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.

Future Fire #18: More firsts

With all this frantic editing and book publicising going on, I forgot to mention something very important to me. My short story, ‘All the Way’ has just been published in The Future Fire.

If you don’t know this magazine, you should probably download some of their PDF editions and have a browse. The Future Fire deliberately aims to provide speculative fiction that explores social and political issues – my favourite kind!

I also hope you will pop across and read ‘All the Way’. Publishing this story is a significant milestone for me – not just because it is the first time I’ve had my name on a magazine cover, and not just because it is the first time a story of mine has ever been accompanied by specially-commissioned artwork, but because this is the second one of my Placid Point stories to be published.

Placid Point is a place in a future world I invented and in which I have set a number of short stories. ‘Murathera’s Orgy’, which appeared in the print anthology Masques earlier this year, is a story from the distant future and is actually set in Placid Point, a massive, orbiting space station, packed solid with computers, in which millions of people live as simulations.  ‘All the Way’ is from a point in time just sixty or so years from now, when the first uploaded humans are learning to adjust to their new situation. At this time, Placid Point is known as ‘Omega Point’ and doesn’t even get a mention.

However, Omega Point features prominently in the novel I am currently writing: ‘The Credulity Nexus’. If this book ever sees the light of day, it will be great to know that Masques and The Future Fire, paved its way.

A key piece of the future history of Placid Point – including the background of one of its main characters – is contained in an unpublished short story of mine called ‘JimsWorld’. There is also a short story called ‘Last Christmas’  – the winner of last year’s ‘Spec the Halls’ competition – which describes the very end of the story. Any magazine or anthology editors reading this who want to be a part of this unfolding saga, just drop me a line.

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)

A bit of Australian internal politics, guys. You might want to just retweet this and move on if that’s not especially interesting to you. However, if you ever read an Australian book, read on.

Those who have campainged hard to ensure that parallel importation restrictions on books are not removed or amended, should be congratulated. They have done us all a great service. Today, a press release from Craig Emerson’s office announced: ‘The Government has decided not to change the Australian regulatory regime for books introduced by the previous Labor government.’

It goes on:

‘Australian book printing and publishing is under strong competitive pressure from international online booksellers such as Amazon and The Book Depository and the Government has formed the view that that this pressure is likely to intensify.

‘In addition, the technology of electronic books (e-books) like Kindle Books will continue to improve with further innovations and price reductions expected.

‘The Government has not accepted the Productivity Commission’s recommendation to remove the parallel importation restrictions on books.

‘The Productivity Commission report acknowledged that removing these restrictions would adversely affect Australian authors, publishers and culture. The Commission recommended extra budgetary funding of authors and publishers to compensate them for this loss.

‘The Government has decided not to commit to a new spending program for Australian authors and publishers.

‘Compromise proposals were considered, involving reductions in the length of the 30-day publication rule and the 90-day resupply rule.

‘In the circumstances of intense competition from online books and e-books, the Government judged that changing the regulations governing book imports is unlikely to have any material effect on the availability of books in Australia.

‘If books cannot be made available in a timely fashion and at a competitive price, customers will opt for online sales and e-books.

‘Introducing a price cap along the lines of the Canadian system would increase regulation with questionable effects on book prices.

‘The Australian book printing and publishing industries will need to respond to the increasing competition from imports without relying on additional government assistance.’

Please note that 3rd-from-last sentence, “If books cannot be made available, etc..” It was the book sellers of Australia (supermarkets and department stores included) who wanted to trash Australian publishing for the sake of larger profits by changing the PIR legislation. I think that sentence puts them firmly back in their box. However, it also points those of us who are concerned about Australian writing to where the next big battle will be fought.

I think this is the first time I’ve ever had my name on a flyer. My publisher, Lyrical Press Inc. is organising an event on one of its Yahoo groups. They’ve invited me to take part as one of about 20 Lyrical authors who will be talking about, well, I’m not quite sure, but I should imagine books, ebooks, romance, sci fi, and writing will all get a mention. Everyone is welcome. Ever wanted to meet 20 authors?

I’ve never been involved in one of these things before – being a newbie at Lyrical – but “chat, fun and prizes” sounds like it’s worth dropping in for.

Antipodeans, Europeans and Asians please note that dates and times are in American. (At this time of year, times shown in the flyer are GMT minus 5 hours.)  I’ll probably be dropping in throughout the event but I’ll definitely be around between 10pm and 11pm US EST (which is 1pm to 2pm Aus EST on 19th November, 3am to 4am GMT on 19th November – why don’t we all just use UTC?). I certainly hope to see some of you there – maybe not the Europeans!

One in 20 again!

Like many ‘emerging’ Australian writers, I’ve been concerned that the government is thinking of lifting parallel importation restrictions (PIRs). This is legislation that helps Australian publishers compete by giving them the opportunity to publish works over here and keep out overseas editions of the same work. Virtually all countries, including the US and UK have similar legislation. It is almost certain that without PIRs, imported editions of popular books at lower prices (possibly remaindered books, and most of them, if they came from Australian authors, edited and censored to suit their primary, overseas markets) would make life very hard for Australian poublishers and thereby reduce the number of new Australian authors who could sell their work. For lots more on this subject see the Saving Aussie Books website.

Today, however, I read a blog post by Joanna Penn that made me think that PIRs were not the only, nor the major threat facing Australian publishers. Joanna makes no bones about the fact that she finds books published in Australia too expensive. She has often said she buys books from Amazon.com and pays the shipping and still gets them cheaper. With the huge mark-ups that Australian booksellers put on books, she has a valid point. However, Joanna recently bought a Kindle. In fact, she was probably one of the first people in Australia to have one. And, if you’ve read her blog post, you’ll see one of the main reasons why. A book she saw in a local book shop was available for instant download to the Kindle at about a quarter of the book shop price.

The important message for Australian publishers and Australian book sellers in this is that Joanna states flatly she would not have bought the book from the shop. It was too expensive, but, on the Kindle, the price was right.

Joanna is at the leading edge of a wave of change that is going to sweep through this country in the next couple of years. As an early adopter of e-reader technology she is among the first of probably millions of Australians who will buy these devices and use the wireless connectivity built into them to buy books – from anywhere in the world.

Australia has a book-selling infrastructure that is almost guaranteed to encourage rapid adoption of e-readers now that the first have arrived. Even when I lived in a Brisbane suburb, my nearest decent bookshop was 30km away (in the city, where parking costs a fortune). Now I live in the country, my nearest good bookshop is 150km away! (I don’t count the K-Mart that is a mere 60km away.) I rarely get to a book shop to buy books. I buy books from Fishpond.com.au (when they have them) and Amazon.com (when they don’t) or I go to the library. When I buy e-books, I tend to get them direct from the publisher where possible. It won’t be long before I get my own wireless e-reader and stop using Australian bookshops altogether.

There will come a tipping point, in five or ten years, when the number of people using e-readers and the number of books published electronically means that books printed on peper will be printed in smaller runs and will start rising in price – on their way to becoming rare, luxury goods. PIRs seem almost irrelevant in the face of what’s coming.

Concept Sci-fi Magazine Issue #6

The Concept Sci-fi Magazine 2009 Short Story Competition Special Edition is now avaialable online. It contains just three stories, the winner, “Bringer of War” by Iain Cairns, and the two runners-up; “Volume Control” by Matthew Fazakerly, and “Swan Song” by yours truly. Download it now and have a great weekend read. It’s free!

Congratulations to Iain and many thanks to Gary Reynolds (Concept’s editor) and Sean Williams, who was the judge.

If the Australian Government and the big-chain booksellers have their way, the Australian publishing industry will be all but dead in a few years’ time. There are very few Australian literary agents now, but they too will have gone. For Australian writers – especially new ones – the only chance of being published will be to find a publisher overseas – probably in the US or the UK where they will still have parallel importation restrictions and healthy publishing industries. For Australian readers – for readers everywhere – the only chance to read an Australian book, in an Australian setting, and in an Australian voice will be… Well, there won’t really be much chance of that at all.

Unless…

Unless Australian publishing doesn’t just roll over and die when the market is flooded with American remaindered books and competition becomes impossible. Because there will be an opportunity hiding in the weedy wasteland of what once was a thriving, local publishing industry. Australian publishing could go digital.

The world is just waiting for the huge, global digital book publishers of the future to emerge. By default, these will be Amazon and Google, but what if backs-to-the-wall Australian publishers refused to go down and, instead, re-engineered themselves into the digital content empires of the 21st Century? It wouldn’t be the first time an Australian media company had achieved world domination. All it takes is foresight and a willingness to take bold and radical action when the times call for it. Like they do. Right now.

Other countries aren’t knocking their publishing industries to the ground and kicking them ’til they bleed. So other countries’ publishing industries don’t have the incentive to get a move on and make the change ahead of the pack.

And if the Australian publishers won’t do it, it’s going to be up to us, Australia’s writers, to do something. I don’t think any of us want to have our voices silenced because a criminally negligent Government has dumped us in favour of hard-line capitalist ideology. I think we all believe there is more to Australia’s culture than being able to buy cheap American books. I think we all believe we have something to say that is relevant here and throughout the world, that we, as writers, are as good as others who happen to have viable publishing industries wherever in the world they are, and that we do not deserve to be turned into charity cases as the Productivity Commission recommends.

If our publishers can’t survive what is coming, we will have to find other ways of getting our work out. We will have to embrace the opportunities of digital publishing ourselves and make them work for us. One thing is for sure, in Australian publishing, business as usual will not be an option for any of us.

Another reason to buy an ebook reader

Now that’s fast! The competition was only opened in May this year. Since then, there have been all the entries, the judging, the editing and the production. Now, in July, the top 40 stories from the Editor Unleashed Flash Fiction 40 competition are available in an anthology, edited by Maria Schneider, and available for free in multiple e-book formats from Smashwords. Is this how book publishing might be in the future? Not a year or two years to produce an anthology but two months?

You’ll find my flash-fiction piece ‘Sales Call’ in there along with 39 other stories in all kinds of genres and styles. I’m pretty sure you’ll fnd something you like there – and the price is very reasonable. Use the table below to select your download format, or to view the collection online. If you don’t have an ebook reader (and who does?) pick PDF or RTF and read it on your PC/laptop/netbook.

Have fun, and when you’ve finished it, add a review at the Smashwords site. There were also several very good stories that didn’t make it into the anthology. You can see all of the competition entries and how the voting went on the Editor Unleashed forum.

Available e-book reading formats:

A new kind of contest

Continuing yesterday’s competitions theme, I see the Editor Unleased/Smashwords Flash Fiction 40 competition has announced the 40 lucky winners.  (That’s me, about half-way down the list, under the user ID graywave.) As there are 40 winners and there were only 280 entrants, that puts me roughly in the top 20%.

I remember a day, many, many years ago, when a friend of mine said – a propos of nothing in particular – “You’re a leader of men. You’re one in twenty.”  His sincere tone and generally admiring manner suggested he really meant it as a compliment. I’ve often wondered what prompted it and I’ve often wished I’d quizzed him about it instead of just staring at him, gobsmacked. Yet I have often noticed that, in various areas of life, I am, actually, one in twenty – somewhere in that top 5% anyway. Of course, it depends on how well you choose your comparison group. With care, you can be one in a hundred or better.

Flash Fiction 40 was a bit of fun – and a marketing ploy, of course. That’s why there were so many winners. It was also a very unusual contest in that there were two kinds of judging. First off, all the entries were on display at the Editor Unleashed Forum and readers were asked to read as many as possible and to give each one a score out of 5 (5 good, 1 bad). Then a bunch of ‘editors’ read through all of the stories and made an independent assessment of them, coming up with the top 40 and an overall winner. So it was partly like a normal contest and partly a beauty contest.

Frankly, it is the beauty contest side of this that was most interesting for me. It often occurs to me to worry that I don’t write in a popular-enough style. When you don’t have a book on the shelves and have no sales figures to look at, all you have to go on is what editors and agents think. Here was a chance to see just how well-received my work would be because the average ratings for all 280 stories are on display. At first glance, this tells you almost nothing, since the numbers are rounded to the nearest whole number and presented as stars. As anyone who has ever done social science research would expect, 3 stars was the score almost everybody got. Slightly more interesting was the fact that there were no four-star and no five-star ratings (plenty of 2s and a few 1s). But, if you look beneath the stars at the actual scores, it is even more interesting. Almost nobody scored as high as 3. There were literally half a dozen or so scores of 3.00 and above. The overall winner had a score of 3.50.

Most inetersting to me was that my own score was 3.22* putting me in the top handful of stories by reader’s score, certainly well within that magical 5% group. So, what can I conclude from all this:

1. Readers, at least those who visited this site, who were probably also writers, like my stuff.
2. People vary widely in their tastes. I can tell this because this was a very varied bunch of stories and there were no stand-out winners. The ratings clustered around the mean.
3. People didn’t really like any of these stories much. The top few percent managed to scrape an average just above 3. The great majority were in the 2-3 range. I suspect that if Anton Checkhov and O. Henry had entered pieces of flash fiction, they wouldn’t have made it to 4. (It would have been easy to ‘game’ the contest by giving a low rating to anything that looked better than your own piece. This kind of behaviour would certainly explain the strange shift to low scores. Are writers really so devious?)
4. There are some good flash fiction writers out there. I read dozens of these stories and found some real gems.
5. People can be very nice. Several people – all of them strangers – took the trouble to write to me to say how much they had enjoyed my story. Some were extremely flattering. It’s just what a writer needs, sometimes.
6. 204 people read one of my stories who would not otherwise have done so (well, 202, really). That alone has to have been worth the trouble of putting it in an email and sending it in.

Fascinating. This particular ‘win’ won’t go in my cv, but it has definitely been an interesting event to participate in.

—

*Look, I could work out the variances and give those, too, I know averages without variances don’t mean too much, but life is just too short. Besides, there were all kinds of biases. For instance, writers were encouraged to recuit all their friends and family to go along and rate their stories – including all their Facebook ‘friends’. This is fair enough, since it is, after all, a popularity contest and, as I said, a marketing ploy. But this did make some of the figures a bit suspect. Most pieces had between 150 and 200 readers, I’d say (mine had 204 – but I swear I only mentioned I’d entered to two people) but a few had over 500 readers – including the winner.