Mike Resnick

The original 59 Ask Bwana columns ran in Speculations and were reprinted here over the past year and a half, with updates where required. This is the four all-new Ask Bwana column answering questions that arrived while the originals were running.

QUESTION: Mike, do you think there are more new writers or fewer new writers trying to break into science fiction, now, versus when you were breaking in, and is it easier or harder now, versus then?

ANSWER: I have no meaningful statistics, but it seems to me that since there are more people, there are more new writers trying to break in. Will more manage to do it? That’s problematical. Back in the early 1950s there were 56 magazines; today there are 3 digests and about 16 e-zines paying pro rates — and if you sell a story every ten days, you probably qualify for food stamps. But back in the early 1950s, there were less than 100 science fiction books being published per year, and these days there are over 1,600. Certainly more writers can make a full-time living from science fiction; at an early meeting of the Science Fiction Writers of America at the 1966 Worldcon, it was shown that only two writers — Heinlein and Silverberg — were making as much as $10,000 US a year off their science fiction. (Asimov and Clarke were making more than that too, but primarily from non-fiction.) In 1992, a similar survey by a major fanzine showed that over 50 writers (and estates) were making over $75,000 US a year.
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Okay, here we are with a third set of recent questions (and answers, of course) to follow the 59 Ask Bwana columns I’ve run and updated here.

QUESTION: What’s something you think your successful writer proteges are doing right?

ANSWER: I suppose saying “listening to me” isn’t the answer you’re looking for. So I’ll say that they’re studying the markets and writing in every spare minute they have — and it must be working. Of the 22 who Hugo winner Maureen McHugh has dubbed “Mike’s Writer Children”, 9 made the Campbell Ballot for Best New Writer — and most of them are still around and still selling. As I’ve pointed out time and again, writers write. People who are never going to make it talk about writing.

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QUESTION: What new material do you have coming out in 2013 and 2014?

ANSWER: That’s always difficult to answer, since lag times vary so much these days, and I’m a relatively fast writer. The books I know for sure will be coming out will be the 4th and final Weird Western, The Doctor and the Dinosaurs; a mystery novel, The Trojan Colt; a co-edited anthology, The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs; a collaboration with Eric Flint titled The Gods of Sagittarius; at least one more mystery novel, probably two; the first and possibly second of a new science fiction series from Pyr; and a pair of Stellar Guild team-ups, one with Lezli Robyn and one with Janis Ian. Jack McDevitt and I are also discussing the possibility of another collaboration or two in 2014.

I would imagine I’ll have from 16 to 22 new stories out during that time, in magazines and anthologies, and probably about that many reprints. And of course I’ll be editing 12 issues of Galaxy’s Edge and maybe 10 to 14 Stellar Guild books.

Other than that, and conventions, and workshops, my time is my own.
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