Cons

If you want to be a writer, you need to network. There's no two ways about it. You need to see and be seen. You've gotta press the flesh and schmooze. And that means going to cons and other writerly events.

Cons, as the name suggests, are a great way of spending lots and lots of money. They are gatherings of the great and good where, forthree or four days at a stretch, you get the chance to pester publishers and editors, agents and fellow writers, with the small but tantalising possibility that you will meet someone who can do your 'career' some good. Yeah, you get to listen to people standing at podiums and going on about stuff - how they got their big break, how they organise their time, how to market in the digital age, and so on - but the real reason everyone is there is to get their face known.

Or so I'm told.

Other people tell me its all about meeting fellow writers and discussing one's art with people who will understand, or who will at least be clever, interesting people who like to drink and have a laugh.

Whatever it's all about, it's expensive. I've just done the sums for the two cons I'd like to go to this year. Travelling by coach and the very cheapest flights, staying in the cheapest possible hotels, and not eating much, each con comes to a little over a twelve hundred dollars. Even the book launch I want to go to, travelling by pack mule and eating only tree bark, will set me back about six hundred dollars. So, a total of three thousand dollars for three marketing events.

If I got an agent out of it, and she got me a book deal, it would cover the cost (although I'd have to wait maybe two years to get it all back.) If I didn't, I'd have to sell a barrow-load of short stories this year to pay for it - my quick calculation puts it at about a tenth of all those printed in the paying mags this year.

As a marketing proposition then, going to a couple of cons and a book launch is probably a non-starter. In fact, if I self-published my book and spent the money on online advertising, I'd stand a much better chance of breaking even (I'd only need to sell about 600 copies).

Of course, if I did that, I'd miss all the fun of sitting in bars with half-drunken writers for seven evenings - which is not to be sniffed at - but I'd also miss the six days of travelling by JetStar and Crisps Coaches, and the ten nights of staying in cheap hotels miles from the convention centre.

What I can't understand is why I still want to go.

Is sci-fi the new black?

I've spent many hours now trawling through listings of literary agents, trying to find ones that are sci-fi friendly, and there are very, very few of them. In fact, agents who say they handle sci-fi are outnumbered at least ten-to-one (maybe twenty-to-one) by the ones who go out of their way to say 'No science fiction.'

Now, I know that sci-fi isn't the most popular genre on the block - fantasy out-sells it by ten-to-one, and crime and 'general' fiction are 30 and 40 times more popular, respectively, than sci-fi, and, let's face it, fiction as a whole is less than a third of the total book market - but must sci-fi writers really be treated like pariahs? Must we be singled out and shunned by agents as if we were poets for heaven's sake?

I can only think of a single reason. My guess would be that, although sci-fi books in print represent less than a third of one percent of the books published each year, sci-fi writers represent a large proportion of all writers submitting manuscripts to agents. If only a third of one percent of the MSS they received were sci-fi, agents wouldn't need to mention it. So agents are trying to maximise their chance of finding a publishable book per thousand metres of slush by excluding all the 'noise' sci-fi (and poetry) introduces.

The worst offenders in the 'No peddlers, hawkers and sci-fi writers' stakes are the agencies who say they handle 'literary fiction' or 'quality fiction'. I suppose they're willing to miss out on the chance of a Bradbury, a Vonnegut, or a Ballard, in order not to have to wade through all the space operas and steampunk epics.

Well, there's no harm in asking, I suppose, so, would all the other sci-fi writers out there just stop writing for a few years, please? Then the agents won't need to hold back the floodwaters with such paranoiac fervour and I might actually get one of them to take on my books.

Giving It All Away

I just had an email from Jeff Vandermeer - which is kinda cool. I don't know the guy but I know his books and I read his blog and he is one hell of a writer. So it's nice to be tenuously associated with him. It makes me feel more writerly just being in the same cyberspace.

It also reminded me of how I came to read him for the first time: I foud City of Saints and Madmen remaindered in a big bin of books in a mall in Brisbane. The book had a quirky cover, so I picked it up and scanned the blurb. It all seemed a bit weird but, hell, it was only a few dollars, so I bought it anyway. And, boy, am I glad I did! It blew me away. It was a fantastic read, the writing was excellent, and the 'world' of Ambegris was the richest, most sumptuous and compeling that I had come across in many years.

And this, in turn, reminded me of other authors I've discovered through their remaindered books. (Like the amazing The Limits of Vision by Robert Irwin - a book I re-read often and which I found in a remaindered book shop in Toronto, Canada.) Maybe I'm just tight-fisted (well, alright, I admit it, I am tight-fisted) but I hate paying out $25 to $35 for a paperback and then finding I don't like it. It gives rise to what novelist Dave Freer recently called 'the resentment factor' (and he's in the same writers group as me - another cool thing) - that feeling of antagonism one feels towards an author for making you shell out so much for something you didn't like. Dave actually gives his books away (as well as selling them) and says it helps him win new readers - and paying customers - something I've heard from several different writers.

For me, being able to buy remaindered books for a couple of dollars is an even better way of getting a sample of an author's work than downloading the text for free. It comes as a real book. I hate reading long works on screen and it's well worth a few dollars to avoid having to do that. (Libraries are pretty good too - that's where I first found Dave Freer's work.)

I would encourage every bookshop, everywhere, to carry a large stock of remaindered books - and then be sure to have the same authors represented on the full-price shelves.

What Is The Future Of Publishing?

As a one-time Authonomy user (see why I left) I have been following the recent controversy about what happens to their top-ranked authors. Rumour is that not one has yet had a book contract and, instead, some have been quietly offered the chance to take part in a print on demand (POD) self-publishing experiment. Well, Harper Collins, which runs the site, has published an apology for the concern they've caused and assurances that POD is merely another service that HC is offering Authonomy users. It's all very odd, I must say.

But that's not why I'm posting. What struck me about the HC post was that they assured authors who felt like self-publishing that this would not bar them from future publication with HC. To quote:

"And as a publisher we certainly don’t have a problem with authors who have self-published: we’ve acquired a number of authors who took this route initially."

Which is nice to know, since I've read several self-published books which are better than most of the stuff currently on the shelves at my local bookshop. (I'll pass over the hideous grammar of this sentence and the horrible notion that HC 'acquires' authors - as if we were commodities to be bought and sold.)

Agents, publishers and bookshops act as filters on what is available to us to read. Agents and publishers in particular use their professional skills to prevent the great bulk of manuscripts which are poorly written from being published. This, I believe, is a valuable service. It means that, what you see in the bookshops, in the high street and online, meets a minimum standard of coherence and literacy. It is a fairly low standard, but it is there.

But what the agents, publishers and bookshops also do, is try to guess what we the readers will want to buy. So they exclude manuscripts - however well written, however thoughtful, intelligent and insightful - which they do not expect will sell in large enough numbers. The reason for this is obvious: publishers and booksellers need to make money from selling books, and agents need to make money from supplying publishers with books. If the books that are printed don't sell, the whole supply chain collapses.

For the writers of books, this can be a frustrating, infuriating situation. Some writers are not writing commercial works - but they would still like to see them in print. Some writers are producing highly commercial works but their themes or presentation, genres or style, or whatever, are not judged to be saleable that year, or that month. Some writers who produce good, saleable work still don't get a look in because the industry knows it will make more money from a da Vinci Code lookalike, or a celebrity memoir, and each publisher can only do so many books in any one year.

So there are a lot of writers out there who will take the risk and publish their book themselves - because they believe in it, or because they can make enough money from it (even though a publisher couldn't), or because they just don't care about the money. There is a world of talent and excellence in self-published books that the ordinary buying public never sees simply because the agent-publisher-bookshop chain excludes them.

I can understand why each of these groups is loathe to accept that there can be high quality self-published books. The agents simply have no role in the self-publishing supply chain. The publishers are also excluded middle-men. The booksellers can't easily take on self-published books because, without a book going through the agent-publisher filter, there is no guarantee that it will meet even the minimal standards of quality I mentioned earlier - the booksellers would have to become their own filter, judging the books they allowed on their shelves. (For booksellers, there are also issues of quantity, reliability of supply, economies from single-sourcing, and the sale-or-return deals they have with publishers, that would make them wary of self-published works.)

Which all means that the self-published author, no matter how good he or she is, or how saleable his or her book is, is almost inevitably doomed to economic failure because they simply cannot get their product under the noses of the book-buying public. Yet, in this digital age, it has become cost-effective to lay out all our wares - good, bad and ugly - and let the market decide which are the quality products. After all, we find the best blogs to read, the best news aggregators to visit, and the best online shops. The Web has made finding what we need and what we like easier than it has ever been, and a lot quicker and better-focused than marching around town, browsing through bookshops.

There is so much talk these days about the future of publishing - which is mostly about ebooks and other delivery mechanisms. Maybe some of that talk should get down to the basics of how the whole industry could be restructured to let more voices be heard and to give the public more choice in who they listen to.

Parallel Importation of Books is Bad for Australia

If you are interested in the culture of Australia, in particular, if you are interested in having a thriving, creative literary culture here, you should speak out against the proposed lifting of restrictions on the parallel importation of books. This pointless destruction of Australia's publishing industry and the subsequent silencing of Australia's writers, is currently being considered by the Productivity Commission.

Go and look at the Productivity Commission's web page and the submissions already made. Then check out one or two of the publishing industry insiders who have been commenting. I encourage you to add your own submission. But be quick, the Productivity Commission will accept them only until 20th January 2009. After that you'll be too late to stop our book market being given away to the US and UK, with all it entails in terms of the devastation of Australia's own literature.

Why I'm Leaving Authonomy

If you've somehow been missed by all the advertising - viral or otherwise - Authonomy is a website run by HarperCollins. Authors can post part or all of their books on the site and other participants (mostly other authors) get to read them, comment on them and vote for them. There is a ranking scheme so that you can see how popular your book is with the other members. Another website quite like this has also just started, called Writing Raw, it is basically the same deal except for one crucial difference. On Authonomy, HarperCollins promises that their editors will take a look at the top five ranked books each month.

The chance of having a major publisher actually look at your work has proven irresistable to many authors (myself included). When I joined, about a week ago, my book was allocated the number 3,403 and I estimate that about 200 books a week are being added to the site (I don't know how many are being removed). I know many people reading this blog might also be tempted to join, so I thought I'd write a few notes about my experience with Authonomy and why I'm leaving it.

1. The first and foremost reason is that the cost-benefit equation is not working out for me. I am spending too much time on the site and yet it doesn't look as if I'll make the top five - which is the main point of doing it. My book 'Time and Tyde' has been well received and I've had some very flattering comments about it. It also climbed steadily in the rankings - from the bottom to about half-way up in five days - but now it has stalled in this mid-league position and the only way to get it moving again would be to spend more time on the Authonomy site. This is because
2. Everyone on Authonomy is hustling. If I say Authonomy is a popularity contest, you probably won't get the full flavour of it. The way to get your book read on Authonomy is to plug it. You join the forums, you start threads, you comment on other people's books, you make 'I'll read yours if you read mine' deals, you invite 'friends' (yes, like MySpace!), and on and on and on. You plug and you plug and you plug. Putting up your book is the least of it. Being successful on Authonomy is a matter of constant, intensive marketing. And it works. The people whose names come up in all the forums, whose comments are all over the site, are the same people who are highest in the rankings. I'm not saying their books are no good. They're mostly quite readable. What I'm saying is that if you're a good writer but you're not a good, persistent, single-minded marketer, with loads of spare time, Authonomy is not for you.
3. Even as a popularity contest, Authonomy is not ideal. Some genres (particularly sience fiction) and sub-genres (comedy) are grossly over-represented, compared with book markets in the real world. I suspect this is partly because Authonomy is a more accurate cross-section of writers than it is of readers, and partly because those writers in genres for which it is most difficult to find a publisher, are the ones frustrated enough, or desperate enough, to try Authonomy. So if your book hits the top five, my guess is that it will still struggle to get past the HarperCollins editors who will have a much more market-oriented view of what is publishable.
4. There is an awful lot of rubbish on the site. I've tried to read widely and not just to follow the herd's recommendations and, while I'm sure the overall standard must be miles higher than a site like Writing Raw (just because Authonomy is attracting some serious writers) I still find I am handing out detailed advice to writers who don't seem to know even the most basic things about the craft. Meanwhile I'm getting lots of 'Wow that's great!' comments and no real help or guidance. It has begun already to grate on me that I am providing my time and effort for free to HarperCollins to help them winnow their slush pile and all they're giving me in return is the chance - the very small chance - that one of their editors might one day look at my book.

So there you are. Maybe it's all rationalisation because 'Time and Tyde' didn't shoot to the top of the rankings and I've got a bad case of sour grapes. It's possible, but I feel more like it's resentment at having been 'used' by HarperCollins. I entered into Authonomy enthusiastically and was a good citizen of this social network but I found that to get anything out of the site, the site demands more and more of my time and effort. In the end, far more than I was prepared to give away.

Cory Doctorow: Creating Value Through Celebrity

Once again, I find myself feeling uneasy about Cory Doctorow. I just read his article Macropayments in Locus Magazine online. In it he argues that using 'micropayments' for buying creative works online doesn't really work because (a) the transaction processing costs can't be brought down low enough, (b) there is a step-function in the buyer's mind between 'free' and 'not-free', and (c) if it is the artist themselves charging the micropayment, it changes the relationship between artist and audience in undesirable ways. Instead, he appears to be advocating a system of commercial intermediaries – such as already exist today (e.g. a publisher who sits between artist and buyer and does all the selling.) On the other hand, 'in an ideal world' as he says, there might be a graded commercial relationship between artist and customer which starts with giving the artist's work away for free as downloads but which begins to incur costs as the work is embodied (in print, or on disc, or whatever) and then grows more expensive as various value-added features are added ('deluxe' packaging, additional content, the artist's signature, and so on). Presumably all of this is done through a commercial intermediary too.

The problem with Doctorow is that, while I tend to agree with just about everything he says (and while I think he is a good and entertaining writer of non-fiction and fiction) I always feel he has pulled off some kind of sleight of hand in getting my agreement. I'm not certain I've discovered quite what it is yet but it is something like this: what Cory Doctorow says is true for Cory Doctorow and for people like him, but not for the great mass of artists.

In the kind of economy Doctorow promotes for artists, the works of art themselves are effectively valueless. It is only the packaging and the additional content that make them worth shelling out money for. I've struggled with why this seems so wrong to me, despite how convincing his arguments are, and I think I may have found the heart of it. This kind of economy only works when the artist is also a celebrity. This is why the artist's signature adds value. This is why you give away your work for nothing but charge high fees for public speaking engagements. Specifically, it means that in the world he envisages writers must become like rock stars and film stars. Their persons must become a cult, they must have fans, their lives must become the real product so that they can add value to the intrinsically worthless writing they produce.

Is this really the direction we want writing to take? Do we any longer have a choice?

Chrome: Giving Your Rights Away to Google

As a writer, I will not be using the new browser - Chrome - from Google. The problem has nothing to do with its capabilities, its security, or its provenance. The problem is the end-user license agreement you must agree to when you install it. Clause 11.1 of the Chrome EULA says:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

Effectively, this means that for any material you "submit, post or display" via the browser (this post, for example) Google gets the right, for free and forever, to use it in any way they want.

No. I don't think so, Google. You want my stuff, you pay me for it.

Presumably, if Google ever exercised this right, you could challenge it in court if you felt you had grounds that it wasn't being used "for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote" its browser. But why would you take the risk when you can be absolutely sure of keeping all your intellectual property rights by not using Chrome at all?

I know Google isn't the sweet little bunch of struggling upstarts it once was but this is real Evil Empire stuff. Maybe the PR department should take a stand and rein in the company's lawyers before Google loses all its friends.

A Tale of Two Stories

Of all the stupid things to do! I have this book-length collection of crime stories I wrote a couple of years ago, right. They're all chronological and linked on the theme of the relationship between two sisters, one of whom is the detective. (It's called 'Sisters'.) Anyway, it was a dumb idea because who's going to publish a thing like that?

However, I fell to reading it the other day, whilst wondering if there was anything I could do with it and had the bright idea of merging two of the stories. In fact, even though it was a complete distraction, I got wildly enthused and set about it right away.

It should have been quite easy because both stories covered exactly the same events but from different perspectives (a serial killer and the detective hunting him down). Sadly I'd written one in first person and the other in third, so it entailed a fair bit of re-writing. Anyway, days later I emerged with a new combined story - and it's 28,500 words long. No longer a short story but a novella! (Which I'm calling 'Manhunt'.) Fine, I thought, I've never done a novella before. At least that's different. Then I started looking for somewhere to sell it and realised just how foolish I'd been.

The thing is, no-one wants to buy novellas. That is, I found a few publishers who said they did, even a couple that specialised in them but when I delved deeper, these companies were no longer accepting submissions - either that or they'd ceased trading (giving me a clue as to why the others were not accepting submissions.)

And the moral of this sorry tale? Well, for me at least it is to check the market before I go and get all excited about a new project. In fact, I could do with being a lot more market-aware altogether. My shiny new novella, carved from the ruins of a themed anthology, is now consigned to the Bottom Drawer of Despair along with all my other master-works.

Unless someone knows a mag that is buying crime novellas...

The Future of Publishing: Techie Perspective

Writers interested in the future of publishing might have been following the articles and discussion by Sara Lloyd over at The Digitalist. For those not also following the techie nerd literature on this subject, there have been a number of relevant articles at the TechDirt blog. The latest of these has the great benefit of being a bit of a crossover, critiqueing Steven Poole's critique of his failed experiment in giving away a book for free. The article, "'Give It Away And Pray' Isn't A Business Model... But It Doesn't Mean That 'Free' Doesn't Work" is well worth a read, as are some of its referenced articles.