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

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.

Reading the Entrails

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 I’d get into some pretty silly calculations involving Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, prices, shipping, and exchange rates.

Then I bought a Kindle. The relationship deepened. I stopped buying printed books from Amazon. In fact, I stopped buying printed books altogether. Now I only get ebooks from the Kindle Store. Unless they’re cheaper elsewhere, of course – which they easily can be, because Amazon charges a US$2 ‘foreigner tax’ on every book bought by people who have the temerity to live outside the USA. (Don’t ask me why. Something to do with Amazon wanting all the money in the world, I think.) This means there is no such thing as a free book on Amazon. All Amazon books start at US$2. So I tend to look around. If I can get a PDF of the book somewhere else and cheaper, or a Mobipocket version, I will. As for free books, on sites like Project Gutenberg, they’re rather better value than the US$2 Amazon equivalents. (What’s worse than the ‘foreigner tax’, I’ve discovered that many Kindle editions of English classics have been ‘Americanized’. God knows why but someone has gone to the trouble of changing the spelling in old Wilkie Collins and Jane Austen novels! Are American readers really that dumb that they need a ‘translation’ from English spelling before they can read a classic English novel?)

When my novel, TimeSplash, went on sale in the Kindle Store, my relationship with Amazon plumbed new depths. At first my biggest concern was with the huge slice of the sale price Amazon charges for the privilege of selling my book. They take a 65% cut of what you pay! Then, not only do they arbitrarily discount it from US$5.50 – the publisher’s sale price – to US$4.40, they also add a US$2 ‘foreigner tax’, making it US$6.40 for foreign buyers, making the book more expensive for the 95% of us who do not live in the USA. (And you only get a DRMed, .PRC file for that – which is why I recommend to anybody wanting to buy my book, for the Kindle or any other eReader, that they buy it from the publisher’s own bookstore. Even for American buyers, I think the bundle of non-DRM formats you get from the publisher is a far more attractive deal than the slightly lower Kindle Store price.)

But that’s not the worst of it. I’ve started noticing all the twiddly bits on te book page in the Kindle Store. Things like the star rating and the tags. As a buyer of the book, you get to rate it and to tag it (either just ticking tags you agree with, or adding your own). It turns out the ratings and, especially the tags are crucial for sales. They determine whether the book turns up in Amazon searches (if it’s not tagged, it probably doesn’t show) and how high up the results list it appears. (So, for God’s sake, if you love me and you bought TimeSplash, rate it and tag it, or you might be my last customer on this site!) Then there’s the customer review. I don’t know how many people have bought the book so far – from the kind things people are saying on Twitter, there are a few of you – but, so far, only one person has written a review. Just one!

But the most insidious and terrible piece of data on the Kindle Store page for TimeSplash is the Kindle Store ranking. It’s something to do with how many books are being sold, but I don’t know what. It’s never the same from one minute to the next and it fluctuates wildly – and I mean wildly, within a range of 70,000 so far. And it means nothing, or, perhaps it means everything! Since it is a rank, and I know Amazon has about 400,000 books in the Kindle Store, it’s easy to see that, if the book is ranked better than 80,000, it is in the top 20% of sales. If it is ranked 20,000 or less, it’s in the top 5% of sales. But what does that mean? Does Amazon sell a thousand ebooks books a day, or a dozen? Who knows? And since 90% of the “best-sellers” in the Kindle Store are free books anyway, what on Earth does that do to the sales distribution? If they’re giving away books by the shovelful (in the US presumably, since they’re not free anywhere else) at one end of the ‘sales’ scale, are there 200,000 titles at the other end that are not selling at all?

I’ve had to stop looking at my book page on Amazon because this kind of thing is driving me nuts. I only make about 60¢ on an Amazon sale anyway so it’s hardly worth worrying about. I’d need to sell tens of thousands before I saw any serious money, and that’s not going to happen. So why torture myself?

Well, because, regardless of the money, I’d like to see people buying the book – and reading it!

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!)

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 came up with and try to get a feel for how appropriate they might be for marketing an ebook. The list, most popular at the top, is this:

1. Social networking and social media
2. Blogging
3. Seeking book reviews
4. Seeking testimonials and endorsements
5. Press releases
6. E-zines or email marketing
7. Radio and television talk shows
8. Speaking or teleseminars
9. Article marketing
10. Book signings

There are some obvious things to say about this, so let’s say them first. The people surveyed clearly included a lot of non-fiction authors. So I can eliminate items 8 and 9 as not really relevant for a novel. I can also eliminate 10. With an ebook, there is nothing to sign, and, for that matter, no reason why a bookshop (the traditional venue for such things) would let you in the door. So that leaves:

1. Social networking and social media
2. Blogging
3. Seeking book reviews
4. Seeking testimonials and endorsements
5. Press releases
6. E-zines or email marketing
7. Radio and television talk shows

1 and 2 are no-brainers. Anybody with a book to promote in any format and little or no money to spend, will be all over the social networks and blogsphere.

Seeking book reviews (3) might also seem obvious but it isn’t an avenue that is open to ebook writers in most genres. Where ebooks have been popular for years – in erotica and romance – there are dozens of popular and authoritative review sites on the Web. In all other genres, book reviewers will almost never review an ebook. Only rare exceptions exist among the popular review websites and online magazines. I am unaware of any exceptions among the major offline reviewers. So we can scratch that one. Over the next decade, as it becomes normal to release ebook-only novels (and as more reviewers buy ebook readers!) this will change. But in 2010, ebooks just don’t get reviewed.

4 is an interesting one. I have read a number of advice blogs saying you should do it and telling you how to go about it, but it is an amazingly difficult thing to bring oneself to do. You have to approach famous writers you admire and respect in your own genre – complete strangers, of course unless your damned lucky – and ask them to read your book and say something quotably nice about it. Given that many such writers have already come out and said, on their own blogs, that they hate being pestered this way, and some have said flat out that they won’t do it, I just can’t bring myself to ask it. I screwed up my courage in one single instance and asked a very well-known writer I’d had some slight dealings with, if he would look at my book. I then waited, cringing in embarrassment, for a reply that never did come.

5 is also interesting. I could put out press releases but who, really, would be interested? Not the national press, certainly not the international press. Which leaves the local press. Since I live out in the boondocks, my local press is full of reports on farming and country shows, and letters to the editor complaining about the global conspiracy to fool us into thinking there’s such a thing as climate change, or explaining, with Bible quotes, why God dislikes liberal politicians. I’m pretty sure I could get into a local paper but who in my area has even heard of ebooks? Who, in a town where they play country and western music in the supermarket, is interested in sci-fi?

Many e-marketers advise you to convert your social networking successes into cash by creating mailing lists. You get everyone to sign up for your regular magazine or newsletter and then, cunningly, blast them all with spam emails when the book is released. This is the strategy I assume is meant in 6. Well, I think such practices are evil. Sadly for me, I think most marketing practices are evil. Like a lot of writers, I just don’t have the personality type it takes to sell things.

And as for radio and television talk shows (7), the idea seems to suffer the same drawbacks as sending out press releases.

So, for an author with an ebook to promote, who is squeamish about marketing, and doesn’t live in a major metropolis, 1 and 2, and to a very limited extent 3, seem to be the only options available. Of course, ‘social networking’, ‘blogging’ and ‘reviews’ can mean a lot more than is obvious. Blog tours, viral promo videos, Twitter parties, online competitions, and so on, are all in the potential mix. The online activity around a new book can be quite vibrant and exciting. And, as for reviews, even if the big-name sci-fi magazines won’t review ebooks, ten kindly bloggers with readerships of a thousand or so, might easily reach more actual readers than a major print review magazine could ever hope for.