Editorial
Buying the Fantasy

"No Dragons! Dear, dear. Everyone knows epic fantasies have to have a dragon.

They called it "Annacon" -- a chance to meet Tor editor Anna Genovese one-on-one at a hotel in Bellevue, Washington, the second weekend in November. Other editors and programs shared the bill, but most of the thirty registered writers focused on the opportunity to bring their manuscripts to the personal attention of Genovese, who many considered a friend based on her chatty Live Journal blog.

Nobody articulated it going in, but in the lizard brain of every writer who plunked down their $150 registration fee lurked the same wild hope, the fearsomely powerful "If Only" Syndrome. If only they could evade the publishing industry's malevolent gatekeepers -- indifferent agents, over-worked readers, gutless under-assistant editors, soulless bean-counters -- and get even a portion of their manuscript into the hands of a real editor, a publishing contract, fame and lots of fortune would inevitably result.

From the irate accounts of several participants, Genovese lost no time in shredding that particular daydream. She applied her critical faculties like a whip, stripping several layers of skin from the submitted manuscripts and the hands that offered them. She fired editorial broadsides at everything from first-person point of view to epic fantasy novels over 100,000 words long. She undoubtedly killed Bambi too. I just happened to miss that post.

Like every writer who didn't attend the November 12 Bellevue Writer's Weekend I spent a fair amount of the following week consoling on-line writing buds who did. Off-line, I also started composing a snarky editorial covering the important points I felt were getting lost in the umbrage:

	What about Genovese's blog gave you the idea she would be any less opinionated in person?
	Publishing houses don't reward editors who buy books that don't sell.
	Genovese's depressing pronouncements -- and those of other high-profile fantasy editors and agents -- on the relative salability of fantasy and its various sub-genres (such as first-person paranormal chick-lit and epic fantasy door-stoppers ala J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Jordan) derive from sound marketing data.
	Publishing professionals wouldn't lie about that, because they want writers -- including unpublished writers -- to submit manuscripts that will sell and sell well.

But a couple days before I climbed on this month's soapbox I ran across an article in the November 20 issue of USA Today: "'Potter' series casts a spell over entire genre." The bookstore buyers cited in the article paint a rosy picture for fantasy fiction. Sales show a steady 8 to 15 percent increase over the past year and continue to rise. Not only that, according to Barnes & Noble buyer James Killen, multi-volume fantasy epics make up the "lion's share" of the fantasy market.

Wait, didn't the editors and agents at Bellevue tell the participants they wouldn't be caught dead buying epic fantasy? That it did not, could not, would never ever sell? That clicking sound you hear is me frantically paging through about a half-dozen writer blogs (links omitted to protect the guilty).

According to the blog writers, they did.

Sigh.

Well, two out of four ain't bad.

On a happier note, the staff and writers of Crescent Blues join me in wishing you and yours the very best of the holidays. May they be filled with joy and good fellowship -- and an acceptance call with a phat advance for all the writers-in-waiting. I can't think of a better way to greet the New Year.

Jean Marie Ward

In addition to editing Crescent Blues, Jean Marie Ward writes for a number of Web-based and print magazines, including Science Fiction Weekly. She is the author of Illumina: the Art of Jean Pierre Targete (Paper Tiger) and several short stories, including "Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space" in Strange Pleasures 2 (Prime Books). Her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Teri Smith, was published by Samhain Publishing in 2007.

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