being consistently the English-speaking world’s #1 best-selling SF magazine for that entire period, Stan has never won a Hugo Award for Best Editor. It’s high time he did win.
To nominate and vote, you have to be an attending or supporting member of this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, Denvention 3.
Membership info is here — you need to be at least a Supporting Member to nominate.
And the Hugo ballot itself is here. People who are already members should be receiving their online nominating identification numbers in the mail very shortly, if they haven’t already.
Now, yes, Stan is probably a slam-dunk to get nominated this year — he’s nominated every year. But if you want to vote for him on the final ballot, which will come out in March, you have to be a paid-up Denvention 3 member by January 31, 2008; if you’re not yet a member, and would like to help see Stan get his way-overdue rocket trophy, now’s the time to sign up — don’t wait to become a member until the final ballot is out, because by then it’s too late. Again, details on how to become a member are here.
Stan’s own web page is here. In addition to 2008 being Stan’s 30th anniversary as editor of Analog, it’s also his 40th anniversary as a published SF writer. Besides actually editing Analog (and in a very hands-on fashion, working diligently with his writers), it should be noted that Stan is the only editor of a major SF magazine to write an editorial for each issue, and his editorials are in themselves worth the cost of the magazine.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
… they pull a boneheaded stunt.
Okay, we all know that traditional encyclopedia publishers have been taking a beating as people turn to the free Wikipedia for content.
Still, every couple of years I update my Encyclopaedia Britannica CD-ROM. This year, I opted for the 2008 Ultimate DVD edition because, as it says on the packaging, it includes: “Free! Encylopaedia Britannica Online 1-Year Subscription — a $70 Value!”
I mean, heck, the DVD, with over three gigs of quality content was only $35 — and with a year of online access thrown in, it’s a bargain, right? Especially if you want signed articles by authorities whose bona fides you can trace, right? (For example, Britannica‘s article on “Science Fiction” is by none other than Bruce Sterling.)
But it turns out that what’s included is NOT a free one-year subscription to Britannica Online. No, it’s a free one-year trial of Britannica Online that auto-renews at $49 if you don’t cancel it before the end of the year. You have to give a credit-card number to claim your “free” subscription, and if you don’t cancel on just the right day you either (a) get charged more than you paid for the effing DVD in the first place, or (b) get something less than the year you were promised because you canceled early.
F*ck that noise. In its quest to beat Wikipedia at its own game, instead of taking lessons in how online access should be done, they’ve copied the ploys used by porn sites, Classmates.com, and other shady dealers. When will they ever learn?
There are some improvements in the latest CD-ROM/DVD version of Britannica, most notably that long articles appear as one continuous scrollable page, instead of in little section-by-section chunks, which does make finding particular facts easier, and you can freely export articles to HTML.
But the largest font size you can select in Britnanica is still too small for my eyes, and they still use the clunky not-Windows-standard Java engine they’ve been using for the last several years, so all the menus and dialog boxes look a bit off.
Also, while the included Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary is indeed the new 11th edition, it’s actually a stripped-down version, missing proper nouns such as Toronto and Clinton that are in the print and standalone CD-ROM versions.
Sigh.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’m pleased as punch to announced that my 17th novel Rollback was the #1 bestselling hardcover for the entire year of 2007 at Toronto’s Bakka-Phoenix, the world’s oldest surviving science-fiction specialty bookstore, beating out J.K. Rowling for the top spot.
And Phyllis Gotlieb’s Birthstones, published under Red Deer Press’s Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint, was #4.
At #1 on the paperback list: Old Man’s War by my friend John Scalzi.
The full lists, in all categories, are here in Bakka-Phoenix’s LiveJournal.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Penguin Canada is my new Canadian publisher; I’m about to turn in Wake, the first volume of my upcoming WWW trilogy, to them. Good to know that they’re doing fine, as you can see in this Publishers Weekly article.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
One of the coolest things about Amazon’s new Kindle eBook reader is the ability to download content directly to the reader, without having to use a separate computer. (Although, as I mentioned before, it was really the old Rocket eBook devices that pioneered this notion, delivering eBooks just by plugging your reader into a phone line.)
In order to compete, eReader.com now is offering their flagship eReader Pro software for free for Windows Mobile PDAs and Windows-powered smartphones, and they’ve added “OTA” — “over-the-air” — technology to let you download books directly to the device.
But what about us folks with Palm OS devices? Well, if yours has WiFi (as mine does) or you have a Palm OS smartphone, try this for an easy experience downloading public-domain and Creative Commons ebooks straight to your device: the mobile-optimized mnybks.net, a simplified portal to the manybooks.net site I raved about earlier:
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Happy New Year, Everyone!
This past year was spectacular for me, I must say. In approximately chronological order:
Now, onward to 2008!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Besides writing in good old WordStar for DOS, I
also use a legacy program for maintaining my contacts database: I use Alpha Four for DOS version 1.1b (from 1990), which stores its data in the old dBase *.dbf format.
(I use it because WordStar can read data from .dbf files, and because it works well, and because I spent a lot of time many years ago creating forms and templates for it, which still do exactly what I need.)
Anyway, yesterday I found a very nice Palm database viewing/editing program that supports (among other formats) dBase *.dbf, and syncs the files between my Palm OS handheld (a Sony Clie TH55) and my Windows XP computer: Database Viewer Plus (or “DBViewerPlus”) from Cellica. It works well, so I registered it.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’ve always been fascinated by studies of identical twins separated at birth, because they shed so much light on the nature-vs.-nurture debate. This one is particularly fascinating, in part because of the questionable ethics involved.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
… can be found here, over at The Breathing Corpse blog.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’ve just started experimenting with EverNote, a way cool program good for (among other things) organizing all those little research clippings a writer grabs from various places on the Internet.
It has a really slick interface, and I think it’s going to be quite useful — so I went ahead and registered it. It’s on sale until January 15, 2008, for US$19.95, instead of the usual US$49.95 price.
And I gotta say I like their Google AdWords ad (you’ll see it if you google “evernote”:
www.EverNote.com: Info management that’s so good our competition buys the keyword.
The competition, apparently, is Microsoft’s OneNote, but the reviews I found online seemed to generally agree that EverNote is a slicker, more-feature-rich product. So far, I like it a lot.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The January 2008 edition of Report on Business Magazine — one of Canada’s top glossy magazines, distributed for free with the Friday 28 December 2007 edition of The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper — contains a series of emails from the future by Robert J. Sawyer, along with comments from a bunch of other people about the future.
You’ll find some of the pieces, including mine, here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Remember that Classic Star Trek episode about the Greek god Apollo?
The title of that episode is not “Who Mourns for Adonis?” — despite the fact that you see it rendered that way frequently.
No, the title actually is “Who Mourns for Adonais?” It’s a line from the poem “Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats” by Percy Bysshe Shelley; you can read the poem here.
“Adonaïs” is Shelley’s own coinage, apparently a blending of the Greek “Adonis” (beautiful young man) and the Hebrew “Adonai” (used in place of YHWH as a name of the God of the Hebrews during prayer recitation).
Now you know. :)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
