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Take me to Graham's writing blog.

The page you are on now is an old version of my writing blog which I no longer maintain or update. The new version is where all the action is.

By all means search or browse here for old posts but these too have been transferred to the new site, so you can also find them there.

If you came here from a link on your own website or blog, please update your link to point to the new site. The new URL is http://grahamstorrs.cantalibre.com/

If you have an RSS (or Atom) feed for this page, you should update that too. (Probably the easiest way is to delete it in your reader, then go to the new site and subscribe again there.)

If you came here following a link on somebody else's blog or website, please do me a favour and let them know their link is out of date. (Thanks.)

More Added Value!

(Cross-posted from my real writing blog. Update your links today.)

I just can't stop playing with my new writing blog. The Wordpress template I'm using makes everything so easy. Today, I had the bright idea that I'd add a link to an Amazon shop featuring my old, out-of-print books. They're pretty ancient now but you can still buy them second-hand on Amazon and I hoped people would be curious.

Then I thought maybe that wasn't really interesting enough. So I hit on the idea of putting up a page of sci-fi books that I thought were the most important, significant and purely wonderful I have ever read - just to let everyone know what my taste is. Unfortunately, once I'd started, I couldn't stop and I ended up listing over forty of them! (And I still keep thinking of others I should have included.)

Doing it as an Amazon shop makes it so easy to pick books and lay out the pages that it would be idiotic to do it any other way. Plus, it has the added bonus that if anyone does feel like buying one of the books I recommend, I get a small cut of the sale price!

To see the new page on this blog, click "Buy My Books" - the rightmost menu item at the top of this page. Or you could just go straight to the Amazon shop page.

(Please note, this blog has moved to a new address. If you link to this blog from your website or through a feed reader, you should update your link. If you wish to comment, please do so at the new address. Thanks.)

Say It With Words

(Cross-posted from my real writing blog. Update your links today.)

There used to be an ad campaign for a florist with the tag line “Say it with flowers.” I always hated it. When relationships are getting rocky, or when you need to express something good, my view is, “Say it with words.” Do the job properly.

One of the most wonderful things about books, is that they’re constructed from words. Words, handled well and chosen with care, are the only way to express an idea or an emotion with any degree of subtlety and finesse.

Which is sad for e-books because I have no doubt that e-books will evolve into multimedia medleys with text playing a smaller and smaller part in the mix.

People will see this as providing content that is suitable to the medium and which exploits the capabilities of the device. But as e-books move farther and farther away from plain text content, they will also lose much of what makes a book worth reading. The words.

(Please note, this blog has moved to a new address. If you link to this blog from your website or through a feed reader, you should update your link. If you wish to comment, please do so at the new address. Thanks.)

Building a Career Backwards

(Cross-posted from my real writing blog. Update your links today.)

Just when I thought I was being smart and finally getting somewhere, I meet some fellow writers and have my confidence shaken.

I nearly made it to a Vision Writers' Group meeting in Brisbane last week. I travelled 250 km especially for the event and then got the time of the meeting wrong! (Which led to 20 minutes of running around the State Library of Queensland trying to find a meeting room full of people I've never met before, who might just look like writers, because the State Library keeps no record of who has booked it rooms for what periods!)

Fortunately I owed one of the writers some money, so he hunted me down and directed me to a pub just a few blocks away where the remains of the meeting was winding down in the beer garden. I must say that it was 35 degrees C in Brisbane and the hygrometer stood at 'soup'. So it took a couple of cold beers before I managed to cool down enough to enjoy the experience. But enjoy it I did - until the point where I mentioned that I've largely been submitting my stories to non-paying magazines.

My rationale for this is that I'm slowly building up to the high-paying mags, first by building a portfolio of published work in the non-paying markets, then moving up to the low-paying mags, then the mid-range ones, then the high-paying ones. It seemed like a good strategy to me and it's been working out. I've been clocking up some publications, I've been getting the experience of working with editors, and my confidence in my publishability has been growing.

But no-one else does it that way, it seems. Everyone else starts by submitting to the highest-paying mag they can find, then, when they're rejected, move down a tier, then down again, and so on until someone publishes their story. Given this, they had all supposed that I'd been rejected by every paying mag in the world or I wouldn't have been published in non-paying mags! (Someone also said that they thought I was doing myself an injustice and that my work was easily good enough for at least the mid-range mags - bless 'em.)

So, do I change my strategy, or what? If I stick with what I'm doing, I'm pretty sure my bottom-up approach will get me there in the end. If I switch over to the top-down strategy, I might get there quicker - and I won't have to endure people assuming I can't hack it in the high-paying markets. It seems like a no-brainer, yet I can't help feeling my 'work your way up' strategy has merit. Maybe it's just my working-class background making me feel like I should serve an 'apprenticeship' before I can claim to be a trdesman.

(Please note, this blog has moved to a new address. If you link to this blog from your website or through a feed reader, you should update your link. If you wish to comment, please do so at the new address. Thanks.)

Another Baby Step

(Cross-posted from my real writing blog. Update your URL today.)

Be still my beating heart! I just got a letter today from the JABberwocky Agency in New York in reply to my query letter. It asked to see some pages!

Maybe I'm getting the hang of this query-letter thing after all.

JABberwocky is a great agency, and the agent I approached, Eddie Schneider, looks like a great fit for this book (TimeSplash!) so my fingers and toes are all crossed.

When I've calmed down a little, I'll put the package together to send to him.

Thanks to the ever-giving Marianne de Pierres for the recommendation.

(Please note, this blog has moved to a new address. If you link to this blog from your website or through a feed reader, you should update your link. If you wish to comment, please do so at the new address. Thanks.)

Is It Dangerous to Sign Deals for Self-Published Books?

(Cross-posted from my real writing blog.)

I read a piece by Galley Cat this morning about self-publishing which featured the famously petite model Isobella Jade. Aparently, Jade wrote her memoir in an Apple Store. Then she got an agent. Then she fired her agent because things weren't going fast enough. Then she self-published the book. Then she promoted herself so effectively that she ended up signing a deal with Harper Collins.

Jade is definitely very good at self-promotion - and I mean that in a good way. Take a look at her tips for self-promotion on a small budget and see what I mean. She is dedicated, professional, and savvy, and she clearly puts in a lot of time and effort. Talking in a recent interview on the Morning Media Menu podcast, she said,

"I'm extremely self-absorbed, but in a productive way. I'm always thinking ... how is what I'm doing interesting to somebody else? How could this appeal to an audience? Why would somebody care what I have to say?"

There is something very good about this. We all admire people who believe so strongly in themselves that they manage to push through to success against all odds. Yet there is also something very disturbing about it.

As the publishing industry creaks under the strain the recession is putting on it, as it struggles to maintain its relevance in the digital age, as other options for publication and (especially) distribution become available to authors, people like Jade and the many other self-publishing success stories like her, are becoming minor folk-heroes to the vast numbers of authors aching to break into the exclusive club of published authors and looking for a way around the roadblocks that agents and publishers appear to place in their way.

Publishers too see the drive and ingenuity that Jade and her kin possess and, with their own publicity and marketing resources stretched way past the point of usefulness to any but the biggest-name authors, they want some of that. They want their authors to be their own publicity machines. They want their authors to be celebrities. They want their authors to find markets and build brands and grow loyal followings.

Which is great if you're Cory Doctorow but not so good if you're not.

This is a slippery slope for publishers. We all know that the author is the brand. But if the publisher isn't the one building that brand, if you have to do it yourself, then the publisher's value has slipped yet another notch. Right now, they have a strangle-hold on distribution because the bookshops only want to deal with publishers. So their value is high. But what if more lightweight intermediaries stepped up? What if there were companies that would manage an author's brand for them? Companies that would project-manage book production, warehousing/POD and distribution. Companies that would review, rate, even marlet-test self-published works as a service to booksellers? Where is the publisher now? Or the agent?

Picking up deals for successful, dynamic self-published authors may look like easy money for publishers, but it looks to me like another step down the slippery slope to extinction.

(If you have comments, please post them at my writing blog.)

Agents Need (Software) Agents

(Cross-posted from my real writing blog.)

I recently finished writing (yet another) novel and I'm looking for an agent to represent it.

To get an agent (it seems) you have to 'query' them. That is, you have to write them a letter asking them if they would be interested in reading your manuscript. Easy enough, you'd think, but writing a query to an agent is actually a form of High Art. The novice must master this exacting artform before the agent will even consider responding to the letter, never mind them actually asking for your manuscript.

Don't laugh. I'm serious. I never knew until recently how delicately-wrought an agent's query is. When I look back at queries I've sent out in years gone by, I realise now that I never had a cat in Hell's chance of being asked for my MS. I was doing it all wrong! There was one time - many years ago - I sent out 56 agent queries and got back just six, pro forma rejection letters. That experience was instrumental in me deciding not to bother even trying to get published again: a resolution I kept for nearly fifteen years.

There are whole websites dedicated to critiquing query letters. And many others that deal with the subject among many others on publishing etiquette. I'm told there are even services where people will write query letters for you for money!

Why is it so hard? Because agents get hundreds of queries each week. Far more than they can read sympathetically and consider with a generous spirit. The query has to be organised so that it is in a structure they expect, is concise enough to scan through in a few seconds, and gives them specific pieces of information.

As someone who has spent a long career designing user interfaces to computer systems, I understand this problem very well. In fact, it would make the agent's life soooo much easier if they created an online form that could be first checked by computer to weed out the grosser errors. For example, they like to see their names spelled correctly. A computer could easily check that. They like to know that a manuscript (fiction, anyway) is complete. That just needs a checkbox. They need to know it is a genre they represent (selection from a drop-down list), that the word-count is reasonable (peasy), and that the author can spell and construct gramatical sentences (so easily checked these days). This kind of checking would probably mean form rejections are sent out to a huge number of queriers without ever having to bother the agent.

Of course, the agent would still need to read the synopsis and they'd still need to see whether the author had personalised the query appropriately, but the software filter would be saving them so much time that they could spend lots more effort on this than they currently have available.

Sadly, most agents still insist on paper queries and havent even reached the stage where they can deal with email. It looks like there may be an opportunity here for a new agent to leap ahead of the competition. Don't forget, less time spent reading duff queries is more time spent networking and selling the good ones.