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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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 powerful yearnings and problems with self-confidence, to being a popular, well-regarded blogger with a publishing contract and a bright future ahead of her) the nature of her blog has failed to keep up.

It made me wonder why I’m not having the same trouble with my own blogs. I began my first blog (Waving Not Drowning) because I wanted to be part of the ‘conversation’ that was happening in the blogsphere. It was fun, I met interesting people, I fearlessly told the world just what I thought. I had a readership barely distinguishable from zero.

Then, a couple of years later, I got the bug to be published. I went to a writer’s workshop and they said, start your own blog and create your brand. So I started a new blog (the one you’re reading, called Graham Storrs because that’s my brand) and did pretty much what Emma did. I agonised about my struggles to find an agent and a publisher, I cheered my successes, I posted my stories. I also found a different set of interesting people. My readership leapt up from just scraping the ground to something like head-height. Not exactly soaring off into the stratosphere but a lot higher than I ever expected (thanks, everyone!)

I kept the two blogs going in parallel and have done so for nearly two full years (my writing blog and my ranting blog, as I like to describe them.) Some months ago, I signed a book deal for my novel, TimeSplash (and now I’ve started yet another blog just for the book!) Obviously, I could no longer write about my struggles to become published. I had to look again at this blog and ask myself what I was doing with it. (Unlike my friend, I don’t do this kind of agonising in public – which is probably a failing on my part.)

The answer, it turned out, was simple. In New Age terms, this blog is about my’ journey’ as a writer, a journey that will never end. In marketing terms, it is also, still, the major vehicle for my brand. The third post I wrote after I got my contract was called “After the End Comes the Beginning” which pretty much sums up how I feel about it. OK, I’ve got that first book contract – the one I’ve wanted all my life – but, to become a writer, I need more. I need a second contract, and a third, fourth and fifth. Unless TimeSplash sells like crazy, which is unlikely I have to admit, it is going to be harder to get that second contract than it was to get the first. Yes, harder. Agents and publishers look at the numbers and they judge you coldly and harshly. So I foresee plenty of writerly angst, a lifetime of ups and downs, and that means tons more to write about.

One of the interesting things Emma said on her post was that she didn’t want to “squander the privilege” of having people visit her blog. I know how she feels. The more your readership grows, the more you feel a responsibility towards all those people, a need to justify their attention. Just switching off the blog and doing something else would feel like a betrayal. Even long periods of silence make you feel guilty. All I can say is, thank heavens for RSS feeds! People don’t have to keep visiting your blog and going away empty-handed. They only come when there’s something happening.

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 to find a publisher overseas – probably in the US or the UK where they will still have parallel importation restrictions and healthy publishing industries. For Australian readers – for readers everywhere – the only chance to read an Australian book, in an Australian setting, and in an Australian voice will be… Well, there won’t really be much chance of that at all.

Unless…

Unless Australian publishing doesn’t just roll over and die when the market is flooded with American remaindered books and competition becomes impossible. Because there will be an opportunity hiding in the weedy wasteland of what once was a thriving, local publishing industry. Australian publishing could go digital.

The world is just waiting for the huge, global digital book publishers of the future to emerge. By default, these will be Amazon and Google, but what if backs-to-the-wall Australian publishers refused to go down and, instead, re-engineered themselves into the digital content empires of the 21st Century? It wouldn’t be the first time an Australian media company had achieved world domination. All it takes is foresight and a willingness to take bold and radical action when the times call for it. Like they do. Right now.

Other countries aren’t knocking their publishing industries to the ground and kicking them ’til they bleed. So other countries’ publishing industries don’t have the incentive to get a move on and make the change ahead of the pack.

And if the Australian publishers won’t do it, it’s going to be up to us, Australia’s writers, to do something. I don’t think any of us want to have our voices silenced because a criminally negligent Government has dumped us in favour of hard-line capitalist ideology. I think we all believe there is more to Australia’s culture than being able to buy cheap American books. I think we all believe we have something to say that is relevant here and throughout the world, that we, as writers, are as good as others who happen to have viable publishing industries wherever in the world they are, and that we do not deserve to be turned into charity cases as the Productivity Commission recommends.

If our publishers can’t survive what is coming, we will have to find other ways of getting our work out. We will have to embrace the opportunities of digital publishing ourselves and make them work for us. One thing is for sure, in Australian publishing, business as usual will not be an option for any of us.

Can you hear its siren call?

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 may remember I blogged about this recently.) And I would still recommend this to other writers who are starting out. The editors I’ve dealt with have been intelligent, professional people who put a lot of work into helping me adjust my stories for their needs and, in the process, taught me a lot about writing for magazines and about how to work with editors. In fact, I have noticed no difference in the standards and professionalism of the ‘for-the-love’ editors and the ones who’ve paid me.

However, as I also noted, other writers have a completely different attitude. They target the highest-paying magazines first, then, on rejection, move to lower-paying magazines. Only when all paying markets are exhausted, will they send their work to non-paying magazines. Effectively, the non-paying mags are used as dumping grounds for stories they can’t sell. In which case, you have to ask yourself, why do they send their work to non-paying mags at all? Presumably, because it is better to have your story published, even for free, than to have it sitting forever on your hard drive. In other words, it’s a kind of vanity publishing.

Yet I’m pretty sure these same authors would baulk at the idea of actually paying someone to publish their work. That really would be beyond the pale. And it’s not such an odd reaction. After all, the free magazines do have standards – quite high ones. They do reject work – lots of it. So acceptance by a ‘for-the-love’ magazine is still a validation of the author as a writer. And the free magazines do still have wide circulations. Publication by those magazines still means the author’s work ‘gets out there’. But why is that better than leaving the story unpublished? Why is it that, when all else fails, writers would rather give their stories away to a magazine than to have them go unread?

It can only be vanity.

And here’s another interesting development I’ve noticed. Some authors have begun publishing their work directly as e-books. If you live in the USA, you can very easily self-publish a work as an e-book on Amazon and, for everybody else, you can do the same thing on Lulu. It is rumoured that Sony will introduce a similar service soon. It costs absolutely nothing and, for some, there is money to be made. These companies provide tools to support the author in formatting their books, designing covers,  and so on. The only expenses are getting an ISBN and registering your copyright (in the USA) and even an ISBN isn’t necessary to sell through Lulu.

Of course, there is no editorial selection at all. Anyone can publish anything this way. (Someone – and I forget who, unfortunately – said recently that the way to think of Lulu is as a photocopying service – a service it provides very well and at reasonable prices.) So maybe this is the next step for those authors who can’t sell their stories, and can’t get them accepted by the free magazines, but still want to get them out there. They can publish their work as e-books through these online services. It is still free. They still have not crossed that line and paid to be published.

How many will do it? How many will go there?

We already see the writers advice sites saying there are perfectly good reasons to self-publish (a family memoir, say, or a local history – the kind of books that commercial publishers won’t touch.) This is a distinct softening of the hard line that used to be drawn. Maybe the next softening will be to say it’s OK to self-publish if you have a work that is unpublishable for the reason that it has been rejected by every legitimate outlet. It seems unthinkable, but you never know, after all, commercial publishing is contracting and may well contract a lot farther over the next couple of years. Every month now, a few more magazines go bust, or are put ‘on hiatus’ as they wait for better times. The number of stories not finding a paying or even a non-paying outlet must be rising steadily. Stories that, last year would have been publishable, next year won’t be. What will happen to them all?

Watch this space.

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 writers unless a publisher is willing to invest money in their books. The sales thing is something else altogether and this is it, a self-published book will bevery lucky to sell 150 copies, while a ‘properly’ published book might expect sales between ten and a hundred times that much.

The reason I’m mulling this one again is that I came across an old article by the author Sherman Young called “Everybody Writes“. In it he talks about the modern trend towards increasing participation in the blogsphere as a possible path for the future of publishing. The view that blogging is self-publishing one’s writing to a global audience is reasonable. I suspect the many bloggers who don’t really see it that way – whose blogs are little more than diaries or shouts to friends – have been migrating steadily to Facebook and Twitter since the article was written (2007) making it an even more valid view now than it was then.

As a writer who is trying to get his books published, I have considered all kinds of options, including serialisation on my blogs. Since the readership of my blogs went past 500 per month a few weeks ago, serialisation here would almost certainly give me more readers than self-publishing on paper. (Since about two thirds of my readers are regulars, that’s about 150 drop-ins each month – so 350 + (150 x 12) = 2,150 potential readers in a year.)

The good news is, it would cost me nothing. The bad news is, it would earn me nothing.

The upside is that thousands of people would see my work. The downside is that most people who come here are not looking for free fiction and, if that’s what they found, might start looking elsewhere – then I wouldn’t have all those nice people dropping by at all. (Actually, I’m not quite sure why so many people are stopping by – anyone care to enlighten me?)

Which brings me back to Sherman Young’s piece. Yes, everybody is writing these days. We are all “prosumers” as he puts it (maybe “wreaders” would be a better term). But what we’re serving up to one another is not fiction. It is opinion and news. The big blogs – the ones getting half-a-million visits a day – are news and opinion sites too. They are definitely not fiction sites. I think it is truly wonderful that so much exchange of ideas and information is going on in the blogsphere and I love being a part of it. But I suspect this is not the place to publish your books.