I’ve got something I’ve been crafting for weeks on Hollywood and Kevin Spacey and 90’s indie cinema, but it’s coming out on Monday. For now, read this Post by Dorothy Grant at Mad Genius Club. It explains several things:

• How Christmas season became an insane time of shopping deals and inventory clearances.
• How publishers stopped keeping backstock in old books, killling distribution of books by anyone except large chain bookstores.
• Why genres that appeal only to certain regions or who aren’t culturally connected with the Publishing nexus in New York City are declared “dead”.

Here’s the warning for those trying to “write to the market” though:

Kris Rusch once spoke about the waves of publishing on a fad, and it roughly went like this:

1. Breakout book breaks out big
2. Publishers look around their slush piles, and find possibly books in similar vein that writers wrote on spec, which are pretty darned good, and publish them.
3. Meanwhile, writers notice Hot New Fad is lucrative, and write derivative stuff to jump on the bandwagon.
4. Publishers run out of slush pile good books, and publish derivative stuff, because the market is buying everything as fast as it hits the shelf.
5. Public realized that most of the stuff is dreck, tires of fad, moves on. Publishers, operating on a year lag, put out a lot of derivative dreck and it all fails.
6. Publishers declare that the genre has dies, and stop buying in it.

If you can’t be on the 1, at least be on the 2. Don’t be 3.

Dorothy Grant has a sci-fi novel, Scaling the Rim, available on Amazon.