Publisher Spotlight - Tyche Books: New and Shiny

To tell you how I first came to meet Margaret Curelas and Tina Moreau would take a blog post all of its own, but I assure you, it’d be an adventure story full of twists, turns, coincidences, and an overabundance of women wearing hats at the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto, November 1st through 4th, 2012.

I’d mentioned a few posts back that I had been approached by Margaret to see if I would be interested in interviewing some of her authors in time for book launches.  The more I interviewed their authors, the more interested I became in Tyche Books itself, not only as an emerging publisher, but as a business owned and operated by two real risk-takers with an unorthodox sense of timing.

Now, if you’d like to hear an actual professional interviewing them, then go here.  It’s the link to an interview condcted by DayBreak Alberta, a CBC Radio production.

Upon listening to that interview, I was inspired to chat them as well.  The challenge:  they’re in Alberta and I’m not.  But, then Fortune – Tyche’s mascot, by the way – smiled upon us.  Tina and Margaret were both coming to Toronto to attend the World Fantasy Convention, and I just happened to be in town at the same time.

I had invited these two businesswomen out to dinner, and to my vast delight, Patrick Weekes came along for the ride.  So, between the last panels and Patrick’s 8:00 p.m. signing at the Sheridan, we headed across the street to a Chinese food place, and after an awesome repast of foodstuffs we could barely pronounce, I switched on the voice notes on my shiny new iPhone, and we talked shop.

It also bears mentioning that Tyche Books has recently celebrated its one-year anniversary.  Ladies, many happy returns!

New Kids

Tina and Margaret share something of a common experience:  they both originally worked for Edge Science Fiction and Publishing.  Tina was the managing editor of one of the smaller imprints, handling such things as the slush pile, author relations, layout, and so forth.  Margaret was the acquisitions editor for Edge proper.  After a couple of life-changing events (specifically, having kids), both found themselves looking for new dragons to slay.

In fact, both Margaret and Tina were looking for work that they could do at home – work that allowed for hours flexible enough to accommodate a baby’s changing (and demanding) schedule.  Fortunately, because of the evolving nature of the industry, they no longer needed to store boxes and crates of material; no need for heavy duty production or shipping; everything could be done online – and therefore, from home.

Tina told me, “Most people would say we were a little bit crazy there.”  Considering they were both new mothers – one with a toddler and the other with a three-month old – and considering that they were starting up a new business in a changing industry at the tail end of a recession, I was inclined to agree!  But as their business credo states:  “Fortune favours the bold.”  Apparently Fortune also favours the sleep deprived.  In their first year alone, they’ve launched five new books, with a solid line-up for the future.

So was it hard getting started? I asked them.  Tina admitted that the learning curve had been a challenge.  She held up two hands about four inches apart, saying, “I’ve learned this much.”  She moved her hands to the left.  “And [Margaret]’s learned this much.”  She added the spaces together.  “And we’ve pooled our knowledge base.”  Then she held one hand close to her chest and pushed the other one across the table.  “And we still have to learn this much.”

Margaret agreed.  “Our learning curve is shrinking, but it was pretty steep in the beginning.”

It’s Tina who handles a lot of the business aspect – the numbers, book layout, the distribution, basically all the whip-cracking that takes a book from a project to product, on time and at budget.  This is the kind of thing she went to school for, though even in her late teens, she had the entrepreneurial bug, though her initial dream of starting her own bookstore didn’t pan out.

And it’s Margaret who deals more with the authors and the social marketing, from acquisitions to editing.  She’s also moving out of her comfort zone to talk with the crazy people behind interviews and reviews.  Y’know, people like me.

By the way: Lucia Starkey is responsible for cover design, and according to Patrick Weekes, she’s a delight to work with.  I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting her yet.


Collaborative Competition

Experience and big dreams aside, I know it’s tough for any new business to start from the ground up, especially when there’s already a huge and well-established base of competition.  So I asked them how intimidating the competition was.  They surprised me with me with their answer.

“We’ve found small presses have welcomes us with open arms,” Tina said.  “It’s not as competitive as I would have estimated.  When you get into the larger presses, it does become more competitive – between the larger companies.  They don’t see smaller companies as much of a threat.  They don’t really care too much about us one way or the other.”

Margaret agreed that there is a sense of collaborative competition.  “What’s good for us is good for others.  So it’s beneficial for small presses to help each other.”

When they were first starting out, Tina and Margaret talked to a lot of other small presses out there, and they exchanged information, contacts and best practices – a lot of don’t do as I did, do as I do now experience.

And when you think of it, this makes a lot of sense.  Let’s say there’s a start-up company out there that offers a new way of marketing small press books.  To keep that start-up company afloat, it would make sense to throw as much business their way as possible.  Small presses can only do so much – a book or two or three per quarter, tops; but together, many small presses can throw a lot of business over to that start-up company.  The start-up company stays afloat, multiple small presses are increasing their distribution effectiveness, readers are getting more books at better prices – everybody wins.

This all blew me out of the water.  I mentioned that I’d seen this kind of attitude between other emerging and independent authors, but I couldn’t imagine it happening amongst small presses.  So I asked if this was a changing trend, or if it was just a Canadian thing.  Margaret said that most of the presses they’d met were Canadian, “and more specifically, Albertan.”  Tina added that even most of the small presses she’d met in Ontario and BC had been supportive.  So maybe it is a Canadian thing.  With luck, I’ll be able to interview small presses in the States and abroad as well, and we can find out.

I asked them what they saw as their biggest challenge in expansion.  They could sum it up in one quick word:  distribution.

A little sidebar here:  in the scant few hours I’d spent at the convention, the one thing I heard the most was:  support Canadian presses by buying books from Canadian presses.  Without consumers paying for unique and high quality books from worthy small presses, those small presses will simply disappear.  It’ll be that much harder for rising stars to get noticed and get paid for doing what they do best:  building culture and telling good stories.

So how do we encourage people to buy more from small presses, especially when it’s so easy to download free books elsewhere?  And how do we know where to find books from these small presses?  And therein lies the challenge of distribution.

Tina explained:  “If you have less than ten titles, you’re considered a risk.  They [book sellers] think you might just be a self-publisher who is trying to get away with a publisher title.  So anything under ten titles is considered a risk.  So a lot of them won’t stock anything from anyone with less than ten titles.  Once you cross that threshold, though, then they start taking you seriously.  Then they start thinking, ‘Well, these guys have been around for a while, they’ve got ten titles, all right...then they’ll start stocking you.’”

Margaret added, “By the end of next year, when we have nine or ten titles, that’ll go away.”

In the meantime, Margaret and Tina are doing everything they can to break past that image of bad risk.  “Yes, we’ve only got five titles,” Margaret said, “but we’re still legit.”  Considering the big plans they have plans for 2013 and 2014 – including the Canadian sf anthology Masked Mosaics, edited by Camille Alexa and Claude Lalumière – and considering the amount of time and effort they put into marketing their agents, I would absolutely agree that they have the business sense required to be “legit.”


New Gates Mean New Gatekeepers

So how do they market a relatively unknown press with emerging authors?  Margaret said simply, “Not easily."

Tina explained:  “Because we’re a small press, we have limited marketing dollars, so we try to do as much as we can with as little as we can.”

They rely a lot on social media marketing and a lot of word of mouth.  That comes from Twitter, blog posts, interviews, Facebook fan pages, the lot.  They spend a lot in review copies as well, to get them into the hands of reviewers who will also help to spread the word about their books.  They also take out ads in specific, niche-appropriate and well-researched magazines, they get their books into library catalogues.

And who bears the responsibility of marketing, I asked, the publisher or the author.  Margaret said it’s a fifty-fifty split.  It’s also up to the author to build and make use of a network of their own.  Patrick Weekes had a bit of an advantage here, coming “preloaded with all the software” required for virtually marketing his book, The Palace Job.

But it's more than just the means that make social media effective.  Patrick said, “It’s important having a network already in place full of people who are willing to say the things that you’re embarrassed to say yourself.  I can say, ‘Hey, my book is out, it’d be great if you all buy it, thanks.’  But that’s just once.  Whereas, y’know, it’s good having a network of friends who are going to jump on and say, ‘Patrick’s book is out!  It’s really awesome!’”

Margaret said, “I do know there are some publishers who say, send us your novel and your marketing plan...and your sales are entirely based on what you do, and not what the publisher does.”  In other words:  it’s sink or swim for the new author.  If you don’t sell well, then you’re at risk of being turned down for future works; or if you’re accepted, you may end up being published under another name, to distance yourself from a bad sales record.

This is especially true when it comes to the Big Six – or rather, the Big Five, what with the merger between Penguin and Random House.

“I’ve known a couple of writer friends who are published by them,” Tina said.  “If you’re still a fairly small author, they will publish your book, and they’ll say ‘This is the amount of money that we will spend on your book.  You tell us where we need to spend it, and then you’re on your own.  And that’s it, that’s all you get.”

They mentioned that marketing is something they’re still learning.  It’s an area of the business where they have no formal training.  But they have hired the services of a BC publicist to teach them the ropes.

But one of their biggest marketing tactics right now is the concept of the eBook card, produced by Enthrill.

Seriously, these are cards are fantastic:  they have the cover of the book, the blurb on the back, and a single-use code for the purchase of an eBook copy.  You buy a card (maybe even get it signed by the author), you go home, you redeem the code, upload it to your eReader – sweet, geekly awesomeness, Batman.

They’re also great for selling at conventions:  anybody travelling by plane can agree that a good convention runs you the risk of going over your luggage weight restrictions.  I bought eight books myself, and I was only there for a couple of hours.  I also seem to buy books from long-winded writers.  That’s why I’ve downgraded from a briefcase to a backpack:  it’s more ergonomically friendly.  But if I were to buy eight books the size of a postcard, I could throw those puppies in my purse and not look like some thirty-something high school nerd.

But there’s another practical angle to the use of the eBook card:  it allows a bricks-and-mortar bookstore to sell eBooks.

We got to talking about the influx of independent and self-published authors, and how it sometimes feels like shoddy workmanship has pushed eBook markets to the saturation point; consumers have become wary of independent authors disguised as small presses.

“People for many, many years have been using publishers as the gatekeepers to fiction,” Tina said.  Consumers trusted established publishing to weed through the slush pile and produce only the best; and now, in some ways, Amazon and Kobo sites have become a kind of slush pile of their own.

“I’m reminded of a blog post, I read,” Margaret said, “called, ‘I’m not your beta reader.’”  You can find that blog post here.

Tina said, “...If you want to self-publish, you’ve got to do it right.  You’ve got to be professional about it.  You’ve got to treat it like a business.  You have to pay the right people to do the things you can’t do yourself...And a lot of people out there don’t treat it like a business.  They’re just like, ‘Hey.  I’ve got a book.  It’s finished.  I’m going to throw it up on Kindle.’  And yeah, then you get this whole beta-reader mentality and people are getting burned and now they’re starting to do the ‘let’s check the brand on the spine to see who publishes this’...People will still go and get the eBooks from self-published authors, especially if it’s an author they know, or recognize...but I think people will become more wary of this whole beta-reader self-publishing thing.”

To me it sounded like not was the industry evolving, but so was the consumer base.

Margaret compared the situation to her once-upon-a-time job as librarian.  “With Google and better, more advanced search engines, people were like, ‘Well, why do I need a library,’ or ‘Why do I need a librarian, because I’ve got Google, and the internet has everything!’  Well, when they start doing serious research, the librarians are the ones to say, ‘Here’s how to find out if this is a trusted source.’”

Which brings us back to the eBook cards:  they allow book sellers to be the new gatekeepers of good fiction.

“That’s kinda the reason why the whole eBook card thing is so awesome,” Tina said.  “It’s because we get to go back to bookstores and use their expertise in selling books...to sell eBooks!”

Margaret jumped in and said, “And because they have the cards, they have something physical, something tangible for people going into the bookstore to actually browse...That’s how [some of my friends] shop for their eBooks:  they go to the bookstore and say, ‘Okay, I like this and this,’ and they take a picture or make a list, and they go home and buy the eBook.”

How much easier then is it to buy the eBook card right in store, then go home, enter the code and upload the book to your Kindle or Kobo?  It means you can buy your eBooks with pocket money, real live legal tender.  Or in my case, you can buy one with spare change, and then hand that eBook card over to a friend, like I did to Michael Lorenson.  (I already had a signed copy of the The Palace Job, so he got the eBook version.)

It also means that you can buy an eco-friendly eBook and support your favourite independent bookstore.  Win-Win-Win situation.

So does it pay to be the new kid on the block?  Absolutely yes it does – especially when the whole block is being refurbished.

Tyche Books is on the bleeding edge of a new era in publishing, one that is scalable, economical and very exciting.  It allows them to be creative and be geeks at the same time.

“We like being new and fresh,” Tina said.  “Like our eBook cards.  Because they’re new and shiny and I like playing with them.”

I read a book! The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi

I'm not often moved to talk about a book I've read - mainly because I don't read enough.  But in this case, Paolo Bacigalupi has really inspired me to actually write a short critique / reaction thing.

The Windup Girl is a fantastic piece of futuristic science fiction, published in 2010 by Night Shade Books. It's been highly acclaimed as one of the best books of 2010, and was the winner of several sf awards, including the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, the Compton Crook Award and the Hugo.  In other words, it won pretty much all the sf awards.

You might call it cyberpunk, or post-apocalyptic - you might even make an argument for steampunk - but I'd say, just read the darned thing and call it science fiction.  And it's the kind of science fiction I like: thoughtful and mildly disturbing.  Not a utopic Star Trek kind of science/future, nor a post-apocalyptic dystopia like The Time Machine.

It's a scary kind of fiction, the kind that comes across as "it still could happen."

Part of the blurb on the back reads:  "What happens when calories bcome currency?  What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when said bio-terrorism's genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution?"

There's a term for this genre:  It's ecotopian fiction, wherein the world has undergone (or is undergoing) massive changes because of an environmental shift.  It's also dystopic, which is a fancy way of saying "Life really and truly sucks in this world I made up."  I won't give it all away, because it's worth your while reading it and discovering it for yourself.  Suffice it to say that the plot revolves somewhat (a lot) around the genetic engineering practices that are happening right now, today. 

If I were to compare this world of Bacigalupi's to anything, I would say "Take the moodiness and overcrowding of Blade Runner, throw in an High Altitude Nuclear Explosion so that all or most of the technology is destroyed, add in some famine, flooding and fires, and sprinkle liberally with political interference by major corporations."  I really enjoyed the world he created.

Before I get into the nitty gritty, I'll say this much:  I almost loved this book.  It's rare that I think about a book I'm reading, once I put it down.  Not the case with The Windup Girl.  Considering the shortness of my attention span, I'm actually surprised at how much I've been thinking about this book, after the fact.

First of all, in terms of style, I'm on the fence.  Some of his scenes are brilliantly written, honestly they are.  The action scenes are worth your time.  The pacing is fantastic - almost.

I have two beefs with the book:  the beginning and the end.

His world is beautiful, vibrant, noisy, claustrophobic, smelly, brilliantly laid out.  But you need to take lessons in Cantonese, Thai, Japanese and anger management to get through the first, oh, 50 pages or so.

You pick the language up as you go along - if you're willing to stick it out.  You learn new words like farang and jai and bodhisattva, and I'm still not sure if they're all actual words or if they're figments of Bacigalupi's imagination (or mispronunciation), but that again is what's so compelling.  I can't tell where reality ends and Bacigalupi  begins, not without doing my own research.

But dang it, I nearly gave up on the book in the first 50 pages, because there were too many new words, too many new people, every chapter began in a new location with new characters - and while it's well executed, it seems like we're picking up part way through the story.  I wouldn't mind it so much if it was only one or two characters, but that many?

As for the ending (the last 50 or so pages), it has the exact opposite problem.  I'm not going to give it away, but, in terms of style, I really had the sense that the last forty pages were rushed, as if Bacigalupi suddenly looked at his watch and said "Oh crap, look at the time!  I'm sorry to have kept you.  Where was I?  Oh yes.  Right, that happened, and then some more stuff happened (and that was very sad), and then it ends."  And that's a crying shame, because I was willing to commit the time to reading the "extended version", if he'd written one.  It's like his pen was running out of ink, so he sacrificed quality for getting-it-done.  Or worse:  like he'd grown tired of writing and researching the danged thing and just wanted it done.

As for the middle 250+ pages, , I couldn't put it down.  The middle makes the book worthwhile.

What I really found refreshing about the book is that it's not set in a place I'm familiar with.  Quite frankly, I'm sick to death of futuristic stories set in the U.S., to the point where I probably won't read it.  Children of Men at least is set in the UK, but even then, it's familiar territory.  (For the record, I watched most of the movie, haven't read the book yet.)

But The Windup Girl is set in Thailand, a place I know almost nothing about (save from what I learned in The King and I), but which has its own rich history and future-history, and which has its own neighbouring rivals and pressures, its own ecosystem, its own weather patterns, its own personality relative to the countries that surround it, and its own aspirations.

And it's not homogenous either:  there are all manner of cultures - most of the Asian, for which I'm glad - plus a wide range of religions and beliefs.

On top of that, you have people from similar backgrounds who have differing personalities - an absolute must, when you don't want to accuse one ethnic group or another of being corrupt, or greedy, or cowardly, or saintly.  What you get, then, is a kaleidoscope of characters - and a fresh pair of eyes to go with it.

The personalities of each character affect their reactions to evolving situations; their actions affect other characters, who act and react according to their personalities and to the changing situations; and the situations in turn influence their personalities.  Oh, and just because he does it right, Bacigalupi also gives characters back stories that show how many of these concurrent personalities have evolved over time, and why.  Brilliant.


The characters themselves are not static, either.  They may or may not learn from their experiences; they may or may not be redeemable; they may be 60% good and 40% rotten, or 40% rotten, 50% selfish, and 10% saintly - you never know, and you won't know as you turn from one page to the next.  It's like...you know...real people.

Character driven?  Plot-driven?  Understatement.  The Windup Girl is the ideal blend of plot and character, where the two are simply inseparable.  Character drives plot, plot causes characters to react.  Very elegant.

Cover of German translation

And like I said in the beginning, what he's writing about - bio-terrorism, genetic engineering, corporate greed versus ecological sustainability - it's already happening now.  Read up on companies like Monsanto, who, on the surface, are trying to overcome real-world challenges, like drought, poor soil conditions, and disease.  Then step back and realize that the genetically engineered (read "patented") seeds are actually sterile, meaning you are utterly reliant on the company to buy fresh seed, season after season.  More importantly, cut away the debate about genetically modified foods and give a harsh, critical look at the practices of the companies that sell them.  (I highly recommend reading this article, even if you don't read The Windup Girl.)

In the olden days, you'd plant a field of wheat; some of the wheat you grind up and make into bread and pastries and spaghetti; some of the wheat you keep, put back in the field, and lo and behold, you have next season's field of wheat.  The ultimate in renewable resources.  The harvest begets itself. 

Now, with genetic engineering - more specifically, with unethical genetic engineering practices - the corporation begets the harvest.  Once you're a farmer and you have nothing but a field of sterile grain, you have no choice but to sell what you've reaped, then take the money back to the corporation to buy next season's workload.  You no longer work as a farmer; you work as an employee of the unethical corporation.

Worse even:  if you're a salaried employee and if your computer breaks, the corporation goes out and buys you a new one.  But if you're "self-employed," if your harvest is lost to a fire, if you've lost a year's worth of labour and you have no money to show for it, you can no longer go out and simply plant another field full of grain.  You have to go back to buy more seed, because the stuff you bought the first time was sterile.  No harvest, no money; no money, no seed, no harvest.  You are SOL, through and through...unless you've invested in insurance, which feeds off your bad luck, etc. etc. etc.

And of course, if the company finds out you've been saving and reusing seeds from one season to the next, you could get sued; or better yet, if the corporation finds its patented products in your fields, even if it was transplanted by natural means (seeds blown across fences, deposited in bird dung), you could be in a world of hurt for unauthorized use of patented products).  It sounds ridiculous, and it's happening.

In a sense, in places where the genetic is king, farmers have become serfs once more, slaves to both government taxes and to the thuggish corporation.

In Bacigalupi's story, he takes it a step further:  these corporations have played god - but they're playing with their own food supply.  I think what he captures most brilliantly is the raw, blind greed of some zealous corporate executives, who are perfectly willing to trade their own sustenance for the prospect of total market domination, even at the risk of massive loss of life.

Finally, what I really found fascinating about this story was the moment when I let go of guessing and let Bacigalupi tell the story.  Usually when I read, I'm trying to anticipate what's going to happen next, sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm close.  But in the reading of this story, I realized I no longer wanted to guess.  I just wanted to know what happened next.

Beautiful DeviantArt by SharksDen

The plot is well engineered and dynamic.  Character A plots X, but independently, Character B plots Y - which will undo X.  Then along comes Character C, who for perfectly rational reasons does Z, which forces Character A to do something spontaneous, which in turn forces the hand of Character B - around and around and around it goes - not confusing, not jarring, just...very, very well done.

Honestly, if he had balanced out the overly busy beginning with the too-minimalist ending, I would have loved this book inside and out.

But who am I to criticize the guy who won pretty much everything you can win in speculative fiction?  He won those awards for very good reasons:  ex-patriotism, research, realism, probability, and an excellent eye on human nature in the 21st century.

--  With thanks to Michael Lorenson for loaning me the book.

-- DeviantArt by SharksDen:  More info here.