Definitions for the Perplexed

Anyone new to the writing business will probably be as vague as I am on the meanings of certain publishing terms. If you're not in the industry, and you haven't had a book published, you might be unsure about terms such as; 'ARC', 'galley', 'proof', 'mech', and so on. Even if you're hip to the jive, you might still not quite grasp the difference between a 1st galley and a 2nd galley.

Well, thanks to one of my favourite bloggers, Editorial Anonymous, you can now bandy TLAs and obscure jargon with the most hardened industry professionals. For a few days now, EA has been doing a series of posts called 'Definitions for the Perplexed', wherein she defines a whole slew of such terms in her usual, clear and concise style.

As soon as I saw the series title I thought, 'Hey, that's me!' If you have the same reaction, I suggest you start adding these invaluable posts to your bookmarks collection.

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.

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.

A Plug For AWM Online

Every Australian writer will be aware of The Australian Writer's Marketplace - one of those 'listings' books like the UK's Writers' and Artists' Yearbook. It's the must-have reference for anyone trying to find places to sell their writing in Australia. What they may not be aware of is the website, AWMOnline. This has all the content of the book (and more) but is searchable. It costs the same to subscribe to AWMOnline as it does to buy the book but, if you ask me, the value you get is much greater.

In a recent attempt to add yet more value for the Australian writer, AWMOnline has established a forum where subscribers can get together and exchange information. It is still very much in its infancy but I have to applaud the effort. Australian writers in particular need electronic fora. Being part of a writing community when you live 250 kms from the nearest city (150 kms from the nearest bookshop!) is not easy. So my hat is off to the Queensland Writers Centre (which publishes The Australian Writer's Marketplace and runs AWMOnline) for this effort to build an online community of writers.

Which means, if you're an Australian writer, or want to sell into the Australian market, subscribe to AWMOnline, and then join in the discussions on the forum. The more the merrier!

Sci-Fi and What?

How did 'science fiction' and 'fantasy' ever get lumped together in the popular mind? In particular, why did they ever get lumped together on bookshop shelves?

I ask because I've just had a couple of days in Brisbane and was able to visit a few bookshops. The nearest town with a bookshop to where I live is 150 km away, so this should have been a real treat. Instead, it was a frustrating and annoying waste of time. I wanted just two things. One was to buy a decent poetry anthology. The other was to have some fun browsing the sci-fi shelves.

The anthology was a dead loss. Bookshops in Brisbane have 'self-help' sections as long as a Buddhist mantra, 'cookery' sections that would take a lifetime to eat your way through, 'business' sections the size of a CEO's 'productivity' bonus, but the 'poetry' section, if it even exists, is a couple of Banjo Patterson collections tossed in with a few Shakespeare plays and school crib sheets. Ah well, back to Amazon, I suppose, land of the long tail and minority interest.

I knew I'd do better with the sci-fi because even a Brisbane bookshop always has a 'Science Fiction and Fantasy' section. Sadly, however, these are invariably 'Fantasy' sections with a few sci-fi books hidden among the hundreds of other books. I must confess, I have now and then read a fantasy novel. I've read The Lord of the Rings. I've read one or two Anne McCaffreys. I even ploughed through six books of Steven Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series, each one the size of a brick. But it was a long time ago and I'm over it. People with talking swords fighting with or against dragons just doesn't do it for me. If I want black-and-white morality and mystical mumbo-jumbo in a pre-industrial setting, I can read the Bible.

Of course, I'm being rather harsh. Most sci-fi - especially space opera - is just as bad. My excuse is that I'm narked that to find anything good - some actual, honest-to-goodness sci-fi - among all these fat trilogies with Celtic fonts on their spines, is like fossicking for gems in the bush.

To avoid wasting shoppers' precious time like this, I implore bookshops (and publishers, and magazines, and conferences) to do the right thing and separate out the sci-fi from the fantasy. They are like chalk and cheese. What is the point of mixing them up?

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.

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.

Jim Frenkel Saves My Self-Esteem

One of the things you struggle with as an unpublished writer - and I have this from many reliable sources - is that there is so much rubbish published each year while your own manuscripts lie mouldering on the hard disc. Who hasn't put down a book in disgust, crying to the unjust heavens, 'How the hell did that get published? I write a million times better than that and all I get are rejection slips!'?

We all know that the publishing game is a lottery - and not a particularly well-run one at that. Slush piles are so high and standards of writing so low that anything good in those piles is effectively a tiny signal buried in lots and lots of noise. I used to think that it was so hard for the publishers to spot the good stuff that, in despair, they simply picked something that wasn't actually written longhand in green ink, published that, and hoped for the best.

Yet something that was said at the Brisbane Writers Festival has given me a bit more insight into what is going on. It was Jim Frenkel who said it.

He's an odd sort of bloke, Jim. An editor with Tor Books in New York, he's about as world famous as an editor can be. I was in one of his workshops at the BWF so had the pleasure of listening to his insider insights for about three hours. I've never seen so many people get up and walk out of a workshop because the presenter had pissed them off before. (Maybe I need to get out more.) It's true he had a strangely confrontational manner, with not just a hint of pomposity about him. He even said that anyone who was anti-Semitic should leave the room because he was Jewish and they might not want to hear what a Jewish person had to say. (I found this quite shocking. I don't know what New York publishing is like but that's not the world I live in. Someone did actually get up and go at that point but not, I suspect, because they didn't like Jews.) Yet there was something strangely likeable about the man. For all the apparent aggression and arrogance that simmered just under the skin, there was a deeper layer of intelligence, delicacy and sensitivity that drew me to him. I could easily imagine being friends with him (not something I often imagine about anyone!) but only after he had lowered the all-but-impenetrable defences he seems to have deployed against the world. It will never happen, of course, unless the two of us are ever marooned together in a well-stocked bar for three days.

I digress.

What Jim Frenkel said, among several other interesting things, was that there are great writers in this world and there are great storytellers and they are not necessarily the same people. He took an impromptu poll of the workshop participants (all wannabe writers, I would suppose), asking who would rather read a good story than read good writing and, to my astonishment, almost everyone wanted the story. His contention, therefore, was that the reason so much execrable prose is published is because publishers are giving the people what they want: good stories.

It certainly explains the fact that not one in twenty sci-fi books I read these days is well-written. It also explains much of the advice and guidance editors, publishers and other writers put out, which almost exclusively focuses on structure and pace, character and plot. It explains why most sci-fi these days is space opera - and pretty awful space opera at that. It also explains why my favourite sci-fi writers are mostly dead, or getting there; they come from a time when good writing was valued more highly than it is now.

So now when I toss aside the unreadable work of some modern 'master' of the genre with cries of anguish and wails of self-pity, I can at least console myself that it was the half-witted, clichéd, trope-ridden story that the publisher liked, even though it seemed to have been written by a hyper-active ten-year-old with literacy issues.

Angry Robot

'Angry Robot' sounds sort of cute doesn't it? You can just see the little fella with its glass eyes popping and its jointed metal arms waving agitatedly. It makes me wonder whether this is really the image Harper Collins UK had in mind when they named their new sci-fi imprint.

I read in SF Scope today that Harper Collins' newly-appointed Publishing Director, Marc Gascoigne, will run the imprint as a stand-alone unit and that he's all fired up with enthusiasm and exciting ideas and intends to "build a new wave of authors in the genre". (Which made me smile, I have to say, imagining a production line where Angry Robot Authors are rolling off the conveyor belt, eyes popping and arms waving.)

More seriously, though, going on the few words of quoted comment from Mr. Gascoigne, his plan seems to be to ride on the back of "other areas of mass-media such as movies, television and computer games [which] have enjoyed massive popular success across a variety of SF and Fantasy subjects." Not surprisingly, then, he seems to want to target "hard-to-reach audiences like teenage boys." So, movies, games, TV and teenage boys, all mentioned in the same paragraph by Mr. Gascoigne. Looks like authors with shoot-em-up space operas, preferably with some yeuky horror sequences and a hot babe or two, should mail them off to Angry Robot asap.

When I was a teenage boy, I wasn't hard to reach at all. In fact, I went out hunting for sci-fi and I couldn't get enough. It was all grown-up stuff too - Ballard, Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Huxley, Vonnegut, and so on. Not a YA writer in sight in those days. Have teenage boys changed so much in a few decades? Or have marketers simply found a different kind of teenage boy to sell books to - the kind that used to kick footballs (and other teenage boys) rather than read but who now shoot simulated aliens (and simulated people) in simulated worlds?

Oh look, I'm getting all bitter and cynical again. I'm sure Angry Robot will be a fine imprint, publishing imaginative, high-quality writing by a new wave of intelligent and thoughtful writers. And, if it is, I wish it all the best.

Science Looks At Fiction

I love science. I love writing fiction. I even enjoy programming. So an article in last week's New Scientist was especially interesting to me. Keith Oatley, a cognitive scientist from the University of Toronto, has been studying the effects of fiction on personality and emotion. His conclusion is that there is a strong effect. He and his collaborators found that people who read fiction (as opposed to non-fiction) actually become more like the characters in the stories. He likens fiction to a simulation of a social world, created by the author, which then runs in the minds of the readers. Reading involves exercising empathy to identify with the characters and, through a kind of social learning, the absorption of some of their traits.

Oatley's finding is that reading fiction improves social skills and gives fiction readers 'substantially greater empathy.' He therefore believes it is generally beneficial to a society. Of course, he might be slightly biased. Oakley, as well as being a scientist, is also a writer of fiction.

But I like the idea that when I write fiction I am also writing a simulation of a world that will run in people's minds. It is an idea that squares pretty well with how I have always thought of writing fiction – although for me, the greatest pleasure in doing it is to create a simulation that will run in my own mind.

Yet I can't help feeling a little anxious about all this. If people are learning social skills, learning to understand people and their interactions, from fiction, doesn't this mean fiction writers have a strong moral obligation to represent the world truthfully and accurately? Doesn't it at least mean they should be intelligent and wise enough that what they write isn't stupid or plain wrong?

Many years ago, I used to study 'argumentation' – the modern incarnation of rhetoric. Ancient rhetoricians such as Aristotle (pictured), Plato and Cicero, understood that effective argument could be a force for good as well as ill. Aristotle in particular believed that only moral men should be taught these potentially dangerous skills. It is pretty obvious that persuasive arguers who might use the craft of rhetoric for their own ends and without regard for morality or truth, can do immense damage to society. Look at the way the USA and the UK were persuaded to invade and conquer Iraq.

If fiction – apparently harmless entertainments like novels and short stories – can have such a strong influence on the reader's mental construction of social reality, maybe we should be more careful about what we read – and what we write. Should only moral people be allowed to write fiction? Should publishers and editors take their share of the blame for what damage an inaccurate or untruthful depiction might do?

Oatley has not directly investigated the other kinds of fiction in our world – films and games, for example – but he suspects they will be found to have a similarly powerful effect on personality and social understanding as literature does. Now that really does make me worried.

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.

Rejection World Record?

Hot on the heels of placing my first short story, I have now clocked up a new personal best - and possibly a world record. I submitted a short story to a well-known sci-fi magazine yesterday by email (my post is timestamped 9:55 pm) and had a rejection from them, also by email, when I logged on this morning. The rejection letter was timestamped 2:22 am, which means the whole process took 4 hours and 27 minutes!

I am at once impressed by the editor's efficiency and shattered that my story was so easy to reject. I don't know if it is worse to wait the usual three months to get my slap in the face or whether I'm pleased not to have been left in suspense. One thing's for sure, if this kind of efficiency catches on in the publishing world, the rate of rejections per day could be quite overwhelming. I'm not sure my ego can take that kind of intensive pummelling.

Meanwhile, I at least have the pleasure of being the current title holder for the World's Fastest Rejection of a Short Story Under 5,000 Words.

Unless anyone would like to contend it.

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.

What I'm Working On

After the major effort I put into editing my sci-fi novel 'Time and Tyde' a couple of weeks ago, that project is now on hold while my wife, Christine, re-reads the book as it now stands and gives me her feedback. There was a recent discussion on the VISION writers' group about whether family and friends were or ever could be one's 'harshest critic'. I don't suppose that Christine is mine by a long chalk but I do trust her judgement completely. If she raises a concern, I take it very, very seriously. So I await her feedback with baited breath.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned, I took some advice elsewhere and sent out some of my short stories to various publications. It could easily be two months before I get all the rejection slips in from that round of submissions, so I have turned to another ongoing project to fill my time: my sci-fi comedy novel 'Cargo Cult'.

Writing 'Cargo Cult' is probably the most fun I've ever had with my hands on a keyboard. It is set in and around present-day Brisbane where the lives of several groups of people - a young reporter and her brother, a group of alien-worshipping hippies, the Queensland Police Service, a bunch of old folk on a gardening club outing, a vicious but intellectually challenged warlord from a nearby star system, and some exiled alien mobsters disguised as kangaroos - become horribly entangled when a Vinggan spaceship crash-lands on Earth and the religious zealots on board decide they must have been guided here by their god to convert the primitive humans. Sadly, they consult the Internet looking for suitable human forms to take and, being unable to tell us apart, all fourteen choose the most popular form they can find - that of Lindsay Loahan. But all is not as it seems. The Vinggan spaceship itself is a dangerous machine intelligence bent on Galactic conquest and hot on its tail is a powerful Agent of the Galactic government.

In short, it's a bit of a wild romp. I intended it to be a two-parter initially and finished Part 1 a couple of years ago. But when I sat down to write Part 2, I realised that the pages needed to bring a new reader up to speed with what had happened in Part 1 would seriously interrupt the flow of a very fast-paced story for those who had already read Part 1. And then I thought the sheer size of the lag between publishing Parts 1 and 2 would also be a terrible drag on the pace. So I took the decision to make Part 2 part of the same book and just kept the story rocketing along.

This has all been in abeyance for quite a while now - I interrupted it when the Orbit/QWC thing popped up (and thank goodness I did!) I had reached the part where all the weird and wonderful characters in the story are converging on a single spot for the big, final scene. Now I'm back, feeling like a spinster on speed, gathering in my fingers the tangled threads of this multitude of sub-plots to spin them into a single, satisfying yarn. Daunting, but I know I'm going to love it.

Of course, I see 'Cargo Cult' as a labour of love. The market for sci-fi comedy is even smaller than the market for sci-fi generally, so its chances of ever being published are vanishingly small. But then, I regard all of my writing as a personal pleasure rather than as a means to an end.

While Woman Wakes To Love.

I don't think a single person I know has ever become famous. None of my school chums, no-one from university days, no-one I ever worked with, achieved fame - even moderate fame. It really hasn't been something anyone I know has had to worry about. So it was interesting that the possibility of fame was seriously discussed at my recent Orbit/QWC retreat. If you publish fiction, it seems, people might just read it and, if they like it, they could become fans.

Even moderately successful authors - the kind you never hear about unless it's by accident - or all the well-known authors' books are out the day you turn up at the library desperate for something to read - have fans. And fans want to know about you, they want to talk to you - and each other - about your work. They create artwork representing characters and scenes from your stories. They get excited by the prospect of more work to come.

It all seems so easy. Too easy even, if fame can be had for the cost of writing a few books. As W. H. Auden once said, "Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud." Maybe he was thinking, like me, on this day when people are digging through the rubble to save trapped children in earthquake-hit China, or walking miles to find fresh water for what remains of their families in huricane-torn Burma, that being admired really ought to require a little bit more from us.

But such talk is silly, of course, and denies the reality of our nature. In a world where so many 'celebrities' are famous merely for being famous, perhaps writing a well-crafted book isn't such a small thing after all, especially if it contains an idea or two. So take a look at the picture below, which is of the attendees (and a couple of the organisers/speakers) at the Orbit/QWC retreat I was at last week. It is quite possible that some of these people might be famous one day. Can you guess which? I certainly can't!

Back row: Marianne de Pierres (already famous), Terence Hornby, Susan Cullen, Jeremy Gordon, Me, Joanne Clay, Jody-Ann Brocklebank

Front row: Fiona Sawyer, Janette Dalgliesh, Kate Eltham (from QWC), Joanne Anderton, Luke Keioskie

Home From The Wars

It can be a bruising experience, spending a week having your work criticised. However nice the critic is, however much you respect them, and however much they tie themselves in knots trying to say things as positively as possible, the message still comes through that your writing is less than perfect.

Which shouldn't really come as a surprise. If you're honest with yourself, you know what a struggle it was in that middle section. You know there are parts you really, really meant to go back and revise and then forgot about. You know that there were some days - in the nine months you took writing that book - when you had the flu, or you were struggling at work, or when your cat was dying. And, let's face it, some days you were just damned lazy and had no excuses at all.

So the publisher told me I'd let the pace sag in the middle of my book and I'd given away the ending in my prologue, and the author told me I wasn't polishing each and every last one of my 90,000 words as highly as I should be and some of my sentences weren't razor sharp the wa they need to be. So I sit and brood and think that's why I didn't get a contract right there and then. And it's a little humiliating and it's a little hurtful.

But you do this to yourself because, as much fun as it is to write books, it would be fun too to see them published - and to be paid for your work. And that means plaesing other people and writing to their standards. So the thing you have to listen to while you're copping all that criticism, is the praise that goes with it. The publisher also said some very flattering things about how I'd done some excellent writing in other parts of the book. The author pointed out passages she had particularly enjoyed. The fact of it is that I can write well and I do write well - I just need to do it more consistently and to be a bit more self-critical. And I need to go back and do those things that the flu, the cat, or just laziness left undone in the first draft.

I also learnt one very useful trick. The publisher told me to go back to my manuscript - on paper, not on the screen - and read it all the way through from start to finish in a single sitting. It seemed like an unnecessary waste of a good many hours when she told me but I did it and now I will always do it with each and every draft. It makes the structure of the book leap out at you and it clearly reveals the pace and quality of the various sections. In a way it is like taking the perspective of your readers - especially those readers like publishers, editors and agents who tend always to read this way - seeing the text as they would see it. You become aware of it as a finished object rather than as the fluid and changing set of ideas that constantly shape and re-shape themselves to your imagination. For the first time, you see your manuscript as a book.

So I'm back from my Orbit/QWC retreat, full of new enthusiasms and insights and ready to get to work on making my book better. Once I'm over the emotional trauma, that is.

May The Fourth Be With You

It's strange, the places life takes you. Today I find myself in a 'conference centre' - a kind of up-market motel designed to take people out of the real world for a few days. How did I get here? Well, by surprise and blind luck, mostly.

Those who know me, know I'm a compulsive writer. Whenever stuff stops happening to me, I reach for a palmtop computer and start scribbling. Part of my 'early retirement' deal with myself is that I get to write for big chunks of time every day - not just in lunch-breaks. In part fulfillment of this deal, I recently finished a novel.

Time and Tyde is about an ordinary guy (Vince) whose life turns to crap when he is visited by a time-travelling jerk from the future (Tony). It was absolutely the best fun to write and I put the last full-stop to it with some regret. (Not too much regret though since it meant I could get back to several other writing projects I'd put on hold.)

Once in my life, I was interested in having my writing published. I used to send things out to publishers and agents and collect the rejection letters as you're supposed to. It was sort of cool but, in the end, a rather sterile way to pass the time. Eventually, I gave up. The writing I do is for me, really, so why put myself through the hassle of licking stamps and hefting thick wadges of paper to the post-office every few years? Actually, I didn't give up completely. I'm not immune to vanity (no, really) and the idea of my name on a dust jacket has a certain amount of attraction. So I have yielded to the temptation now and again.

I wasn't going to bother with Time and Tyde though until someone I was corresponding with told me about the Orbit / Queensland Writers' Centre retreat. This turned out to be a few days in a conference centre on Bribie Island (which is off the coast of Queensland, Australia) where aspiring new sci-fi and fantasy novelists could get their manuscripts reviewed by a publisher and an editor from Orbit and talk to various other publishing professionals. The only catch was that you had to submit part of your manuscript for judgement and only ten authors from all over Australia would be selected.

Bummer! Still, I gave it a go - mainly because it was a shit-hot opportunity, it was quite reasonably priced, and I was feeling pretty good about my spanking new novel. Anyway, as I've already given away to those who were paying attention, I got in. And here I am in the sub-tropical sunshine, head full of flattering comments from Bernadette Foley (publisher and all-round nice person) thinking, for the first time since I was about 16, that I may actually be in with a chance to get some kind of career going in this business. Of course, being older and wiser than your average Airedale puppy, I keep slapping myself across the face and saying, 'Calm down, you fool, nobody's promised anything, let alone signed anything.' But a little voice in the deepest dungeons of my achey, breaky heart keeps whispering, 'Not yet, but they might one day!'
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So I thought I'd start this blog. Either this is the moment that will kick off my writing career and a string of successful books, or it is the moment that kicks off this blog and nothing else but a chain of disappointments. Either way, it might be interesting to chronicle. The fact is that this is the closest I have ever come to publication. It is the first time that a publisher has actually read a whole manuscript of mine. The second time a publisher has read anything I've written (as far as I'm aware). So you can't blame me for feeling that this is quite a breakthrough.

Anyway, a surprisingly-good conference centre lunch beckons me, so I will leave you for now. But watch this space as the story unfolds. Hell, with a new blog I might even be inspired to talk about all the other writing stuff I'm doing. wouldn't that be interesting? Ah well, suit yourself.