It’s Sunday. A week ago Balticon 48 was a ship under full sail. Now it’s over, and a week’s cooling allows for a bit of reflection.
Like any good con, Balticon was a hoot. From reading the random tee-shirt broadside, to conversations struck up in hallways or in meeting rooms before or after sessions, to wandering the dealer room, to taking a chance on that off-the-wall session whose title drew you in, to meeting old friends and making new ones, it’s fun. But for many of those attending, the authors, publishers, agents, artists and other toilers in the vineyards of SF/Fantasy, it’s also, in Jame’s Knapp’s words, a business trip, and even casual fans can see a bit of hustle. It’s not in your face- one of the neat things about SF/fantasy is that the pros are fans, too. But for many of the attendees it’s business.
There’s another current as well. The news is full of the Amazon / Hachette drama, the second salvo in a battle whose opening round was last year’s DOJ price fixing settlement against Apple and the big five publishers. Digital technology and the internet have changed publishing drastically: ebooks, print on demand, web magazines, cheap and accessible audio and video production, and secondary effects of these like the elimination of the backlist and the resurgence of small publishers. Somewhere beneath the surface, in deeper waters, the leviathans of publishing- Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster- are stirring, trying to adapt to the new model, circled by Amazon. And the changes keep coming.
Many of the pros at Balticon represent what’s called new media, and even for those whose medium is print, the proportion of small publisher and self-published work is fairly high. Balticon’s agenda and content have, for some time, been set squarely in this direction. At Balticon, even those who work with the big five publishers rub shoulders with this newness.
One of SF’s roles is to show us alternative futures. I suspect there’s no better place than Balticon see some of future of publishing.