Graham Storrs

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 [...]

A survey of book promotion tactics was conducted by The Savvy Book Marketer in December, 2009, and is reported today. It asked a number of authors what their book promotion strategy would involve in 2010. You can check the method and the outcome there. I just want to look at the list of tactics they [...]

I now have the galleys of my novel TimeSplash and they have prompted me to say this to all aspiring novellists.
When you write a novel, make sure it is as rich, deep and subtle as you can possibly make it. Make all the characters complex and interesting, in fact, make them fascinating. Make sure that [...]

Tara Moss is running a series of posts over on her blog on writers’ desks and what they look like. So I took a snapshot of my own, to see what it might reveal about me. Well, what do you think?
Looking at it with an outsider’s eye, I suppose it looks rather scruffy. Even looking [...]

My perception of the Web has changed. I used to think it was full of people like me, ordinary folk, going about their business, finding things that interested them, chatting to friends and acquaintances, but I was wrong. Oh, there may be such people – millions of them – but they don’t really matter. What [...]

I’ve been looking at 2009 to check how I’ve been doing against my writerly ambitions. It’s pretty good, overall. I got eight shorts stories published and placed in two competitions. I also won a write-a-quote competition! I also had my two first print publications (both short stories in anthologies). Although I actually made money by [...]

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 [...]

When Jeremy C Shipp asked for people willing to read the ARC of his forthcoming novel, Cursed, I was keen but nervous. I’ve been following Shipp on Twitter and enjoying his quirky humour. I’d noticed that Jeff Vandermeer – whom I greatly admire – thinks highly of him. And I’d read an interview Shipp gave [...]

If Isaac Asimov was an unknown writer and wrote the Foundation trilogy today, I doubt very much that he would have been able to get an agent or a publisher for it. I mean, just look at the writing! Endless screeds of exposition, almost everything is told, not shown, adverbs litter the text, and the [...]

Life is short. If you only read 20 or 30 novels a year, as I do, you’ve only got time to read about 1500 of them between being old enough to start and being too gaga to remember where the library is. Maybe 2,000 if you start young and keep a close watch on your [...]