A profound change has come upon me. No, it’s not the male menopause, although I’m long overdue for a red sports car and a dab of Rogaine. No, this change is based on the realisation that from this week onward, whatever I’m doing, wherever I am, I will never be without a book to read.

What happened to me is this: I bought a smartphone.

I got the phone about a week ago. It took me a few days to footle around with it, setting settings and playing with its various bells and whistles. Then, while I was in a vet’s waiting room, waiting, I downloaded the Kindle app and fired it up. If you don’t know how the Kindle works, let me explain. There is a central repository “in the cloud” where books that you buy from Amazon are held – they call it the Archive. You can download books from your archive into your device and then read them. You can also download books from other sources into your device, but they don’t end up in the archive. So, when I looked at my new Kindle app, there was every book I had ever bought from Amazon, just waiting for me. I picked “Welcome to the Monkey House” by Kurt Vonnegut – something my wife had bought recently, meaning to re-read, and I started re-reading it myself.

The display on my new phone is small (about 10 cm – that’s 4 inches in old money) but the text is clear and steady and I was quite pleased with the readability. The touch screen makes turning the page simple – a single touch with the finger (or thumb) to left or right turns the page that way (you can “swipe” to turn pages too if you’re feeling flamboyant). After ten minutes or so, the vet called us in and I popped the phone in my pocket and thought nothing more about it.

Until today.

I was in a coffee shop. I ordered my usual large cappuccino to go and settled in for the usual fifteen minute wait. To while away the time, I took out my new phone – and remembered I had a book I was reading. So I clicked through to the app and carried on with it. The coffee came. I put the phone away. A couple of hours later, I was waiting again – this time while my wife went to the library (oh, irony). So I whipped out my phone and started reading again.

And that’s when it struck me. I carry my phone with me whenever I go out. Even as I write, it is within hand’s reach of me. And now my phone is an ereader, connected to the largest online bookshop in the world. I will never, ever, have to spend another idle moment without a book to read. Old favourites, new adventures, are just a couple of clicks away. A collection far larger than my local library’s is there in my pocket whenever I want to dip into it.

I find this idea profoundly moving. It is a quantum leap improvement in my quality of life. I still can’t get my head around how significant this is.

I’ve been reading ebooks for years. I have a Kindle which is in constant use around the house, or in hotels on overnight trips. I’ve had a smartphone for years too – just not one with a large enough screen to make reading feasible. But, somehow, the combination of big screen phone and Kindle app has given me access to a capability far more significant than the sum of its parts.

Just for the record, I still prefer reading on the Kindle to on the phone (a Samsung Galaxy S, by the way, running Android). The Kindle was literally made for reading books. When I have them side by side, I will always pick up the Kindle. However, the awesomeness of having a not-quite-Kindle there in my pocket, wherever I go, has changed everything. I no longer go to where the books are, or where my ereader is; now the books come to me.

I have a secret identity. No, I’m not going to reveal it. What part of “secret identity” did you not understand? Only four people in the world know it, and two of those found out because I accidentally signed the wrong name on my communications with them! Keeping track of who you are can be a bitch.

Anyway, this secret identity of mine has now published three books on Smashwords; two novellas and a short story collection. It all started a while ago, when I was very excited about self-publishing and ebooks and wanted to get some first-hand experience of what it was all about. It so happens I had a pile of stories lying around in a genre I don’t usually write in (FYI, anything except sci-fi is a genre I don’t normally write in) and a couple of these were novella-length. I was obviously never going to do anything with them and who publishes novellas anyway, so I started looking around for a way to self-publish them at absolutely no cost.

In all my identities, I am a skinflint.

There was this great startup called Smashwords at the time, just beginning to make waves, so I bunged my novellas on there and then checked my ‘dashboard’ every five minutes. Please note, I didn’t make any effort to publicise them. I didn’t mention them on Twitter, or Facebook, or anywhere that anybody might look. I did start up a blog under the false identity and did about three posts, but that gets about one visitor a month. And, guess what? They didn’t sell.

I brought the price down and down, but I never reached a point where anyone was interested. Eventually, I set the price to ‘free’ and started getting a tiny bit of interest. So I put the price back up to $0.99c (‘free’ was just an experiment – I have moral issues with giving my work away for nothing) and, eventually, forgot all about it.

That was about a year ago. Basically, messing about with self-publishing experiments went by the board when I actually found a commercial publisher for one of my novels. (TimeSplash. Yes I know you know, I just like saying it.) Besides, I was absolutely overwhelmed for months with publicising TimeSplash. I set up a website for it, gave it its own blog, I dived into Twitter, I did blog and twitter tours, and begged (and pleaded) for reviews. I was a busy bee.

Gradually, all the TimeSplash kerfuffle died down.

Then, a week or so ago, I took a look at my Smashwords stats, just for old times’ sake. And – bugger me! – those novellas are doing quite well now. In fact, last month they sold more than my commercially-published book did. Which isn’t saying much, actually, since, after a year on the shelves, TimeSplash the ebook is fading away as a force in the commercial publishing world. Please note that, unlike TimeSplash, which still garners the odd flattering review and earns me the occasional interview, but which is still drifting down the rankings,  the novellas had no publicity at all, and yet they are gaining in popularity. It is still true that, over their respective lifetimes, TimeSplash the ebook has earned me many, many times what the self-pubbed novellas have, but that may not always be true, the way things are going.

So I gathered up a few short stories – which have the same characters and world as the novellas – into a 30K-word collection, and published that at Smashwords too. It went ‘live’ yesterday. Partly it was as a sort of ‘thank you’ to all those people who are buying my novellas and might be wanting more, partly it’s another experiment, to see if adding a third book will increase the momentum still further.

That short story collection is my fifth self-published book by the way.  (I also did a children’s story called Hangin’ With the Monkeys under my own name – another genre I never intend to exploit commercially – and a collection of short stories – mostly from my already-published ‘backlist’ – called Placid Point.) I will be watching its progress with interest. Shame I can’t tell you what it’s called, so you could go and buy it. On the other hand, maybe I’d better stick to my no publicity policy since it seems to be working so well.

Well, I feel I am no longer a sci-fi novice. I’m just home from the World Science Fiction Convention, WorldCon 68, and I have the post-con exhaustion to prove it. I met up with my old Orbiteer buddies (the guys who started all this for me) and got the outstanding news that yet another one of us has made it into print. Joanne Anderton has just signed a two-book deal (which I’m sure she’ll announce any moment now)! Anyone who has read Joanne’s work will not be in the least bit surprised. Anyone who hasn’t should shoot off to her blog and keep watching for the release date.

Meanwhile, while I was away, Aussie writer Gary Kemble published an interview with me on his Posterous blog (and it is also up on the Kemblog.) Gary has become a bit of a mover and shaker in the local speculative fiction scene in recent years – one of those people who contributes a lot to the genre, so I gladly recommend that (after you’ve seen the interview) you spend a while looking at the amazing things he’s doing. And, if you like dark fantasy and horror, make sure you read his stuff.

And thank heavens for ebooks! I took my Kindle away with me and even with all that travel and a week away from home – during which I read two novels and a load of short stories – it was nowhere near needing a recharge. Such a great device. I even got to sit in the sun on the rare occasions that it was shining – something you just couldn’t do with a non-e-ink device.

I’ll post more later – you’re not sick of hearing about WorldCon yet are you? – but right now I have a thousand things to catch up on. Be seeing you.

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

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 game will be shaking their heads and smiling wryly. Four months is no time at all to wait! they’re thinking. Small press publishers are far too busy to worry about updating their websites. This guy is obviously a newbie and will have to learn to control his patience and live with his frustration. Worse still, these old hands will tell you that you mustn’t express your frustration, you mustn’t let your impatience show. It doesn’t matter how the publishing houses treat you, if you kick up a fuss about it, they will put a black mark against you. Commissioning editors, they say, have long memories – as do agents.

Frankly, I don’t understand this attitude. I’ve been in business for three decades. I have managed business units for some of the world’s largest corporations, and I have run my own small consultancy. I know how businesses run. I know how buying works. I know how to manage a supply chain. It’s painfully obvious to me that the world’s publishing houses are making some basic and very stupid mistakes.

At the front end of the publishing business, the companies seem to be doing better than at the back end. Their attitude to book shops – their primary market – seems to be businesslike enough.  It’s a mess, of course, horribly inefficient and the book retailers seem to have beaten the publishers up pretty well over the years, but the publishers are doing as well as they can in a market that has become overly complex and difficult for them. Marketing beyond the book retailers seems to be a rout for the publishers but they are trying hard to redefine the business so that this is considered outside their responsibility.

On the supply side, the picture is patchy. On the one hand you have editing, design, printing and related services, which are going OK. On the other, you have content acquisition and management which appears to be a disaster. Most sizeable publishers only receive submissions from agents these days, having thrown their hands up and given up trying to do it themselves. Despite having been at it for a century or two, the publishers never learned how to do this efficiently. I don’t suppose they think that agents can do it any better, but at least now they have passed a large part of the cost on to someone else.

Since agents and publishers do not know which books will succeed and which will not, they have no way of telling writers what they want (apart from saying “This, this, and this genre – oh, and anything that’s really good.”) This means writers must produce work on spec and hope it fits the requirements/hunches/moods of the moment when they submit it. Agents are not in a much better position, they have to read through heaps of queries and mountains of slush, then take a gamble on their gut feeling, imprecise knowledge of publishers’ tastes and needs, and their (often quite limited) experience. This amounts to a major inefficiency in the system. If you include authors as part of the publishing industry, this process alone pushes the overall productivity of the industry very close to zero.

The gross inefficiencies of the acquisition process, and the lack of effective process management tools, are directly responsible for much of the rough treatment of authors that ensues. If you call your local utility company, a voice recognition or menu system will channel you into appropriate queues. There you may be given an estimate of how  long you will have to wait to have your call dealt with. You may be told how many are ahead of you in the queue and this will count down for you as you wait. At the very least, the musak will be interrupted every couple of minutes so they can apologise for the delay and assure you that they are still working on getting to you.

With an agent or publisher, it is very different. You may (or most likely won’t) get an acknowledgement that your submission has arrived. After that you will hear nothing. Sometimes you will hear nothing for three, four, six, or even twelve months, before you get a one or two line pro forma rejection. Very often these days, you will wait forever. Many agents and publishers say their policy is that if you don’t hear from them, you can take that as a ‘no’!

It’s not because they’re rushed off their feet (although that is often true.) It’s not because they’re rude and selfish people (some are, some aren’t.) It’s because their business processes are ridiculous, designed for another age, and propped up by free labour and outrageous demands on salaried staff. It’s because their acquisitions business model depends on luck, rather than on knowing what they want to acquire, leading to huge amounts of additional, wasted work. It’s because their suppliers – the authors – are so desperate for success, so cowed by the system, so petrified by the old hands and the long memories of faceless decision makers, that they will put up with this shoddy treatment.

Do you think the suppliers of paper and transport and warehousing do their work on spec, hoping that the publisher will approve and pay them? Do you suppose the printers submit a quote for services and wait six months without hearing a word from the publisher, afraid that if they complain they might uspset them? Of course not. So why do writers?

Honestly, we get the publishers and agents we deserve.

Right now, the publishers stand with respect to writers as the big supermarket chains stand with respect to farmers. But, in a time when publishers and agents are teetering on the edge of complete disintermediation, this is not the time to be upsetting potential suppliers. This is the time to be raising your game. Writers have long memories too!

The Queensland Writers Centre is touring blogs again. This time the tour has a theme: Writers’ Desks. For some reason writers’ desks are fascinating and pictures of same are hugely popular. So QWC is probably onto a winner here. However, when they asked me to put up a picture of my own desk as part of the tour, I was painfully aware that I’ve only recently done that.

Fascinating as my desk is, I can’t keep posting pictures of it. It’s not as if it has seasonal changes or anything. So I’ve taken the opportunity to correct a glaring omission from my last picture and show you my computer ‘desktop’. This should be just as interesting as the wooden one since, for me at least, the computer is where 95% of the work gets done.

The desktop that really matters

For those without broadband (or using Telstra NextG, which is almost as bad) I apologise for the size of this picture. Even so, it isn’t big enough for you to recognise all the icons. That’s why the animation provides labels for the following groups.

• Group A: Various mobile device managers (phone, camera, MP3 player and so on.)
• Group B: Internet stuff (browser, email, Skype, Twitter, and FTP client)
• Group C: Office software (mostly Open Office but also PowerPoint)
• Group D: Music score editing software. (Yes, I write music. It’s a little hobby of mine.)
• Group E: Image editing software (Paint Shop Pro, IrfanView and IconEasel)
• Group F: Media players (Windows Media Player and WinAmp)
• Group G: HTML editors (HTML Kit and Komodo Edit)
• Group H: Sundry utilities (antivirus, encryption, DVD writers, backup, 3G wireless client, and Celestia, which lets me view the universe from various perspectives)
• Group I: Various ebook readers and ebook creators.
• Group J: Stuff to do with my current writing project (the Open Office file itself, my multifunction tracking sheet, and a program called StoryBook that I’ve been trying out as a way of organising the background info – I’m not getting along well with it.)
• Group K: Games (basically, the only computer game I ever play is Freecell – a patience-style card game.)

I should also mention the background picture. I change my background quite often and it is usually an astronomical theme. This one is a long-exposure shot of the space shuttle taking off in Florida last year. I love pictures of astronauts on EVAs, Hubble deep field shots, and the ISS. Images like these help keep me inspired.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening February to April 2010. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog.