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

Voyager by Stephen J Pyne

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery by Stephen J. Pyne is a book that aims to set the West’s exploration of the Solar System in its historical context. Pyne, a historian at Arizona State University, has an “organizing conceit” for looking at this context based around three broad ages of discovery.

The first began with the great voyages of discovery by Renaissance explorers of the fifteenth century and was led off by Portugal. The second began in the Enlightenment, when mid-eighteenth century Britain and France led the way with scientific expeditions to measure the transit of Venus and measure an arc of the meridian. The third Great Age kicked off in the mid-twentieth century, tackling the exploration of the last great wildernesses of Earth—the Antarctic and the oceans—and space. Driven at first by the cold war, the great voyages that distinguish this new age of discovery are marked by technological sophistication to the point where the explorers themselves are often robots.

Whether we accept Pyne’s categories or not does not matter much. The framework provides the author with a means to explore many parallels and similarities he finds between the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern worlds and the West’s attitudes toward the three great motives for pursuing these difficult, dangerous, and expensive voyages: discovery for its own sake, the ability to do science that you can’t do at home, and finding new worlds for people to colonise or exploit.

What results is a broad and sweeping investigation of the very nature of exploration, with the larger-than-life adventure of the two Voyager spacecraft’s “grand tour” of the Solar System to give it all shape and direction.

After the introductory chapters, which do an excellent job of setting the ground for the three Great Ages and the Voyagers’ role in the present Great Age, Pyne follows the journey of the two robot explorers from their launches in 1977 to the present day and beyond.

The only way it was possible to slingshot these spacecraft to the outer reaches of the Solar System, through the heliopause and out into interstellar space, was to take advantage of a once in 176-year alignment of the outer planets. That the science and technology, as well as the political and social climates were just right at just this moment made this amazing, 33-year (and counting) voyage perhaps the defining journey of exploration of our age. Long years of cruising between planets, punctuated by brief and frantic encounters as each ship swings around a planet and moves on, gives the book its structure and its style, activity and reflection, leading us step by step into the future. As Pyne puts it, the book is “an interpretive history whose internal rhythms mimic those that led to Voyager’s launch and journey.”

We meet a number of characters along the way, not just the luminaries of the Voyager mission, including a succession of project leaders and technical specialists, and key figures like Michael Minovitch, Gary Landro, and Carl Sagan, but also the explorers of previous Great Ages: Magellan, da Gama, Columbus, Cooke, Lewis and Clarke, Shackleton, and many others.

But the people are essentially incidental to the story. This is a history book and rarely dwells on individual stories. Institutions and nations also appear. Portugal’s struggle with Morocco, the USA’s struggle with the Soviet Union, JPL’s struggle with NASA, the Royal Society’s competition with the Paris Academy of Science—all provide the impetus to the great waves of exploration, discovery and, sometimes, colonization.

It is a book that leaves no stone unturned as Pyne’s focus moves from one aspect of exploration to another—the naming of newly-discovered places, the treatment of space exploration (and especially the fantasy of colonisation) in science fiction, the legal treatment of new worlds, the people who speak out for and against exploration.

Sometimes the comparisons between the Voyager mission and earlier explorations are interesting and instructive. Pyne’s discussions of the political and social, even the psychological bases for exploration are often fascinating. Sometimes they verge on the bizarre, as when he compares the physical dimensions of the Voyager craft with those of Lewis and Clarke’s nineteenth century keelboat, and Columbus’s caravel Niña.

While the writing is generally precise and very nicely done, Pyne has a small tendency to sound overblown and somewhat poetical (e.g., “[Voyager’s] trajectory has the arc of a hero’s quest.”) In his defense, he has taken on a huge and quite magnificent subject, and a little exuberance in the writing should probably be forgiven. Even when he swings the other way, rattling off transmission bit-rates, speeds, distances, and broadcast signal strengths, he uses technical terms with complete confidence and clearly understands the engineering, the communications jargon, and the celestial mechanics he is talking about.

Yet there is only so much that can be done with words. As Pyne himself says, “The Voyagers spoke to the public primarily through images, for which words served more as captions than as stand-alone texts.” So it is extremely odd that the book contains not one single image from among all the thousands that the Voyagers sent back to Earth. All we get are a few (simply drawn) diagrams and graphs in an appendix. It is true that many of the Voyager images Pyne talks about are so well known that anyone who has been watching the news for the past 30 years will recognize many of them. Yet the lack of images is a striking and unfortunate omission.

Voyager is a thoughtful and reflective book in which Pyne brings a wide and frequently detailed knowledge to bear on one of our more interesting human traits: the urge to explore. It is not the book to look in for the human faces of the people who discovered and dissected new worlds. It is a book that considers the broader sweep of history in counterpoint to the detailed technical, scientific, social, and political minutiae of this one, exceptional voyage.

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.

(This review first appeared in The New York Journal of Books on 28th April 2010.)

The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer

The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a steampunk fairytale set in an alternative twentieth century. It is the story of a reluctant hero, Harold Winslow, whose life is controlled by the mad genius, Prospero Taligent. Harold’s sad and dysfunctional family leave him ill-equipped to deal with the interest shown him by the powerful Taligent family. While Harold falls under the spell of Prospero’s closeted and lonely daughter, Miranda, her father plans to fulfill Harold’s heart’s desire—no matter what it may cost them.

Like most alternative histories, The Dream of Perpetual Motion is an allegory. The connections between the names of the characters and Shakespeare’s The Tempest are not coincidental; the discussion of Ovid’s Metamorphoses late in the book only really makes sense if you are aware that it was one possible source for the bard’s play. This novel is a literary work, and the allusions are important to understanding it. Not that they are heavy handed, but they are always present. Miranda’s ”brother” Caliban, is a monster, yes, but the ”beast,” imprisoned as he is in Taligent Tower—Prospero’s island in the city’s heart—is also part Ariel.

Like most allegorical novels, this one has a message. It is about us having taken a wrong turn, having spurned the lamented “age of miracles,” and having embraced an age of machines. Harold’s own father and Prospero Taligent suffer parallel but divergent declines into madness, one pining for the time when angels and devils walked the Earth, the other longing for a perfect future of progress and mechanization. Harold himself, an emotionally stunted writer of greeting cards, walks an unhappy path between the two extremes, studying creative writing yet putting his skills to use in creating ”modular” doggerel for use in cynically manipulative products.

It is, overall, a gloomy novel. The clanking, steam-spurting mechanisms—including mechanical men—and the heavily industrial nature of the city itself are oppressive. There are several dark and disturbing themes involving obsessive control, loss of ”purity,” a cynicism toward heroism, and a pervasive fear of change. Yet the book is not without humor—or, at least, whimsy. There is a deliciously brutal lampooning of feminist, post-modernist art criticism, and Miranda Taligent’s tenth birthday party almost turns into a pastiche of a Hollywood treatment of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The choice of steampunk as the style for the book’s background is itself, I suspect, an ironical joke—a world that has supposedly rejected magic has, in fact, embraced a magical, impossible technology, brought about by the wizard Prospero.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion is big-L literature, wrapped in steampunk fantasy, served on a bed of good old-fashioned hero-quest storytelling. It is an interesting synergy and a bold piece of writing (very good writing, too, by the way) for a debut novel, but I wonder if any of the potential audiences for literature, fantasy, or adventure stories will be wholly satisfied with it.

Where do you get your ideas?

Although no-one has ever asked me, I thought I’d answer the question anyway. I’ve just started writing a new book – a new trilogy in fact – and I’ve been watching myself as the process of coming up with the story unfolds. And this is how it happened.

Almost three months ago, I started feeling something. In the back of my head I had a mood, a sense of something big, something grand, and dark, and special. I quickly realised it was a new book coming out. I often get the mood or feel of a book before I write it. This one was very, very large. So I supposed it had to be a space opera.

Space opera has become, to sci-fi, what The Faerie Queen is to poetry, what The Lord of the Rings is to fantasy, what The Grapes of Wrath is to literature. It is the big canvas on which only the grandest of themes are depicted, the highest of high concepts, in an adventure that stretches across the Galaxy, through oceans of time, or beyond. The space opera that had begun stalking me was a big one, so big it was daunting.

I knew what I needed, a place and time for it to unfold in, a cast of characters to carry the story, and stakes so high that loss – huge, apocalyptic loss – confronted everyone at every turn. Yet nothing in my head at the time could possibly match the epic proportions of the sensation I was feeling.

So I started experimenting, sketching out futures, playing with disasters. It took me weeks before I had a place and time  – a future ten thousand years from now, a sphere one hundred light years across containing a thousand inhabited systems – no aliens, just 120 billion humans stranger to one another than they have ever been. I worked on the details, the histories, the technologies, the societies, the economics, the politics… In the end, I had enough to get started.

A story was starting to emerge as I looked at the world it would take place in. It would centre around a catastrophe and it had to be a big one. I sat for hours and pondered the nature of such a beast, why it should happen, how it would unfold, but, while I could describe it in detail, I didn’t know just what it was until, one day, sitting outside in the sunshine, staring into the forest that surrounds my house, I found myself staring at the dark branches of a massive tree, its limbs twisting and dividing against the sky, and I knew I had it.

Now, all I needed were people and a story. Finding the right people is hard, but once you have them, finding their story is easy. For a story that might stretch across three books – or more – the people have to be very special, very interesting, and very sympathetic. I started plucking them from the various cultures and activities of the world I had been inventing. They were OK, not bad, sort of alright – but nothing special. And then I found the one I needed, the catalyst who would bring every one of the others to life, make the story sing, make this huge edifice of invention hang together.

How did I know I’d found such a magical person? Because this was the one with ‘the voice’. The voice of the book, the voice that was there in the mood I’d sensed all those weeks ago. The one that could tell this story and make it sound just the way I could feel it sounding inside me. With this character, with their voice in my head, I could, at last, tell the tale that had been nagging at me.

I’m very excited about it. I’ve written an introductory chapter (so much still to do!) and it feels right, it feels good. I’m ready now to take the plunge into what might be two or three years’ work to bring this to completion.

Wish me luck.

What do you do when you’re trying to build a career as a science fiction writer and you suddenly go nuts and write a children’s book? I’m sure we’ve all done it. Right in the middle of writing your latest high-energy space opera, your brain goes on the fritz and out pours a Rgency bodice ripper – or whatever. Well, if you’re like me, you show it to your family and a couple of friends – for their amusement – and then you stick it away in a dark corner of your hard drive and never look at it again.

Except this particular story (for 6- to 8-year-olds) keeps popping back into my head. In fact, I keep thinking of sequels. Some part of my writerly brain says, “You should try to sell that.” The other part (the part that would have to do all the work of understanding the genre, finding agents and finding publishers) says, “No frickin’ way am I going to do all that! I’ve got a career to build here. Just forget about it.”

But I can’t. So I did the next best thing. I self-published it as an ebook. It’s out there, it’s free, it is, as far as I’m concerned, damned lucky to get even that much effort spent on it. It also afforded me the interest of actually going through the self-pubbing process (I used Smashwords) to see how it works. I may blog about the experience too at some point. I think that’s not a bad return for the effort, actually.

If you have wee sprogs who like stories about feisty dogs and their hapless owners, you might even download a copy and read it with them. I can’t guarantee they’ll like it – what do I know about writing for children? – but I’d be interested in their reactions.

It’s called “Hangin’ With the Monkeys” and it’s avaiable from Smashwords for free.

Reading the Entrails

I’m developing a relationship with Amazon.

It used to be a simple relationship. I bought books from them. Well, not quite simple. I occasionally bought books when their low price plus the exorbitant cost of shipping to Australia worked out better than a local bookshop, or it was a book you just couldn’t get here. So I’d get into some pretty silly calculations involving Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, prices, shipping, and exchange rates.

Then I bought a Kindle. The relationship deepened. I stopped buying printed books from Amazon. In fact, I stopped buying printed books altogether. Now I only get ebooks from the Kindle Store. Unless they’re cheaper elsewhere, of course – which they easily can be, because Amazon charges a US$2 ‘foreigner tax’ on every book bought by people who have the temerity to live outside the USA. (Don’t ask me why. Something to do with Amazon wanting all the money in the world, I think.) This means there is no such thing as a free book on Amazon. All Amazon books start at US$2. So I tend to look around. If I can get a PDF of the book somewhere else and cheaper, or a Mobipocket version, I will. As for free books, on sites like Project Gutenberg, they’re rather better value than the US$2 Amazon equivalents. (What’s worse than the ‘foreigner tax’, I’ve discovered that many Kindle editions of English classics have been ‘Americanized’. God knows why but someone has gone to the trouble of changing the spelling in old Wilkie Collins and Jane Austen novels! Are American readers really that dumb that they need a ‘translation’ from English spelling before they can read a classic English novel?)

When my novel, TimeSplash, went on sale in the Kindle Store, my relationship with Amazon plumbed new depths. At first my biggest concern was with the huge slice of the sale price Amazon charges for the privilege of selling my book. They take a 65% cut of what you pay! Then, not only do they arbitrarily discount it from US$5.50 – the publisher’s sale price – to US$4.40, they also add a US$2 ‘foreigner tax’, making it US$6.40 for foreign buyers, making the book more expensive for the 95% of us who do not live in the USA. (And you only get a DRMed, .PRC file for that – which is why I recommend to anybody wanting to buy my book, for the Kindle or any other eReader, that they buy it from the publisher’s own bookstore. Even for American buyers, I think the bundle of non-DRM formats you get from the publisher is a far more attractive deal than the slightly lower Kindle Store price.)

But that’s not the worst of it. I’ve started noticing all the twiddly bits on te book page in the Kindle Store. Things like the star rating and the tags. As a buyer of the book, you get to rate it and to tag it (either just ticking tags you agree with, or adding your own). It turns out the ratings and, especially the tags are crucial for sales. They determine whether the book turns up in Amazon searches (if it’s not tagged, it probably doesn’t show) and how high up the results list it appears. (So, for God’s sake, if you love me and you bought TimeSplash, rate it and tag it, or you might be my last customer on this site!) Then there’s the customer review. I don’t know how many people have bought the book so far – from the kind things people are saying on Twitter, there are a few of you – but, so far, only one person has written a review. Just one!

But the most insidious and terrible piece of data on the Kindle Store page for TimeSplash is the Kindle Store ranking. It’s something to do with how many books are being sold, but I don’t know what. It’s never the same from one minute to the next and it fluctuates wildly – and I mean wildly, within a range of 70,000 so far. And it means nothing, or, perhaps it means everything! Since it is a rank, and I know Amazon has about 400,000 books in the Kindle Store, it’s easy to see that, if the book is ranked better than 80,000, it is in the top 20% of sales. If it is ranked 20,000 or less, it’s in the top 5% of sales. But what does that mean? Does Amazon sell a thousand ebooks books a day, or a dozen? Who knows? And since 90% of the “best-sellers” in the Kindle Store are free books anyway, what on Earth does that do to the sales distribution? If they’re giving away books by the shovelful (in the US presumably, since they’re not free anywhere else) at one end of the ‘sales’ scale, are there 200,000 titles at the other end that are not selling at all?

I’ve had to stop looking at my book page on Amazon because this kind of thing is driving me nuts. I only make about 60¢ on an Amazon sale anyway so it’s hardly worth worrying about. I’d need to sell tens of thousands before I saw any serious money, and that’s not going to happen. So why torture myself?

Well, because, regardless of the money, I’d like to see people buying the book – and reading 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 :-}