The Guardian's Blog, page 201

Ten ways self-publishing has changed the books world

As the DIY approach gains more and more writers and readers, traditional publishers must reinvent themselves

After a boom year in self-publishing the headlines are getting a little predictable. Most feature a doughty author who quickly builds demand for her work and is rewarded with a large contract from the traditional industry. But in our rush to admire, there's a risk we overlook the wider cultural significance of what is going on. As publishers from all over the world prepare for next week's London book fair, here are 10 changes that they ignore at their peril:

1. There is now a wider understanding of what publishing is – and that it is more difficult than it looks. The industry has long suffered the irony that effective publishing is most evident when invisible; it is only when standards are less than felicitous that we realise how well what we read is managed most of the time. Now that school cookbooks, or fundraising brochures for sports teams, can be effectively self-published, people are learning the process and what is involved. In the past, the industry has tended to recruit heavily from those in the know (the offspring of former publishers and authors being particularly well-represented); wider awareness of publishing is now promoting wider diversity.

2. Gone is our confidence that publishers and agents know exactly what everyone wants to (or should) read, and can spot all the material worth our attention. Soft porn and fantasy have emerged as particularly under-represented in the industry's official output.

3. The copy editor, a traditionally marginalised figure, is now in strong demand. If you are well-connected through social media, can isolate what your writing has to offer and get the message noticed by a reading public, you can probably manage the marketing of your work. The one thing it's really hard to do is self-edit. Long ago publishers outsourced copy editing, relying on the freelance labour market – and freelancers are now being actively sought by self-publishing authors too. The price for services for which there is both high demand and scarce supply tends to rise.

4. The re-emergence of the book as precious object. Some publishers are marketing luxury books; limited editions available only from them. Similarly, it's becoming relatively common for people to self-publish their holiday photographs in book form; to produce a unique photograph/memory book for special birthdays or to mark a retirement. If these are being presented to those who are not big readers, or regular frequenters of bookshops, the social significance of self-publishing may be particularly strong.

5. The role of the author is changing. With the fragmentation of the media in recent years, publishers were already relying on authors to help with the marketing – and learning how to do so is empowering. Now, as authors meet their readers at literary festivals, run blogs or tweet, they know their readers well and are no longer solely reliant on their publishers to mediate relationships. Looking ahead, authors who understand how publishing works are likely to be vastly less compliant than their forbears.

6. The role of the agent is also changing. Literary agents used to introduce ingenue authors to those who might invest, and then work with them to build longer-term careers. Now that so many self-publishing authors are finding the market themselves, agents need to find new ways to make their work pay. If agencies are multi-faceted (film, television, after-dinner speaking) they may be protected, but smaller agencies will struggle. Selling manuscript development services to those in whom they might not otherwise invest their time is an unsatisfactory way to make a living.

7. New business models and opportunities are springing up, mostly offering "publishing services": advice on how to get published or self-publish; guidance on developing a plot or a whole manuscript; lifestyle support and writing holidays; editorial services and marketing assistance. New writing patterns are developing too: team writing; ghost writing; software to assist the crafting. Publishing is emerging as a process – accessible as a variety of different services to whoever needs them – rather than just being an industry.

8. It's not all about making money. If, as I believe, self-publishing means taking personal responsibility for the management and production of your content, this can be achieved as effectively via a single copy to be kept at home as the sale of thousands online. Self-publishing means recognising, and preserving, content that has value for someone – but the process does not have to yield an income to be worthwhile.

9. An end to the "vanity publishing" put-down. No longer the last resort of the talentless, these days self-publishing is seen as a homing ground of the instinctively proactive: identify your market; meet their needs; deliver direct. It's also a flexible solution; a process not a single product, for which the rationale can be very varied – from book as business card to ebook novel; from hard copy of a work-in-progress, to a team compilation for a local history group.

10. Self-publishing brings happiness. Publishers have long assumed that only if nearing professional standards could a self-published product bring any satisfaction. My research has revealed the opposite. It seems self-publishers approach the process confidently, are well-informed, and aware of how much the process will cost and how long it is likely to take. They emerge both keen to do it again and likely to recommend it to others. Finalising a project you have long planned feels good, and the process builds in the possibility of future discoverability – whether that is in an attic (whenever the family decides they are mature enough to want to know), or by ISBN from within the British Library. Self-publishing as a legacy – should we really be so surprised at its growing popularity?

• A former publisher, Alison Baverstock is Course Leader for the Publishing MA at Kingston University. The Naked Author, her guide to self-publishing, is published by Bloomsbury. The full results of her more recent research will be published in the journal Learned Publishing in July.

Self-publishingPublishingAlison Baverstock
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Poem of the week: Autobiography Without Pronouns by Tiffany Atkinson

Swept clean of the 'I', this is poetry full of space and light and freewheeling observation

The title of this week's poem, "Autobiography Without Pronouns," from Kink and Particle by Tiffany Atkinson, declares a paradox: personal revelation (autobiography) and impersonality (no identifying pronouns). Poets, of course, sometimes look for a way of encoding private experience, but it would be complacent to assume that's the aim here. The challenge the writer sets herself is primarily a linguistic one, and she accomplishes it with no sacrifice of specific detail or personal voice.

Although relatively short at 20 lines, the poem seems full of space, light and movement. The absence of an "I" and other pronominal clutter certainly liberates the "eye" of writer and reader. Present participles enhance the poem's momentum, the syntax is loosened, and the reader shares the speaker's experience of watching, though car-windows, a flow of moving images.

This cinematic device is underlined by the "Super-8" simile in lines six to eight and later references to slo-mo and panning. The hand-held camera and 8mm film contrast with the advanced technology of the wind farm, but both might evoke parallels with the mind's memory-storing processes. Perhaps, additionally, the film-making is an activity framed in other parts of the poem (the tricycling child, for instance, could be on film). The immediate observation seems to enfold snippets of an older story, and the homecoming implied by "driving back" and "breaking home for twilight" may involve remembering other meanings of "home".

The windmills are clearly moving fast. Both the sweep of their tempo and the environmental friendliness of their technology are evoked by the colours and preposition of "white-through-blue". At the same time, they're linked to traditional agriculture by the notion of "reaping". A more familiar metaphor, the sky as a china bowl, is wittily filtered through the allusions, "priceless", "hairline crack". Another quietly-plotted surprise is the word "hiss" as a description of the noise the sea makes. Are ominous associations conjured by a sound connected with home movies? Despite the "Feathers by/ the roadside" confirming death or injury, the poem maintains its light-hearted, open-road, into-the-west sort of mood.

More omens appear in the encounter with the traveller selling quartz hearts, an incident relayed with a nicely-underlined zeugma when s/he "prophecies a wild affair/ and light rain, though in no particular/ order". We assume the car has stopped and the speaker has alighted, but the event could, of course, belong to more distant memory. It's an easy shift from the landscape's "slipstream" to these closer, more random-seeming character-shots.

The appearance of the small girl on a scarlet tricycle is all magical surprise. "Rounding the corner," she shrinks the linear stretch of landscape to town-sized dimensions. The observation that she "has just created pigeons" is her own excited point-of-view, perhaps. And now the narrative becomes simultaneously explicit and mysterious. "Mother" and "Ricardo", are not visibly connected to the speaker, but intimacy is implied. The shift to the past tense gives their finished lives a reality; in fact, they seem to supply a sombre biographical core to the poem. These lines enhance our sense of watching a film, a foreign film, decades-old, with a terse voiceover, and images – colourless, grainy, haunting – which seem freighted with back-story. The three characters may form a family triad (child, mother, the unfortunate Ricardo) but it's up to the reader. The absence of pronouns has freed the poem for this kind of bold stroke.

The narrative has always been tight and pacy, and now it consciously accelerates with that almost-monosyllabic camera-direction: "pan through/ sky to sea to road to quartz to pigeons." These different objects seem to meld in tones of blue and grey, and degrees of iridescence, relieving the imagined ugliness of Ricardo's death. The hooting train and the "all change" ("all" being a pronoun without an autobiography) underline a denouement harsher than expected, though in accord with the poem's overall sense of openness to what happens. "And love insists, like gravity" seems to confirm that the poem's journey was not to safety, but to a further emotional centre, a home-in-the-making. As movement ceases, the perfectly-judged intransitive use of "insists" somehow knits every earlier experience and future possibility together.

Atkinson has followed up her debut collection, Kink and Particle, with a lively re-working and re-gendering of the Latin poet, Catullus, Catulla et al, published by Bloodaxe last year. A new collection, So Many Moving Parts, is forthcoming.

Autobiography Without Pronouns

Driving back in the slipstream
of the windfarm, each arc of white-
through-blue reaping ohms from clean
air. The sky would be priceless but
for a hairline crack on its far curve:
everything in slow-mo, the sea
for miles on the passenger side
like the hiss of Super-8. Feathers by
the roadside. Breaking home for twilight
where the traveller selling quartz hearts
on the seafront prophecies a wild affair
and light rain, though in no particular
order. The small girl rounding the corner
on a scarlet tricycle has just created
pigeons; an astonishment of beat and wing.
Mother's death was nothing unexpected
but Ricardo's came brutally. Pan through
sky to sea to road to quartz to pigeons
as the last train westward claxons in. All
change. And love insists, like gravity.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Have 40 years of mobile phones given literature bad lines?

They may have made communication easier, but they have laid waste to many fictional devices

Few writers will have toasted the mobile phone on its 40th birthday this week, and the Nobel and Booker prize winner JM Coetzee certainly didn't. "You say you are quite prepared to write novels in which people go around with personal electronic devices in their pockets," he writes to Paul Auster in Here and Now, a forthcoming collection of their letters. "I must say I am not. The telephone is about as far as I will go in a book, and then reluctantly. If people ("characters") are continually going to be speaking to one another at a distance, then a whole gamut of interpersonal signs and signals, verbal and non-verbal, voluntary and involuntary, has to be given up. Dialogue ... just isn't possible."

Others would go further, adding plot as a casualty: with near-universal mobile phone ownership, developments that depend on misunderstandings, inability to reach others or be reached, or things left unsaid become unrealistic (the ending of The Great Gatsby wouldn't work, for example). Creating characters with secrets has become trickier too since the arrival of social media and Google.

And as well causing all the "continual" phoning Coetzee deplores, smartphones team up with computers to disruptively turn us into fellow-writers who produce a daily stream of texts, emails, updates, tweets and posts. Jennifer Egan and Zadie Smith have had a go at textspeak, but, otherwise, literary fiction has largely steered clear of the texture of urban life in the digital era.

And arguably of contemporary life in general: the phone with superpowers is clearly not the sole or dominant factor in this shunning of the present, but it's a significant one. Coetzee is part of a mass withdrawal: the last four winners of the Man Booker prize – and of the Orange and Costa novel prizes – have been set wholly or partly in the past, or in a past-like pocket of the present (in Howard Jacobson's novel and Julian Barnes's second half) peopled by the middle-aged.

This might seem to leave the field to commercial fiction, but the mobile phone also presents problems for genre writers. The musty romcom trope of a man racing to the station or airport to stop his beloved leaving, for instance, has disappeared now he can simply ring or text her; and few recent thrillers or whodunnits come without scenes in which phones are destroyed, mislaid, stolen or read "no signal", testifying to their ability to render standard plot devices unusable.

Looking at their impact on crime writing (and plays and films) four years ago, Mark Lawson noted they are "now routinely obliged to explain why their detectives or victims don't simply ring someone for help … If there had been a Nokia in Janet Leigh's handbag, Hitchcock's Psycho would have been a short film with a happy ending."

FictionCrime fictionThrillersJohn Dugdale
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Reader reviews roundup

A biographical novel about the poet Edward Thomas and a child's eye view of life on the margins head our reviewers' Easter discoveries

Hello and welcome back to our reader reviews roundup, which returns after a two-week easter break. Though the books desk might have been slacking, our reader reviewers have not.

One of the liveliest conversations has been inspired by a novel about the poet Edward Thomas. It was published in February by the Oxfordshire-based "micro-publisher" Streetbooks, whose founder Frank Egerton says: "My interest is in artisan publishing: which involves high quality, regional fiction, marketed locally in person and globally via the Internet. An analogy I like is that of the micro-brewery: a combination of tradition, passion and the opportunities offered by new technology."

A Conscious Englishman is by former teacher and probation officer Margaret Keeping, and either she has some very conscientious literary friends or her publisher's micro-brewery policy is producing some very heady results in the Edward Thomas fan club.

First to review it was ISWilton, who wrote:

What I love most about this book is the voice of his wife Helen. Much of the book is told from her viewpoint and we understand the pain of being married to a struggling, and sometimes, difficult artist.

Next came Georgeed, who felt Keeping conveyed Thomas's love of the English countryside particularly well.

evmason wrote the clincher over Easter weekend:

Her gift is to create in prose the landscapes and moods which Thomas captured in his poems. In showing us the genesis of 'The Manor Farm', 'Old Man', 'In Memoriam (Easter 1915)', she sends us straight back to the poetry, and for a writer who loves Thomas's work, what finer service could she render?

Annskea, meanwhile, was bowled over by Thomas O'Malley's novel This Magnificent Desolation, writing "It is rare to find a book written in a language which so beautifully conveys its imaginative essence".

The title comes from Buzz Aldrin's words, as he stepped on to the moon, but the desolation belongs to 10-year-old Duncan, who narrates the tale of life on the fringes of the 20th century.

Annskea writes:

There is something of Steinbeck in [O'Malley's] ability to capture the atmosphere of lives lived always on the edge of poverty, and surrounded by loss and death . But over the four years of Duncan's life in the book, the harsh realities are tempered by moments of great imaginative vision.

Two titles that definitely seem worth checking out, then. And that's all for this week. If we've mentioned your review here, or featured one on either editor's picks on the books site, or the reader review slot on the culture site, drop me a line at claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk and I'll send you something good from the cupboard.

FictionClaire Armitstead
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Live webchat: Dennis Johnson on Hans Fallada

The publisher who brought Fallada back to prominence with English readers will be chatting with us on Monday 8 April. Please post your questions now

Monday 8 April 2013 marks the 70th anniversary of the execution of Otto and Elise Hampel, the couple who inspired Hans Fallada's Alone In Berlin, by spreading anti-Nazi postcards around wartime Berlin.

This, admittedly, is a grim anniversary, but an important one to commemorate. We're going to do it by discussing their acts of lonely heroism in a live webchat with Dennis Johnson, the co-founder of Melville House and one of the main reasons that Fallada's book re-emerged into the English speaking world.

You'll be able to ask Dennis how he rediscovered the book (legend has it that it was no less than fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg who first suggested to him that it should be translated), about how it felt to oversee such a global success story. You might also want to ask about the other Fallada titles published by Melville House. (Others are almost as remarkable as Alone In Berlin and have similarly extreme back stories. The Drinker, for instance, was written in code while its author was in an asylum.) Ask about Fallada himself too. In 2012, Dennis met and interviewed Fallada's son Ulrich Ditzen and knows a great deal about this strange and wonderful writer – not to mention the Hampels themselves.

Elsewhere, it's also worth noting that as well as co-running a comparatively new and unusually successful publishing company, Dennis is the founder of one of the world's first book blogs, Mobylives.com, and a leading light in the civilised world's ongoing fight against the encroaching darkness of Amazon . He is, in other words, a fascinating man and we're lucky to have him with us. So please ask him a question!

Dennis will be with us a 1pm BST on 8 April, but you can start posting your questions now in the comments below.

Hans FalladaFiction
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Cats leave their mark on centuries of books

Evidence of feline interference in a 15th-century manuscript reminds us of how big an impression they've made on literature as a whole

Emir Filipović, an academic at the University of Sarajevo, was researching his PhD in the Dubrovnik State Archives when he stumbled across a medieval Italian manuscript from 11 March 1445, from "the 13th volume of a series of archival registers called 'Lettere e commissioni di Levante'".

Doesn't sound that exciting, does it? But the discovery has placed Filipović at the centre of a social media whirl – because the medieval manuscript was stained with inky cat paw prints. I dropped Filipović a line, and he says he's still surprised at how popular the photograph has proved to be ("Cats - walking all over your shit since the 15th century", says a Reddit post).

"I think that one of the main reasons why people seemed to have a positive response to it is down to the fact that it makes you imagine the scene in your head when the cat jumped onto the book. This especially appeals to cat owners, who are, I suppose, familiar with such typical cases, but also to people who do not own pets since they can still identify with the unfortunate scribe," Filipović says.

"One other important thing is that some people seem to equate the past times with history as a (boring) school subject focused primarily on politics and wars. They forget that the past was full of 'normal' everyday events, just like today, and a picture such as the one with the cat pawprints tends to remind everybody that people who lived in the past were not much different than ourselves."

I think that's spot-on – those of us with cats know exactly how annoying/endearing it is to have a purring feline trying to climb onto our keyboards while we're working, and I just love the thought of a medieval scribe being equally irritated. If not more – at least we can just delete.

Could it also be down to the fact that cats and literature, as Filipović puts it in a blogpost about his discovery, make a good combination? I'm now trying to think of my favourite literary cats, and I'm swamped with choice. Obviously there's the Cheshire Cat, but thinking of children's literature makes me remember how much I adored Barbara Sleigh's Carbonel books, and Paul Gallico's Jennie, as a child – and as a parent how much I am now enjoying Lynley Dodd's Slinky Malinki books. ("Slinky Malinki was blacker than black, a stalking and lurking adventurous cat.")

Dodd comes up with some great names for her feline creations – Butterball Brown, Pimpernel Pugh, Greywacke Jones – but obviously, no one beats TS Eliot when it comes to the Naming of Cats. Mr Mistoffelees, old Deuteronomy, Rum Tum Tugger, Skimbleshanks – and my personal favourite, Macavity. I'll leave you with a few lines to whet your appetite.

Macavity's a Mystery Cat: he's called the Hidden Paw -
For he's the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He's the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad's despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime – Macavity's not there!

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.

Just brilliant. And please do share your own favourite literary cats – it's a purrfect way to spend Friday morning…

CatsAnimalsPetsTS EliotChildren and teenagersAlison Flood
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Why this feminist chose an all-male Clarke prize shortlist

The regrettable reasons for the decline in SF by women this year don't change the fact that the best books were by men

As a female science fiction writer, feminist and a member of this year's judging panel for the Clarke Awards, I find myself in the interesting position of defending our choice of an all-male list. I'll start by saying that this was an outstanding year for submissions – 82 books in total, with some exceptional writing from authors of both genders from a variety of cultural backgrounds.

Much of this was quite some way into the "fantasy" bracket, but of the more SF-facing work, we found ourselves looking at a field dominated by big ideas, near – and far – future explorations of the solar system, and some very sharp takes on government intrusion into social affairs. I think the shortlist reflects the best of these three "themes" for 2012, demonstrating a return to both the "sensawunda" and to the critical thought that so many complain is lacking from contemporary SF.

As a feminist, I am opposed to including women writers in shortlists just because they are female: the work has got to hold its own in its field: we can discuss whether that field is a level one or not, but when you're judging a work, you're obliged to deal with what you've got, and to me, that means regardless of any ideological criteria.

This leads us into the wider conversation as to why, despite having a significantly enlarged entry this year (a 36 per cent increase on the 60 books submitted in 2012) we received disproportionately fewer from women, of which many were technically fantasy. We do not have to go far to look for the answer: over the last few years, the publishing industry in both Britain and the US (but particularly in the former) has been commissioning fewer and fewer SF novels by women. The running gag for some years now has been that the industry has had a Highlander approach to women who write SF: there can be only one, at least on contract.

Is this because women don't write SF? Patently not. Genre workshops are full of women writing all forms of the genre. As a freelance editor and writing mentor, I have seen what I regard as exceptional science fiction produced by women. But this doesn't seem to make it into pro publishing, and when it does, it tends to be reviewed in more negative terms than SF produced by men.

I am not, however, of the view that the industry is rife with sexism – at least not on an individual basis (the wider cultural context might be another issue). When I started writing, I was asked by at least two male editors to publish under my full name, not my initials (which I'd hoped to do due to having such a boring name), purely because of the issue of the visibility of women in SF. Throughout my career, I have had significant support from editors of both sexes, and from my peers. So this issue of publication and visibility is not a personal gripe: it's an observation about a disconnect between the work that women are doing, and its reflection in the wider arena of the industry. After all, women have been involved in the genre from its early days, ever since Margaret Cavendish published The Blazing World in 1666, through Clare Winger Harris and Gertrude Barrows Bennett in the 1920s and onwards (and if you've never heard of these writers, ask yourself why not, and you'll start appreciating the core of the problem).

This has been a catch-22 for female genre writers for a long time: as my fellow judge Juliet E McKenna points out, the lack of visibility and discoverability of female writers "perpetuates the misconception that women can't write SF –  for people who don't understand that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". As Juliet also says, changes in bookselling are a factor too: new releases have a very short commercial shelf life. The average chain bookseller puts them on the shelves for a handful of weeks: if they don't sell, they're returned – but bookshop browsing in retail outlets for new releases is now skewed to front-of-house promotions. These are biased towards "safe bets which then become self-fulfilling prophecies: such as 'female SF doesn't sell, so we won't include that' – which guarantees it doesn't sell." This may even go on to affect submissions to publishers … Are women writers, in fact, caught up in an enormous feedback loop of diminished expectation?

This, in turn, feeds us into the much wider, and much-discussed, issue of the changing nature of publishing itself. There's a general view that the mainstream publishers are increasingly concentrating on big names – but that's not to decry the quality of those names. I would argue that the work of quite a lot of white male writers is outstanding, and I believe that to be reflected in the Clarke shortlist this year.

Arthur C Clarke awardAwards and prizesPublishingScience fictionFictionFantasyLiz Williams
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A struggle for the garden

Susie Steiner on how the psychodrama of Christopher Lloyd's life at Great Dixter influenced her new novel, Homecoming

The great gardeners are those that have found their own style and can express themselves freely. And yet the garden can be a scene of struggle between the old guard, which seeks to maintain the status quo, and the more youthful forces for change and modernity. Between these two, are the experts on their grassy mounts generating a steady flow of advice on how to garden – the way things ought to be done. Gardening, in other words, is rich in psychodrama.

In writing my novel, Homecoming, I was concerned with the question of how one grows up fully and becomes one's own person and to explore this, I chose to make my central character, Bartholomew, a gardener. He is in his 30s, struggling to create his own life away from the farm he grew up on. It seemed to me that gardening represented a link to his father's farming – a connection to the seasons and a love of the outdoors – but was also a source of conflict because it was his own thing: a rejection of the old guard to a degree, a feminised version of farming in his father's eyes, and also a creative act.

The struggle at the heart of the book is one of separation – getting out from under one's original family in order to create one's own life. Bartholomew is struggling to become his own man, on his own terms, away from parents he loves deeply, and this struggle has been played out before in gardening. For example, while writing Homecoming, I was influenced by Christopher Lloyd, one of our most revered gardeners, who was dominated for most of his life by his mother Daisy.

I was Christo's editor for several years during his time as the Guardian's gardening columnist, and he sometimes spoke to me about Daisy – how she didn't like women much and how he was her favourite. But it wasn't until I read Stephen Anderton's riveting biography of Christo (Christopher Lloyd: His Life at Great Dixter) that the psychological context of the garden fell into place. For 50 years he was dominated by Daisy, who along with that other Victorian matriarch Gertrude Jekyll, dandled the young Christo on their knee and told him exactly what should be in his long border.

When he was 51, Daisy died and Christo's life began. He took over the famous garden at Great Dixter with a great burst of fervent self-expression and joyfulness, pulling up Daisy's roses as he went. He became one of our most beloved horticultural iconoclasts – a lover of dissent, I think because he had had to fight so hard for it himself. It was a great shame, one feels reading the book, that he could not have been liberated sooner. Yet it was Daisy's garden he re-made, and it was her love of gardening that he shared, so a process took place – of holding some things close, but rejecting others. Most of all, he asserted his right to choose.

Dixter was not the only garden to become the physical representation of a human power struggle. The wonderful writer Margery Fish, author of We Made a Garden, ostensibly describes finding a house in Somerset and creating the garden from scratch but James Fenton describes its "countermelody" as: "How I outlived a brute of a husband and began to find myself and make sense of my garden and my life."

Walter Fish dominated Margery with his strict paths, perfect lawns and an envious contempt for her cottage garden flowers. She liked the loose, naturalistic style:

"I should have preferred to fill our cracks with a mixture of sand and fine soil so that tiny green plants would creep along the stones but this was one of the things that Walter would not have at any price. I was allowed a very few small holes, in which I planted thymes and Dresden China daisies, and the effect was far too neat and tidy. Time has improved things and a lot of Somerset cement has become loosened, some of it helped, I admit, by a crowbar, and now I have little plants crawling in and out of nearly every crevice."

He is dead and she has taken a crowbar to his horrid cement. Good for Margery. She has got out from under him. Gardening, like other creative acts, is an expression of self and involves some assertion of separateness from what has gone before. By the end of my novel, Bartholomew has created his own long border. Gardening allows him to take in and hold dear the father he loves and in his guilt and remorse, the garden can come into full flower. He can become his own man. Christo, I hope, would approve.

• To order Homecoming by Susie Steiner for £10.39 (RRP £12.99), visit guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

GardensSusie Steiner
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A Booker judge's envy of the Arthur C Clarke award

In a very impressive shortlist, the received distinction between 'literary' and 'genre' fiction has never looked so flimsy

Margaret Atwood can sleep easily: the shortlist for the 2013 Arthur C Clarke award is strikingly devoid of what she called "talking squids in outer space". It might even please the self-appointed Dr Johnson of genre fiction, Christopher Priest, who fulminated so fulsomely about last year's shortlist. It seems telling that the dystopic is so much in evidence. Nod features a world where most of the population suddenly cannot sleep, giving a new twist to the zombie novel. Dark Eden rewrites Genesis from a scientifically grounded perspective, with a human population on a distant, sunless world suffering from the results of in-breeding and conservative indoctrination. Earth, in 2312, is an overheated trash-pile whose neo-neo-con rulers manage to exert political influence over the rest of the solar system. The Dog Stars is billed on Amazon as "The Road – with hope" which must surely be the least effective marketing strap-line ever. In Intrusion MacLeod presents a frighteningly possible "democratic dystopia", where the government gives you the choice you would have made had you all the facts that they have. Harkaway, here, is the wild card, with a giddy homage to the unlikely combination of Ian Fleming and John Ruskin.

The Clarke awards have always sought to include the so-called literary within genre (Atwood is a previous winner, as is Kazuo Ishiguro, while David Mitchell, Sarah Hall and Lydia Millet have all been shortlisted). Harkaway is, I suppose, the "literary" turn here, although all the titles deploy techniques from literary fiction: Kim Stanley Robinson, for example, uses bricolage to good effect; Adrian Barnes investigates how texts become holy and Dark Eden has both inventive neologism and wonderful stories-within-stories. The false dichotomy between "literary" and "genre" has never seemed so slight.

As a Man Booker judge, I'm slightly envious of the shortlist here, though not perhaps of making the final decision. But were it me, I'd be pushing for Ken MacLeod. Five times a shortlisted author, MacLeod has moved from space opera to insightful and ingenious near-future fictions. Intrusion comes after the fearfully prescient The Execution Channel, the wonderful take on the Scottish covenanter novel The Night Sessions, and the simulations-within-simulations Soviet fantasy of The Restoration Game. Intrusion is both horrific and comic and deals movingly with the consequences of genetic fixes. The ending – resilient, broken, hopeful and disillusioned – is a triumph. And it will probably be true by a week on Thursday, given his track record.

Arthur C Clarke awardAwards and prizesScience fictionFictionBooker prizeStuart Kelly
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Indie SF and fantasy hunt yields prize catch

From more than 800 indie-published SF and fantasy books, these are my top choices

The real challenge for any writer isn't writing a good book – an arduous enough task in itself – but writing a great one. A month ago I invited indie authors to tell me about their books, and tell me they did, with more than 800 nominations made in the comments here alone. Searching through those hundreds of books has shown me once again that good indie and self-published writing is out there, but great writing is as rare as ever.

I set out looking for a great indie-published book to rival the magnitude and sheer storytelling bravado of George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones. The brutal truth is that nothing I saw came close. But this should come as no surprise. Martin was a bestselling, Hugo award-winning author in his twenties, who spent years honing his craft in Hollywood before applying himself to Game of Thrones. It takes decades to shape a master craftsman, a lesson not just for ambitious indie authors but also for major publishers. A legion of dull, identikit "grimdark" fantasy novels have been churned out in recent years to capture his readership, but without exception their authors lack the writing chops to match the master.

Indie publishing excels in giving a platform to writers whose work is either too idiosyncratic for mainstream tastes, or just not what publishers are looking for at that time. My search this year revealed five books that fit these criteria. Three of my five main picks come from independent presses. By far the most serious failing in the mass of indie books I investigated was a lack of editing. Indie presses – while often unable to offer anything beyond token payment – can clearly still offer the editorial support that makes all the difference between a good book and a great one.

The Vorhh by Brian Catling is a great book, but arguably only for the niche of readers who understand its purpose and intentions. As the introduction by legendary comics author Alan Moore ably explains, The Vorhh is a fantasy novel stripped of the "formulaic lard of dwarves and dragons". It's a testament to the power of Tolkien's epic fantasy in our modern culture that it was not just copied en masse by authors like Robert Jordan and Terry Brooks, but also deconstructed and repurposed by a string of authors including M John Harrison and China Miéville. The Vorhh is a worthy addition to the canon of anti-fantasy, independently published in a period of high conservatism among SF and fantasy imprints, which deserves to be fully considered alongside its contemporaries.

Guy Haley's Champion of Mars celebrates all that is best in the pulp tradition of SF and fantasy. A clear homage to the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs (poorly adapted to film last year as the confused John Carter), there's also a strong flavour of British "space opera" in Champion of Mars, with flourishes of Iain M Banks and Michael Moorcock. Guy Haley interweaves two timelines, one a near-future Hard SF narrative, the other a far-future planetary romance, both focused on the looming red presence of Mars. Simply put, Guy Haley is a very good writer, with an infectious love for sci-fi that shines off every page of his pulp-inspired prose. If there is one author in this list who might write a Game of Thrones-scale hit in future, it's Haley.

The Theatre of Curious Acts by Cate Gardner is a small but beautiful package of mystery and wonder disguised as a novel. Gardner begins her story in the trenches of the first world war, where Daniel Cole is doing his best to hide from the suffering and death around him. Transported into a magical reality by a troupe of theatrical players, Daniel finds himself swept up in apocalyptic events that threaten the entire world. The Theatre of Curious Acts is told with a very deep honesty that takes us deep in to the pain of men shattered by war, but driven to save the world they know. Gardner's great victory here is to remind us how fantasy worlds are built as escapes from the pain of reality, while allowing us as readers some measure of true escape from that pain.

Adrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales is also a story of escape. A short novella written as part of Sale's Apollo Quartet, its style and tone are rooted in classic SF of the 1970s and that era's love affair with Nasa and the Apollo space programme. Colonel Vance Paterson awaits a lingering death in a US moonbase after nuclear war obliterates all life on Earth. His and his men's only hope of survival is the Bell, an artefact of Nazi science that can take them to alternate dimensions. Sales unfolds his story like a Chinese box, an intricate work of logic written in spartan prose. Like much of the very best of the SF it pays tribute to, Adrift on the Sea of Rains examines the experience of space exploration as an insight into the human experience of loneliness and isolation, experiences we all seek escape from eventually.

My favourite novel among these five, however, is A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer. Imagine a history of 19th-century literature where the eldritch weirdness of Poe and Lovecraft had infected the mainstream drawing-room novels of the era. Through four linked short stories and one novella Tanzer traces the occult history of the Calipash family. A variety of historical literary styles from the Gothic to the Edwardian are mashed up, the most amusing and successful being a Wodehouse / Lovecraft fusion that takes an unfortunate Bertie Wooster into alarming supernatural territory. Molly Tanzer is a tremendously clever writer, with a remarakble knack for fusing the grotesque and the comedic. A Pretty Mouth manages the thing that becomes ever harder as the novel grows older. It does something new.

Science fictionFictionFantasyDamien Walter
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