Graham Storrs

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 now have the galleys of my novel TimeSplash and they have prompted me to say this to all aspiring novellists.
When you write a novel, make sure it is as rich, deep and subtle as you can possibly make it. Make all the characters complex and interesting, in fact, make them fascinating. Make sure that [...]

My perception of the Web has changed. I used to think it was full of people like me, ordinary folk, going about their business, finding things that interested them, chatting to friends and acquaintances, but I was wrong. Oh, there may be such people – millions of them – but they don’t really matter. What [...]

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
(from ‘The Waking‘ by Theodore Roethke.)
Writing is a strange business. Last night I killed my babies.
I woke at about 3 am, drenched in sweat, even though it was cool. My head was full of purpose. I knew what to [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

No, not a post about the Battle of Thermopylae just a few comments on building up a following on Twitter. Yesterday, you see, I had 300 ‘followers’ for the first time. Unlike King Leonidas, I won’t ask my gallant band to give their lives in a hopeless rearguard action against the armies of the Persian [...]

And here is part 4 of  my sci-fi writer’s manifesto: five simple statements intended to guide my writing. This is the full set.

Write only about what is real, or about what can reasonably be foreseen based on what is real.
Be honest about what is real and what is not real.
Do not write if you have [...]

Yesterday, I published the first expansion on my sci-fi writer’s manifesto: five simple statements intended to guide my writing. This is the full set.

Write only about what is real, or about what can reasonably be foreseen based on what is real.
Be honest about what is real and what is not real.
Do not write if you [...]

If Isaac Asimov was an unknown writer and wrote the Foundation trilogy today, I doubt very much that he would have been able to get an agent or a publisher for it. I mean, just look at the writing! Endless screeds of exposition, almost everything is told, not shown, adverbs litter the text, and the [...]