How To Help Your Favorite Author

Book launches are important to writers. Much like the way Nielsen Ratings uses sweeps periods throughout the year (Feb., May, July, Nov.) to determine numbers used in setting TV advertising costs, publishers use the first week of a book's sales to gauge a writer's popularity. These are the writer's die-hard fans, or fans in the subject matter of which the author is deemed to excel in writing about.

First week sales numbers determine many factors: how much more publicity money the publisher will free up to promote the book; whether they will continue to employ a writer or set him loose; and, if they do keep the writer, how much his or her next advance will be. Most authors will only make a best seller's hit in the opening week. The majority of books do not have long-term sustainability. Only a fraction of all the books ever published remain in print years after they come out.

So how can a reader help an author?

Dark Matter Is Firefly's Heir Apparent

As far as sci-fi fans are concerned, Firefly was cancelled much too soon. Just as the show was finding its rhythm, the executives at Fox balked at the show's $3 million per episode budget and tepid Friday night ratings. Fox just didn't see its potential. Good space opera has always been costly to produce, and ratings-versus-cost is a repetitive cancelling theme when it comes to our speculative fiction entertainment--at least fans of the original StarTrek got 75 episodes out of that run. At long last, though, we have found Firefly's heir apparent; it is called Dark Matter, and it's already made it past its first season.

Lower production costs have made ambitious programming less risky. SyFy took the plunge recently and produced a plethora of new space operas: Killjoys, Dark Matter, The Expanse--but of all these new series, only Dark Matter captures Firefly's essence. The writing and show mythology only got better in season two, something Firefly never got its chance to prove.

NBCUniversal’s Cable Ratings Drop: Comcast Not Seeing The Forest For The Trees*



Syfy's promising new original series, Defiance, starts in April.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a piece on NBCUniversal’s (NBCU) drooping cable channel ratings, particularly for long-time revenue engines like the Syfy channel (down 4% in viewership in 2012) and E! Entertainment (down 10%). There’s an irony in this since I believe NBCU’s parent, Comcast, is to blame for the drop in its own subsidiary’s ratings due to some ambitious pricing of its properties. What were once free (or almost free) basic cable channels suddenly became part of bundled cable “packages” that you had to shell out close to $20 a month for--and that’s how Syfy lost me as a viewer.


Science Fiction Assoc. of Bergen County Gathering

Me lecturing at SFABC gathering in Bergen County B&N

On Aug. 11 of this year, I was invited as a guest to speak at a gathering of The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County. Meeting fellow local  sci-fi and fantasy fans was a thrill and I enjoyed sharing my knowledge and experiences about general writing and publishing with them. Many thanks to director Phil Departo for the invitation.

I was excited to see people's interest in Awakenings as I explained the book to them, and more excited by how many attendees had already read the book and engaged me with specifics about their favorite characters. At the time, I was hard at work at finishing book 2, "The Lost Prince," and this was one of the rare engagements I made during he summer. (FYI, Book 2 is turned in and with the editor at TOR. We're looking at a summer 2013 release.)

Lecturing at B&N in Bergen County NJ

SFABC meets once a month at the Barnes & Noble on Route 4 in Bergen County. For those interested in joining this group, please contact Phil at: sfabcphil@gmail.com.

Me lecturing at SFABC gathering in Bergen County B&N

In Time Is Money

I initially avoided In Time because of lackluster reviews. I’m glad I eventually relented because it is one of the smartest dystopian films to come out in a long while and one of the most underrated movies of the year. Though Harlan Ellison claims it's based on one of his short stories, the film’s "system-is-out-to-get-you" narrative feels more like a Philip K. Dick progeny (the originator of such paranoid fare as Blade Runner and Minority Report).  Excellently directed by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca), the film debuts Justin Timberlake as an action hero, playing Will Salas, a down on his luck factory grunt who is big on heart but short on time. His love interest is the heiress Sylvia Weiss, played with preternatural conviction by Amanda Syfried. A bevy of hot Hollywood A-listers (Cillian Murphy, Olivia Wilde, Alex Pettyfer, Vincent Kartheiser) round out the cast, bringing sexy back to science fiction.