Here’s another one of my articles published on Impakter – under my real name, Claude Forthomme. Find out about a neat new publishing services website where you can find all you need (if you’re a self-published writer). I interviewed one of the two founders, Richard Fayet:
Reedsy is a startup aimed at the publishing industry. At the Women’s Fiction Festival, a writers’ conference held in Matera, Italy, I met Ricardo Fayet, Reedsy’s Chief Operating Officer and had a chance to chat with him. The website is still in beta version, here is the landing page: www.reedsy.com.
Note the lovely design with soft colors, attractive and friendly. You can open an account as a writer or as a “freelancer” or both. A freelancer is someone providing services as copy or development editor, book cover designer, illustrator etc. Even though this is still in beta version, the list is already quite long, over 100 names, and most are obviously affirmed, experienced professionals. One can filter by genre, which is very useful for a writer looking for help to finalize a particular book in a particular genre. Considering Reedsy is still in a beta phase, this is a remarkable achievement. Of course there are still some bugs and that’s normal, it’s early day. For example, the feature to enable writers to look for more specific professional help is not yet activated, but it soon will be.
Question: Richard, I just joined your site and navigated it a bit. In a few words, can you tell us what Reedsy is about, what is its role in publishing?
Answer: Reedsy is the future’s publishing house. We support independent authors in publishing their own work. We want those authors to earn a living wage from their books. We want to help them publish their best work by connecting them with the best freelancers in the publishing industry, and by giving them the best tools to work with. And, one day, we want to do this all over the world.
Q: So you are aiming directly at supporting self-publishing that, according to some professionals in the industry, will soon become a larger market than traditional publishing. One famous UK literary agent even foresaw that in five years 75% of all books would be self-published. Why is something like Reedsy needed?
You wouldn’t have needed a service like Reedsy ten years ago when there were just a handful of publishers – editors and designers looking for work knew where to go. Now, in a post-Kindle world, we want to make sure the best freelancers are aware of all the independent authors who want to work with them, and that those authors know which freelancers they want to work with and which ones they want to avoid.
Climate Fiction or cli-fi has evoked a surprisingly wide range of book covers. Look here at what the Cli-Fi Books.com website has put together:
This is very different from standard science fiction fare and should put to rest the argument that cli-fi is a sub-genre of sci-fi. What is striking about these covers is the unifying focus on humanity and Earth as we know it – but with a menacing twist, usually transmitted with a frightening color filter, often red or green.
Five days ago, I presented to you two covers for my upcoming cli-fi novel Forever Young, asking you to vote for your favorite one and I used both this blog and my mirror blog on Blogger (see here) to try and get as many votes as possible. Although the sample is small (relatively few votes), the trend was crystal clear, the “full woman” – Alice’s portrait – won by a wide margin, two to one. Here she is, watching a fiery sunset on a dying world:
Part 1 is already available on Amazon here at 99 cents
I’ve already put it up on Amazon (here at 99 cents – it’s Part One of a serialized novel in 4 parts – the other episodes will be coming soon, one a week). And in a few days it should be up on all the other e-platforms for your Nook, Kobo or iPad (or any mobile device). Other news: today Crimson Clouds is exceptionally up for sale at 99 cents. Grab your copy quick here, because tomorrow it will go back to it’s original price of $3.99. Again, many thanks for the support, I’m very grateful to all those who have voted!
Cli Fi, or Climate Fiction, is rapidly becoming a widely accepted term to designate a new genre of books dealing with Climate Change but not only: many elements taken together – like the demographic explosion, growing income inequality, urbanization and the rapid industrialization of the Third World – contribute to threaten our survival on Earth. Personally, I am convinced that things will get from bad to worse in about 200 years and go kaput in 600 years, if we don’t do anything about it. And that’s the worst of it: because it is a relatively slow process, a lot of us don’t feel the urgency and even deny that the process is going on. Result: on a political level things are moving at a snail’s pace and the end of the world could really sneak upon us in 600 years! The involvement of literature in the Climate Change debate is growing, and one UK academic, Dr. Adeline Johns-Putra recently noted that in the past eight years, at least 150 novels dealing in one way or another with the likely future collapse of humanity have been published, fifty of them pure “cli-fi” (I blogged about it here). In this regard, I had an interesting email exchange with Dan Bloom, the man who coined the term back in 2008, and he quoted to me something Adeline Johns-Putra, Reader in English Literature at the University of Surrey in the UK told him: ”I think climate change fiction (or ‘cli-fi’) has, in just a few years, moved beyond simplistic apocalypse scenarios to engage intelligently with questions of science and policy (Kim Stanley Robinson‘s Science in the Capital trilogy) and environmental justice (for example, Barbara Kingsolver and Paolo Bacigalupi, in very different ways). By making us ‘live’ both the devastating impacts of climate change and ways of dealing with these, these novels can’t help but intervene in the ongoing debate on climate change policies.” I love that: “these novels can’t help but intervene in the ongoing debate on climate change policies”…Makes me happy, I certainly hope my Forever Young will be viewed that way, I conceive of it as a contribution to the debate though my main objective always remains one of a story teller at heart! Now I am working on the cover of my cli-fi/sci-fi book Forever Young that will soon be published and I need your help. Dear reader, this is a difficult challenge, there are no established norms for the covers of Cli-Finovels…Consider the variety, from New York submerged in water (like on the cover of Nathaniel Rich’s novel Odds against Tomorrow) to the bucolic charm of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel (about a monarch butterfly invasion). What do you think of my two book covers? I’ve set up a poll below where you can answer, voting for your favorite. Version 1, through a porthole:
Version 2, the full woman:
Why a woman instead of space ships and distant planets as is the norm for science fiction?
Because space travel is not the point of the book. One particular woman is – she’s a major character, her name is Alice. She’s young and beautiful, warm-hearted and very, very independent. One of my beta readers, Bob Rector, who also happens to be a hugely talented writer (he just published Unthinkable Consequences that is fast becoming a best seller), quite literally fell in love with her and asked me to put her on the cover.
So I did a portrait of her, here it is:
To help you decide which cover is best, here’s a quick word about the book:
Forever Young, a serialized novel in 4 episodes, is set 200 years from now, in a world divided between the ultra rich, the One Percent, who live in gated communities and the others who don’t and suffer the full onslaught of pollution and Climate Change. The One Percent are the only ones who can afford all the advances of technology, in particular the exclusive Age Prevention Program (APP), whose members wear special Life Watches that enable them to expand their life span to the genetic maximum of some 140 years and look young till the day they die.
The novel interweaves several plot lines; the first is a love triangle between Alice, a young Swiss nurse, beautiful and independent, Lizzie, a talented golf player, the descendant of the mythical Tiger Woods, and Jamie, an ambitious reporter who works for the World and US Post, an amalgam of the Huffington Post and the New York Times.
The second covers the rising threat to life on earth, as humanity is headed for extinction; there are only two options, both reserved to One Percenters: one, escape to another world, a pristine exoplanet a thousand light years away; the other, retreat to Antarctica, the last virgin continent.
The third follows the murderous attempts of one determined 99 Percenter, a retired Blue Beret who has served all his life in the United Nations Peace-keeping Forces and is hell-bent on carving a place for himself in the Age Prevention Program. And here’s the poll:
Please vote, let me know what you think in the comments below (not on the poll site, I may miss it there). To show my gratitude for your help, I’ll send an advance copy of the book (digital – pdf) to the three best and most useful comments (lottery drawn if there are too many!). Again, many thanks for the help! Post scriptum. Just as I closed this post, I came across an article in the New York Times Magazine, about the amazing “Uncivilization” festival organized in the UK by the Dark Mountain Project led by British author Paul Kingsnorth (see here).
His vision of a future “global collapse” is exactly the one I envision in Forever Young – a future that will come slowly but inexorably and that you have to live with…like Alice and her friends. Yes, there is a good reason why the sky above Alice is blood red, or alternatively, why she is plunged in a frightening sick-greenish world…
Claude Forthomme's Blog about Social Issues and Books 