Newsgroup: it.cultura.fantascienza
Titolo: Racconti e Romanzi

Alcuni anni fa , su una prefazione di un'antologia  di racconti di Fs, di
cui non ricordo il nome, forse un millemondi, ho letto che la dimensione del
racconto rappresentava il futuro della fantascienza.
Ricordo che si portava tra gli altri esempi  la scarsa propensione delle
nuove generazioni alla lettura.
Causata anche  dal  differente approccio al reale legato all'uso dei mezzi
informatici che privileggerebbero una conoscenza orizzontale rispetto
all'analisi e all'approfondimento.
In realtà  i romanzi  di Sf che un tempo, il "galateo"  editoriale
consigliava non superiori alle 200 pagine oggi raramente sono inferiori al
migliaio.
Al contempo obiettivamente diminuiscono i lettori e la loro fascia media di
età si va  progressivamente alzando, almeno in italia..
Personalmente trovo cicli come quello di Hamilton, sulla crisi della realtà,
pubblicato da urania,  anche se di piacevole lettura, eccessivi.
Letti i primi due  o 3 si potrebbe tranquillamente fare a meno di leggere il
resto tanto non si perde niente, si gira e si rigira sempre sulle stesse
identiche vicende.
Invece sto trovando molto interessante l' antologie di Dozois sulla Space
opera ( urania 1402 e seguenti), soprattutto per le brevi introduzioni agli
autori, alla loro collocazione nel periodo storico e al contributo che hanno
dato alla Sf.
Trovo anche interessanti i riferimenti bibliografici anche se molte opere
attualmente non sono di facile reperimento o addirittura mai state tradiotte
in italiano come la monumentale raccolta dei racconti di Kornbluth.
By
Carlo
Anna dorme

 towards shorter novels.
I think that would be me ...
I was discussing book lengths with David Hartwell of Tor a few
weeks ago, and he explained the evolution of book lengths in
the US market to me thuswise, by way of elucidating the length
constraints on my own output:
In the old days, most paperbacks in the US were sold via
supermarket, drugstore and general store racks. These racks
were stocked by about 400 regional wholesalers, and these
sales constituted the mass market.
In the old days, a good length for a first novel was 60,000
words; established writers turned in 70-80,000 word books.
The old days ended in the early 1970's.
As the inflation of the 1970's bit, publishers wanted to raise
the cover price on their books. The distributors retalliated
by saying "if you want to charge more, you've got to weigh
more -- where are the extra pages?" Yes, this was stupid:
people don't buy books by the kilogram. But the publishers
had to deal (with hundreds of small distributors they couldn't 
make an end run around them), so gradually page counts crept
up, and once they couldn't make the typeface bigger they
started publishing longer books.
Over 20 years, the average length of novels crept up from
70,000 words to 100,000 words. And the bloat we are familiar
with became a fact of life.
In the early 1990s, the facts of life changed. The change was
effected by Walmart. Walmart consoldiated their wholesale
business by awarding the contract for the entire west coast to
one wholesaler. This precipitated a wave of bankruptcies and
takeovers at the end of which only about a dozen national
wholesalers were left standing.
Because the local wholesalers went bust, the book buying was
all done centrally by the big chains. They lacked the
specialist knowledge to know that certain stores in the local
college town always sold way more SF/fantasy than others, or
that this supermarket or that could shift loads of romance 
titles, because they no longer had local buyers. So the big
wholesalers concentrated on buying A-list bestsellers, which
would sell well everywhere. (Hence the so-called Vanishing
Midlist).
In reality, the midlist didn't vanish -- it moved. With the
loss of the traditional mass market,  chains of bookstores
like Borders sprang up. These shifted fiction in bulk, albeit
with the emphasis on trade paperbacks and hardcovers. Back in
the 1980's, it was a rare SF novel by a midlist author that
would see hardcover -- but a print run of 30-40,000 mass
market paperbacks was not unusual. By the late 1990's, it was
rare for such a book to break 20-30,000 paperbacks -- but it
could easily sell 3-4000 hardcovers.  Hardcovers are *much*
more lucrative than mass-market paperbacks, so the publishers
and their authors managed to turn a profit.
But the publishers wanted to get more money from their
hardcovers. So they tried putting the price up, and kept to
the logic of increasing page counts that had worked with the
wholesalers.
In 2001 or 2002, Borders noticed that they were stocking an
increasing number of fat midlist novels with prices creeping
up to the $25-30 range. And these were not selling. Because
hardcovers don't get the same strip-covers-and-return
treatment as mass market paperbacks, this was a stock turnover
liability.  So the order went out: "we will only buy novels
with a cover price above $24.99 if they're by A-list authors."
This brought the expansion of the books to a screeching halt.
Publishers couldn't jack up the cover price any more, so they
had to either concentrate on volume sales or cut the
manufacturing/shipping/storage costs of the book blocks if
they wanted to increase their margins.
And that is why "Singularity Sky" weighs in at 118,000 words
but is published in hardcover in just 304 pages. And why Tor
want two 100,000 word fantasy novels from me instead of a single
200,000 word novel. The book chains that sell hardcovers march
to a different beat from the retail racks that sell mass
market paperbacks, and now that hardcovers are a larger
proportion of profits than paperbacks the rules have changed.
(Anyone got anything to add?)
-- 
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan - 
ada...@despammed.com
 - this is a valid address
homepage: 
http://www.fantascienza.net/sfpeople/elethiomel
English blog: 
http://annafdd.blogspot.com/
Blog in italiano: 
http://fulminiesaette.blogspot.com

 racconto rappresentava il futuro della fantascienza. 
ne dubito, almeno Initaglia;
sui cicloni ho una mia teoria che chiama in causa la pigrizia del
lettore, part. quello italiota;
r
-- 
oggi fa proprio freddo [Kant]
tutto sui Pentangle: 
http://umpf.net/