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Slightly late to this news, as I am to most news these days, but a big congratulations is due to Lou Anders, editorial director at Pyr, who acquired and publishes The First Law trilogy in the US, and won the Hugo Award for Best Editor (Long Form) over the weekend. Lou has done amazing things at Pyr over the past few years, starting from nothing and building up an imprint that has a great reputation for innovation and quality in presentation and content. In spite of including me among their authors. Richly deserved.
The Killing
It seems that Denmark is not only the home of bacon, Hamlet, and extremely high quality modernist furniture, the Danes can also craft a pretty damn good piece of crime-based TV. The Killing is a 20 part series about a murder that sits somewhere between that tradition of sparse Scandinavian psychological thrillers and The Wire.
Comparisons to The Wire abound, in fact, not least on the cover of the boxed set, and it’s a comparison that is apt in many ways and not so much in others. Both series try and take a broader view of society than you’d get in your common or garden cop show, with the Killing focusing on the family of the victim, the police investigation, and the effect on an ongoing political campaign. Both series aim at a realistic and cynical look at society and police work. The Killing less than The Wire, perhaps, but with its suspect politicos, dodgy hair and crap knitwear it’s still admirably unglamorous. Both series have an impressive knack for presenting a variety of complex, multifaceted and convincing characters from all walks of life, a happy meshing of script and acting with a trick for expressing relationships through manner and movement without anything even needing to be said. The developing relationship between obsessive chief investigator Lund and her hammer-headed partner/replacement Meyer, largely communicated in occasional glances and the way they stomp around after each other, is a particular delight. The most minor characters here exude personality, which is particularly impressive given I have to watch in subtitles.
The Killing is excellent for twists and misdirection. Some revelation will have you suspecting one character before a sideways glance or throwaway line will suddenly have you looking elsewhere. The touch is deft, but some of the secrets people choose to keep from the police therefore allowing themselves to continue as suspects – in a brutal murder, after all – sometimes stretch credibility. And despite its occasional forays into the nature of people and politics, the Killing remains essentially a whodunnit. A clever one, no doubt, but where the Wire transcends its genre – the question there is never who did the crime, but why – The Killing remains bound by it, and the plot twists and turns so much that by the end you cannot but have suspected pretty much everyone with a credit. As a result the resolution is maybe a tad anticlimactic.
So The Killing isn’t quite the masterpiece the Wire was but, hey, what is? It’s still excellent telly.
(A) Red Country
So I’ve finished the first draft of the second part of my latest masterwork, workingly titled, ‘A Red Country,’ or possibly just, ‘Red Country,’ we will see on that score. For those who have failed to follow this blog religiously for the past few months (shame on you faithless scum), it is another semi-standalone set in the world of The First Law, and fusing fantasy elements with western elements, in the same way that The Heroes was a fantasy/war story and Best Served Cold fantasy/thriller-ish. That puts me about 40% of the way through a first draft, though I suspect there’ll be a fair bit of work to do once the first draft is complete. Isn’t there always? Now the terrifying wait for feedback from my editor and readers while I try and sort out what exactly I’m going to do with my next part. I guess one could say that if Part I was a little bit Searchers then Part II rolled into Lonesome Dove territory and Part III has something of a Deadwood/Fistful of Dollars motif.
I feel a fair bit more comfortable with this second part than I did with the first, as you’d expect or at least hope. One generally aims to get a better and better handle on the plot, settings and characters as one goes through a draft, until by the time you’re finishing your first draft you know pretty much exactly what you’re aiming at, and editing becomes largely a case of bringing earlier parts into line with that final one.
I’ve made quite a significant change to the personality of one of my two central characters – or perhaps not a change but a clarification, a shift of emphasis and a refinement of style – and he seems to be working quite a bit better now. In essence, I’ve made him a bit more of a shit than he was before, which tends to be a fruitful direction for me to go in with characters on the whole. Who knew?
It’s taken me a little longer to get this part together than I’d hoped, what with one thing and another, but if I can up the pace a little from here on in we should still be looking at delivery early next year and publication somewhere around late summer early autumn 2012. Such is the hope. But you know what they say about hopes.
Don’t make a parachute out of ’em.
New US Covers
A tricky business, covers.
The cover is one of the most important tools a publisher has to actually sell a book – with the majority of books where your publicity and marketing budgets are going to be tiny, much the most important. If a bookseller really likes a cover they might stock it much more prominently. If they hate it they might refuse to stock it at all. A great cover won’t necessarily make you a smash hit, but it’ll certainly go a long way towards it, and a bad cover can without doubt sink a book, so it’s vital that, whatever else, a cover have solid commercial concerns at it’s heart.
From that point of view you’re trying to kill many, many birds with one stone, often birds flying in opposite directions. You want to attract a core audience that you feel will be best suited to the book, but at the same time you don’t want to repel other readers. You want the style and content of the cover to reflect the content of the book and the style of the author, though of course exactly what that means is entirely subjective. You want to some extent to give people something familiar, some visual touchstones that make them think, ‘ah, I’ve read this sort of thing before and this is the sort of thing I like,’ but at the same time you want there to be something unique about it that makes it stand out from the crowd and make readers think, ‘ah, this is special and striking and better than the fifteen other books it’s shelved alongside.’ Then you also, in an ideal world, are looking for some kind of visual recipe that establishes a strong brand for the book, series, and author, so that someone who loved author X’s last can, on scanning a table of new releases, suddenly say at a glance, ‘ah! There’s author X’s latest! I must have it immediately in hardcover!’ You’re aiming for something that is intrinsic to a larger strategy about an author’s, and perhaps even a whole imprint’s, readership and positioning. Then there’s the added complication of late that a cover has to work digitally as well as in physical form. Covers will float about on the internet as a form of viral promotion, will sit in the top left corner of an amazon page, have to look good at any size, at any distance, strike from afar but intrigue more close up.
Then consider that most covers will involve input from art directors, editors, artists, designers, marketing and publicity folk, senior publishers, agents, booksellers, not to mention those meddling bloody authors, all of whom may well have very different notions about what makes a cover work.
Starting to see why it’s a tricky business?
And why publishers are constantly tinkering with their approach and trying new treatments out in the hopes of improving and updating the profiles of their authors and tapping new veins of readership. They say it’s when they stop recovering your books that you have to worry…
Now to the meat of the issue – Orbit have decided to re-release the undisputed fantasy masterworks Best Served Cold and The Heroes in trade paperback, and taken a radically different approach with the covers, and it’s one that I actually really like, but having done this a few times before I don’t doubt a lot of you won’t, and my curses and screams of tough shit upon you all. Stand amazed:
Not to mention:
In your face. I take absolutely all the credit I can possibly get for these, of course, but of equally course, I don’t deserve any of it, for they are the brain child and indeed work of the Art Director at Orbit, Lauren Panepinto and my US editor Devi Pillai, with Photographer Michael Frost and Illustrator/Propmaster Gene Mollica. The treatment was basically for something reminiscent of modern sports photography – high contrast, high detail, high drama, fast shutter speed, frozen action. A filmic approach, you might say, and I think they’ve totally nailed it. Lauren’s post on the development, including a few steps in the process, can be found over on the Orbit blog. Going back to our earlier discussion (alright, my monologue) about what a good cover needs to do, the reasons I like these:
They’re extremely bold and striking images which take no prisoners. I can see them appealing to a committed reader of epic fantasy or of historical fiction or for that matter a more general reader of action-based books. There’s nothing naff about them. The content isn’t modern, but the way it’s presented very much is, and the lettering makes no compromises, it says, these might be books about then, but they’re very much for the now. So I think they achieve that tricky balance of hitting a core and a wider audience, and also of telling you very clearly and accurately the type of read you’re getting while still setting out a really striking and individual visual style. I can see this as an approach working across a whole series. A brand, if you will. And one that connects my books to the right type of readers. Shit loads of them, preferably. It’s a cohesive and coherent approach, and I also like the fact that it’s radically different to the UK approach – no doubt it gives the books a different flavour.
In summary they look like tough, edgy, very modern, kickass action fantasy for the discerning man or woman of today. Which of course is what they are. My advice?
Buy several. I’m told the Trade Paperback of The Heroes will be available from October 2011, Best Served Cold from July 2012, but I shall keep y’all posted.
Now tell me I’m right about how great they are in the comments section.
Or, alright, moan about how Monza should have three scratches on her cheek instead of two…
One of those Weeks
You ever had one of those weeks? I daresay we all have. I was geared up to give a nice little optimistic progress report, then my wife got a bit ill, and before you know it she’s been in hospital for a week with an impacted gall stone. Ouch. Three children under five? With my parenting skills? What were they thinking? So my brother and his wife came down to help. Overnight she started feeling ill, and before you know it, she’s in hospital as well! The veritable bed next door! Ridiculous. Then there’s been a veritable cornucopia of delayed joinery, urgent packages stopped by customs and levies charged, contractual wranglings and other such to distract me. Then two members of my extended family died.
Unbelievable.
Luckily my wife came out of hospital this morning, so hopefully things can return to a normal level of panic. But work somewhat delayed. Perhaps we’ll have an optimistic progress report next week.
ON THE SUBJECT OF ENHANCED EBOOKS – some folks have been asking whatever happened to the enhanced e-book of The Heroes that I announced would be coming in January and … hasn’t. Well, it is coming, but has been delayed by various design and retailer related issues. Hopefully it will be released alongside the trade paperback of The Heroes in the next coupla months. Watch this space.
The Gateway
My Dark Masters at Gollancz have unveiled an interesting project – they’re using the latest digital e-book-ification technology to make available the entire backlists of various past (and in some cases current) giants of the genre, some of which are available dead tree style on their Science Fiction and Fantasy Masterworks lists, but a lot of which have been long out of print. All this will be index linked to a new e-edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction along with all sorts of other of your twenty-first century network social hubbery antics.
The Gateway does not open for a couple of months (see what I did there?), but I and a few other current authors are on their front page talking about some of our favourite titles on the list. For me it’s Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories. Mmmmm, definitive.