Okay but don’t tell anyone yet
A few weeks ago before Comic Con I got an email from Alan the store manager at Exclusive Books Waterfront saying they were going to stock my book at the event and would I like to do signings at the stand (nice idea but unworkable in reality since, on the day I was there, a Sarah Maas promo took up about three quarters of the shoebox space). I said yay thanks and then he kindly offered the main store as a place I might be able to hold a book signing and I said yay no thanks.
You see, it might sound like a lovely idea in theory, having a book signing like in the movies, but if you’ve spent even five seconds at a local book fair as a new author you know that unless your book has a dedicated and hungry fan base or you also happen to be a celebrity, no one, but no one, is interested in coming to your book signing.
Besides I know how to learn from other people’s experiences and I’d read enough and seen enough sad tweets by new authors at their book signings in malls to know that I did not want to put myself through that kind of mortification.
So I suggested that we make the circle somewhat bigger and host an SFF event with other authors who love the fantastical.
And so this is basically what I’m working on now with co-organiser Shameez Patel Papathanasiou, fantasy author of The Selene Trilogy.
And what an eye-opener it has been.
If you’d asked me last year who wrote science fiction or fantasy in South Africa I would’ve counted maybe only three people off the top of my head: Lauren Beukes, Charlie Human, and JT Lawrence.
That’s largely on me for not doing my homework, but if you don’t live in SA or know anything about this place, I’ll just say that SFF isn’t a thing for publishing houses here. So if you’re not directly tapped into the SFF scene in SA or actively looking for other SFF authors – which I wasn’t – it’s easy to miss who’s actually producing work.
And my god there are a lot. More than that, there are a lot winning awards and getting wildly rave reviews – just in other countries.
In SA, we’re told SA readers don’t consume science fiction or fantasy. That there isn’t a market for it.
The closest major publishers here come to anything spec fic is dabbling in magic realism and then only very occasionally. It’s only the small publishers that might fully consider taking a chance on deep SFF.
Small press Jacana, for instance, were the ones to publish Beukes’ first book Moxyland and have recently started their own SFF imprint ‘Mother’ to oversee SFF authors in Southern Africa. And South Africa only just recently got a dedicated SFF small press when Mirari opened their doors this year.
Other than that, authors in this genre in this country must either self-publish or find UK or US agents or publishers. Both choices difficult in their own special ways and neither of which leads to local acknowledgement or necessarily readers.
In a way, learning about how many authors we have working in the SFF genre has both reassuring and alarming.
Reassuring because it’s nice not to be alone; alarming because I realise that I don’t quite fit here either. I have a pretty good idea what my next two or three books will be, and no matter which way I swing it, none of them – barring Neko and the next novella – are ‘genre’ enough to satisfy readers of either science fiction or fantasy.
The term ‘speculative fiction’ is the closest I get to something meaningful, but then what does that really mean? (In truth, isn’t all fiction speculative?)
I’m looking forward to the day I have a PR company telling me and other people where my stories fit in.
Until then, I’m enjoying pulling this event together with Shameez, and once we’ve got a better handle on who’s who and when, I’ll do a follow-up post to this one about everyone we’ve contacted and link you to their work. It’s really amazing stuff.
T
(PS: I got invited to Open Book Festival this year! Maybe I’ll figure out what kind of books I write by the panel I’m on. Just crossing my fingers it’s not another self-publishing conversation. Good god, I’m tired of that. So tired in fact that I will put myself through the ringer again for the next book and try find a US publisher. I’ll start holding thumbs for myself now.)