Angela Slatter's Blog, page 12

All the Murmuring Bones in The Guardian

The wonderful Lisa Tuttle has reviewed All the Murmuring Bones in The Guardian, along with amazing tomes like Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander, Under the Blue by Oana Aristide and Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki.

Of All the Murmuring Bones, she says: “Shifting between scenes of wonder and horror, a complex plot is gradually revealed, as well paced and gripping as a thriller.”

News: No Good Deed

After a LOT of enquiries, Brain Jar Press has decided to do a physical version of No Good Deed: A Sourdough Tale!

The e-book version will remain free to download from the Brain Jar website, but if you’re a completest and love the idea of having your hot little paws on a physical copy of the book, you can pre-order the chapbook here.

Happy Easter

Or Passover, or holiday of choice!

I just wanted to share this gorgeous thing from Titan Books. My editor Cath decorated an Easter egg in the style of All the Murmuring Bones.

Aurealis Awards Shortlists!

The Aurealis Awards Shortlists for work published in 2020 is out and I’m delighted to see that my collection The Heart is a Mirror for Sinners is on the shortlist for Best Collection. I’m in the best company possible with friends! Juliet Marillier, Cat Sparks, Lisa L. Hannett and Tansy Rayner Roberts.

Thanks to the wonderful PS Publishing for producing such a beautiful book, to Daniele Serra for one of my favourite covers, and to Mr Kim Newman for a delightful Introduction.

For the full listings, go here.

Watch Your Backlist: Five Points on a Theme

Art by Kathleen Jennings

You’ve been writing for a while. Several years, in fact. You’ve even been publishing some (or a lot) of what you write.

All those stories are defunct, right? After they’ve appeared, and gone through the awards cycle (where they either got shortlisted, won something, or disappeared into the void despite the fact that you thought it was one of your Best Stories Ever), they’re totes dead, yeah? Desiccated word corpses littering the landscape of your career?

Nope.

They’re backlist, and they can keep earning you a living (or part of one) and your name and work in circulation. Traditional publishers (and a lot of authors) think in terms of a month: “Will it sell enough in a month to pay for it itself or at least make decent sales figures reading in the next report?” If the answer for the publisher is “no”, then there’s a good chance it will be forgotten like a red-headed stepchild. But the redheaded stepchild can and will rise again.

Some of my favourite people have fallen prey to the mindset that old stories are simply done and gone. You know who you are, and know that I love you – you can tell that I love you coz I’ve yelled at your about your backlist, and on occasion bullied you into putting together a short story collection, or other new-old thing.

So, my five points about what all those “dead” stories can become are:

Single author collections:

If you’ve been writing and publishing for three to five years (or longer) with an average of five to ten stories per year, then you’ve probably got a decent number of tales that could be collected together (and it doesn’t have to be just one collection). It might be broadly themed, or a Stonecutters’ “Royal Sampler”. It’s the sort of thing that will generally appeal to small publishers (trade publishers seldom do short story collections for anyone except Famous Authors Who Will Sell), so the small and indie press will be your target market.

Make sure you do your research about the presses you approach: ask authors who’ve been with them about their experience. No advance, but royalties are paid on time? That can work. No advance and you’re continually having to chase for royalties every damned year? That won’t work. Is the editor there an actual editor with experience and knowledge or a plucky and enthusiastic amateur who doesn’t know where to put an apostrophe? Are the books pretty – i.e. will a reader pick them out of a lineup and buy them based on both blurb and cover? Or will the cover make them shriek “Sweet Jebus, what is that?” and run away? Are the layout and design professional looking? Do they have distribution networks? Can they turn your files into e-book files that look right rather than a word Picasso?

You might already have had collections published over the years and forgotten about them. They’re out of print and gathering dust on your shelves. They might have been produced before the rise of the e- and audio book. That’s collateral right there that can be repackaged and introduced to a whole new generation of readers. Again, generally the small and indies will be your new home with them.

To note: I’m not fond of individual author collections called ‘Best Of’ because it implies you’ve done your best work and that’s it. It’s a finite classification that doesn’t sit well with me. This is just my opinion about my own work – other authors can do Whatever They Fecking Well Please. But for me, it’s a no thank you. My literary heir can do a Best Of when I’m dead and there’s nothing more to write – although, if anyone was going to dictate a novel from beyond the grave …

Reprints in themed anthologies

Keep an eye on the calls for anthology submissions that accept reprints, particularly if they’re themed (which they generally are): you might have the perfect story. Publishers like Flame Tree Press are often bringing out subject-specific reprint anthologies, such as about gothic ghost stories, epic fantasy, classic science fiction, etc. Sign up for their newsletter and you’ll see what’s upcoming. The pay rate for a reprint will be lower than for an original piece, but as you’ve already been paid for this story once before, it’s a bonus to be paid again. Might cover a phone bill or your coffee for a month.

Translations

Whatever language you’re writing in is not the only language in the world. Keep an eye out when other authors are announcing their works, long and short, going into translation. Check out those markets, try to make contact and see if they’re interested in your work – those will be new markets for you. Sometimes you’re lucky and foreign language publishers will reach out to you: in fifteenish years, I’ve been fortunate enough to be translated into Bulgarian, Chinese, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, French, Romanian and soon Turkish.

Caveat: unless you speak the language your story’s being translated into, you won’t be able to check the proof. With luck, the translator will come to you with any questions they have (“This word translates as ‘mega-lobster’ – was that your intention?”) and you can set things straight.

Podcasts

Podcasts like Podcastle and Pseudopod (among others) will accept submissions of reprint stories to turn into audio. Again, it’s a new medium for your work, and a source of a new audience for older writing. It can be wonderful hearing your words read out loud by someone who knows how to tell a story orally.

Caveat: you won’t get a say in who narrates your story. These places aren’t big budget, they do great work in spite of it, but there’s no room for being a diva. “My tale can only be narrated by a woman, 20-22, of Irish ancestry, with red hair and a slight limp to her left – only then will authenticity be achieved!”

Chapbooks.

Small or indie presses can take a single story and turn it into a pretty chapbook in both hard and soft formats. Again, those tales that you feel kind of disappeared soon after their birth can be given a new career. I’m going to mention mostly Brain Jar Press here, not because it’s an advert for BJP, but because they’re my main experience in this area and I’ve seen what they can achieve. In terms of short stories and older collections, as Pete from BJP says, treat your shorts like they’re singles from an iTunes store.

They can also take things like your old blog posts and turn them into chapbooks – look at Brain Jar’s Writer Chaps (that “chaps” is for “chapbooks”) Season One. BJP has turned years of writing advice blog posts by myself, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Sean Williams, Alan Baxter, Kaaron Warren and a Mystery Author into compact clever little chapbooks so you can find that advice easily and refer to it over and again.

Did you make some clever tweets? A long-running series filled with awesome info? There’s another thing that can be collected and turned into a chapbook. An address to a convention about “stuff relating to what I do”? A series of poetry/vignette-y things? There’s Kathleen Jennings’ Travelogues chapbook right there.

Those are my five points, now here are some other things to keep in mind:

The above doesn’t apply to whatever you’re writing now, your primary writing. It applies to backlist, to the blog posts, the tweets, the conference papers. Hell, even if you’ve got a PhD or MA thesis that reads in an interesting fashion (i.e. not written in academic-speak designed to make things completely impenetrable to “the ordinary folk”).Pay attention to self-publishing even if you’re not a self-publisher. There are lessons to be learned in terms of delivery and innovation, toolkits, etc. What’s valuable to you as backlist generally isn’t the same as what’s valuable to traditional publishers.Maintain a list of your rights, your translations, and what you’ve been paid for everything you’ve sold. That last one can help you identify which piece of work has earned you the most, been most popular in its time, brought you most exposure – and might be likely to be met positively when approaching a small or indie press about some sort of re-package and re-release.If you have an agent, then they might do some of the above legwork – it will depend on how supportive they are, how much they think they can get from a commission, how much good they think it will do your career. If they’re not interested, then just let them know you’re doing this yourself and see if they’ll agree to a one-off exception on any agency agreement clauses that might relate to this sort of thing.Another thing to think about: depending on the age of the work, it might have been written into a different world. As a writer you might not still hold the opinions that you held then. So, consider this: would you write the same story now? Would you say the same things now? Depict the same sorts of characters? If the answer is “no”, then maybe that story was “of its time” and has had its moment in the sunshine and you should leave it to its dusty retirement.

Even if you’re a relatively new writer and don’t have a backlog of stories to rebirth, if you keep writing and publishing, then one day you will find that you’ve got a nice nest egg of tales that can be repurpose for fun, (re)publication, and hopefully profit.

Thank you to the fabulous Ron Serdiuk and Joanne Anderton for thoughts on, and beta-reading of, this piece.

Diary of a Ditch Witch

Art by Kathleen Jennings

This is my favourite new discovery: Diary of a Ditch Witch with Tara Tine.

Irish myth and legend, witchcraft and curses.

Language warning for those with delicate ears – but it’s fecking brilliant.

Listening to it while I’m percolating new stories …

Aaaaand launched!

So, we launched All the Murmuring Bones on Friday night.

Thanks so much to Jo Dillon of ScreenQueensland for being the hostess with the mostest, to Brisbane Square Library for the beautiful space and getting us organised (Marcelle and Angela!), to their audio crew for livestreaming the event, to Pulp Fiction Booksellers for selling books, and to Cupcakes by K for the truly magnificent cupcakes!

But especial thanks to the folks who came along to listen to me waffle on, who bought books, and then chatted about books. And a big thank you also to 730 people who livestreamed with us, and to the extra 570 peeps since then who’ve sat and watched it online! If you’ve got some time and curiosity, go to the Brisbane Libraries Facebook page and you can find the video there – just click on the picture.

Fly, little book, fly!

Also in the mail! All the Murmuring Bones …

I can’t believe I forgot to post this here – ARCs of All the Murmuring Bones arrived in my hot little hands the other week!

Here at last! The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales

So much joy from this morning’s bookmail! The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales is finally here! When I say “finally” I don’t mean the fact it was published last week and is in my hot little paws this week, I mean “finally” after I started it in 2013/14. I was fortunate to be awarded a Queensland Writers Fellowship for this project – it just took longer than expected to get here.

With an Intro by Helen Marshall, illustrations by Kathleen Jennings, and wondrous attention to design by Ray and Rosalie at Tartarus, it’s a glorious thing. At the moment the hardcover limited edition and the ebook version are available. Once the 350 limited editions run out, we’ll look at doing a paperback. You can order the first two here.

Preorder: The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales

Yes! At long last (my fault entirely) The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales is available for preorder from Tartarus Press. The words are by me, the art by Kathleen Jennings and the very lovely introduction by Helen Marshall.

This is the hardcover limited edition with the embossed, foil cover – there’s an ebook version (and a paperback likely), but there are only ever going to be 350 of these beauties … 

‘Once upon a time when wishing still helped . . .’

Return to the dreaming streets of the cathedral-city of Lodellan, where a new generation of characters face fairy tales and nightmares. Cordelia Parsifal has an enviable life, hard won, but the ghosts of the past are soon to remind her that no sin or omission goes unnoticed. Slumbering saints awake, hind-girls dance, boys become bears, and the fate of the upper- and under-earths rests on the whim of a single, volatile creature.

Also, for those who are interested: The Tallow-Wife has a couple of links to the forthcoming novel All the Murmuring Bones (Titan Books) – published under A.G. Slatter. You can absolutely read one without the other – but why would you say “no” to an adventure (Bilbo)?

And! For a free novelette in ebook form, you can go to Brain Jar Press and download No Good Deed, about the ancestress of Cordelia and Bethany Lawrence – and which contains a previously unpublished Sourdough chronology. Just saying.