Night Shade Books is Being Bought

Editor Jeremy Lassen is reporting via Twitter that Night Shade Books is being bought by a larger publisher.  Authors with Night Shade are being contacted.  Lassen's words were "being bought" not "being sold", which I think is an interesting distinction.  No word of the sale is one the Night Shade homepage as yet.

I'm sure more details will emerge over the next few days/weeks/months.  I only hope the authors currently with Night Shade come through the process relatively unscathed.  I say "relatively" because this has got to be a nerve wracking experience.  Hopefully no one's books will be orphaned by the new owners.  Somehow I'm not gonna hold my breath.  Regardless, Adventures Fantastic wishes all the Night Shade authors the best when the dust settles.

I'll update as more details become available.

UPDATE:   Jeff VanderMeer has posted on his Facebook page a partial copy of a letter he has received about the sale.  It doesn't look particularly promising.  A transcript of what he posted is below; errors are on the part of author of the letter.  VanderMeer says in the comments that he's been advised not to sign, as have several other authors he doesn't name.

NIGHT SHADE BOOKS
1661 TENNESSEE STREET #3H
SAN FRANSICO, CA 94107

April 1, 2013

Howard Morhain Litery Agency, Inc.

Dear Jeff & Ann Vandermeer,
Provided that a sufficient number of Night Shade authors agree to certain changes to their contracts with Night Shade, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. and Start Publishing, LLC have agreed to acquire all Night Shade Books assets. To be clear, this is an acquisition of assets, not a purchase of the company as a whole. The revenue received from the sale would go towards paying off the debts of the company. If you sign below, and a sufficient number of other Night Shade authors and other creditors also agree to these terms, you will receive full payment to bring all royalties and overdue advances current.

Your payment would be in the amount of $0.00.

By signing this letter, you agree that:

END  OF TRANSCRIPT

I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not entirely sure about this, but it sounds like the publisher is sacrificing the authors and their works on the altar of the publisher's debts.   I really hope I'm wrong.  If there's a Night Shade title you've been wanting, you might go ahead a get it now.  No telling how much longer they're going to be in print.  I should probably get caught on reading Eclipse Online this weekend.

Overcoming Literary Snobbery

When I was a lad, just discovering how vast the field of science fiction and fantasy was, I was firmly in what David Hartwell has referred to as the omnivore stage.  To put that in plain English, I read everything I could get my hands on with no regard to author, publisher, or to a limited extent, quality.  If it had anything to do with spaceships, other planets, or aliens, then I was interested in it.  (This was shortly after a certain fantasy movie in science fiction drag hit it big.)  I soon branched out to other subgenres.

As I grew older and more discerning, I also grew more discriminating.  As in discriminate against.  I became interested in only reading works of originality.  My definition of originality was pretty rigid.  The work had to be something created by an author on spec that had been published by an established publishing house or the continuation of such a work.  Franchise work, by its very nature, had to be substandard.

At least that was my thinking at the time.  This years before electronic publishing leveled the playing field.

2012 in Retrospect: Publishing

Rather than doing a single post about what I thought of the past year, I'm going to break things up into some smaller posts.  There will be on short fiction and one on titles I especially enjoyed.  But I thought I would start with publishers.

Last year, I wrote about the publishers I thought you should be reading this year.  That list hasn't changed much.  The day before I posted that list, I gave reasons why I wasn't going to be reading much from the main imprints.  Those reasons haven't changed much, either.  If anything, they're more valid than ever.

What I'm going to attempt to do here, in this present post, is to assess some of the things I said in those two posts.

First Professional Payment

After years of sporadically collecting rejections, I received my first payment for something I'd written.  Well, for fiction at least.  Review copies of books don't count in this context.  And while it's not professional rates by SFWA standards, I got paid for it, so by that loose definition it's professional.  I just transferred the money from my Paypal account to my bank account.  What a rush.  I can definitely get used to that.  Anyway, the story is supposed to be available in a few weeks, so I'll post a notice when that happens.

The Changing World of Publishing

Kris Rusch has been doing a series over at The Business Rusch about how publishing is changing.  Over the last few weeks, she's written about agents.  Here's the latest that just went up.  There are links in it to the earlier installments.

Why am I writing about this here?  Two reasons.