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

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?

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.

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!

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 :-}

At last, it’s February 15 New York time, and Once Upon a Bookstore, my publisher’s own online bookshop, is now selling copies of TimeSplash.

Get your copy here

Please, everybody, pass on this message. Retweet it, Digg it, Stumble it, and tell all your friends on Facebook. You can even mention it to people in real life, if you like.

And, if you do me the great honour of buying it and reading it, I’m dying to hear what you think of it.

(If you haven’t heard me talking about TimeSplash before and don’t know what I’m talking about, here is the website of the book that tells you everything you will ever need to know. And if you find you need to know more than that, there is also a blog of the book. Enjoy!)

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 the book you write has enough wit, wisdom and intricacy that you could read it over and over again and still go on loving it and believing in it’s value. Because, even after you have edited it and polished it for months before delivering your final draft, if the book is accepted by a publisher, what with the copy editing, the line editing, the proof reading, and the marketing (hunting through the text for suitable extracts and so on,) you will find yourself reading it end-to-end another ten times before it is published. If you are not to find yourself hating it, or embarrassed by it, it better be one hell of a good book!

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 selling stories last year, it didn’t amount to much. The biggest single return for a story was $68 (which amounted to 4c/word). On average, I earned about 1c/word last year. One trip to attend a local writing conference wiped out the whole lot many times over. If you count my time, trips to my writing group (which is 300km away and involves an overnight stay) and consumables, I doubt that a lifetime of selling short stories will ever compensate me for just this year!

Yet, strangely, I feel I’ve had a successful year.

More exciting by far was signing  my first book deal. Unspeakably wonderful as this is, sadly, it isn’t likely to make me much money either. As an unknown writer, trying to sell an e-book in a world where no-one has an e-book reader, with no publicity except what I provide for myself, in a genre that people keep saying is dead, I expect sales to be embarrassing at best. However, I will probably be happy with anything above crushing humiliation. (So please, buy the book and then tell your 5,000 Facebook friends how great it was – even if you have to lie through your teeth. You wouldn’t want my utter failure on your conscience, would you?)

The book, TimeSplash, took hundreds of hours to write and scores of hours to edit. I’ll make about $2/book on sales, so, even if I paid myself minimum wage, I’d need to make many thousands of dollars to cover all that time – and that would involve selling many thousands of books. Unfortunately, because almost nobody has ever published their first book as an e-book with no print edition, especially their first sci-fi novel – there are no good stats to suggest what sales might be. Even my publisher is working in the dark here. I’m a bit of an experiment. It could be zero. It could be a few hundred. If it goes as high as 1500, I’ll be blowing that month’s royalty cheque on a bottle of champagne.

So, it has been a good year. In fact, it’s been a great year. But there is as yet no prospect of making a living from writing. To do that, I’d probably need to be publishing four books a year, or more, and selling really well – and I’m not sure I want to be that guy. Publishing one has been hard enough!

Maybe I need an agent?

One of the first things that struck me when I became involved with writers’ groups, was that most aspiring writers can’t write. They may be full of wild imaginings, they may have stories in them, yearning to be told, but, as well as lacking the more esoteric skills of the craft, they can’t form a grammatically correct sentence and they can’t spell.

Most of the grammatical and spelling mistakes you see in people’s manuscripts are old chestnuts. They don’t know how to punctuate (especially when it comes to apostrophes,) they mix up the spellings of homophones (their, there, they’re, for example, or your and you’re,) they misspell uncommon words, they use inappropriate words, they blindly repeat common errors (like using ‘epicentre’ when they mean ‘centre’,) they don’t understand how to form plurals (especially frequently malformed ones like ‘medium’ vs ‘media’,) and they write as they speak (using ‘then’ instead of ‘than’ for example, as in, “He was bigger then his father.”)

What people who can’t spell and who don’t understand grammar fail to appreciate is that, for people who can and do, each little mistake they encounter provokes an almost physical pain. Editors and agents faced with a page full of mistakes like this will save themselves the agony of reading the whole manuscript by rejecting it as swiftly as they can.

To lack such simple skills when you aspire to publication is therefore quite an impediment, and astonishing, too, when the causes and the remedies are staring us in the face. I believe that the root of the problem is that people do not read enough well-written books, that they do not pay enough attention to what they read, and that they do not acquire the habit of speaking well.

You don’t have to read the classics to find good, grammatically-correct writing, you can find it in most published fiction. But if you want to know what it looks like, go and read some Aldous Huxley, William Golding, Margaret Atwood, Gore Vidal, and Ray Bradbury. Then, at least, you’ll have a benchmark. You do have to read carefully though. You have to consider the sentences, the word-choices, the punctuation, the arrangement of words. And you do have to read enough of it that it starts seeping into your unconscious. If you love words, if you love reading, this will hardly be a chore.

And practice speaking too. I have never seen this mentioned as an aspect of good writing, but it seems clear to me that many of the mistakes people make in their writing come directly from the way they speak. I’m not suggesting that everyone who wants to write in English should speak ‘the Queen’s English’ but that they should, at the very least, speak English.

The grammatical mistakes people make in ordinary speech are more easily forgiven – and feel less jarring – than the same mistakes seen in print. We get away with a lot when we speak but we cannot expect to receive the same latitude when we write. If you speak sloppily, if your grammar is atrocious, if you misuse words and can’t form plurals, and you are unaware of it, it is not really surprising that your writing will reflect this. So listen to what you are saying. Think about what your words mean. What’s more, don’t just let other people’s words and sentences wash over you, or into you. Listen to them and analyse them. And don’t take it for granted that a newsreader or a journalist knows how to speak or write good English; a large proportion of them do not.

And as for bloggers… Well, let’s just say that the first draft of this piece contained numerous typos. I’ll also say that the final draft of my novel, TimeSplash, came back from the copy editor buried in such a thick encrustation of markup, it was hard to find the text. You did take that pinch of salt, didn’t you?

Hot on the heels of my last publication announcement (see below) I bring you ‘The Shouter and the Chanter’ which is out now in Alien Skin.

I very much enjoy writing and reading flash fiction and this is the second time I have had a piece appear in Alien Skin (thanks guys). People often say that sci-fi (and fantasy) books are longer than other genre novels because the writer needs to spend so many words on world building. This is clearly not true and part of the skill of a good sci-fi writer is to embed the world building seamlessly into the rest of the story. There is no better way to practice this art than to write flash fiction.