Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

Awards and Independents

A talking point that gets repeated is that the Dragon Awards are more open to indy published works than the Hugo Awards. There are a few issues there.

  • A neutral issue is finding a good definition of independently published. I take it to mean self-published and/or small-press published and/or published by anybody that is not owned by a large publishing house. Are books published by Baen independent? I think it is fair to class them as so in the sense of not being controlled by one of the large corporate publishers.
  • A harder to untangle issue is that different editions of books can be published by different publishing houses. Some books are both independently published AND published by major publishing houses.
  • A trickier issue is the two awards do not have commensurable categories. Both the Dragon Awards and Hugo Awards have multiple categories for published works (i.e. ignoring awards for films etc) but the Dragon Awards splits those categories across novels into different sub-genres, whereas the Hugo Awards split those categories across structural dimensions (length, type).
  • Finally, the Dragon Awards are still new. The kind of works nominated in 2016 or 2017 may not reflect where the award eventually ends up.

However, some of those issues are salient to the question of which award is more open to non-big publishing — after all, if both awards were structurally identical then it’s unlikely they would be different. I’ll try to work through some of those issues by comparing the 2017 winners in various categories.

The Dragons

For the Dragons, I’m looking at the novel categories. I considered including the comic/graphic novel categories but the publishing dynamic in that space is different (Marvel v DC as the big two, with various others competing).

  • Best Science Fiction Novel: Babylon’s Ashes, by James S.A. Corey  — Orbit
  • Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal): Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge, by Larry Correia and John Ringo — Baen
  • Best Young Adult / Middle-Grade Novel: The Hammer of Thor, by Rick Riordan — Penguin
  • Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel: Iron Dragoons, by Richard Fox — Triplane Press, Createspace Independent Pub
  • Best Alternate History Novel: Fallout: The Hot War, by Harry Turtledove — Del Rey
  • Best Apocalyptic Novel: Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow — Head of Zeus, Tor Books
  • Best Horror Novel: The Changeling, by Victor LaValle — Canongate Books, Random House

Of these seven categories, two categories were won by works published independently or by a publisher not owned by a multinational. Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway is an interesting case as Head of Zeus is an independent publisher but Tor is not. Likewise, Victor LaValle’s The Changeling was published by both an independent (Canongate) and Random House.

Consequently, we can count books NOT published by one of the big multinationals and get the answer 2 out of 7, or we can count non-big publishing represented by the winners and get 4 out of 7.

The Hugo Awards

We can’t do a like-by-like comparison of categories as the two awards do not have the same style of categories. The simplest comparison would be awards for printed works other than graphic (for the reasons given above). I’m not including Best Fanzine as I feel that’s drifting well away from something comparable. Best Semiprozine I’m semi-including: obviously, it is inherently indy and would give the Hugos a structural advantage but then again that’s exactly the question we are looking at! However, I’m leaning to not including it as a category because the award is given generically rather than to a specific issue. There is an indy versus big-publishing comparison to be made in the editor categories as well but those are so wholly unlike the Dragon Award categories as to make the comparison untenable.

  • Best Novel: The Obelisk Gate, by N. K. Jemisin — Orbit Books
  • Best Novella: Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire — Tor.com
  • Best Novelette: “The Tomato Thief”, by Ursula Vernon —  Apex Magazine
  • Best Short Story: “Seasons of Glass and Iron”, by Amal El-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales) — Saga Press
  • Best Related Work: Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, by Ursula K. Le Guin — Small Beer

Not including Semi-prozine, gives 3 2 out of 5 of the categories to non-Big publishing. Including semi-prozine gives 4 3 out of 6 to non-Big publishing. [ETA corrected count as I’d included Saga as independent when I’m fact it is owned by Simon & Shuster]

Case Closed?

The 2017 numbers looked across multiple categories would point to the Hugo Awards as being more friendly to independents by a small margin. However, this can be countered by pointing to the ‘headline’ categories. The Hugo Award for Best Novel is the most notable award of the categories and is the award with the most prestige¤. The last time one of the big publishing houses didn’t win Best Novel was in 2004 when Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls won — published by Eos, which is now an imprint of Harper Collins but at the time was an imprint of the smaller Avon Publishing (bought by Harper Collins in 2010). [ETA – OK didn’t realise that Avon was already within the News Corp orbit at that point] In 2010 the award was given jointly to Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl published by Night Shade Books and China Miéville’s The City & the City published by Del Rey Books. At the time Night Shade Books was an independent publisher and is now an imprint of another independent publisher, Skyhorse Publishing. So, depending on how you phrase it, Big Publishing has dominated since 2004 or 2010.

The contraction and consolidation of publishing into a few big conglomerates have been reflected in the Hugo Awards for Best Novel, which have become dominated by two publishers Tor (owned by Macmillan) and Orbit (owned by Hachette). The growth of small and self-published ebooks is not currently reflected in the Hugo’s headline award. Yet, it is reflected in the other categories. The interesting semi-exception is Novella, where Tor.com (an imprint of an imprint) primarily competes against independently published novellas*.

For the Dragon Awards, there are two headline categories: Best Science Fiction Novel and Best Fantasy Novel. There are only two years worth of winners, so it is hard to draw any firm conclusions yet. The shift from 2016 to 2017 implies a shift to more mainstream winners (and hence a shift away from Independents) but that is based on very thin data. Baen have a strong association with the award and may continue to do well in it. With little data, it is hard to tell.

Structure

Both Awards have structural advantages for independents. For the Hugo Awards, it is categories that favour magazine-style publications, which in turn favours independently published stories. For the Dragon Awards, it is multiple sub-genre categories – military science fiction, in particular, is a sub-genre with a strong independent presence.

The nature of both awards as being to various degrees (and in different ways) fan-led means that works with more publicity is going to have an advantage, which favours works backed by large publishing houses.

Conclusion

It is too early to tell for sure with the Dragon Awards but currently, they don’t seem to be particularly more favourable to independently published works than the Hugo Awards. The initial advantage self-published works had in the Dragons in 2016 was primarily due to a general lack of awareness and low participation. If those factors decrease then more mainstream works are likely to be nominated.

Complicating the picture for both awards is the changing dynamics of publishing in general but that’s an area in which prognostication remains a fool’s game.

¤[Aside from the Hugo Award for Best Puzzle Section in the Hugo Packet, which I think I’m a very strong contender for.]

*[There is a side hypothesis here about Puppy hatred of Tor. It is a redundant one as there is plenty to explain the dislike of Tor by the Sad Puppies through personal conflicts. However, looked at in terms of publishing spaces, Tor.com is very much an arm of big-publishing that acts far more like an independent press operating in the new landscape of Amazon dominance.]

camestrosfelapton

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46 responses to “Awards and Independents”

  1. Do you -really- have nothing else to do than make blog posts out of my MGC comments, without attribution? Because it is starting to look that way, floppy.

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  2. 1) Their whole thing was that their conservative nutty mcnuggets fiction was the bigger, more commercial, more popular fiction that was distributed more widely through big publishers, and the Hugo Awards were focusing more on smaller, more “literary” and “academic” work — and thus more liberal — and on less popular mass market commercial and widely distributed writers. They disliked the fact that the Hugos spent awards on short fiction forms published in magazines and anthologies and thought the Hugos should only concentrate on the big money, most popular novels. They were upset that Analog, one of the biggest magazines owned by a corporation, was not winning and being nominated for more of the awards for shorter fiction that were going to small magazines and small press anthologies that they viewed as less popular and too esoteric. So for them to complain that the problem is now all popular corporate instead of “indie” offerings? Please.

    2) Their one kind of exception to a pro-corporate philosophy was Baen Books, where most of them published. Baen is a medium sized independent publisher, but it’s never operated like one. It’s been a commercial corporate venture from the start. It was started with financial help from another medium-sized independent publisher — Tor Books. Doherty invested in and helped found Baen Books only a few years after he started Tor. Baen built itself to serve as the paperback SFF arm of Simon & Schuster, a giant corporation, but not be owned by S&S. That was the deal he made with S&S because they wanted him to head their SSF line, much like what DAW did with Random House. Baen’s titles are still distributed by Simon & Schuster — one of the mass conglomerates which gives Baen a distribution for products well and above most medium and small independent presses. Most medium sized independent publishers that are successful either eventually get bought up by a bigger house — such as occurred with Tor, bought by St. Martins, its distributor, in the late 1980’s, St. Martin’s part of a large British corporation and then became part of Macmillan, etc. — or have their stuff distributed by a larger conglomerate. In contrast, self-publishers have much less wide distribution and small presses have limits on distribution unless they can sign up with a sizable distribution company that handles a lot of small presses and gets better terms with major sellers and distributors than the small press can do on its own. Baen Books and Small Beer Press, a well known small press, are not the same — Baen Books is much bigger and more corporate. Yet it’s Baen titles that the Puppies declare good and Small Beer Press titles are considered too esoteric and of little interest to the Dragon Awards, which were supposed to be concentrating on novels and be way more commercial than the Hugos.

    3) Avon Publishing is not nor was an indie or “smaller” publishing house for the last nearly seventy years. It started out as a major publisher of mass market paperbacks and comics. In 1959, the book half became part of the Hearst Corporation, one of the largest media and publishing corporations around. Avon was a mass market paperback arm to William Morrow under Hearst and was like the third biggest corporate romance publisher in the English language market on the globe and one of the major corporate paperback houses. In 1999, the News Corporation — you know, Rupert Murdoch’s company — bought all of Hearst’s book divisions, including Avon. News Corp also owns HarperCollins, a sub-corporation formed by merging several of their publishing acquisitions together. Eventually News Corps merged all their book publishing holdings under the HarperCollins brand, which then made Avon an imprint of HarperCollins, instead of Morrow, but the same corporate owner. (I.e. HarperCollins did not buy Avon — they just became responsible for it in the reshuffling.) Eos was the SFF imprint at Hearst/Morrow under Avon’s jurisdiction because they did mostly mass market paperbacks. It was one of the major SFF imprints in the big corporate publishers. Bujold’s Paladin of the Souls in no way, shape or form was an indie publication with a smaller house. It was a completely big corporation publication, same as Del Rey.

    4) Night Shade Books was a small press that grew very quickly into a medium sized press that used major corporate presses for distribution. Their growth was partly due to repackaging backlists of prominent authors like Glen Cook — a deal which also happened to involve Tor — and from that, getting several prominent authors to publish works with them. But they grew too fast, mismanaged their finances, cheated some of their authors and nearly went into bankruptcy. They were then bought up by Skyhorse, a medium sized house that is growing, and they and Skyhorse’s other imprints are distributed by Simon & Schuster, just like Baen. So they count as independent, but at the time they got the nomination, they could not be considered a small press and they always were definitely a commercial press. But hey, one.

    5) But if you look at the history of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, that the big, corporate publishers won/nominated most of the time has always been the case. In the early years, many of the novel winners were serialized in magazines first for their award nomination — but they were the big, corporate owned magazines like Asimov’s, Astounding SF, Galaxy SF and the Magazine of SF & Fantasy. Doubleday, Ballantine, Dell, Bantam Spectra, Ace, Harcourt, Avon, Putnam, Holt, Delacorte, Scribners, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Harper & Row (later HarperCollins,) St. Martin’s, Houghton Mifflin, Del Rey, Berkley Putnam, Dial Press, Victor Gollancz, Warner, Villard — all big houses that were part of corporations, merged, traded around and sold to other corporations. The Hugo Award for Best Novel has always been a big house game. Even Pyramid Books (which would be sold to Harcourt Brace in the 70’s and renamed Jove,) started out as a book imprint of a magazine publishing corporation, Almat, with massive paperback wholesale distribution. So the idea the Puppies liked to float, that the Hugos had been taken over and rigged by big, “corporate” publishers like Tor in the recent decade or so and before that not, is bunk. The claim they earlier floated that the recent winners and nominees for best novel in the last decade weren’t big names and bestsellers was also quite clearly factually wrong. Which is why, I suppose, they’ve now switched to calling those authors corporate stooges instead of unpopular, little known authors.

    6) Of the two years of Dragon Awards for best novels, the nominees have been a mixed batch of big corporate publishers, smaller press and self-pubs, with unclear voting regulations, mass and repeating voting blocks allowed, and a lack of promotion of the awards from DragonCon. And of those two years, seven categories, fourteen authors altogether, only six winners were non-big corporate publications. The other eight went to Doubleday, Disney-Hyperion, Orbit, Spiegel & Grau/Random House, Tor twice and Del Rey twice. That’s not including the big corporate published authors who withdrew their nominations, once the Dragon Awards stopped pitching a fit and declaring that authors couldn’t do that. The Dragon Awards begged John Scalzi and N.K. Jemisin last year to not decline their nominations (Jemisin declined, Scalzi relented after having declined the year before,) as well as Alison Littlewood, nominated for Horror and published by Jo Fletcher Books, a corporate imprint. Scalzi and Jemisin are two of the most hated authors by the Puppies, thanks to Beale, and Scalzi is pubbed by Tor to boot. Yet they placed high enough to nominate and the Dragon Awards wanted them around for the name recognition.

    So yes, self-pubbed authors still have a shot at the Dragon Awards because they are still involved in running the Dragon Awards. But if the awards become better known and if the people running the awards continue to try and court big corporate authors to stay in, corporate pubbed wins will probably further increase to nearly all of the total, except for maybe an occasional best-selling self-pubbed author, like a Howey or a Weir (both of whom moved their books partially or in total to big corporate publishers.) So they should enjoy it while it lasts.

    Books published by big corporate publishers are the most widely distributed books and their big sellers are also the ones they most promote. Consequently, they are the most well-known books for the most fans who might vote on awards from having read those books. They are always going to have an advantage in a popular-vote award at a convention, organization or online. Juried awards are more likely to include smaller pubs, especially if that’s a mandate of the award. And some awards — like the Hugos — believe that short form fiction has value, even if the reading audience for it is small, and so have made an effort to keep doing awards for short form fiction, (though there again, larger, more corporate, more widely distributed or well known online short fiction pubbers will have an advantage.) Awarding short fiction in the first place is an idea that the Puppies disdain, however, so I really don’t even see why the Dragon Awards has those categories.

    I may have to stop reading some of these posts of yours — they raise my blood pressure. But once again the Puppies either don’t know much about or pretend not to know much about the business they are in or in which they supposedly want to take part.

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  3. Baen is a traditional publisher. I’ve always heard “indy publishing” thrown around by self-publishers, originally (my impression was) because “self-publishing” had a bad rep. Do a lot of self-publishing authors really include big companies like Baen as “indy”?! Maybe my definitions are wildly out of line. But then, you mix “indy” and “independent” which seem to perhaps have different meanings??? Independent – technically, stands alone. Indy – the “in” phrase for self-publishing. I feel like they’re two different things. Maybe it’s just me, though.

    I’m not sure how you get 3 out of 5 for the Hugos. You’re surely not counting Saga, which is part of Simon & Schuster, are you?!

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      • LOL. Dann in the File770.com 5/31 Pixel Scroll uses the phrase “indie (and small press)” showing I’m not the only one who doesn’t see small press (or larger) as “indy/indie.” Two people doesn’t mean I’m right! 😉 I just happened to read that right after commenting above (I’m catching up on evening comments), though, so I wanted to mention it.

        BTW excellent point about by having short fiction categories, the Hugos are in theory more open to zine-published “independent” SFF. I feel like the Dragons are more open to being gamed, which teeeeeechnically means they’re more open to, well, whoever wants to game them (e.g., Puppies), but I’m not sure that’s the same as being more open to independent/indy/non-mega-corp work.

        /ramble, sorry

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        • I think even ‘self published’ is unclear. A few authors publish together are they now not self published?

          I think the broader socioeconomic question is the big corporate owned companies versus everybody else but even that is unclear.

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      • Over at the Speculative Fiction Showcase (and the Indie Crime Scene), I use “Indie and Small Press”, indie meaning self-published in this case. Not that I would reject it if e.g. a Tor publicist suddenly showed up and wanted a book featured. But the focus is on indie and small press writers, because they have fewer opportunities to get visible.

        Regarding small presses, I would count Small Beer and Nightshade and Tachyon as small presses (just), but not Head of Zeus or Cannongate (both pretty prominent in the UK) let alone Baen. Though the small presses we’ve feature at the Spec Fic Showcase are smaller than Nightshade or Small Beer.

        Coincidentally, the HWA’s Stoker Awards are very small press friendly. One horror small press whose books I regularly feature at the Speculative Fiction Showcase is a multiple Stoker nominee and even winner.

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    • They are two different things — independent and self-published — but at this point, it’s been conflated and the term is unlikely to leave. Independent has traditionally meant in book publishing a publisher that is not owned by a corporation. Some independent publishers could be quite large with multiple imprints, though most are smaller. Self-publishing was/is, as the name implies, an author publishing a work as their own publisher.

      But when Amazon revved up the retail e-book market back in 2008, they started calling themselves “indie” authors, which seems to have come from the music industry where indie music studios, even if very large, are considered independent music. And musicians who record and put out their own music are also called indie artists, so that’s what the electronic self-publishing authors adopted and it is less unwieldy than self-published.

      Calling Baen an independent publisher is technically correct. But what is included in the “indie” market seems to get larger and larger. At first they were using indie only for self-publishing. Then they started to include the small press field in it (though usually the small press field has just been called the small press field.) Then they include medium sized publishers in it. Which again, nothing wrong with it, but it can get confusing. So I usually just use self-published if I’m talking about self-published authors.

      And the reality is that Baen, while an independent, functioned as a publishing imprint of Simon & Schuster, but in a licensing deal instead of being owned by S&S. So its whole history as a company has been fairly corporate and certainly commercial and mass market geared. The big corporate SFF imprints in the U.S. don’t really see Baen as different from them. They don’t have quite as large a list, but they are not seen as small press.

      Head of Zeus is a British independent publisher, growing to medium sized and distributing for Mysterious Press (a former specialist medium sized independent press which is now mainly backlist,) in the U.K. But Doctorow’s main publisher in the U.S. for that book, where the Dragons center, is Tor, so that’s not really an indie pub, unless he made the deal first with Head of Zeus and then sold or they sold reprint rights to Tor for the U.S. as a foreign territory sale. And it sounds like that was not the case. Likewise Canongate — a U.K. independent press but the author is American and his main publisher is Penguin Random House (still can’t believe they let that merger go through.) Foreign territories sales are sometimes made to independent houses.

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      • @Kat Godwin: As a reader, I guess I just don’t find “independent” to be a very useful term, in that case. Baen or Tor, they’re all publishing houses to me; whether one has a megacorp behind it and another doesn’t, meh. Small press, medium, large seems more useful/descriptive to me. But I’m not in the biz, and the people saying the Dragon Award is more open to indy/indie/whatever have skin in the game. . . .

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        • The other irony with Tor is that specific reasons the Pups give for hating it all centre around a small number of personalities as if Tor was effectively a small but ambitious independent publisher.

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      • Kat Goodwin: Penguin Random House (still can’t believe they let that merger go through)

        I register my protest at both the merger and the name, at every opportunity, by referring to them as Random Penguin. 😉

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      • Romania actually was somewhat independent and isolated within the Eastern bloc, since Ceausescu didn’t get along with the USSR leadership.

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  4. Colour me unsurprised that trad publishing, with all its money, distribution, money, marketing and money has a tendency to win popular awards.

    But good distribution and quality writing aren’t mutually exclusive; the books that win the Hugo are still very good, but it definitely doesn’t hurt that a trad publisher is able to get those books in front of many, many more eyes.

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  5. The short form stuff in the Hugos are both indie pub from small semipro or prozines; the Big 3 don’t get a look in any more. Plus, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Uncanny etc. put their stuff up for free on the web, which is where almost everyone sees them. You can’t get more indie/less gatekeeped than that. Even the stuff from tor.com is read b/c it’s online free; they’ve just recently started selling novellas.

    Note also that this year’s YA award has one completely indie published (and written and illustrated) novel, “Summer in Orcus”.

    And of course, technically the self-pub Nutty Nuggets are actually distributed by a tiny little independent company called Amazon, which is worth (as our old pal Carl used to say) beelyuns and beelyuns, doing the advertising and discoverability for them. I don’t see Puppies out there handcrafting personal ebook stores to be all pure about their independence. The smaller zines also have to do Kickstarters along with subscriptions — there’s no Dell Magazines keeping them alive with the money from crossword puzzles, sudoku, and horoscopes, plus ads.

    As Kat said, if the big corporations get interested in the Dragons, they’ll make them tighten up and promote the voting and take it over even more than they have. If Disney decides to care about them, might as well put mouse ears on the dragon, or add a flightless waterfowl if Random Penguin does. Big 5 authors will stay in if it’s decently administered.

    Or if the entire attendance of the con bothers to vote, it’s liable to get a whole lot girlier, queerer, and melanin-enhanced. I guess AO3 counts as indie publishing. 🙂 Won’t be so nuggety then!

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  6. I think “Indy=not big five” is a false place to put the dividing line. There are plenty of houses that aren’t big five but have the same structure in how they acquire and publish – e.g. to be published by Baen, or Angry Robot, or Night Shade, you have to persuade someone else that it’s worth publishing, and they will make decisions on things like marketing for you.
    I think the distinction most people think of for indy is that it’s been published because one person – the author – thought it was a good idea to do so, and the final decisions on marketing etc are made by the author (e.g. they may hire a cover artist or even an editor but they retain the final say).

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      • There are also micro-presses – with some of the editorial functions of major houses but without money or the the capability of marketing on a higher level. Some are little more than a few self-pubbed authors getting together and giving themselves a brand name, others are more like trad publishing on a shoestring. (Silvia Moreno-Garcia ran one of these)

        Where they belong in the scheme of things is one of the ongoing questions.

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    • The SFWA forums always have threads where independent authors offer each other advice, and I think the sort of things they worry about gives the best clue to what a meaningful definition would be. Their #1 concern is effective marketing techniques. “I spent $XXX on Facebook ads and had nothing to show for it. Really? I spend $XXXX every month and it’s the best advertising I do. Here’s my secret . . .” I would have thought #2 would be editing, but it’s actual cover art. Good editors for hire must be more plentiful than good cover artists. (You might wonder why cover art matters for eBooks, but I can tell you with authority that omitting the cover picture for a book offered on Amazon cuts sales by a factor of 80, as measured by the Books team when I was working there.)

      An independent author handles his/her own editing, cover art, and marketing. In traditional publishing, the publisher takes care of all of that. An independent author worries a lot about what these things cost. In traditional publishing, all money flows to the authors; they don’t pay for anything.

      The only thing that indies pay with a share of royalties is distribution, and the overwhelming majority of indie works are eBooks sold by Amazon. Indies worry about physically printed books a little bit, but I suspect it’s so they have something to put on their coffee table and give to their friends and family.

      So (I claim) there’s a huge difference between indie and even small press.

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      • Simply put; Cover art IS marketing. It’s the single biggest and most effective piece of marketing you can get if you don’t have your name out there. And most big publishers will tell you that.

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    • I think it goes Big 5, medium corporation (Baen), small press (often local), author collective (Book View Cafe), person who publishes themselves and a few others (Teddy), then complete indie which is self-pusiub (Cora).

      I have a friend who published a few books with a long-running Midwestern small press, then got a contract with one of Macmillian’s lit’rary divisions. Guess which got hardback and more publicity and sales; the money was not that different once agent, business, royalties, etc. It was more, but not an order of magnitude, and the advance was nice but not all that and took a while to earn out even so.

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  7. Well, if you’d like an SF/F award that celebrates small-press work, then your best bet would be… KillerCon Austin’s Splatterpunk Awards!

    The inaugural ballot consists entirely of works from small-press outfits like Necro Publications (purveyors of such redoubtable fare as Spermjackers from Hell and The Lucky Ones Died First). There’s even a self-published Amazon ebook up for Best Collection: A Year of Horror and Pain, Part One. Want to step away from the Big Five? Stuff the Dragons – the Splats are where it’s at!

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  8. Camestros: “Shit – yes, I included Saga Press. Another error”

    I missed that one in my rant. 🙂 Don’t forget also that Angry Robot used to be part of HarperCollins when it was first started.

    “The other irony with Tor is that specific reasons the Pups give for hating it all centre around a small number of personalities as if Tor was effectively a small but ambitious independent publisher.”

    Tor was an independent publisher for six, seven years at its beginning, and it was that when Doherty helped Baen fund Baen Books in the early 1980’s and invested in that company. They were distributed by St. Martins’, part of a corporation, and had their offices in St. Martin’s offices, so they had wide distribution. Then Tor sold itself to St. Martin’s in the late 1980’s and became an imprint of a corporation and also started the imprint Forge for suspense fiction. Technically that corporation was Macmillan because St. Martin’s was the main U.S. operation of British corporation Macmillan Publishers, which was I think owned by an even larger British corporation at that time. But Macmillan Publishers sold off part of itself in the U.S. which became the corporation Macmillan Inc., separate from St. Martin’s, which then was sold several times and broken into pieces — to Simon & Schuster, which has been part of several corporations, part to McGraw-Hill, etc. In 2007, Holtzbrinck, a German corporation, bought up British Macmillan Publishers which included their U.S. divisions of St. Martins (and thus Tor,) and acquired rights to most of the uses of the name Macmillan from Pearson, another British corporation that had owned Simon & Schuster and Macmillan Inc., plus bought a few stray divisions called Macmillan. So now it’s just Macmillan Publishers, owned by Holtzbrinck, and it includes St. Martin’s, Tor, Farrar Straus & Giroux, which was a large renowned independent publisher for a long time, Pan Books, Picador, Macmillan Children’s, etc. All very complicated. But for the last thirty years, Tor has been a corporate imprint and is global to boot.

    Kendall: “Small press, medium, large seems more useful/descriptive to me.”

    That’s usually still mainly in use: small press, medium press, large press, corporate press (which isn’t always large, by the way.) But technically if a publishing company, even if it is large and has thirty imprints, is not owned by a corporation, it can be called an independent press. Most of the time, though, if someone is using the term indie these days, they mean self-published authors.

    Lurkertype: “The short form stuff in the Hugos are both indie pub from small semipro or prozines; the Big 3 don’t get a look in any more.”

    Which the Puppies complained about in their campaign. Which is why now saying they are anti-corporate and pro-indie is bilgewater lying.

    “As Kat said, if the big corporations get interested in the Dragons, they’ll make them tighten up and promote the voting and take it over even more than they have. If Disney decides to care about them, might as well put mouse ears on the dragon, or add a flightless waterfowl if Random Penguin does. Big 5 authors will stay in if it’s decently administered.”

    No, that’s not what I said. The big corporations have no control over awards and never have. That’s the false claim the Puppies have made about Tor, (while curiously ignoring Orbit.) They claim the publishers lobby for awards (they don’t much though the Hugo award packets — which authors put together, not pubs — do let the publishers offer stuff to read for free,) and give freebies away that get them votes (but really that’s just usual convention promotion including cons without awards,) and do conspiracy outright fraud, etc. It was the authors who pulled themselves out of the Dragon nominations. But just because the corporate pubbed titles are the most widely distributed, their standouts are most talked about and most likely to be read and judged by people who will vote on awards. As more people learn that the Dragon Awards exist, they’ll vote for their favs and most of those for novels will be big corporate pubs. And the main folks running the Dragons want the big, best-selling authors to stay in if they got nominated, even if they’re liberals or liberal-leaning. (They initially told them that they couldn’t leave till that backfired.) So already the big corporate authors got more than fifty percent of the Dragon novel awards. That will increase over time by natural reader means.

    Greg: “The only thing that indies pay with a share of royalties is distribution”

    Self-pubbed authors don’t earn royalties. The only way you can earn royalty income is if you license production rights to a company in your intellectual property, for which you are paid a royalty rate on sales income from that license contract. Self-pub authors aren’t licensing rights to anybody; they are producing and selling their own product directly. They earn profit sales income (gross sales.) Sales income and royalty income are two entirely different types of income streams.

    Amazon acts as a distributor and vendor for self-pub authors who fit their product to Amazon’s production format. Amazon deducts marketing, accounting and distribution fees from the self-pub authors’ gross sales profits and gives the remainder of the gross sales profits to the self-pub author. There is no licensing or royalties involved. But Amazon calls the gross sales profits “royalties,” as if it was doing the self-pub authors a big favor in giving them a cut in the profits of their own product, because the lie gave them a false advertising advantage versus publishers’ licensing agreements, even though Amazon does not incur the costs publishers do in licensing agreements and production — the self-pub author does, and Amazon is not risking any capital investing in the self-pub author’s work, unlike publishers buying a rights license. (And the other e-book vendors unfortunately followed suit and keep using the lie.) So we’ve had a whole decade of self-pub authors filing their taxes wrong because they think royalty income and gross sales income are the same type of income when they aren’t accounted that way at all.

    Cora: “probably because there isn’t a whole lot of horror published by the big 5 anymore.”

    There’s a ton of horror being published by the Big 5. So much that they launched a small category market dedicated to horror in the U.S. the last two decades, as well as all the stuff they put out in general fiction. But it is scattered across many different imprints in corporate publishers. Other factors may play a role as well. But horror was part of the big expansion in the late 1990’s into the oughts and is still doing very well.

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    • Yes, I’ve gotten plenty of corporate books and some magazines at regional cons that don’t give awards which most people never heard of. Sometimes even ARCs! Sometimes remainders out on the freebie tables or stuffed into the info packet. A con that attracts fewer than 500 people, none of whom live more than a day’s drive away, can still get a bunch of books given out by Big 5 imprints, and some comic books

      And there’s always some self-pubs out on the freebie table; I got a good trade paperback (Fid’s Crusade) at the last con b/c it had a paragraph missing and the wrong cover, so the local guy brought the copies along. At another con, I got a horrible, unreadable, terribad fantasy from an Amazon imprint, at one a good space opera romance, and at another I got an ARC of big hit book “Red Rising” with a publicist note in my tote bag.

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      • Book Expo is the magic place to get ARCs and free copies, although sometimes they hoard them for the booksellers. But big, small and other publishers are at that one with all the booksellers.

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      • I must correct myself, the terribad Amazon book and the “Red Rising” ARC (Random Penguin) were both acquired at the same con, which had attendance in the neighborhood of 700. It was unexpected. They both garnered me a pittance at the used book store. But everything does.

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    • If we’re going to get into this much detail about Tor/SMP/Holtzbrinck/Macmillan history, here are a few corrections regarding those details.

      “[Tor was] distributed by St. Martins’”

      Tor’s hardcover distribution was through St. Martin’s. Mass-market paperback distribution was through Pinnacle. Tor didn’t actually publish any hardcovers until 1984.

      “and had their offices in St. Martin’s offices”

      In fact we didn’t move into the Flatiron until January 1992. The sale to to St. Martin’s Press was in 1986.

      “Then Tor sold itself to St. Martin’s in the late 1980’s and became an imprint of a corporation”

      Tor was “an imprint of a corporation” from its founding. Initially that corporation was Tom Doherty Associates. The word “corporation” is being put to some strained uses throughout this thread, and not just in this comment.

      “In 2007, Holtzbrinck, a German corporation, bought up British Macmillan Publishers”

      Generally referred to as “Pan Macmillan.”

      “which included their U.S. divisions of St. Martins (and thus Tor,) and acquired rights to most of the uses of the name Macmillan from Pearson”

      The acquisition of global rights to the Macmillan brand actually happened several years after Holtzbrinck bought Pan Macmillan and thus St. Martin’s and Tor.

      “That’s usually still mainly in use: small press, medium press, large press, corporate press (which isn’t always large, by the way.) But technically if a publishing company, even if it is large and has thirty imprints, is not owned by a corporation, it can be called an independent press.”

      Very many, possibly most, of what people call “independent” publishers are incorporated, as LLCs or some similar structure. As you point out, “corporation” isn’t the opposite of “small.” It also isn’t the opposite of “independent” or “privately owned.” The entire global Macmillan book-publishing operation is owned by a single pair of siblings.

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    • If we’re going to get into this much detail about Tor/SMP/Holtzbrinck/Macmillan history, here are a few corrections regarding those details.

      “[Tor was] distributed by St. Martins’”

      Tor’s initial hardcover distribution was with St. Martin’s. Mass-market paperback distribution was through Pinnacle.

      “and had their offices in St. Martin’s offices”

      In fact we didn’t move into the Flatiron until January 1992. The sale to to St. Martin’s Press was in 1986.

      “Then Tor sold itself to St. Martin’s in the late 1980’s and became an imprint of a corporation”

      Tor was “an imprint of a corporation” from its founding. Initially that corporation was Tom Doherty Associates. The word “corporation” is being put to some strained uses throughout this thread, and not just in this comment.

      “In 2007, Holtzbrinck, a German corporation, bought up British Macmillan Publishers”

      Generally referred to as “Pan Macmillan.”

      “which included their U.S. divisions of St. Martins (and thus Tor,) and acquired rights to most of the uses of the name Macmillan from Pearson”

      The acquisition of global rights to the Macmillan brand actually happened several years after Holtzbrinck bought Pan Macmillan and thus St. Martin’s and Tor.

      “That’s usually still mainly in use: small press, medium press, large press, corporate press (which isn’t always large, by the way.) But technically if a publishing company, even if it is large and has thirty imprints, is not owned by a corporation, it can be called an independent press.”

      Very many, possibly most, of what people call “independent” publishers are incorporated, as LLCs or some similar structure. As you point out, “corporation” isn’t the opposite of “small.” It also isn’t the opposite of “independent” or “privately owned.” The entire global Macmillan book-publishing operation is owned by a single pair of siblings.

      Like

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