Courtesy of the very kind Marilee Brothers, I had the chance to blather about the three-ring circus we call publishing on her most excellent blog. If you’re interested in what I think about small publishers, self-publishing, and the Big Six, you should hop over there. If not, you should go there anyway as there is a wealth of fascinating posts by far more knowledgeable and interesting people, all on your favourite subject*.

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*Books and publishing, of course. What did you think I meant?

If you are reading this, the chances are about four to one that it is because I am a finalist in the Sydney Writers Centre, Best Australian Blogs, 2011, Competition. That’s what my site stats tell me, anyway. Believe me, I’m as amazed as you are to find my blog has made it so far. Apart from a general feeling of chuffedness and a bit of bragging to my wife and daughter, I hadn’t given much thought to what this means.

Then I noticed my site stats and the big spikes in the number of visitors on the days when announcements have been made. Now I feel vaguely guilty. I mean, all you nice people popping over to take a look at my blog! I should have done something nice for you all, put up a couple of deep and profound posts, changed the banner to a big “Welcome!” sign, tried to flog you a book, or something.

Ah well, another day, another blunder. Too late now, I suppose.

Unless…

Nyah! There’s no chance I could win. I mean, there are some truly exceptional blogs in my category (and I already follow them all, by the way) and anyone in their right mind would see that at a glance. Still, I didn’t expect to be a finalist, either. So, just in case, the following paragraph is for you, kind stranger. (Regular readers can go back to writing desperate pleas to publishers and agents.)

Hello, and welcome to the Graham Storrs blog. Don’t let this post fool you, I can be quite sensible, even interesting, sometimes. So, take a few minutes to skim through previous posts. The gold nuggets are in there somewhere. Probably. If not, well, at least you will go away inspired by the thought that, if my blog can be a Sydney Writers Centre, Best Australian Blogs, 2011, Competition finalist, then so could yours.

Thank you for dropping by.

Happy New Year everybody!

First off, thanks to everyone who took advantage of my publisher’s Holiday Special and snagged a cheap copy of TimeSplash. Astute shoppers will notice that the offer has now closed. Personally, I’d like to keep the price that low all year round but it’s not up to me. Instead, I hope you’ll find it is still good value at the price the publisher sets. You’ll still find it discounted on sites like Amazon, and Fictionwise – just not quite so much.

New Year’s Resolutions

I’d like to tell you about my resolutions, but I didn’t make any. I never do. I have enough plans and goals to keep any anal retentive happy, I just don’t set them at the turn of the year. My Big Push for the year is to get an agent. Hopefully, I’ll achieve this before all the book shops (and then all the publishers) go out of business, otherwise my exciting new agent won’t have anyone left to sell my books to. In a way, it would be nice if all the book shops (and publishers) stopped yelling at the tide to go back and just quietly turned up their toes. At least then the market would be nice and simple again. We’d all be self-publishing because there would be no other way to get a book out.

It’s nice that the agents I’m approaching tell me I write very well and so on, but it would be nicer if they didn’t also say things like “but I’m getting out of the fiction market before I starve,” or “but I can only take on one new client per decade now and their books have to give me an orgasm whenever I touch the title page.” When the book shops have all gone broke, and the publishers have all gone broke, the agents will have to get jobs as freelance editors or book publicists for all the self-publishing authors who are also going broke.

Work In Progress

Meanwhile, I keep on tapping at the old keyboard. My current WIP is tentatively called Mindrider and is based on one of my short stories of the same name. It’s dark. The protagonist is an alien parasite who lives in people’s brains and it’s sometimes just a tiny bit difficult to make him a sympathetic character. But I like a challenge. It’s all written in first person from the parasite’s POV too. Another challenge. I’m enjoying it so much, I can easily see me doing a whole series based on these characters. I’m 50,000 words into it, with maybe another 40,000 to go. Then I can get back to the space opera this book interrupted – about a 10,000-year-old robot who is helping humanity fight off an alien invasion. You know what? Being a writer is like being a kid in a toy shop. There are so many wonderful things to play with, you don’t know what to pick up next. There are a couple of anthologies I’d like to do stories for too (actually, four) but I’m so much into novel-writing these days that I write very few short stories.

2010 In Review

Not shabby at all.

Concluding Remarks

By for now. I’m looking forward to chatting with you all in 2011. So don’t be shy now, and don’t be a stranger. There’s plenty of space in the comments section below for everybody. I hope you all have a good and successful year too.

Graham.

This is probably my last post before Christmas, so let me wish you all a great one. I love Christmas and I love having my family here for the celebrations, so I’ll be having a good time. I’ve also lined up my Christmas reading – for all the quiet time that never quite materialises.

As a thank you for visiting my blog during the year, I have thee things I’d like to offer you for your own Christmas reading:

First off, I have persuaded my publisher to reduce the price of my novel TimeSplash for the holiday season. Click on the TimeSplash cover image on the left and you can pick up TimeSplash at the special holiday price of $2.50. It’s only on sale at the publisher’s site.

Secondly, if that doesn’t tempt you. I have put together a set of six, short sci-fi stories, all based in the same ‘world’ – some previously published in magazines or anthologies but some brand new – and published them as an ebook on Smashwords. The collection includes my prize-winning story ‘All the Way’, and the Christmas story ‘Last Christmas’, and it’s yours for free using the following code:

‘Placid Point: Tales from the History of Transhumanity’ by Graham Storrs, https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19879 coupon code PJ92A (expires Jan 1 2011)

Finally, I’ve written a short Christmas tale for Jodi Cleghorn’s themed Christmas collection “Deck the Halls”. Twenty-four short stories on the theme will appear on the Lierary Mixtape blog on 24th December (Aussie time) and will later be available as an ebook. I’ve already seen a few of these stories and I think you’ll like them.

Have a good read and a safe Christmas and New Year,

Graham.

What does a novelist need from a publisher? The question might sound a bit daft but, when publishing your own writing is so easy and so cheap, and finding a publisher is so hard, a writer really needs a good answer to this question. A related question is, what does a novelist need from an agent? Again, finding an agent is a lot of work and there is no guarantee of success, so the sensible writer really should be asking whether it is worth it. I want to tackle each in turn, looking at the services each provides and the costs and benefits of each compared to self-publishing. So, today, let’s look at what it takes to do it yourself.

Going It Alone

First, to establish some kind of baseline, let’s say you are interested in having your novels appear in print, in English, in all the main markets (US, UK, Canada, Australia) and you’d also like an ebook edition, available globally from all the major online retailers, and, in the future maybe, an audiobook edition (on disc and by download)  and sales in translation in various other countries.

You need professional editing. I’m sorry, you do. I don’t care how good you think you are. Try it just once and you will be convinced. You could pay for this outright or do a royalty deal with an editor. Let’s say it costs you US$1500 to get the editing done. (You can probably get it done for much less if you shop around.) You will also need cover art. This is much cheaper and you can probably get a good job done for US$100 or so. If professional graphic designers are too expensive, find a starving student. There really is no way to avoid these costs so, if you’re self-publishing, you must just suck it up.

After that, setting up and publishing an ebook is essentially free, and very easy. If you use a service like Smashwords (and are happy to say they are your publisher) you can even get a free ISBN.  They take 15% off the top of every sale but handle all the ecommerce side, don’t ask for any rights, and are non-exclusive. They have distribution deals with many large players so global distribution in mutiple formats is covered.

For print, you would probably go print-on-demand (POD) and there are many services that will let you do this with no set-up costs. Print books (unlike ebooks) don’t just format themselves. You will need to design the book – choose the fonts, the layout, the size, and so on. Book design is a skill that some people believe is essential to create a high-quality printed book. I absolutely agree. However, most books you read could have been put together by anyone with a copy of Word and a couple of hours to spare. My advice, unless you have an artistic bent and a good eye for aesthetics, find a book you like the look of  and copy it’s style. It’s an area where an amateur with decent word-processing skills can get results that are quite acceptable. The POD company will effectively sell you each copy for the cost of production plus a profit margin. You can then add your own margin and resell the book (through Amazon, say.) Some are affilliated to retail sites. You will probably want an ISBN (which enables listing in catalogues) and the cost of these very much depends on where you live. Some countries issue them for free, some charge you a small fortune. Are they worth it? If you want to try to sell through (physical) bookshops, and many of the big online outlets, then yes. If you’re only selling through your own website, then no. If they’re free or cheap where you live, get one.

So far, you’ve spent less than US$2,000 and your book is on sale in print and electronically around the world. Is anyone buying it? Almost certainly not. Figures (which are a couple of years old now) show that the average self-published print book sells 150 copies. That includes the enthusiasts who do print runs of thousands of books which then fill up their garage forever (still counts as ssales as far as the printers are concerned), and the few, the very few, successes who sell a thousand or two thousand copies. Sales in double-digits are quite normal. If you’re selling at a $5 markup on the printer’s price, you are probably going to spend four times more on production than you recover in sales.

So you need to think about promotion. You need to print at least 50 copies of the book to give away free to reviewers (another unavoidable cost which just pushed your outlay up past US$2,500.) If you’re lucky, you’ll get a handful of reviews out of this. Most of the reviewers you want – the big newspapers, the literary magazines, the genre magazines, the big websites and blogs – will not even look at a self-published book. So you’re left with the small-fry, and your social networking buddies. Work damned hard, do the blog tours and the blog interviews and the Twitter and Facebook promotions, pester your local book shops to hold a book signing or two, run a launch party, send out press releases, and so on and so on, and you might make a few thousand people aware of your book. Maybe one per cent of those people will buy a copy. If your book is really, really good, this is where it has a chance to take off, because now you have done all the promotion you can, and it’s down to other people to mention your book to their friends, write about it on their blogs, and generally spread the word. If it’s anything less than excellent, this is the point where your book flops. You spent $2,500, you sold 150 copies, you lost nearly $2,000, and spent every spare minute you had for the best part of six months on publishing and promoting it.

Better luck next time.

In a future post I will come back to the questions of what a novelist needs from a publisher and an agent.

Well, I feel I am no longer a sci-fi novice. I’m just home from the World Science Fiction Convention, WorldCon 68, and I have the post-con exhaustion to prove it. I met up with my old Orbiteer buddies (the guys who started all this for me) and got the outstanding news that yet another one of us has made it into print. Joanne Anderton has just signed a two-book deal (which I’m sure she’ll announce any moment now)! Anyone who has read Joanne’s work will not be in the least bit surprised. Anyone who hasn’t should shoot off to her blog and keep watching for the release date.

Meanwhile, while I was away, Aussie writer Gary Kemble published an interview with me on his Posterous blog (and it is also up on the Kemblog.) Gary has become a bit of a mover and shaker in the local speculative fiction scene in recent years – one of those people who contributes a lot to the genre, so I gladly recommend that (after you’ve seen the interview) you spend a while looking at the amazing things he’s doing. And, if you like dark fantasy and horror, make sure you read his stuff.

And thank heavens for ebooks! I took my Kindle away with me and even with all that travel and a week away from home – during which I read two novels and a load of short stories – it was nowhere near needing a recharge. Such a great device. I even got to sit in the sun on the rare occasions that it was shining – something you just couldn’t do with a non-e-ink device.

I’ll post more later – you’re not sick of hearing about WorldCon yet are you? – but right now I have a thousand things to catch up on. Be seeing you.

I read yet another blog post recently about writers not following submission guidelines. This one was by a publisher, but I’ve also read them from agents and magazine editors. Well, yes, writers should follow the submission guidelines. The fact that every agent and editor in the whole world has ever-so-slightly different requirements notwithstanding, it is impolite and just plain self-destructive not to do that extra bit of work if they really want you to.

The interesting thing about this particular complaint – which, again, I find occurs quite often – is that the publisher used the ‘job interview’ metaphor to describe what goes on in the initial contacts between publisher and writer. In the publisher’s mind, they are interviewing applicants for a job. Since there are many applicants for each ‘post’, these applicants had better take great pains to present themselves well, they said. They ought to ingratiate themselves. The publisher even used the phrase “asking a favour” to describe what a query letter is about, which is a rather extreme view even for the publishing world. Even job applicants are not supplicants.

It doesn't have to be like this.

It really won’t do. My own reaction to publishers and agents who display this kind of attitude is to step back sharply and keep my distance. As a writer, one has to remember that signing with a publisher is the beginning – you both hope – of a long and successful business relationship. You are not applying for a job. You are agreeing to a mutually beneficial commercial arrangement in which the other party will also have obligations, will also be expected to contribute their time and skills, and will need to perform to your satisfaction. It is hardly likely to be a professional or satisfying relationship if one party considers that they are doing the other a favour by participating in it.

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.