I’ve just come home from dancing attendance on a two-and-half year old toddler (who toddles with terrifying speed, and, while silence may seem a welcome change – his tongue runs on wheels, it is something that gets wary adults to run to see what he is doing right now. If you can’t hear him, it is Trouble, with a capital T. There were several tantrums too. He’s pushing for limits, and wants his own way. He’s not necessarily very good at communicating what that actually is, or able to judge very well whether it is in his best interests, but he is very sure about it. So: I have been suitably mentally prepared for the post-election melt-downs on X. In general, the toddler was more mature and rational, even when I cut his sandwich in triangles instead of squares.
The most toddler-ish have been the cut my nose (or hair) off to spite my face ones. I’m seeing this in the arts, too. “I won’t perform/ go to art shows/allow my books to be read by people in Red States”. I see. And just exactly what will that achieve? I mean, speaking personally, I probably don’t care, probably had no interest anyway. If I did, it would have been being unaware or unconcerned by the politics/message. All they gained was to lose my financial contribution and any chance of getting me to see their ‘message’ whatever it is. But their fans in those areas (and nowhere, except DC appears to be a complete political monoculture in the US) will get ‘punished’ – and the toddler… er, artist loses income and relevance. I am really not sure I get this, but if it blows their hair back, well, maybe the virtue signaling will help somewhere.
As a writer, it’s an interesting situation. Supply and demand are as real in our world as elsewhere. And this opens up a lot of demand, as most of trad publishing has been far-left for the last 20 years and heading that way for 20 before. They really only bought and promoted their fellow travelers (see Stephen King for melt-downs as a great example). The market was saturated with that, because the publishing world buyers were as skewed as DC bureaucrats. Unfortunately, the readers were not. So: if you managed to become visible as not far-left you had something of a scarcity value, whereas the opposite had over-abundance lack of value.
Interesting times. I hope publishers and authors boycott as much as possible. I am happy to take any market share they had. I don’t care who reads my books, and if they want to burn them, they need a big pile of them. Why not buy more? I think we’re in for a period of technological/space expansion — and I reckon optimistic sf should flourish in this climate too.
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Tantrums and alarums”
I have a fairly low buying threshold for trying new authors in my favored reading genres, but for the last few years I have become hyper-alert to the “I have a CAUSE to push” blurbs. For example, while this used to be unremarkable (e.g., a gift of the gods), I can no longer tolerate the “female protagonist with (currently fashionable) power/grudge punches above her weight and shows a ridiculously “it all works out and the world is a better place” result. It’s a shame — decades ago I used to enjoy the occasional female protag who achieved her unremarkable ends using cunning, honor, endurance, etc. as one of many sorts of plots. Now, the authors have point to make, and it leads to dull and bad stories.
It’s gotten so any whiff of DEI in any genre blurb is an immediate red light. It’s a shame… odd characters are one of the joys of fiction (Paksenarrion comes to mind, or Penric). There’s a place for them, but as characters, not as a cause.
The one nice difference between a toddler and the Leftist tantrums is that I can close the app on the latter…
And then there was this bit of lefty-prog hysteria…
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/72252.html
I clicked the link and got a Trojan virus warning. Not sure if the site has been hacked.
It hasn’t – there’s been a constant alert on Powerline, lately, as well.
Saw an interesting datapoint– and this is a long way around, but it does get there– at Barnes and Noble yesterday.
The Ice Planet Barbarians series (spicy romance) was there, eye-catching sunset pastels and all, and… printed in the same format as the Kindle published books.
Our B&N does have non-big-whatever books sometimes, but I had a vague idea that the author wasn’t in position to be doing local promos, so I went back and checked– it’s published by Randy Penguin.
But they’re trying to look like Kindle publishers.
Now, yeah, I know they exist because they’re on KU, and I’ve been researching romance novels. I’d classify them as something like vaguely scifi setting for the fantasy of what if a guy would have sex with you, actually value you, be willing to not just do something but do dang near anything for you, and oh yes having a baby is a good thing you’re allowed to be happy about– a sadly popular wish fulfillment format.
Which is, apparently, not that common in trad-pub, but sells.
So they’re signaling that they’re part of a market that isn’t hyper-saturated.
When you started talking about the series I was like “wait a minute, those WERE self-pubbed, last I heard.” Well, after doing the research it seemed like only the first one was self-pubbed in the mid-10s, and then reissued by tradpub in the early 20s to be followed by many tradpub sequels. I’m guessing the self-pubbed looking covers on the tradpubbed ones are a matter of branding continuity with the OG self-pubbed edition of the first one.
Oh, good, I wasn’t completely backfilling it as “was on KU, must be self-pub” or something!