'Skyball' now online in Bewildering Stories Issue 324

Why waste your time reading blogs when you could rush over to Bewildering Stories Issue 324 and read my newly-published short story 'Skyball'?

Yes, I'm in print again! And this particular achievement is always going to hold a special place in my heart. It was the first of my sci-fi stories ever to be accepted for publication. It will also be fondly remembered for the process I went through with the editor Don Webb.

Don is a very exacting editor and I had a tough time working the story into a state where he would accept it. He's also an intelligent editor and easy to get along with. I had never been through such an exercise before (although I've been through similar with other editors since) so it was a hugely important and valuable lesson for me which, I hope, will have lasting benefits for my writing.

But the experience didn't stop there. Bewildering Stories includes a set of 'challenge' questions that Don asks as a way of exploring the stories he publishes. These reflect deep and thoughtful insights, and show how intently Don considers the work he publishes. In the case of 'Skyball' the questions reference one of Don's own essays “Space Aliens as Metaphor” which sparked me to draw an analogy between alien invasions in fiction and the Iraq war, which in turn prompted Don to write a commentary on my analogy.

It really doesn't get any better than that.

Writers wishing to have their own 'Don Web experience' are urged to submit their work to Bewildering Stories. This is not a paying market but the value I got from it went way beyond getting a few extra bucks in my PayPal account. Readers looking for good fiction should just go along and read the magazine. Here is an editor working hard to make a serious contribution to the genre.

P.S. Don't mention this to any of my Australian compatriots, but I was telling someone about Don's challenge questions and his other comments and I could see they were impressed. "Is this an Australian magazine?" they asked, sounding confused. "No," I replied. "It's Canadian." "Oh well," they said. "That explains it!"

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.

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.

The Earth Ship - published today

There is no feeling like it!

My short story 'The Earth Ship' is out today in The Absent Willow Review. I am so glad to see this story in print as it is one I'm particularly proud of. At 8500 words, it's longer than most magazines are comfortable with these days, so I'm particularly grateful that AWR came into existence just in time to pick it up and give it an airing. I wish Rick DeCost every success with this new venture and look forward to seeing even more SF appearing there (are you listening, Rick?).

So please go along and read 'The Earth Ship'. I would be more than happy to hear your views on it - just leave a comment below.

Manuscript Brokers Wanted

Agents are brokers. They are the middlepersons who sit between writers and publishers and make the connections between the needs of each group. Trouble is, agents are in short supply.

What we now need is a new kind of broker: one who will sit between agents and writers and make those connections.

I mention this for two reasons. Firstly, I'm looking for an agent. I've just finished my latest novel, TimeSplash! and I'd like to see it published.* Trawling through agents' websites, one by one, trying to understand what genres they like to work in, whether they're accepting new clients, how they like to be queried, and so on, is only part of the work involved. I'm also working my way through authors of similar material, trying to find out who their agents are. None of this is easy. All of it is time-consuming and tedious. The yearbooks for writers that list agents and their preferences are helpful and take a lot of the pain out of the initial stages of the work, but you need one per territory (so, for me, at least Australia, America and the UK) and the printed ones are at least a year out of date already.

Secondly, I just read a blog posting by Janet Reid of FinePrint Literary Management, telling the world that she wants people to send her queries right now so she can read them over Christmas. Wow! If only I wrote crime fiction! This is the kind of service agents should be providing - both to writers and to publishers. It got me thinking just how much easier and more efficient finding an agent could be if they were all willing to let the world know when they were open to new queries.

Of course, even if they were all as proactive as Janet, one would still have to subscribe to the blogs of every agent in your genre. But it would be a start.

Wouldn't it be nice, though, if I could just tell someone what kind of agent I needed and they would then line them up for me? Or if there was a 'clearing house' online where I could tick a few checkboxes to describe my book and up would come a list of a dozen agents around the world, actively seeking for manuscripts of that type? Surely there would be money to be made by someone in starting up an electronic marketplace like this?

On the other hand, even Janet Reid isn't perfect. Consider this post about 'surrogate writers' which basically says she'll dump any query that doesn't come directly from the writer. Makes it kind of hard for the new middlepeople to get into the market if agents don't like hearing from them. But then Janet wasn't talking about my new breed of broker (meta-agents? super-agents?). She was talking about writers who get their mums to send in a query for them! I just hope that, when manuscript brokers start to appear, her email filters won't search for phrases like 'I'm writing on behalf of...' and file their correspondence under 'Junk'.

Meanwhile...

*For any agents reading this, TimeSplash! is a sci-fi thriller, set about forty years in the future and deals with the struggles of two young people trying to prevent a very singular terrorist attack on London. He's doing it because he's a nice guy who just got dragged into it. She's doing it because she has a personal vendetta agianst the terrorist.

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.

The Earth Ship Docks at Absent Willow Review

My head is reeling! Not a week since I got my acceptance from CSfG for the Masques anthology (see below) I have had another story accepted - this time by The Absent Willow Review, a relatively new online SF/F/H magazine from the American publisher Absent Willow Books. And I am so pleased to say that the story they took was a personal favourite of mine The Earth Ship. I wrote the story some years ago and have always loved it. I gave it a big makeover recently (and cut a thousand words out of it!) and that seems to have paid off.

Anyone interested in reading it won't have long to wait, it will be in the 16th January issue of the mag. and I will post a link on this blog.

The Orbit/QWC retreat (see way down the bottom somewhere) may not have done much for getting my novel Time and Tyde published, but my goodness it seems to have worked wonders for my short stories! My thanks again to Marianne de Pierres for kicking me in the butt and to my fellow Orbiteers for their more gentle encouragements.

Masques

'Masques' - isn't it a lovely word? Doesn't it conjour up so many images of intrigue, revelation, and dark sensuality?

When I heard that the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild (CSfG) was publishing an anthology with that name and was looking for stories, I was immediately inspired to write one for them: Murathera's Orgy. One of the book's editors, Scott Hopkins, took a shine to it and has been working with me over an intensive couple of weeks to polish it - a fascinating and educational process in itself (thanks, Scott).

I heard the other day that it has been accepted for for the collection and will be published in Masques - which is extremely good news. CSfG has published several excellent SF anthologies over the years, featuring some great Aussie SF&F writers, and I'm immensely proud to be part of this. I recently heard that my friend Joanne Anderton has also had a story accepted for the anthology - so it's even better news!

I don't have details of the publication date yet but I'll keep you informed. Meanwhile, CSfG has a page on its website for Masques where, no doubt, you'll be able to track its progress.


(The image above is Chelepteryx collesi, 2007, from the series 'Moth masks,' synthetic polymer paint on canvas by Deborah Klein.)

'Too Late' in Concept Sci-fi Magazine

Rush over to Concept Sci-fi magazine and download issue #3. Not only is this a great up-and-coming sci-fi magazine, but issue #3 carries my short story 'Too Late'.

Just thought I'd mention it...

:-)

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.

Short List, Long Wait

I had wonderful news a couple of weeks ago - my tiny little story The City made it to the shortlist in the Concept Sci-fi 150-word flash-fiction competition. For someone who has only just this year started seriously trying to get published, getting on this shortlist was a major achievement and a huge morale-booster.

But now I have to wait to see whether I win or not.

Waiting is the curse of the writing classes. You write, it's great. You revise, it's not so bad. You send it off, you wait, it's awful! Sometimes you wait days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months. Months and months and months sometimes. And for what? Usually a rejection. The waiting is so bad sometimes that even a rejection feels like good news because at least the waiting is over.

The really bad thing about being serious about getting published is that you have to keep sending your work out there even after it has been knocked back. You don't get your rejection letter and say, 'Ah well, that's that I suppose,' and get on with your life. You immediately find soemwhere else to send your work so that you can spend more weeks waiting. Everything you write is out there being considered. You're not just waiting on one thing for a finite period, you're waiting for loads of things, all the time, forever!

And hoping, hoping that, just this once, it won't be a rejection letter.

Three Observations On Successful Writers

Marianne de Pierres (She Who Must Be Obeyed) suggested I write and chat to Peter Cawdron about getting published. She seems to have forgotten that I know almost nothing about it and have certainly not had any success until recently when I got one story into print.

However, in wondering just what I could tell somebody about being a successful writer, I realised that I have formed some opinions based on what I've seen of the species. So, rather than bore only Peter with my neophyte observations, I thought I'd share them with everyone and give everyone the opportunity to comment. Here then are the three things I have noticed about being a successful writer.

Observation 1. You have to be a good writer. Not a great writer. Just a good one. Pick up a book or two at random from a bookshop shelf, or browse the e-zines in your genre and you'll see what I mean. Most writers in print are competent and capable - very, very few of them are brilliant. Not by a long way. I suppose if publishers had to wait for an L.P. Hartley or a William Golding to come along, there just wouldn't be enough books printed to make a living from it.

This is good news for the likes of me, since I ain't no Michael Frayn!

Observation 2. Successful writers seem to be very much into the writing 'scene'. They go to the conferences, they belong to the discussion groups, they track the industry news. They all know one another and they all know who's publishing what, who's on the judging panels for the various competitions, and what other writers are doing. As an example of how important this is, let me tell you a little story.

I've been a writer since I first learned to hold a crayon. From time to time over many years, I have tried to get a piece published. The way I did it was to package up a manuscript, write a covering letter and send it to a publisher - or agent. This has always been a waste of time. In the end, I decided I would simply write for my own amusement and sod the publishers - and agents. I did this for about ten years - and got a lot of very pleasurable writing done.

Out of curiosity, a couple of years ago, I joined a writers' group (Crime Writers Queensland). I eventually left them - mainly because it was a very long drive to the meetings. However, at one meeting, someone had passed on the news that a new literary agent had opened up shop in Brisbane. I filed the address away and forgot about it. Then, a few months ago, I finished yet another novel - one that I thought really ought to be publishable - and remembered the new agent. My book is set in Brisbane and I thought a Brisbane-based agent might just be interested. So I dropped him an email.

He told me he'd given up agenting (already!) to focus on writing his own books but he did mention the Orbit/QWC manuscript development program that had recently been announced and suggested I try for it. I, of course, hadn't heard of it and I've always hated the idea of entering competitions - but, since he went to some pains to stress what a rare opportunity this was to ensure that a publisher would actually look at your work, I thought I'd have a go. And I did. And I won one of the places, got my book read by Orbit, had a one-on-one session with the publisher about my book, and got the opportunity to revise and resubmit the manuscript.

Now this is as close to being published as I have come in all those years of trying and it only came about through 'networking'. If I hadn't been at that writers' group meeting, if I hadn't written to that (erstwhile) agent, I would never have known there was an opportunity, let alone profited from it.

This, however, is bad news for the likes of me as I am an antisocial troglodyte who lives up a mountain in the middle of nowhere.

Observation 3. Successful writers tend to be prolific, dedicated and, above all, persistent. Even if you're a good writer and totally plugged-in to the world of writing, there is still a very big element of luck involved in becoming successful. Publishers only do so many books a year, magazines only do so many stories. They are looking for good writers, of course, but they're also looking for other things; things that excite them personally, things that will excite their colleagues in marketing and production (who also need to be convinced) things that will sell well in particular markets, things that will sit right with the other material in their list, and so on. All of these factors change all the time, even for the same publisher, so your piece better be exactly what is needed at precisely that moment in time or it doesn't stand a chance, however good it is.

This means that, if you aren't writing, if you aren't sending your stuff out all the time, all over the place, your story will not be there in the slush pile for the editor to find it when they're looking for exactly that kind of thing. You simply have to be in the game. The odds are not in your favour but if you're not in the game, you will never get the prize.

This is one of the areas where I have been letting myself down. I do the writing alright but I haven't taken seriously enough the process of getting it out there and keeping it out there. As it happens, as soon as I did start making a concerted effort, it payed off.

Not the deepest of insights, I'm afraid but they're all I have. If it seems a bit gloomy, I have only one small word of consolation for Peter and all the rest like me waiting to leap into print. When you do start networking with writers, editors, agents and publishers, you will probably discover, as I did, that they are a pretty good bunch and incredibly helpful and supportive. Talking to these guys makes being a writer a much more pleasant experience than one in which you merely swap mauscripts with publishers for rejection slips.

One Small Step For Me. One Giant Leap, Also For Me

Am I excited or what? It's barely a month since I resolved (after a bit of brow-beating) to start putting my short stories out there, looking for publishers and I've just heard that one of them has been accepted! The story is a new one, called 'Skyball', and it will appear in a spec fic e-zine called Bewildering Stories - early in the New Year, I hope.

This is the first time I have ever had a story of mine accepted for publication, so you can imagine what a monumental event this is for me.

I've published a lot of stuff in my time - science books, technical papers, even comedy (in New Scientist of all places!) but never fiction. (Actually I had a short crime story read out by Nick Eales a few years ago on his national radio show - but I can't decide if that counts.) So getting 'Skyball' accepted is a huge milestone in what I hope will be my writing career.

So thank you Marrianne for pushing me, thank you Orbit and QWC for getting me excited again, and thank you Don Webb (the editor at Bewildering Stories who didn't exactly open the gate - he made me jump it!)