Over the past year or so, wisdom has been accumulating in the blogsphere about who should self-publish, what they should self-publish, and when. The advice seems to amount to this:

• If no-one else is going to publish it (because, say, it was commercially published once but is now out of print, or it’s new but your agent can’t sell it) AND
• It is good (which you can tell because it was once commercially published, or your agent has been trying to sell it) AND
• It has been professionally edited (this is harder to judge, but if you paid someone who works as an editor and you both agonised over the text for weeks or months, getting it to the point where the editor was satisfied, you’re probably OK) AND
• It has a good cover, designed by a professional AND
• You are willing to spend hundreds of hours promoting it, or thousands of dollars paying a professional to promote it THEN
• You should self-publish.

OR

• If no-one else is going to publish it (because, say, it would only be interesting to your immediate family) AND
• The quality doesn’t matter (because your immediate family will only be looking at the pictures anyway) AND
• You don’t care at all if only five people ever see it THEN
• You should self-publish.

Nevertheless, with self-publishing being so easy these days, and ebook publishing not necessarily having any up-front costs (except cover design) it is very tempting to give it a go.

Strangely, the temptation is probably higher for published authors than for not-yet-published ones. Published authors have already had (on average) ten years of being rejected by agents and publishers. They have already felt the frustration of having the publisher, agent, and retailer between them take 90% of the sale price of each book. They have already felt the strain of running themselves ragged to promote a book when no-one else in the food chain seems to care. They have already gnashed their teeth over their lack of control over the pricing, positioning and presentation of what used to be their own property, the product upon which their whole future depends.

Yet commercial publication is still the best option for the new writer. (Joe Konrath may be demonstrating that, for established writers, or writers with a huge ‘platform’, it no longer is.) If it all goes well, it is by far the best – and easiest – way to make sales and establish a reputation. If it all goes well.

And this is all by way of a preamble to the announcement that I have just self-published a small collection of short stories. Some of them have already been published in magazines, some have not. What links them is that they are all set in the same ‘world’ and all belong to the unfolding story of a group of transhumans who inhabit a virtual world called Placid Point.

The collection is called “Placid Point: Tales from the History of Transhumanity” and is available in all popular ebook formats from Smashwords (over the next few weeks, it will also be available through Amazon, B&N, the iBookstore, and other major retailers.) I’ve set the price at $1.99, which I hope you’ll agree is reasonable. I don’t actually intend to sell bucketloads of this collection (unlike my debut novel, TimeSplash, which I do want to sell lots of) but I want these stories out there because they are in the same world as the novel I have just finished writing (The Credulity Nexus) and, if that is ever published, it would be nice to be able to point readers to a book of related short stories.

Placid Point: Tales from the History of Transhumanity - A collection of short stories by Graham Storrs

In the brave new world of electronic publishing – in which we live right now – picking up an unknown book by an unknown author has become a much bigger risk than it used to be in the old, print-only days of a couple of years ago. This is because, on the major retails sites, the line between commercially-published and self-published ebooks has become rather blurred. Sometimes it is impossible to tell which is which without looking at the content. Sometimes, of course, even the content won’t give you a clue, but that is only in a few, very rare cases. So, if you pick up an ebook at random, and it turns out to be self-published, the chances are that you have wasted your very, very precious time.

I don’t want to disparage all self-published work. A small amount of it is very good. I just want to point out that finding the good among the bad is hard work. Let’s face it, finding the good among the bad in commercially-published books is hard enough. But, with commercially-published work, the book has gone through a sort of quality control process that self-published work typically has not. It has been read by an agent (most likely) and the agent has liked it. The agent may have worked with the writer to improve the book. Then it has been read by an intern at a publishing house and, if she liked it, it has been passed up the line to a commissioning editor. If that editor also liked it, and could convince an acquisitions meeting that the book looked saleable, it probably got into print (or ebook format) but only after a further, very important process; the manuscript was edited.

It seems to me, therefore, that the “vetting” publishers do is in two parts. In one part, the publisher (and the agent, if one is involved) makes a judgement about commercial potential. Here, publishers (and agents) mostly get it wrong, judging by the statistics. (Most published novels – perhaps as many as 80% – do not “earn out” their advances. The figures for début novels are very much worse.) In another part the editor (and perhaps an agent) makes a judgement about the manuscript’s quality and then actively works with the author to bring the book up to the best standard they can achieve between them.

When it comes to giving the reading public the assurance that an unknown book is a good bet, it is the editor’s part that appears to be really crucial in all this. The commercial judgement by the publisher seems to be not much better than throwing darts at the slush pile. The recognition of good writing and the work that polishes the manuscript, is what makes the real difference between commercially-published and (most) self-published books.

It looks as if there is a huge opportunity here for editors. Since it is their judgement and their work that gives the public its confidence in a published book, it is the editors that readers and reviewers should be paying attention to. For this to happen, editors would need to begin branding themselves and working with independent (self-published) authors as well as publishing houses. Book reviewers and readers could then ask themselves the question, “Is this a book that has been worked on by a well-respected editor?” regardless of who published it.

I’m not suggesting that an editor’s brand would ever outsell an author’s brand – although for top editors with great judgement and skill, perhaps it would – only that editors are what self-published books need, and editor brand awareness is what reviewers and the buying public needs so they can tell, by glancing at the cover, whether a book is a good risk or not. Then the distinction between commercially-published and self-published can safely disappear.

Look out! It's BP!

G’day mates. It’s a bright and sunny winter’s morning as I write, Independence Day in the US, and just another gorgeous 5th July here in Australia. Since I’ve been neglecting my readers lately, I thought I’d throw in a simple update on my writing life just to keep things moving along.

My head has been buried in my netbook for the past few weeks as I tackle my latest novel, Loner’s Deep. It’s part 1 of a three-part spce opera (and a sequel to another three-part space opera of mine). I’m just about at the half-way mark on my first draft and it is rolling along quite nicely, thank you. The structure of the story is one I haven’t really used before – several groups of characters whose story arcs are leading them inexorably to one point in space and time, where they will all meet and resolve everything. It’s fun but very much complicated by the scale of the piece. It is set in a far-future time when we have colonised stars out to about 50 light years around the Earth, but we don’t have faster-than-light travel. Yet the story visits many different planets and the characters travel huge distances. This makes the timings and the interactions rather complicated. One of the main characters, for example, has a journey of 55 light years, during which she ages about seven years. Another character, whom she will meet, travels just 8 LY and ages about one year. Yet both their stories unfold side-by-side in the book. I’m not sure I can make it clear to the reader that events in their stories are not simultaneous until the very end. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing some plumbing around the house – the perfect antidote to time dilation calculations – and trying to find an agent for ‘The Credulity Nexus’ – also rather mind-numbing.

Over on Smashwords, they’re having their Summer/Winter sale. I put a children’s story there a few months ago (the picture of the dog on the left is the cover) so if you want to pick up a copy for free, July is the time to do it. Smashwords is a company I have a lot of admiration for. They seem to be doing everything right and I wish them huge success in the future.

So, a happy Nice Winter’s Day to everyone, and, for those still celebrating Independence Day, maybe you should have kicked the Brits out of the Gulf of Mexico while you were at it.

Today, May 4th, is the second anniversary of the commencement of this blog. I started it on my return from a writer’s retreat which I credit for kick-starting my career as a published author. So this anniversary is my day for taking stock of how all that is going.

Here is what I wrote in the initial post, and here is what I wrote last year on this day.

In the past year:

• I have had my debut novel, TimeSplash, accepted, edited and published. I only have complete data from the first two weeks of sales at the moment, so I can’t even tell you yet if it is selling well.
• I have been promoting TimeSplash as much as I can online. I built TimeSplash its own website and it even has its own blog. For the past two months I have been running a blog tour which has had eighteen stops on it, Before that, I did a 24-hour, non-stop, round-the-world Twitter tour.
• I have had seven short stories published – two in anthologies
• I’ve won prizes in two short story contests – one being the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest 2009.
• I have continued to earn a trickle of money from short story publishing – but my production of short stories has dropped considerably. I wrote only six last year.
• I finished writing and editing my novel The Credulity Nexus and have begun querying agents for it. (I’ve written to two, so far, the second only about three days ago.)
• I have begun writing a new book, Loner’s Deep, which is a space opera set in the far future (and a sequel to my not-yet-complete Emissaries trilogy. (If fame ever comes knocking, I’ll have two great space opera trilogies ready to hand it.)
• I went to a writer’s festival.
• I have been increasing my presence in the various online social networks. My blogs (this one and the TimeSplash blog have over 1,000 unique visitors a month, and my Twitter following has gone from 0 to 987 in the past year. I’ve become a little more active on Facebook and quite active on Goodreads.
• In an attempt to raise my profile (and my writerly credentials ) I’ve joined the New York Journal of Books as a reviewer. I’ve done them 5 reviews on science and science fiction books so far. Early days. If this is successful, it will also one day become a writing income stream.
• I wrote a children’s story, Hangin’ With the Monkeys. I don’t want my career to go that way, so, rather than just throw it away, I’ve self-published it, and I’m giving it away free on Smashwords.

It all adds up to a very busy year – and a successful one. I’ve finally achieved my goal of having a novel published. I’ve made some great online friends. I’ve done loads of interesting things I didn’t expect I’d be doing. I’ve learned so much about writing and about the industry.

There are two things I didn’t manage to achieve this year – and that makes them my goals between now and next May. The first is to get an agent. It is patently obvious to me, even at this early stage, that TimeSplash would have done so much better if it had been agented. The second – and it may be related – is to start making some real money from my writing, not the dribble that has been coming in so far. And that is probably more a wish than an actual goal, but it’s what I have my sights on, so let’s see what can be done.

May the Fourth be with you too.

The other day, someone in my online writers group wondered if a particular publisher was still in business. They had submitted a manuscript to them four months ago and had heard nothing. So they’d checked the website and found it hadn’t been updated since some time in 2008. Of course, old hands at the submissions game will be shaking their heads and smiling wryly. Four months is no time at all to wait! they’re thinking. Small press publishers are far too busy to worry about updating their websites. This guy is obviously a newbie and will have to learn to control his patience and live with his frustration. Worse still, these old hands will tell you that you mustn’t express your frustration, you mustn’t let your impatience show. It doesn’t matter how the publishing houses treat you, if you kick up a fuss about it, they will put a black mark against you. Commissioning editors, they say, have long memories – as do agents.

Frankly, I don’t understand this attitude. I’ve been in business for three decades. I have managed business units for some of the world’s largest corporations, and I have run my own small consultancy. I know how businesses run. I know how buying works. I know how to manage a supply chain. It’s painfully obvious to me that the world’s publishing houses are making some basic and very stupid mistakes.

At the front end of the publishing business, the companies seem to be doing better than at the back end. Their attitude to book shops – their primary market – seems to be businesslike enough.  It’s a mess, of course, horribly inefficient and the book retailers seem to have beaten the publishers up pretty well over the years, but the publishers are doing as well as they can in a market that has become overly complex and difficult for them. Marketing beyond the book retailers seems to be a rout for the publishers but they are trying hard to redefine the business so that this is considered outside their responsibility.

On the supply side, the picture is patchy. On the one hand you have editing, design, printing and related services, which are going OK. On the other, you have content acquisition and management which appears to be a disaster. Most sizeable publishers only receive submissions from agents these days, having thrown their hands up and given up trying to do it themselves. Despite having been at it for a century or two, the publishers never learned how to do this efficiently. I don’t suppose they think that agents can do it any better, but at least now they have passed a large part of the cost on to someone else.

Since agents and publishers do not know which books will succeed and which will not, they have no way of telling writers what they want (apart from saying “This, this, and this genre – oh, and anything that’s really good.”) This means writers must produce work on spec and hope it fits the requirements/hunches/moods of the moment when they submit it. Agents are not in a much better position, they have to read through heaps of queries and mountains of slush, then take a gamble on their gut feeling, imprecise knowledge of publishers’ tastes and needs, and their (often quite limited) experience. This amounts to a major inefficiency in the system. If you include authors as part of the publishing industry, this process alone pushes the overall productivity of the industry very close to zero.

The gross inefficiencies of the acquisition process, and the lack of effective process management tools, are directly responsible for much of the rough treatment of authors that ensues. If you call your local utility company, a voice recognition or menu system will channel you into appropriate queues. There you may be given an estimate of how  long you will have to wait to have your call dealt with. You may be told how many are ahead of you in the queue and this will count down for you as you wait. At the very least, the musak will be interrupted every couple of minutes so they can apologise for the delay and assure you that they are still working on getting to you.

With an agent or publisher, it is very different. You may (or most likely won’t) get an acknowledgement that your submission has arrived. After that you will hear nothing. Sometimes you will hear nothing for three, four, six, or even twelve months, before you get a one or two line pro forma rejection. Very often these days, you will wait forever. Many agents and publishers say their policy is that if you don’t hear from them, you can take that as a ‘no’!

It’s not because they’re rushed off their feet (although that is often true.) It’s not because they’re rude and selfish people (some are, some aren’t.) It’s because their business processes are ridiculous, designed for another age, and propped up by free labour and outrageous demands on salaried staff. It’s because their acquisitions business model depends on luck, rather than on knowing what they want to acquire, leading to huge amounts of additional, wasted work. It’s because their suppliers – the authors – are so desperate for success, so cowed by the system, so petrified by the old hands and the long memories of faceless decision makers, that they will put up with this shoddy treatment.

Do you think the suppliers of paper and transport and warehousing do their work on spec, hoping that the publisher will approve and pay them? Do you suppose the printers submit a quote for services and wait six months without hearing a word from the publisher, afraid that if they complain they might uspset them? Of course not. So why do writers?

Honestly, we get the publishers and agents we deserve.

Right now, the publishers stand with respect to writers as the big supermarket chains stand with respect to farmers. But, in a time when publishers and agents are teetering on the edge of complete disintermediation, this is not the time to be upsetting potential suppliers. This is the time to be raising your game. Writers have long memories too!

I’ve been looking at 2009 to check how I’ve been doing against my writerly ambitions. It’s pretty good, overall. I got eight shorts stories published and placed in two competitions. I also won a write-a-quote competition! I also had my two first print publications (both short stories in anthologies). Although I actually made money by selling stories last year, it didn’t amount to much. The biggest single return for a story was $68 (which amounted to 4c/word). On average, I earned about 1c/word last year. One trip to attend a local writing conference wiped out the whole lot many times over. If you count my time, trips to my writing group (which is 300km away and involves an overnight stay) and consumables, I doubt that a lifetime of selling short stories will ever compensate me for just this year!

Yet, strangely, I feel I’ve had a successful year.

More exciting by far was signing  my first book deal. Unspeakably wonderful as this is, sadly, it isn’t likely to make me much money either. As an unknown writer, trying to sell an e-book in a world where no-one has an e-book reader, with no publicity except what I provide for myself, in a genre that people keep saying is dead, I expect sales to be embarrassing at best. However, I will probably be happy with anything above crushing humiliation. (So please, buy the book and then tell your 5,000 Facebook friends how great it was – even if you have to lie through your teeth. You wouldn’t want my utter failure on your conscience, would you?)

The book, TimeSplash, took hundreds of hours to write and scores of hours to edit. I’ll make about $2/book on sales, so, even if I paid myself minimum wage, I’d need to make many thousands of dollars to cover all that time – and that would involve selling many thousands of books. Unfortunately, because almost nobody has ever published their first book as an e-book with no print edition, especially their first sci-fi novel – there are no good stats to suggest what sales might be. Even my publisher is working in the dark here. I’m a bit of an experiment. It could be zero. It could be a few hundred. If it goes as high as 1500, I’ll be blowing that month’s royalty cheque on a bottle of champagne.

So, it has been a good year. In fact, it’s been a great year. But there is as yet no prospect of making a living from writing. To do that, I’d probably need to be publishing four books a year, or more, and selling really well – and I’m not sure I want to be that guy. Publishing one has been hard enough!

Maybe I need an agent?

One of the first things that struck me when I became involved with writers’ groups, was that most aspiring writers can’t write. They may be full of wild imaginings, they may have stories in them, yearning to be told, but, as well as lacking the more esoteric skills of the craft, they can’t form a grammatically correct sentence and they can’t spell.

Most of the grammatical and spelling mistakes you see in people’s manuscripts are old chestnuts. They don’t know how to punctuate (especially when it comes to apostrophes,) they mix up the spellings of homophones (their, there, they’re, for example, or your and you’re,) they misspell uncommon words, they use inappropriate words, they blindly repeat common errors (like using ‘epicentre’ when they mean ‘centre’,) they don’t understand how to form plurals (especially frequently malformed ones like ‘medium’ vs ‘media’,) and they write as they speak (using ‘then’ instead of ‘than’ for example, as in, “He was bigger then his father.”)

What people who can’t spell and who don’t understand grammar fail to appreciate is that, for people who can and do, each little mistake they encounter provokes an almost physical pain. Editors and agents faced with a page full of mistakes like this will save themselves the agony of reading the whole manuscript by rejecting it as swiftly as they can.

To lack such simple skills when you aspire to publication is therefore quite an impediment, and astonishing, too, when the causes and the remedies are staring us in the face. I believe that the root of the problem is that people do not read enough well-written books, that they do not pay enough attention to what they read, and that they do not acquire the habit of speaking well.

You don’t have to read the classics to find good, grammatically-correct writing, you can find it in most published fiction. But if you want to know what it looks like, go and read some Aldous Huxley, William Golding, Margaret Atwood, Gore Vidal, and Ray Bradbury. Then, at least, you’ll have a benchmark. You do have to read carefully though. You have to consider the sentences, the word-choices, the punctuation, the arrangement of words. And you do have to read enough of it that it starts seeping into your unconscious. If you love words, if you love reading, this will hardly be a chore.

And practice speaking too. I have never seen this mentioned as an aspect of good writing, but it seems clear to me that many of the mistakes people make in their writing come directly from the way they speak. I’m not suggesting that everyone who wants to write in English should speak ‘the Queen’s English’ but that they should, at the very least, speak English.

The grammatical mistakes people make in ordinary speech are more easily forgiven – and feel less jarring – than the same mistakes seen in print. We get away with a lot when we speak but we cannot expect to receive the same latitude when we write. If you speak sloppily, if your grammar is atrocious, if you misuse words and can’t form plurals, and you are unaware of it, it is not really surprising that your writing will reflect this. So listen to what you are saying. Think about what your words mean. What’s more, don’t just let other people’s words and sentences wash over you, or into you. Listen to them and analyse them. And don’t take it for granted that a newsreader or a journalist knows how to speak or write good English; a large proportion of them do not.

And as for bloggers… Well, let’s just say that the first draft of this piece contained numerous typos. I’ll also say that the final draft of my novel, TimeSplash, came back from the copy editor buried in such a thick encrustation of markup, it was hard to find the text. You did take that pinch of salt, didn’t you?

I just won a prize in a competition. The competition was run by the Seven Writing Quotes site and the prize is Advice to Writers by Jon Winokur (ed.) To win, I had to complete the simile: “Being a writer is like…” Here’s what I said.

Being a writer is like standing naked in the High Street hoping no-one will think you look ridiculous.

Most people who are not writers will probably think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. That sense of being naked in public view is very strong indeed. Anyone who has handed a story to a friend to read will know the feeling. Anyone who has sent a manuscript to an agent or publisher will know it tenfold. You have laid yourself bare and you are asking for approval.

When they laugh, when they sneer, it cuts you to the bone. And they do, sometimes, carelessly, or gleefully. Friends, family, agents, publishers, editors, reviewers, can hurt you so much you can hardly believe it’s possible to survive it. Yet you always do, and you always expose yourself to them again, hoping this time they won’t laugh, or sneer, or turn away.

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t played with Wordle yet, it’s definitely worth ten minutes of your time.

Revealing, isn't it? (click for larger version)

If Isaac Asimov was an unknown writer and wrote the Foundation trilogy today, I doubt very much that he would have been able to get an agent or a publisher for it. I mean, just look at the writing! Endless screeds of exposition, almost everything is told, not shown, adverbs litter the text, and the dialogue tags are some of the most inventive I’ve seen. I can just imagine some of the big name agent/editor bloggers sending off the form rejection with a frustrated sigh, thinking, “Why do writers continue to make these elementary mistakes? The Web is full of guidance about the rules of good writing.”

Well, it is and it isn’t. What the Web is actually full of, what those how-to-write books are full of too, is advice on how to write for publication. It is really quite a big mistake to confuse the two.

It becomes obvious, if you go back to the sci-fi classics of your youth, or to any classics at all, that what was once publishable is very different to what is now publishable. Why is that so? Are writers better now than they once were? Of course not! All that has happened is that fashions in writing style have changed. The somewhat intellectual, discursive style of the classics has been replaced by the more staccato, visceral style of today.

Some people, of course, really do prefer books without a single adverb, where every idea, however subtle, needs somehow to be expressed by people doing things, and where the mounting jeopardy in which the hero finds himself is the primary, if not the sole reason for the reader to turn the page. For them, that is good writing. Such people can only yawn or scoff their way through Thomas Hardy, assuming they make it past the first page. Such people would find a Chekhov story that begins with a description of the weather, unbearably dull and old-fashioned.

Honestly, Mr. King (and that’s an interjection, not an adverb) I get it. If I want to sell like you, I should write like you. Trust me, FleshEatingEditor.com and all your friends, I know that’s exactly how you do want me to write (as long as I find my own voice, too, of course) because you care deeply about how well I sell. But please don’t confuse publishable writing with good writing.

Asimov is excellent because of the way he wrote, not in spite of it.