Just a quick note to let you know I have been interviewed by the lovely A.M. Harte on her quillsandzebras blog. Anyone who has read my book, TimeSplash, may wonder what is the only thing that my uber-villain, Sniper, and I have in common.  Well, the answer is…  just a click away at quillsandzebras.

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.

The TimeSplash Non-Stop 24-hour Round-the-World Twitter Tour starts soon. The process is complicated but all you need to know is that I’ll be in your timezone between 7pm and 8pm during the next 24 hours. To shout out to me as I go by, send me a tweet on Twitter.

This is my Twitter ID:  @graywave  ( http://twitter.com/graywave )

I’ll be using the hashtag  #timesplash if you’d like to follow the whole thing (and have lots of stamina and a very high tolerance for me saying “Hello New York”, “Hola Argentina” “Gruetzi Switzerland” and such for the next 24 hours.)

Don’t forget to shout. And if you know people in odd places, tell them to shout out too. I’ve a feeling some parts of this are going to be very lonely :-}

A survey of book promotion tactics was conducted by The Savvy Book Marketer in December, 2009, and is reported today. It asked a number of authors what their book promotion strategy would involve in 2010. You can check the method and the outcome there. I just want to look at the list of tactics they came up with and try to get a feel for how appropriate they might be for marketing an ebook. The list, most popular at the top, is this:

1. Social networking and social media
2. Blogging
3. Seeking book reviews
4. Seeking testimonials and endorsements
5. Press releases
6. E-zines or email marketing
7. Radio and television talk shows
8. Speaking or teleseminars
9. Article marketing
10. Book signings

There are some obvious things to say about this, so let’s say them first. The people surveyed clearly included a lot of non-fiction authors. So I can eliminate items 8 and 9 as not really relevant for a novel. I can also eliminate 10. With an ebook, there is nothing to sign, and, for that matter, no reason why a bookshop (the traditional venue for such things) would let you in the door. So that leaves:

1. Social networking and social media
2. Blogging
3. Seeking book reviews
4. Seeking testimonials and endorsements
5. Press releases
6. E-zines or email marketing
7. Radio and television talk shows

1 and 2 are no-brainers. Anybody with a book to promote in any format and little or no money to spend, will be all over the social networks and blogsphere.

Seeking book reviews (3) might also seem obvious but it isn’t an avenue that is open to ebook writers in most genres. Where ebooks have been popular for years – in erotica and romance – there are dozens of popular and authoritative review sites on the Web. In all other genres, book reviewers will almost never review an ebook. Only rare exceptions exist among the popular review websites and online magazines. I am unaware of any exceptions among the major offline reviewers. So we can scratch that one. Over the next decade, as it becomes normal to release ebook-only novels (and as more reviewers buy ebook readers!) this will change. But in 2010, ebooks just don’t get reviewed.

4 is an interesting one. I have read a number of advice blogs saying you should do it and telling you how to go about it, but it is an amazingly difficult thing to bring oneself to do. You have to approach famous writers you admire and respect in your own genre – complete strangers, of course unless your damned lucky – and ask them to read your book and say something quotably nice about it. Given that many such writers have already come out and said, on their own blogs, that they hate being pestered this way, and some have said flat out that they won’t do it, I just can’t bring myself to ask it. I screwed up my courage in one single instance and asked a very well-known writer I’d had some slight dealings with, if he would look at my book. I then waited, cringing in embarrassment, for a reply that never did come.

5 is also interesting. I could put out press releases but who, really, would be interested? Not the national press, certainly not the international press. Which leaves the local press. Since I live out in the boondocks, my local press is full of reports on farming and country shows, and letters to the editor complaining about the global conspiracy to fool us into thinking there’s such a thing as climate change, or explaining, with Bible quotes, why God dislikes liberal politicians. I’m pretty sure I could get into a local paper but who in my area has even heard of ebooks? Who, in a town where they play country and western music in the supermarket, is interested in sci-fi?

Many e-marketers advise you to convert your social networking successes into cash by creating mailing lists. You get everyone to sign up for your regular magazine or newsletter and then, cunningly, blast them all with spam emails when the book is released. This is the strategy I assume is meant in 6. Well, I think such practices are evil. Sadly for me, I think most marketing practices are evil. Like a lot of writers, I just don’t have the personality type it takes to sell things.

And as for radio and television talk shows (7), the idea seems to suffer the same drawbacks as sending out press releases.

So, for an author with an ebook to promote, who is squeamish about marketing, and doesn’t live in a major metropolis, 1 and 2, and to a very limited extent 3, seem to be the only options available. Of course, ‘social networking’, ‘blogging’ and ‘reviews’ can mean a lot more than is obvious. Blog tours, viral promo videos, Twitter parties, online competitions, and so on, are all in the potential mix. The online activity around a new book can be quite vibrant and exciting. And, as for reviews, even if the big-name sci-fi magazines won’t review ebooks, ten kindly bloggers with readerships of a thousand or so, might easily reach more actual readers than a major print review magazine could ever hope for.

Please say hello to the newest member of The New York Journal of Books‘ reviews team. And, while you’re at it, why not nip across and have a look at my first review for this new, online book review journal. (Actually, if you read my recent review here of Dawkins’ Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, you could skip that step, since it is almost the same. Almost, I say, but not quite. When you write a review for a review mag, you can’t adopt the same chatty, personalised, approach that I do in my blog reviews. And if that difference intrigues you, you might like to go and take a look anyway, to compare them.)

Why favour the New York Journal of Books with my erudition, you may ask. Well, I’ve been looking for some non-fiction projects to become involved in, lately, the kind of project that is both writerly and related to my interests, that will involve me more in the writing world, and which will raise my profile in literary circles. I’ve come to being a published writer from a long, long time of wandering in the wilderness. My name is much better known in other, completely unrelated spheres of life. Now I need to change that.

And by great good fortune, I came upon the NYJB. It’s a new venture (it started last month!) and, I think, an exciting one. As Editor-in-Chief and founder, Ted Sturtz says:

In light of the shift from print to online content, there is an opportunity to establish a purely online book review positioned to capture the ongoing growth of the online audience. Moreover, by gradually assembling a broad panel of highly-credentialed reviewers the journal is positioning to offer far more comprehensive coverage of new books than any other book review. While it will be critical to review major new titles as they are released, the Journal aims to review more books in niche or non-mainstream genres than are covered by the current major review publications. The NYJB aims to also review more books written by first-time authors and books published by smaller independent houses, providing respected reviews for authors and independent publishers that are generally spurned by the major review publications. The review also intends to review books in niches that are generally ignored by mainstream publishers. In short, the aim is to establish NYJB as a review widely recognized to be on par with the most respected traditional reviews, while reviewing a far larger number of books.

With so many highly respected review sources either folding or being drastically cut back, I’m very pleased to get behind the NYJB and to help create a top-class online review site in the tradition of (the struggling) Kirkus and the great New York Times Book Review. Authors and publicists, you should seriously consider adding the New York Journal of Books to your list of review sites for your next release.

The Queensland Writers Centre is touring blogs again. This time the tour has a theme: Writers’ Desks. For some reason writers’ desks are fascinating and pictures of same are hugely popular. So QWC is probably onto a winner here. However, when they asked me to put up a picture of my own desk as part of the tour, I was painfully aware that I’ve only recently done that.

Fascinating as my desk is, I can’t keep posting pictures of it. It’s not as if it has seasonal changes or anything. So I’ve taken the opportunity to correct a glaring omission from my last picture and show you my computer ‘desktop’. This should be just as interesting as the wooden one since, for me at least, the computer is where 95% of the work gets done.

The desktop that really matters

For those without broadband (or using Telstra NextG, which is almost as bad) I apologise for the size of this picture. Even so, it isn’t big enough for you to recognise all the icons. That’s why the animation provides labels for the following groups.

• Group A: Various mobile device managers (phone, camera, MP3 player and so on.)
• Group B: Internet stuff (browser, email, Skype, Twitter, and FTP client)
• Group C: Office software (mostly Open Office but also PowerPoint)
• Group D: Music score editing software. (Yes, I write music. It’s a little hobby of mine.)
• Group E: Image editing software (Paint Shop Pro, IrfanView and IconEasel)
• Group F: Media players (Windows Media Player and WinAmp)
• Group G: HTML editors (HTML Kit and Komodo Edit)
• Group H: Sundry utilities (antivirus, encryption, DVD writers, backup, 3G wireless client, and Celestia, which lets me view the universe from various perspectives)
• Group I: Various ebook readers and ebook creators.
• Group J: Stuff to do with my current writing project (the Open Office file itself, my multifunction tracking sheet, and a program called StoryBook that I’ve been trying out as a way of organising the background info – I’m not getting along well with it.)
• Group K: Games (basically, the only computer game I ever play is Freecell – a patience-style card game.)

I should also mention the background picture. I change my background quite often and it is usually an astronomical theme. This one is a long-exposure shot of the space shuttle taking off in Florida last year. I love pictures of astronauts on EVAs, Hubble deep field shots, and the ISS. Images like these help keep me inspired.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening February to April 2010. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog.

Tara Moss is running a series of posts over on her blog on writers’ desks and what they look like. So I took a snapshot of my own, to see what it might reveal about me. Well, what do you think?

It was the maid's day off.

Looking at it with an outsider’s eye, I suppose it looks rather scruffy. Even looking at it with my own eye, it looks that way. Well, if I’d have known you were coming…

Just out of shot on the left is a filing cabinet so full I can’t get another sheet of paper in it – yet I can’t bear to throw out any of the junk it contains, which I never look at. Over on the right, again out of shot, is a bookcase and some drawers. The drawers are full of rubbish and the bookcase is full of books, CDs (mostly software), souvenirs, and a collection of mugs, each of which has its own story.

Left to right on the desktop are:

• Some unattended admin (receipts, letters, etc.)
• My pens, pencils , post-its and what have you
• My notebook (with the only pencil I actually use lying on top of it – a beautiful, lacquered, Waterman propelling pencil that my wife gave me over 20 years ago)
• A small weather station, ironically placed right in front of the window (shades of Subterranean Homesick Blues) The window, by the way, has a fabulous view across hills and forests.
• My Asus EeePC netbook, with a music CD lying open on top of it (a Christmas-themed collection of rock songs, compiled by a friend in Switzerland.)
• Tissues, spare ink cartridge, printer…
• The round white thing is a Stargate Atlantis coffee warming pad. It is, perhaps, the most useless thing I own (my Airedale excepted), but it lights up in neon blue when you switch it on and looks cool.
• Behind the coffee warmer is a collection of family photos (so I don’t forget who they are), a tray filled with flash memory sticks, acquired here and there, a phone and, out of sight, a bunch of chargers, USB hubs, transformers, and such. I actually have the wiring for 13 electronic devices on this desk. You can see some of it dangling attractively down the back.
• Then there’s my external hard disc drive (for backups)
• My dear old computer (actually, my original dear old computer died a few months ago but I got a new dear old computer with the exact same specification for $300 on eBay)
• To the right of the computer is a hideous but extremely reliable and accurate clock
• Another USB hub and an MP3 player
• A copy of Advice to Writers by Jon Winokur, which I won recently in a competition and which I dip into while my machine is booting, or I’m waiting for software updates, or whatever.
• Just visible at the top right is the corner of my whiteboard. This has the ranges of various instruments and voices written on musical staves, phone numbers, passwords, and Linux shell commands.

Just to complete the picture, the room also contains the gutted remains of my original dear old computer on the floor, a guest chair, a pile of wires of various kinds, pictures around the walls that are mostly from work-related events, a small collection of poker dice, a box full of music CDs I keep meaning to give away, and my guitar.

If you can imagine me slumped in that big, black chair, typing with three fingers at this blog post, you pretty much have my working life in a nutshell. It’s a good room and, I have to say, a good life.

My perception of the Web has changed. I used to think it was full of people like me, ordinary folk, going about their business, finding things that interested them, chatting to friends and acquaintances, but I was wrong. Oh, there may be such people – millions of them – but they don’t really matter. What matters are the eyeballs. The eyeballs float above this solid mass of ordinary people, surging in flocks from one site to another, drawn there by ‘optimised text’, pausing only to graze on the ’5 ways to increase your traffic’, or the ’7 ways to maximise newsletter registrations’. Then they are off again, swarming to another site with tasty ‘keywords’ or juicy ‘anchor text’.

To the Web marketing gurus, the cattlemen (and women) who can herd eyeballs around the Web at will, none of this talk sounds strange. Eyeballs, to these expert manipulators, are like floating voters to the politician, free electrons to the elecctrical engineer, mum and dad investors to the financial advisor. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is their equivalent of election promises, electrical potential, or a glossy prospectus, respectively. Eyeballs are a crop to be harvested.

Why do I care? Because I’m a writer. And that makes be a small businessman. And that makes me a marketer with no budget and only one place to look for customers: the Web. So I’ve been reading lots and lots of Web marketing articles lately. I’ve been learning how to structure my Web presence so as to funnel eyeballs to my main site. I’ve been hearing about how to woo eyeballs with value-added commenting and by taking a ‘genuine interest’ in their lives. All the marketers’ not-so-subtle tricks of language and persuasion, are now mine. I’ve read and absorbed them. My own eyeballs have flitted hither and yon like butterflies, alighting here and there to sip the sweet nectar of marketing wisdom.

“Most of this is just common sense,” the gurus tell you, disarmingly. In fact, most of it is. Most of it, given the uniformity of the message, is probably just what they’ve read on each other’s blogs. The rest is a tiny dollop of personal experience (no-one has been in this game too many years), the ability to drop names (names like ‘Google Blog Search’, ‘Alltop’, and ”TweetMeme’), and a sprinkling of graphs.

Proof that doing nothing clever also produces spikes in site visits

The graphs are an especially nice touch. They don’t actually present real evidence. There is no science behind this. No-one is publishing academic papers on the effect of guest blogging on RSS feed subscriptions. There is no ‘marketing theory’ that generates testable hypotheses that lead to solid facts. What there is is guru A showing a graph of how using a particular search term on one site over a few days last year produced an apparent spike in visits (which, may look impressive, but is statistically meaningless) or guru B showing a graph of how guest blogging on a popular site led to a sudden increase in Twitter followers.

In fact, the graphs reveal something very profound about eyeball herding. The people who do it for a living are the same kind of people who sell soap. Once you’ve absorbed the common sense from the message, you should try to forget the rest. There are some people who can sell soap and there are some people who cannot. If you’re not one of life’s soap salespeople, there is no graph in the universe that will help you become one.

And the point of all this eyeball herding? To get eyeballs to a place, physically and mentally, where the marketer can finally make his sales pitch. If the marketer ‘owns’ enough eyeballs and the pitch will yield a high enough ‘conversion rate’, he or she will, at last, make some money.

So let’s cut to the chase, so I can stop reading all that stuff. What I’m selling is my new novel, TimeSplash, a near-future sci-fi thriller. If you’re an eyeball a lover of great stories, go to the TimeSplash website and sign up so I can tell you when it’s available to buy. No obligation. No pressure. And a free bar of soap with every ten purchases.

Well, thank God that’s over.

This will be the last post on this blog before Christmas. I can’t promise you that it’s the last post of the year, but for now I’m signing out. My daughter’s arriving the day after tomorrow and there’s lots to do before then.

I want to leave you with a little Christmas present though. My short story ‘Last Christmas’ is available for you to download as a PDF or in Mobipocket/Kindle format or you can read it online in your browser. Readers who were with me last year may have seen this before (if there are any of you, thanks for sticking around!) Who knows, maybe you’ll see it again next year too! New readers, I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

A Happy Holiday to everyone!

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?