Graham Storrs

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]