You’ve spoken a lot about, I think, something that’s really…kind of… beloved —a beloved topic of one of our panelists—and he’s online and hasn’t had a chance to talk yet this evening. Bill, I know you’re very excited about internet promotion and the use of the internet as a distribution device, and kind of DIY publishing and promotion. Do you have a question for Brandon about how he went about it with Warbreaker , or just what his thoughts are on the industry in, kind of, extension of what he already mentioned?
Right. Hi Brandon, how’re you doing?
Pretty good; thanks, Bill.
I just…I’m sorry I’m kind of late to the show today; I have been having a computer nervous breakdown, so…
Oh boy, I hate those. I’ve had a couple myself.
Yeah. I have been backing up some files and doing other things before I go into the major surgery. But I guess that leads me to my point, and I’m trying to back up your earlier point, [which] was, the genre community—fantasy, science fiction, horror, and so forth—we do have this collector mentality gene within our pool there. I know that if I see a book that’s cheap, I will want to get the collector’s edition.
Right.
You know, so the whole online thing is part of that revolution—it is part of that evolution , I guess—and I think that one aspect that Tor has been able to harness is the idea that they are, you know, putting out books online for free for people to get that ‘taste’, to get, you know, the free one and then go, “Oh yeah, I gotta have that for my collection.” Now, do you see yourself ever doing something on your own—you know, you do have your book on your website as you said earlier, for free—but do you feel that for…you know, yourself, is there a print-on-demand book from you coming out in the future?
I could see a reason to do that. You know, I’ve kicked around concepts. It would never be one of my main books. What I might do is, you know, if people were interested in one of those early novels of mine, just to see how I’ve evolved as an author, and maybe print on demand my first or second book that if you just want the collector’s copy, for the collectibility, say, “Hey, let’s see what Brandon was like when he was a terrible writer,” and I would have to make sure that they knew, “This is a terrible book. It’s a terrible book by someone who eventually became a good writer, and so maybe you can see the evolution.” That…I thought about collecting…one of the things I do for my books is I release annotations. This works like a director’s commentary on a DVD; every chapter in my books—during the copy-edit phase, when I read through the book for the last time—I stop after each chapter and I write a few paragraphs about it—where it came from, maybe some history for the world and the characters, or what was going on in my life when I wrote that chapter, what inspired me to write that chapter, these sort of things—and then I post them at about [?] space of about two a week after the book comes out. And so, I think that’s a really fun thing that you can only do with the internet, that ties into all this. I’ve considered collecting all of those and adding a little bit more bonus material, and then selling that as a print-on-demand book that people can just buy a copy for, you know, ten bucks through Lulu or something, that they can set on their shelf that then they can have all the annotations printed, that they can have their own annotated version of one of my books, that sort of thing, which I think would be a really fun thing to do.
So I see the potential for that. I see the potential for using this viral marketing—I don’t know; there’s a whole lot of exciting things going on with this. This all excites me; it doesn’t scare me. And I think part of what’s happening, um…Orson Scott Card, in one of the magazines he writes for just a couple of months ago, said that he believes fantasy is entering its Golden Age, which excites me because fantasy has lagged behind science fiction a little bit—quite a bit. For a while, science fiction was the big genre in our little spec-fic, underneath our spec-fic umbrella, which includes science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all of these other things. Science Fiction was dominant for a while; it really had some time to grow and to explore some ground, and I don’t know that fantasy has done that yet. I think that, fantasy, the best is yet to come, so to speak. I think that, certainly we’ve had some fantastic writers—I’m a big proponent, obviously, of Robert Jordan; I think that he did some wonderful things with the genre—but I do think that there’s a lot of space left in the genre, a lot of places to go, new things to be explored. The genre has only barely been explored. It seems like for a long time we were telling the same types of stories, essentially over and over, as we were trying it right, trying to figure it out, and I think readers got a little bit tired of those same stories. And this ties back into the whole marketing and internet thing, because the internet’s going to give us an opportunity for some of those really explorational things to get out there and get some attention where they might not otherwise have done so, and I think this is going to spur the writers who, you know, the entire community, to have to stretch a little further, to be a little bit better.
I think it’s the same thing that happened to the community, honestly, in the late 90s with the YA explosion. Young adults, and middle-grade, with Harry Potter becoming so high-profile, a lot of really great authors released some really powerful fantasy during that era. Phillip Pullman, Garth Nix, and J.K. Rowling herself—I love her books; I think she’s a genius—and I think ‘epic’—which we, I use that instead of ‘adult fantasy’ cause the term ‘adult fantasy’ just doesn’t sound right when I tell people I write ‘adult fantasy’; anyway, they get the wrong impression—so, I think during that era, ‘epic’ was forced to say, “Whoa, what are we doing? All this exciting stuff is happening in children’s, and all of our readers are going to children’s, because they’re doing the exciting stuff where we’re the same old stuff,” and I think that forced a revolution in the epic fantasy genre, that we’re still feeling it shaped because of that.
Yeah, nobody wants to keep on rereading Tolkien done over and over again.
Yeah. Right.
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