Stephen Cox's Blog, page 5

The Owen Problem

I was signing the paperback of my second book.  A man came up to me, introduced himself as Owen, and said,

‘I love Our Child of the Stars! I didn’t know you had written a sequel.’

He bought another copy for a friend, and a copy of Our Child of Two Worlds for himself. So, lovely, but also, I felt like banging my head on the table.

I’ve named this the Owen Problem.   Everything I did to promote the book for six months hadn’t reached an enthusiastic reader. In fact, sales suggest a great many Owens are out there.

186,000 books are published in the UK each year. Traditional publishers rely on the retailers to sell to individuals. Some small presses and some online retailers retain contacts for the purchasers – so Amazon can tell you a sequel is out.

Marketing and publicity is expected to reach the millions of Owens. But I believe 95% of marketing goes on 5% of titles. Not everyone reads book bloggers, and no one reads all of them. Not everyone reads the reviews in papers.

Furthermore, the traditional model relies on publishing the paperback six months later than the main publicity drive. (Some publishers now do eBook and paperback first, and then do a hardback if demand justifies it!)

Every commercial social media platform becomes progressively less effective, demanding more payment to make your content widely visible, or at all. TikTok (which only works for some books) is starting to go down that route.

The traditional publisher arguing the author on social can sell the books has never been brilliant and now looks very out of date.

Self-publishers of course have a similar problem.

Mastodon is a federated, non-commercial social media platform.  I quite like it, it has potential, but it’s really not the main solution.

If I sold handbags on Etsy and the like, I would have emails from my buyers.  I could warm them up for new products, within reason, and they’d at least know when the new one was out.

It’s why I run a newsletter and why I want to expand it. But still, I cannot expect people to follow me and 99 different authors. Our email inboxes are already very full.

If you like my content, sign up to the newsletter anyway! Free, special offers, not too frequent.

It’s one reason why I am moving into training authors in media skills, useful across a range of publicity activity.

NEW Media skills for authors/creatives

I woke up this week and thought – you should run media skills workshops for creatives.

Stephen, you worked for twelve years at Great Ormond Street. You supported world class doctors and nurses and fundraisers with the media. You helped parents and patients get through tragedies, and to get their side of the story across. I helped with research and fundraising and public interest campaigns. You enjoy doing this. You were good at it.

Last century, you led a successful consumer campaign, much of which was empowering local branches. You did turnaround PR support for the Nursing and Midwifery Council six months after it was described as ‘failing at every level’. You helped pro bono all sorts of small organisations.

My publisher publicists knew what they were doing. The publicity for Our Child of the Stars was excellent. But they’re overworked. Social media is becoming steadily less helpful at reaching audiences. It’s fragmenting, punishing small creators, and increasingly asking for money.

I thought – why not use these skills for authors and other creatives? You’ve been a writer and talking about that journey for years. Hell, you sent over a friend exhibiting her art a free PR plan last month just cos you could.

Being confident and interesting, and knowing how to answer difficult questions, will help in many ways. Some obvious opportunities on your doorstep will take little time. Speaking in public, doing interviews, getting coverage…. a bit scary but doable.

I’m piloting these workshops free, then I’ll be running them for a modest fee in the autumn. Interested? Drop me a line through contact asap.

Subscribers to my newsletter will get a discount.

Are indie authors the rock stars of publishing?

A survey of independent (self-published) authors shows several interesting features of the market.  Report is from CREATe at the University of Glasgow, commissioned by ALLi, the alliance of independent authors, and the Self Publishing Formula.

The headline figures for indie authors was a median income of $12,755 for 2022, which is higher than a similar survey of traditionally published authors (reported here), and an increase on the indie author 2021 figure.

(The median means half of all authors earn more and half less than the median figure.)

The indie market offers good opportunities with more women than men answering the survey (traditional publishing is roughly equal), women earning more than men, and LGBTQA+ authors earning more than those outside that community.  However, both black and disabled authors earned significantly less than others.  The argument that self-publishing widens access to the reader clearly has some truth, but not universally. Benefit could work in different ways – the LGBTQA+ authors also appeared to write primarily in community tagged genres.

As with traditional publishing and many creative endeavours, the rewards are unevenly divided – 1% of authors received 31% of income.  And those who had been self-publishing the longest, and with the most works available, tended to do better.

These figures refer to authors who spend at least half their working time on writing and allied activities.

The report notes that many of the successful indie authors make money from direct liaison with their readers – crowdfunding, subscriptions, paid content newsletters, patron platforms etc. At a time where reaching your fans directly and cheaply, owning a mailing list becomes ever more important – however you publish.

Analysis: “Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity.”

ALLI, the alliance of independent authors said the survey showed that independent authors earned more.

However, this needs to be interpreted with caution. This is income, not income after costs.  CREATe has yet to study the difference in costs between traditionally published and indie published authors.

An independent author must pay for their own editing, cover design, printing, advanced copies, and promotion etc. A traditional author largely doesn’t – the exception being perhaps promotion.  If an independent author advertises, they directly raise their own income more than a traditional author would. (Independent authors receive a cut on each sale.  Traditional authors receive a lower cut, but are usually paid a lump sum assuming a certain level of sales, even if they never make that. Trad authors advertising their books benefits their publisher more than them.)

A very large number of independent authors lose money on their publishing career. One might ask how many of them filled in the survey?

What is clear is that independent publishing is a world away from thirty years ago – where it was a bit quixotic, although some still made it work. Now a businesslike author who writes fast, to a specific audience, probably in series, and promotes their work well, can get their work into print quicker, stay in print as long as they want, and generate a significant income. Traditional publishing has probably got more vexing for many of its authors. But there’s no guarantee, just as with in traditional publishing.

Photo: Vitalina, Pexels

Offer on author services

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Autocorrect Insanity

With the news that new producers of enhanced autocorrect machines (purporting to be Artifical Intelligence) are taking creative content and using it to train their autocorrect machines…

A copyright reminder.

Everything on this site is or anything written by me posted anywhere on the web is copyright. Any of this scraped and used by an AI is breach of my copyright, and possibly other people’s rights too.

A retrospective fee of £100 a word plus expenses will be levied.

Where does Cory’s spaceship land?

Doug Johnstone’s The Shape Between Us has an alien land in Scotland, adding to the large number of alien landings whose story is shaped by where they land, and who finds them.

ET lands in Modesto California, since it is a story about Spielberg’s childhood. Superman in Smallville, Kansas, for his Jewish creators wanted him to be an immigrant but raised by an all American family.

I have often mused on how Pilot, Cory’s mother, might have landed somewhere else, and the infinite stories that flowed from that.  To write is to choose.

Contains mild spoilers for Our Child of The Stars and Our Child of Two Worlds – spelling out some things not spelled out before.

Cory’s mother, the Pilot, flies Forager Ship Four towards a lush world of green and blue and white. A world of war, a world of summer and winter. Her son Little Blue Frog is unconscious, and her best friend and her child are already dead.  Her body is wracked with pain, she cannot shake off the pain from the wounds of so many deaths.  She knows she is alone dying.

Behind her, the huge colony ship tries a desperate move.  It launches one of its engines into the swarm of alien machines and detonates it…

A swarm of murderous alien machines heads for Earth, dragging a meteor as a shield.  What havoc it could wreak… Can she, dare she, destroy them as they fall?

This is a primitive planet, gripped by the psychosis that violence is an appropriate response to feeling beings.  She may need to hide.  Where on that world does she land…?

In the beginning, was a small New England town. The characters were American, except for the small purple boy with a heart of gold and a dreadful secret. His adoptive mother named him Cory.  The characters and the setting existed before there was thought of anything as fancy as a book or two.  I had a short story that obeyed Aristotle’s unities – a few characters, and the whole action in one place and on one day. 

What if Pilot, dying, bereaved, not wholly rational, had landed somewhere else?

Fellow writers challenged me why I did not move the setting – set it in the country I knew from experience, perhaps the Meteor striking somewhere in Somerset with an improbable name like Abbot’s Balcony or Fester St James, with the Ship down in the Bristol Channel.   A story set in the UK in 1969, where the times were a changing too.  I was a little younger than Cory is, not remembering the Moon Landings but I did remember Apollo 13. 

How different the flavour of the book would have been! Maybe I should have written a book of optimism and starry-eyed hope about Britain…

In part I set it in Amber Grove, New York, because that was as exotic as I felt up to – and because the characters came as liberal North-Eastern Americans and weren’t up for changing.

Where does Cory land and who finds him first?

Infinite books spread out.  In many, Pilot’s gamble fails and Cory dies. Where there is no medical attention, his death is all but certain.  In many, the authorities learn of the boy, and in every one of those he becomes a plaything of the powerful.  How many governments would rush to tell the world and how many to keep him a secret?  How many keep him tucked away as Molly feared, like a lab rat?  How many see him first as a person?

Perhaps some of these stories are not too dreadful for him. Maybe even in an unkind world and for cynical reasons, those around him are still kind. If the President’s scientific advisor Dr Pfeiffer gets hold of him… he’s an ambitious and conceited Cold-Warrior but a kind and almost indulgent father. Many options will be nightmares for Cory and for me thinking of them. 

Of course, Cory is not human.  He has ways to flee captivity, before his powers are known.  Afterwards I see little chance.

Look at an equal area map of the world.  Look how much is Russia, China and their satellites.  Look how much of it is Africa.  Imagine Cory on the Serengeti, laughing at elephants, or staring at the blazing stars in longing… not knowing which star is home.

Imagine Cory’s first Earth winter – sledding in Alberta with other children, or skating a frozen pond in some Communist dacha… He does not like the stern men who come, but the Grandmothers are kind. 

He might have learned Danish or Igbo or Minnan or one of the countless tongues of Papua New Guinea.

He could have fallen into a hot war… into ignorant or criminal hands…  

Cory is a child who has known nothing but love.  He will be a challenge to all of us, our systems and our hypocrisies, wherever he lands.  What would Harold Wilson have done, or Pierre Trudeau?  Indira Gandhi or Seretse Khama?  How quickly the great powers would move on a lesser power – with threats and bribes.

Cory in Japan, Cory among the Amish, Cory bought and sold…

Alien ships tend to deposit their precious cargo in rural places – not just because there is more rural to land in, but for plot convenience.  Imagine the Ship being seen over a city.  Imagine trying to hide him in a Brazilian favela, or Manhattan.  But even cities have possibilities.

There are some stories it is perhaps not mine to tell.  I have a secret wish, where a kind and strong-minded widow with children of her own takes him in. She has a small circle who know their place, how people like them exist under a ration of tolerance, who know how to keep their mouths shut.  Her son is a hothead, a loudmouth who renounced the name she gave him for an African name, but he is smart and he knows people on both sides of the law.  Her older daughter is sleeping with a white slacker, connected to the seedier bits of youth culture.  She would use those connections, and her church. The youngest daughter would love Cory in this story as much as she does in mine.

Somehow the wheel turns, and Cory is taken in by Diane Alexander… a teacher, a Black woman, a widow, head of one of the few Black families in Amber Grove. Molly, her crazy friend and neighbour would soon find out, and help with this bewitching child, but Diane would be Earth Mom.

Maybe when the big money comes calling, the film will follow that story instead.

The Space Between Us – Review

(Doug Johnson – Orenda Books)

An alien washes up on a Scottish beach and is recovered by a small group of humans, linked by a curious burst of unexpected strokes. Needless to say, sinister authorities get involved, and soon the alien, a telepathic five-tentacled cephalopod dubbed Sandy, is being kept safe in a dash across scenic Scotland.  Who wouldn’t want a book which adds an alien to Loch Ness? 

For a story like this to work for me, the humans need to be empathically drawn, the alien the right blend of vulnerable and mysterious, the thrills and reveals well-paced, and the setting more than background scenery. Johnson, an experienced writer, succeeds on all fronts, including delivering his first science fiction book.

The story is grounded in four engaging humans.  Lennox is a troubled older teen from a children’s home; Ava, a heavily pregnant woman fleeing a coercive husband; Heather, a middle-aged mother contemplating suicide; and Ewan, a washed-up journalist tracking a story which draws him from reporter to participant.

Sandy is enigmatic and in some curious sense, plural. They are often recovering and powerless, but as the book progresses, who they are, where they came from, and what it all means becomes clearer.  All my reviews are spoiler free, but the climax gave me the wonder and hope implicit in the premise.  Those involved have been transformed in large ways and small.

The title I read is about the space between human beings and how we reach across it when thrown together by accident or a common purpose, but also, the distance between us and other thinking beings.  That space is bridged in a spectacular fashion.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in return for an impartial review.

Newsletter published

My recent newsletter talks about progress on the book and has a long series of short pieces about Artifical Intelligence, including asking how far the Luddites were right.

I suppose progress happens, but how why and to what benefit is a legitimate question. In the last forty years I have become much more awate that when something is invented, how and why it is used and who makes the decisions is the real issue.

An example I don’t give is genetically modified crops – there was a lot of hysteria about human safety which was not justified, leading to blanket bans in many countries – obscuring some much broader issues which had some real weight to them.

I share across various platforms but I really do need regular subscribers to the newsletter as with the changing, deteriorating, state of social media, being able to keep in touch matters to any author (except the super successful ones).

It is free, you can unsibscribe at any time, rarely more than once a month, and gives access to giveaways, tip-offs, competitions, free fiction and who knows what else.

Photo: Me being interviewed by the very smart Bryony Pearce at SciFi Weekender.

“Playing Just A Minute with Nina Wadia”

SciFiEtc Weekend SFW XIV was well organised, friendly and entertaining – and a bit bonkers. It describes itself as a SFFH weekend or a Geek Camp or a party. They were kind enough to invite me and Sarah and we had a great time. And I got to play Just A Minute with Nina Wadia.

I am struck by the difficulty of describing SFW both to people who go to other SFFH ‘conventions’ and those who lump them all together.

What they have in common is assembling people who are enthusiasts for the fantastic – people who have different tastes in books, shows, films, T-shirts, and art can still recognise a common ‘geekium’.

There are common elements

-lots of people cosplaying – wearing elaborate costumes. This makes me feel ‘I am with my people’ even if I don’t do it myself.

-talks, interviews, panel discussions, Q+As.

-different interests reflected particularly in the bigger events– film, TV, books, comics, games.

-entertainment of various forms – from folk music to rap, from standup to puppet theatre – all with some SFFH references

-guests who are working in the field, or who stay involved despite their professional life having moved on. So sometimes actors from series in the 70s 80s and 90s.

These events can be overwhelming or small and focused, they can be commercial and hardnosed, or run so much for the fans that they put off commercial and professional attendees.

SFW had the wonderful thing common to many enthusiasms that ‘everyone here treats this incredibly seriously’ but also with a firm core of ‘of course we don’t take ourselves too seriously’. In fact, never trust any group of people who aren’t happy to laugh at themselves.

It put a lot of emphasis on the entertainment – we were in a holiday camp. Guests like me in the Writer strand were treated as important but also expected to be accessible to the other attendees. For example, I was delighted to be given an hour where I went round six tables of 6-8 people and talked with them for ten minutes each.

I had an intelligent interview with Bryony Pearce (author in several genres) and Q+A –  a panel discussion on fandom such as how far do fans own a topic and is that always good – numerous slots selling my books and talking about what was on people’s minds and…

And I got to Play Just A Minute with Nina Wadia. It was a riot.

So Nina Wadia was there because she was in the Sandman TV series, which is very big, and was a first timer at any SFFH event. She was lovely and hilarious – and I’m not sure she was expecting the friendly warmth and enthusiasm and minor insanity she got.

Just a Minute was played as a full contact sport – like all these things you are singing for your supper and so we tried to give the audience entertainment. Nina, briefed on the rules only as we entered the stage but well able to stage a tantrum where required, me – listened to the game as a child – and author Bryony Pearce and actor Chase Masterton who are convention regulars and utterly ruthless players but charming and delightful with it!  I got plenty of laughs, which was a relief – sometimes my being funny mode doesn’t switch on. The result depended more on whose buzzer was working than anything else.

It was all great and people seemed interested.  I don’t think I got snappy, although I did have to disagree with the person who thought it was ‘a shame’ no one read Asimov any more.   

All the artists had the option to meet up for dinner which meant we got to know each other better.. Extrovert mode takes it out of me and a quiet night was appreciated. Shout out in particular to Anna Stephens (prolific author and fanfic advocate), and Simon Kurt Unsworth (horror writer and calm voice of reason on panels) and Benjamin his son and also a horror writer/collaborator. And Sam and David and Matt from Area 51 and everyone else who worked on making it happen.

Why Our Child of the Stars is not ‘a YA novel’

My two novels are suitable for strong readers aged 12+.

I don’t consider them to be Young Adult Novels.

I don’t have a problem with Young Adult Novels – I have read a good number which are as good as anything not labelled YA and indeed, address issues which are not often enough addressed in mainstream work. Famously the Hunger Games attacked class, poverty, and state inspired violence glorified on TV at a time when many adult novels were on much less political themes. I might write a YA novel.

The wikipedia entry for YA genre is good but to my mind does not go far enough.

“Young adult fiction (YA) is a category of fiction written for readers from 12 to 18 years of age. While the genre is primarily targeted at adolescents, approximately half of YA readers are adults.

The subject matter and genres of YA correlate with the age and experience of the protagonist. The genres available in YA are expansive and include most of those found in adult fiction. Common themes related to YA include friendship, first love, relationships, and identity. Stories that focus on the specific challenges of youth are sometimes referred to as problem novels or coming-of-age novels.

Young adult fiction was developed to soften the transition between children’s novels and adult literature.” (In fact, ‘juvenile novels’ were a thing long before the YA term existed..)

For me, A YA novel usually has one or more teenagers as the **main** protagonist, and contains in some measure that teenager working out themselves and their relationships with world. My work covers the following main characters

Gene and Molly start the book in their twenties

Cory an alien is a child in the first book and early adolescent towards the end of the second book – although exact matching with his species is difficult.

Dr Pfeiffer, an adult well into his professional career, at least his late forties.

An alien adult.

So I don’t mind Young Adults reading my books, I hope they do. But I don’t see it is a specific YA book written at least half for that audience. Hope that makes sense.