Recently, Jay Lake said:
One of the things you buy when you pick up Analog or an Ellen Datlow edited anthology is a group of stories selected by an editor you trust. A random anthology, or a novel from an unknown independent publisher, doesn't have that trusted branding. It has to work harder to win you over.This is something I have direct experience with. And have continued experience with.
Starting the zine, very few people knew who I was. I could not expect to jump out there and get interest from any appreciable amount of people. I knew this going in, since I had experienced some of this while working full-time in publishing with new writers. So I started slowly, looking to build an audience over time.
This is something a lot of people starting a magazine don't think about. The reason why people buy Analog, or an anthology edited by Ellen Datlow or Gardner Dozois is that they know what they're getting. Analog's been around since the 1940s and Ellen and Gardner have been editing for decades. I don't have that experience yet. It was hard to keep this in mind when my anthology came out last year and I kept seeing reviews for books other than mine.
Even though I've been in the field since 1993, it's only been in the past two or three years that people have known my name. That means I spent more than 10 years working in genre publishing before people started to know what I was doing. That's a long time people.
And it only means that I need to work harder so that my name doesn't disappear from public view.
UPDATE: Strangely enough, this post by Nick Mamatas shows a real-life example of what I'm talking about.
And for people coming from Nick's blog, here's a link to the Zine Series: http://evzine.blogspot.com/search/label/Zine%20Series
2 comments:
This is very true. I think the same can be said for authorial brands as well. Little by little, as an author gets more published, editors and the public come to trust that author more and more. Which makes perfect sense, of course, but can be damned maddening when you're just starting out and can't get anyone to look at you twice.
Yep. What Jennifer said, in spades. But a writer's brand has several facets: how editors see it, how critics/reviewers see it, how Fans/pros/close observers see it, how the general public sees it. Very few editors in any genre ever have a true public brand, for example, whereas that is the Big Leagues for a writer. This offers a lot of nuances in the distinction between auctorial brands and editorial brands.
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