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.

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.

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!

Please say hello to the newest member of The New York Journal of Books‘ reviews team. And, while you’re at it, why not nip across and have a look at my first review for this new, online book review journal. (Actually, if you read my recent review here of Dawkins’ Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, you could skip that step, since it is almost the same. Almost, I say, but not quite. When you write a review for a review mag, you can’t adopt the same chatty, personalised, approach that I do in my blog reviews. And if that difference intrigues you, you might like to go and take a look anyway, to compare them.)

Why favour the New York Journal of Books with my erudition, you may ask. Well, I’ve been looking for some non-fiction projects to become involved in, lately, the kind of project that is both writerly and related to my interests, that will involve me more in the writing world, and which will raise my profile in literary circles. I’ve come to being a published writer from a long, long time of wandering in the wilderness. My name is much better known in other, completely unrelated spheres of life. Now I need to change that.

And by great good fortune, I came upon the NYJB. It’s a new venture (it started last month!) and, I think, an exciting one. As Editor-in-Chief and founder, Ted Sturtz says:

In light of the shift from print to online content, there is an opportunity to establish a purely online book review positioned to capture the ongoing growth of the online audience. Moreover, by gradually assembling a broad panel of highly-credentialed reviewers the journal is positioning to offer far more comprehensive coverage of new books than any other book review. While it will be critical to review major new titles as they are released, the Journal aims to review more books in niche or non-mainstream genres than are covered by the current major review publications. The NYJB aims to also review more books written by first-time authors and books published by smaller independent houses, providing respected reviews for authors and independent publishers that are generally spurned by the major review publications. The review also intends to review books in niches that are generally ignored by mainstream publishers. In short, the aim is to establish NYJB as a review widely recognized to be on par with the most respected traditional reviews, while reviewing a far larger number of books.

With so many highly respected review sources either folding or being drastically cut back, I’m very pleased to get behind the NYJB and to help create a top-class online review site in the tradition of (the struggling) Kirkus and the great New York Times Book Review. Authors and publicists, you should seriously consider adding the New York Journal of Books to your list of review sites for your next release.

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?

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.

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)

I suppose the title sums up my overall reaction to my new Kindle ebook reader but there are all kinds of details of the experience that I should probably add.

I was reluctant to get a Kindle. It’s not the best e-book reader in the world and e-ink is not my favourite screen technology. The ‘international’ version (why don’t they just say ‘the one for foreigners’?) doesn’t have a proper charger (just USB – which is SLOW) has no SD card slot, and, even at the current exchange rate, I still think it’s overpriced.  However, it is the best – certainly the best value – that is currently available in Australia, I really, really wanted an ereader, and it’s wireless connectivity trumps most other technical features.

When I took it out of the box, I have to say I was a little disappointed. The screen was smaller than I had expected and the device weighed more. The e-ink page is not as high contrast as I remembered (much less than the LCD screen I’m typing into at the moment) and the slow refresh rate makes the user interface feel slow and clunky. When I uploaded a few MobiPocket files from my PC (a piece of cake, by the way) and started to read, I found the slow page turning and the flickering through black as the page turns a bit of a worry. (Please note that most of these drawbacks would be common to all e-ink ebook readers.)

Then I started to read. Within a couple of minutes the page turning and the rest didn’t bother me at all. I got used to it and the whole device just melted into the background. In fact, now that I’ve spent a few hours using the Kindle, I found going back to a real book quite a surprise. Have they always been so big and heavy and cumbersome as that? How did I cope with such a ridiculously cumbersome technology for all those years?

Someone put a lot of thought into the Kindle hardware. The ergonomics of the physical device are excellent. The controls are just where they need to be. Most things do just what you’d expect them to without having to check the manual. It’s easy to hold, well balanced and feels natural to operate. The only part of the machine I don’t like is the on/off switch at the top. It’s hard to find (when you’re holding the machine in a reading position) and fiddly to use. But then, you don’t use it all that often.

The software user interface design isn’t quite so good, but it’s acceptable. The menus are OK, screen layouts for books and so on are adequate. The book cover images are too small to make much sense of and being black and white and fairly low resolution doesn’t help. But the designers made some good choices about menu contents and about defaults. The first time I went back to a magazine I had been reading and found that it opened just where I had left off, I wanted to shake the designer’s hand. My (long-sighted) wife particularly likes the fact you can easily switch to a larger font size.

Registration was easy (essentially there is none – unless you received the Kindle as a gift) and the shopping experience really shows the years of bookselling expertise that Amazon brings to bear.

So far I have a handful of sci-fi magazines on the device, and a bundle of 50-odd books by Wilkie Collins that I bought from Amazon for about $7. (Yes, I know they’d have been free from Project Gutenberg but, for a few dollars, the convenience of having 50-odd books delivered direct to the reader is irresistable.) I’ve yet to see how the Kindle handles collections of hundreds of books and other documents. The way it seems at the moment (books easy and cheap to acquire, reading simple and pleasurable) I can only see one reason I would ever buy another print book: availability.

The Kindle Booksstore has about 300,000 titles but it is nowhere near enough. The first three books I looked for using the device (‘Anathem’ by Neal Stephenson, ‘Dead America’ by Luke Keioskie, and ‘Old Man’s War’ by John Scalzi) were not there. Stephenson and Scazi would definitely have made sales if they had been. (I’ve already got ‘Dead America’.) Fortunately, there are plenty pf other ebook shops and ebook editions of everything will be the norm soon enough.

I’m pretty sure my Kindle (for foreigners) will be thoroughly outdated in a couple of years’ time (hell, it’s starting to slide even now) but between now and then, I expect it to be my constant companion. People who don’t think electronic publishing is the future, probably haven’t tried using an ebook reader yet. I’ve only had mine 24 hours and the advantages of presenting books electronically over presenting them on paper seem overwhelming. Yes, the technology is not yet perfect, but it is already good enough that I don’t want to go back to the old days (yesterday morning) before my ereader arrived.

When I was asked by QWC to take part in the Queensland Writers Centre Blog Tour, I leapt at the chance. Anything I can do to help QWC, I will, since QWC changed my life. I also think the Australian Writers Marketplace Online is a fantastic tool that writers the world over should subscribe to. So a big welcome to followers of the tour. I hope you’ve been enjoying the journey as much as I have. And for my regular readers, you can catch up on the rest of the tour at the QWC blog (details at the bottom of this post.)

They asked me the following questions:

Where do your words come from?

This probably sounds a bit weird but my characters write my books. My part in it is to create a world – I’m extremely meticulous about world-building – invent some interesting characters to go in it and an interesting predicament for them to find themselves in. After that, I just need to follow them through the story and let them say and do what their natures and the situation inevitably lead them to say and do. Not that I don’t work out the plot and the pacing, the key moments I need to hit, and the themes of the book, but even that is done by letting the characters’ actions unfold within the constraints of their world.

Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

I grew up in the city of Hull in Yorkshire, a poor town in the North of England. I lived on a gigantic council estate, part of a big, extended family, half of which was on the dole on any particular day. Yet, thanks entirely to the amazing, generous, socialist policies of the times, I got a first class schooling, and went to excellent universities, for free.

Now, after a long career in software R&D and user interface design, that has taken me all over the world, I have settled in the beautiful hills of Southern Queensland in an area they call the Granite Belt. My house is on a peak at about 1000m, I’m surrounded by native bush and wild animals. It’s quiet, peaceful, and very beautiful.

What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?

My first novel, TimeSplash, starts with the following:

“The music thundered. So loud it was hard to breathe. The way the dancing crowd heaved in time to the beat made Patty feel nauseous.

Or was that just fear?

There had been lots of splashparties. Since she became Sniper’s bitch that’s all they’d done, going from one to another right across Europe. But she’d never seen a party from up here before. Not from inside the cage.”

As you might suppose, it’s a thriller. It’s set in Europe about forty years from now and it took most of last year to write. It’s due for release on 15th February 2010.

What piece of writing do you wish you had written?

I should probably say ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘The Da Vinci Code’ if I had any sense. At least then I’d be rich. But I obviously don’t because the kinds of books that come to mind are the ones that leave me gasping in admiration, awed by the skill, intelligence and sensitivity of the writer. Books like; ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ by Ursula le Guin, ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut, and ‘Fahrenheit 451′ by Ray Bradbury, to name but a tiny few of them. And that’s just the sci-fi novels. Don’t get me started on Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Kipling, Wilfred Owen… And, oh, to think of writing Milton’s ‘On His Blindness’!

What are you currently working towards?

That’s easy. I’m working toward building a career as a writer. As I say, my first novel, TimeSplash, is about to be published. I really need that to be a success if I’m ever to be given the chance to publish another. These days, as a new author, that means publicising the book myself, using whatever resources I have to drive sales. A writer today is very much an entrepreneur. Writing the books is only half the job. I’m not one of life’s salesmen. It doesn’t come easy. But I’m more than willing to do it because I am one of life’s writers, and I’ll do whatever I have to to ensure that I can keep writing and keep getting published.

Complete this sentence… The future of the book is…

…electronic. My novel, TimeSplash, is being published as an ebook only. There will not be a print edition. This is a bit of a gamble at the moment but you will see this more and more over the next few years. These days, the mainstream publishers are still trying to work out what electronic publishing is all about. My own publisher, Lyrical Press Inc., has specialised in electronic publishing for some years already. While the big publishers are tentatively publishing electronic editions in parallel with print editions, the electronic publishers are branching out into more and more genres, and print-on-demand. I think it’s inevitable that print will slowly decline until it is a niche luxury product. In the end, the economics of electronic publishing will drive out print.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening October to December 2009. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog The Empty Page.

I’ve just spent half a day working on the schedule for the TimeSplash Blog Tour in March and April, contacting everybody involved and trying to firm up all 16 dates. Just another facet of the writerly life that no-one ever bothers to mention. I’d rope Wifie in to do all my admin (she’s great at that stuff) only she has this unfortunate view that she has her own life to lead and her own stuff to do. If only the dog could type!

Juggling all these dates, planning all these interviews and pieces of writing, making sure the tour stays interesting over the whole two months got me thinking. And this is what I thought, “I hope to God the publication date doesn’t slip.”

It made me realise that I need more information from my publisher. If I’m working as the freelance publicist in this team, I’d really like to be attending the staff meetings and seeing the internal project reports on my book’s progress. My last editing deadline went past about two weeks ago with no word or sign of progress. The Managing Editor tells me not to worry, everything’s fine, but is it? Is it? I now have 16 blog tour dates set up. I have reviewers waiting to receive review copies of the book. I have other events planned. I’ve been telling the world to expect my book on 15th February 2010 US EST (there, I’ve done it again) and it is starting to become important that that date is actually met.

In this world where authors are their own publicists, where books succeed or fail depending on what kind of marketer the writer is, a publishing house can no longer be a black box. It has to become a project partner. We have to plan together and share information. My own publisher attempts to do this through half-a-dozen discussion groups and the writer/editor relationship. But, although it’s a lot, it’s still not enough. The process is not transparent enough for me.

Maybe I’m a control freak, but I have run lots of IT projects in my day, some of them involving fifty-odd people spread across several countries and lasting years. I know that communication and the visibility of information is what makes large collaborations work. I’m sure publishing houses know this too, they just don’t yet seem to have grasped fully that the writer has become an essential part of the downstream process and his own plans and schedules need to be coordinated with all the rest.