Addendum to Night Shade

Back when I was VP of SFWA, Executive Director Kate Baker told me she had a dream. “I want to make the Nebula conference -the- premier conference for professional F&SF writers,” she said. “Something that no one wants to miss. A conference so good that if someone has budget for only one convention each year, that’s the one they know they’ll get the most value out of.”

It seemed like a pretty good goal to me. After all, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America is over fifty years old, has close to 2000 members, including some pretty impressive names, has and continues to do major work in the field protecting professional F&SF writers, and gives out one set of the industry’s major awards as well as the recognition of the SFWA Grand Mastership.

It’s five years later, and in my opinion, Kate’s done what she set out to do. She didn’t do it alone, of course. She had the help of a whole lot of amazing SFWA staff and volunteers, including the amazing Terra LeMay and Steven H Silver. Mary Robinette Kowal got turned loose on programming the last couple of years and has been doing a stellar job. And others have made their mark with additions, such as the Nebula Award Alternate Universe Acceptance speeches or the mentoring program led by Sarah Pinsker or (I’d like to think) two I’ve contributed: the volunteer appreciation breakfast as well as the spouses and partners reception that have been regular features (and I hope will continue to do so!) Or the Book Depot, because I don’t know of ANY other con that takes as much care to make sure that its authors — including the indies — can sign and sell their books there. And there’s a fancy Nebula website, which remains a work in progress as more and more gets added to it, preserving the history of the Awards.

We’ve only got a small fraction of the schedule so far, with plenty of new stuff getting added every day, but here’s some highlights.

• Panels about interesting things that may lead to story ideas, like the Future of Death, Realistic Military in Fiction, and Megatrends in the Near Future.
• That mentoring program has grown every year, and now we do it at WorldCon as well. People new to the Nebulas can go knowing they’ll have someone there to explain stuff and fill them in on the etiquette of things as well as provide a friendly face and introduce them to people.
• Interesting, innovative programming that comes in a variety of forms, including the Ignite talks and office hours, stuff that ranges all over the place and includes things like deep dives into Facebook advertising or what life aboard a space station is like.
• A chance to explore some new areas of fiction, such as one of the several Interactive Fiction or Writing for Hollywood panels.
• Plenty of panels aimed at indies and hybrids like myself, including the Self-Publishing Committee Town Hall, which should have plenty of crunchy info about recent and upcoming self-publishing events.
• Panels that talk about practical things, such as combining parenthood and writing, productivity tools, or make-up basics for writers about to make media appearances.
• The yearly What Teens Are Looking For in YA is a great panel that features actual teens talking about what they like to read and how they discover it, which is always informative. I think this is the 5th year (?) for this panel.
• Memorials to a few of our lost greats, such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Vonda N. McIntyre. SFWA’s got a lot of history, and the Nebulas give us a chance to celebrate some of the folks we’ve lost each year.

I don’t mean to imply that the old version of the Nebulas was not what they promised to be. They were a chance to mingle and meet, but programming was usually slim and single track at best, and sometimes the topics were very broad indeed. They didn’t feel like a professional conference so much as a party. That’s fun, but it doesn’t give members stuff they actually need to be successful at what they do.

So…well done, Kate. You deserve a lot of applause for the effort you’ve led and you did exactly what you said you would do. The Nebulas now also stay within their budget, which is impressive, and has made enormous strides towards paying for itself, an important thing at a time when we see SFWA’s budget changing and adapting to the new publishing landscape.

It’s my last Nebula weekend as SFWA president, so I’ll be flitting around with a lot of relief on my face. Please say hi, but more importantly, please tell Kate and her team how much you’re enjoying the conference. I’m really going to miss working with this group of fabulous, amazing, talented people.

This is the final part of a four part series. In this part, I’ll talk about plans down the road and make some predictions for what SFWA will witness over the next few years. Overall, I think it’s going to be nothing but positives and that SFWA will continue its tradition of helping authors.

The series so far:

1. Part one describes the organization and its history.
2. Part two talks about the decision to admit independent and small press published writers.
3. Part three talks about what happened when the independents were first admitted.

Going forward, I expect more and more indies to enter the organization as it proves that it’s giving them solid value for their membership in the form of:

• Community
• Knowledge sharing
• Publications like the Bulletin and the Singularity
• Chances attend and sell books at places like Baltimore Bookfest, ALA, and other book-related events
• Marketing opportunities for themselves such as the Speakers Bureau
• Promotional opportunities for their work such as the New Release Newsletter
• Reading material (there’s a lot on those internal forums)
• The wealth of networking and information available via the SFWA Nebula Conference
• Existing programs like Griefcom, the Emergency Medical Fund, and the Legal Fund

I also expect the SFWA offerings that attract indies to expand and develop. Here’s some specifics, ranging from those already in the works to some still in the planning stages.

SFWA Storybundling

I want to start by plugging that SFWA Fantasy Storybundle again, because it’s still up, and b) it’s a great example of a program that we’ll continue to expand. Next year we go from two bundles to three altogether — one focused on SF, one on fantasy, and a third on games — and we’re thinking along the lines of a Nebula nominee bundle for 2019 that would provide some financial benefit to being on the ballot, which I think is nifty.

It’s also an example of SFWA writers working together. All of the Storybundle contributors have been coordinating social media and interviews, and it’s definitely going to make it worthwhile to participate, plus raise a little money for the organization in the process.

Partnering

The Storybundle partnership, as well as the terrific Nebula-based HumbleBundle that ran this year, are examples of good partnerings. Another is the support of Kickstarter, who has sent representatives to our Nebulas and Worldcon to talk with our members about not just the basics of running a Kickstarter but the advanced details that help them finetune such a campaign.

Kobo’s another example, as is ACX and Bookbub. Overall, though, there’s plenty of opportunities, and the sky’s the limit as far as expanding things go.

SFWA Nebula Conference Programming

I’d like the 2018 Nebula conference to be the first where we don’t get complaints about the indie programming, but human beings are human beings and that remains to be seen. There will always be glitches. I do expect it to be even better than last year. And as I said in the previous piece, I believe part of last year was more a question of perception rather than actual lack.

SFWA Stuff in the Works and Coming Soon
Several projects with strong implications for indies are in the works, such as:

SFWA Ed will be SFWA’s online school, offering content that will include plenty aimed at indie publishers, such as book cover design, book marketing basics, and working with social media. This project’s at the point where its coordinator is working with individual contributors and companies on the first wave of content; I expect to see it manifest fully in 2018.

The SFWA First Chapters Project is a budget item I pushed through this year. For those that haven’t worked with nonprofit corporations, one way to earmark some energy for a project is to make sure it’s represented in the budget, and while I had to yank it the previous year, this time I got it through.

Just as buying a book is an expenditure financially, reading that book represents an investment of time for most people. Accordingly, my thought is a compendium of only first chapters, giving the reader a chance to dip into a book and see whether or not they want to make that investment. Available only electronically (perhaps somewhere down the road in print form, who knows?), this would ideally hold first chapters from books by publishers ranging from indie to trad, but it’ll take time to get to that point. Therefore, we’ll start with the group that most needs some boost to their discoverability, and start with the indies.

I would like to stress that this is not open for material yet. If you want to make sure you get e-mailed when the project portal goes live, please e-mail me or comment below in a way that will let me know what your e-mail address is. (If you have been requested to not contact me, please direct that e-mail to office@sfwa.org.)

Still in the Planning Stage
Other items are a little further down the road, like these:

SFWA Mentorship Program is something I expect very soon. I’m looking forward to seeing what SFWA Board member Sarah Pinsker and her committee have put together.

SFWA Review Site with Listings for Editors and Other Publishing Resources is still nascent to the point where it’s a budget item I’ll propose for the 2018-2019 financial year. I’d like to see a portal where SFWA members can review copy & developmental editors, book formatters, cover designers, book publicists, and similar resources in a format modeled after review sites like Yelp or Angie’s List.

We do have a spreadsheet some members have contributed to, but recent issues make me think that we need to rework it in a way that lets people know if an individual has a pattern of bad behavior.

Whither SFWA?

Right now while there are some hybrid authors on the boards, the majority remains traditional. That a major one of the many reasons I’m sorry that we lost Maggie, but she put in a hell of a term and a half, and many efforts simply would not exist without her. So I hope we’ll see not just one but several indie members stepping up and running for the SFWA board in coming years. This is for selfish reasons — I’ve learned so much from our indies so far.

Supporting indie writers has strong implications for diversity, including meaning we can better serve the indie groups that have arisen because of traditional publishing’s obstacles, which can take many forms. I’m finishing up editing a SFWA roundtable podcast about the BlackSpecFic report that references this, along with a blog post about what action items for SFWA I perceive, and hope to have that up Wednesday or Thursday.

What else lies down the road? I don’t know. I love this organization and continue to think it’s worth putting a whole lot of volunteer time into every week, particularly at a time when for many of us, our financial livelihoods are in jeopardy. I get a whole lot of intangibles, including knowing that I’m paying it forward, in exchange for that time.

One great joy of working with creative professionals is the tremendous amount of talent, imagination, whimsy, and overall enthusiasm that they bring to projects. I close with one such example, our SFWA anthem, “Radio SFWA,” created by Henry Lien, in a Nebula conference that exemplified one more reason to join: just how much fun SFWA can be sometimes. I believe every time you hear someone screaming “woooo” in the background, there’s a very good chance it’s me.

#sfwapro