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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A friend of mine whom I’ve never met, Emma Newman, has been worrying lately that her blog ain’t what it used to be, and that maybe it won’t ever be the same again. She is concerned that, as her circumstances have changed, as she herself has changed (from being a struggling, unknown, unpublished writer, with [...]

If the Australian Government and the big-chain booksellers have their way, the Australian publishing industry will be all but dead in a few years’ time. There are very few Australian literary agents now, but they too will have gone. For Australian writers – especially new ones – the only chance of being published will be [...]

I’ve been trying to decide lately at what point being published for no fee counts as vanity publishing. A few of my recent publications have been in non-fee-paying magazines. I sent my work to them because I thought it would be an appropriate first step on the ladder to being paid for my work. (You [...]

Everyone who writes books these days agonises about self-publishing. There are many arguments for and against but, in the end it probably comes down to two things for most people; validation and sales. The validation thing makes my skin crawl but it amounts to this, most writers do not feel as if they really are [...]