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

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.

I’ve become obsessed with a place in my imagination. It’s called Placid Point and it is a space station, packed to the gunwhales with computers, and inhabited by a huge number of uploaded human minds. It started life on Earth before moving into Earth orbit, then to solar orbit (at L1) and then around another star as it moved farther and farther away, leaving Earth behind.

I first began writing about Placid Point in mid-2008, when I wrote the short story “In the Dark of Second Sleep”. It was about an alien race having a very strange close encounter with transhumans who had left Placid Point. Immediately, the transhumans I had created invaded my imagination. For a while I thought about nothing else but where they had come from, where they were going, and what might be the many individual stories that marked their journey.

Every now and then, one of those stories demanded to be written. I realised, as I elaborated this world, that becoming transhuman would not be the slick transition some futurists imagine, that we would take with us into this new way of being, much of what ties us to our past, and that the Universe would continue to shape and mould us in the same way it always has, that the economics of survival don’t care what form your body or mind might take. More than this, it seemed, the pioneers of transhumanity would face difficulties as emotionally challenging as any human has ever faced, as they pried themselves free of their ancient biological heritage.

After ‘In the Dark of Second Sleep’, I wrote ‘Last Christmas’, leaping from the middle of the story to the end. Then ‘All the Way’, groping my way back to the beginning, a time when Placid Point was known as Omega Point. With ‘Jim’sWorld’ I finally had my creation myth, along with a couple of characters I knew would be appearing again and again. Martin Lanham in particular would play a key role. He became an important character in my first novel set squarely in the Placid Point universe, The Credulity Nexus. ‘The Whispering Dead’, another story from the early days, features Lanham, although his name is not mentioned, and the narrator in ‘Murathera’s Orgy’, set far into the future, is probably not him, although it could be.

I have written a number of novels in the same future ‘world’ – whether Placid Point features largely in them or not. The Credulity Nexus, set just seventy years from now, I have already mentioned. My Emissaries series, set three hundred years in the future, is in the same ‘world’ but barely mentions Omega Point (as it was called then). However, the transhumans of Placid Point play a much more prominent role in the sequel to that series, Deep Fracture, set ten thousand years in the future.

Maybe I should put all these shorts in a collection and self-publish them?

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.

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.

And guess which ebook I hope everyone is reading

With between 200 and 300 per cent growth year-on-year in the ebook market (different surveys call it different ways) you wouldn’t think there was much need for such an event, but there is.

It isn’t just that there is entrenched, almost paranoid resistance to ebooks among many readers (you know the type – people who rhapsodise about the smell and the texture of blocks of printed paper, and who feel besieged and beleaguered by those who promote ebooks, swearing to defend their right to own lumps of pulped tree to the bitter end)  it’s that the vast majority of readers have not even heard of ebooks and ebook readers.

For those of us who have, there are many free ebooks on offer during this week. So shoot across to E-Reads, or Smashwords, the Read an eBook Week site, or any participating outlet, and see what’s on offer. (You can avoid all the big e-book stores like Amazon and Fictionwise if you’re looking for read an e-book week special offers, none of them appear to be participating. I bet they will be next year.)

But it’s not just about the free stuff. Books are starting to be published in digital-only editions (like mine, for instance) and digital-first editions. This means that, even now, the only way to see some new books is to get the ebook. If you’re not reading ebooks, your choice of books is already starting to narrow.  A few years from now, this trickle of digital-only books will be a torrent.

And when you have a hard drive stuffed with great books, maybe you’ll want to pick up an ebook reader to go with them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honestly, we get the publishers and agents we deserve.

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

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 :-}