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.

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.

What can I say? It's fun!

Not being a religious person, I don’t have a handy reference book to guide me on moral matters. So I tend to put in quite a lot of brain-time working on questions of right and wrong. One of these questions popped into my head a couple of years ago – about the time when I first started having my fiction published. I suppose that, until that point, writing fiction was just something I did in private that had no consequences in the world. Suddenly, people were reading the stuff and I had a moral quandary: telling people stories about things that have not happened seems very much like lying. In fact, as far as I can tell, it is exactly like lying. Not to mince words, it is lying! I wanted to be a writer but did I want to tell lies for a living?

I voiced my concerns on a couple of online forums at the time and got the usual responses, which amounted to this, despite the veneer of fiction, the novelist is actually telling a “deeper truth”. The notion is that by making characters that are psychologically real, their responses, even to fictional situations, reveal truths about the Human Condition. What’s more, without the fictional setting, the carefully constructed story, and the carefully chosen characters, it would be almost impossible to state these truths in any other way.

I didn’t like the answer so I shut up and brooded about it. It may be true that, in certain types of fiction, or in fiction of a certain very high quality, such “truths” can be revealed, but how can we be sure we are seeing truth in such cases, rather than being bamboozled by a clever writer (who may themselves be suffering all kinds of delusions about reality)? Besides, what proportion of the books that exist are such high art? One in ten thousand? One in a million? And what about the rest? Don’t they count? The explanation threw up more questions than it answered – a sign, I always think – that there is something very wrong with the explanation. Yet I couldn’t find my own answer and had to let the conundrum simmer on the back burner all this time.

Now, I think I see it. I was right. Fiction is lying. There is no way to pretend it isn’t. If by some fluke of skill or chance it reveals a “deeper truth” that’s fine, but it almost never does and it’s status as a lie remains unmitigated in almost every case. Unmitigated except by one and only one thing: fiction is entertaining. And that is where the crux of the moral problem is resolved. We enjoy fiction. We like to be told stories, even though we know they are not true. We collude, as readers, with the writers. The harmless deception I practiced in the quiet of my office is, after publication, a vice enjoyed in tandem with other consenting adults.

My readers give me permission to lie. They give me encouragement to do it! God bless ‘em. I may be lying, but I don’t deceive anybody. I may be lying, but only people who want to be lied to pay any attention. And, as with other vices, practiced in private by consenting adults, I have no objection to that whatsoever.

–

The title is from Sir Walter Scott’s poem Marmion.

“Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!”

As one of my favourite authors, Sir Walter and I have tangled webs together many times.

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.

This post is only really relevant to Australian sci-fi fans. The rest of you may pass the time watching TV or cutting your toenails while they read this. I’ll give you a shout when you can come back.

I just saw a tweet from @AustLiterature which reminded me that the 2010 Ditmar awards are seeking nominations. To be considered for a Ditmar, you need to be Australian and to have had something published in the previous calendar year. That makes the Ditmars the first Australian awards that I actually qualify for. The possibility that I could actually be considered for an award (merit notwithstanding) is strangely exciting.

I mark the start of my fiction publishing career as May 2008. However, stories that were accepted back then mostly did not start appearing until 2009. So that is the year in which people reading odd magazines and anthologies around the world will have started seeing my name. I’ve never really considered myself as being someone who might win an award – not because awards are so wonderfully prestigious that little old me doesn’t deserve one, but because I think of the whole awards thing as being about people in in-crowds scratching each others’ backs, and I’m more a sort of sitting on the outside feeling sorry for myself kind of bloke.

Yet I can’t deny that an award or two would not hurt my career. There was a recent discussion on a writers’ group list I belong to about compiling a list of all Australian writers in the spec fic genre. Many people mantioned many names that ought to be on the list, but no-one mentioned mine. (It’s a list I’ve been contributing to for two years now, mind you.) Then the discussion turned to how to maintain such a list and the most popular suggestion seemed to be to look at the Australian award lists and take the names from those each year. Which all got me thinking.

When I was in business (sorry, I mean a different business) I was quite happy to consider awards as part of the general marketing fluff that went on all the time. I once won the prestigious British Computer Society Medal for a software project I ran (and had it handed to me by HRH the Duke of Kent) and thought it was a pretty good thing at the time. So my reticence to engage in a ‘popularity contest’ for my writing seems pretty strange. In fact, it seems downright precious when I come to think of it. So I’ve decided to suck it up, join the affray, toss my cap in the ring, swallow my pride, and write lots of cliches have a go.

In terms of the Ditmar categories, I have a couple of things I could be nominated for:

Category 3.5 Novella or Novelette: A Novella or Novelette is any work of sf/f/h of 7,500 to 40,000 words. Oddly, I published a short story that fits the bill. It is called ‘The Earth Ship’ and is 8,500 words long. It appeared in the SF/F/H anthology, Best Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction of 2009, edited by Rick DeCost and Robert Griffin, published by Absent Willow Publishing. It is one of my favourite stories – probably because it’s one of the few that has actual spaceships and galactic empires.

Category 3.6 Short Story: A Short Story is any work of sf/f/h less than 7,500 words. This is where the bulk of it lies, but I want to mention just two possibilities, ‘All the Way’, which appeared in The Future Fire #18, and ‘The Shouter and the Chanter’, a piece of flash fiction that came out in Alien Skin Magazine, Vol. VIII No. 3. Has a piece of flash fiction ever won before, I wonder.

Anyone who qualifies and would like to make my day, might like to consider bunging in a nomination or two.

Next year I’ll also have my novel and some reviews to put up as well.

—

*For those who didn’t spot it, the title is from a quote by the composer Charles Ives. What he said was, “Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.” Oh to be Charles Ives!

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.

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.