OOC -- help?

[sythyry]

Various people have been after me to publish various bits of fiction. I'm thinking about it, without making any decisions yet, and I've got a couple questions.

Please answer these if you read Sythyry, even if the answers are negative. [Poll #349513]

Also, do you have any other advice?

Comments

[rowyn]

But the connection to the RPG is quite solid. I don't know
that I could hide it at this point, even if I wanted to. To
an editor's casual eye, looking for some reason to reject it
quickly, the gaming connection -- or the furry connection --
could be sufficient reason and then some

I am not well-versed in the business, but I suspect the gaming connection would not be obvious to an editor unless you chose to mention it. An example:

Several years ago, a new TV series came out -- "Vampires 90210" or something like that. It was a big Aaron Spelling drama production about vampires, wiht lots of politics, romance, and bloodsucking in it. It was a lot like "Melrose Place" with slightly nicer and more likeable characters.

Anyway, it wasn't just about generic "vampires". It was about White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade vampires. It was OBVIOUSlY about these vampires. No effort was made to hide the connection: they came in clans, with Gangrel that lived out in the woods and turned into wolves, and violent street-ganger Brujah and power-brokering Ventrue, and they used all the names and terminology that White Wolf coined.

The one thing the series did not do, however, was mention White Wolf. Or the game. Anywhere. Not in a tie-in, not in a footnote in the credits, not in the magazine promos. As far as I know, there wa no official acknowledgement of the connection whatsoever. For all I know, the show didn't even get White Wolf's approval and the reason it folded was lawsuits rather than bad ratings.

But regardless of the reason, my point is that this was a big-ticket production with lots of people involved and nation-wide network TV audience waiting for it, based on one of the most successful RPGs out there. And they didn't see fit to acknowledge a connection between the two.

If you submit a WorldTree manuscript to a publisher without a cover letter stating "Based on the WorldTree RPG setting", then I will lay odds that the editor will not look at it thinking "gaming fiction".

Even if you mention it in the cover letter, but carefully -- say, for example: "My writing credits include WorldTree, a work I co-authored with my wife and published by PadWolf Press. This novel is based in the same setting" -- then, again, I doubt the editor is going to assume "gaming fiction". OK, maybe he'll Google "WorldTree". But I'd expect him to read the first page or two of the manuscript and decide whether or not he likes it based on that, before bothering to do any research on you.

And whether or not it can slide under the radar of an editor as "not gaming fiction", it can certainly go into bookstores without being marketed as a gaming tie-in. The question is "Do you want it to be tied to the RPG sourcebook?"