Graham Storrs's Blog, page 20

Secret Success in Self-Publishing

I have a secret identity. No, I'm not going to reveal it. What part of "secret identity" did you not understand? Only four people in the world know it, and two of those found out because I accidentally signed the wrong name on my communications with them! Keeping track of who you are can be a bitch.

Anyway, this secret identity of mine has now published three books on Smashwords; two novellas and a short story collection. It all started a while ago, when I was very excited about self-publishing and ebooks and wanted to get some first-hand experience of what it was all about. It so happens I had a pile of stories lying around in a genre I don't usually write in (FYI, anything except sci-fi is a genre I don't normally write in) and a couple of these were novella-length. I was obviously never going to do anything with them and who publishes novellas anyway, so I started looking around for a way to self-publish them at absolutely no cost.

In all my identities, I am a skinflint.

There was this great startup called Smashwords at the time, just beginning to make waves, so I bunged my novellas on there and then checked my 'dashboard' every five minutes. Please note, I didn't make any effort to publicise them. I didn't mention them on Twitter, or Facebook, or anywhere that anybody might look. I did start up a blog under the false identity and did about three posts, but that gets about one visitor a month. And, guess what? They didn't sell.

I brought the price down and down, but I never reached a point where anyone was interested. Eventually, I set the price to 'free' and started getting a tiny bit of interest. So I put the price back up to $0.99c ('free' was just an experiment – I have moral issues with giving my work away for nothing) and, eventually, forgot all about it.

That was about a year ago. Basically, messing about with self-publishing experiments went by the board when I actually found a commercial publisher for one of my novels. (TimeSplash. Yes I know you know, I just like saying it.) Besides, I was absolutely overwhelmed for months with publicising TimeSplash. I set up a website for it, gave it its own blog, I dived into Twitter, I did blog and twitter tours, and begged (and pleaded) for reviews. I was a busy bee.

Gradually, all the TimeSplash kerfuffle died down.

Then, a week or so ago, I took a look at my Smashwords stats, just for old times' sake. And – bugger me! – those novellas are doing quite well now. In fact, last month they sold more than my commercially-published book did. Which isn't saying much, actually, since, after a year on the shelves, TimeSplash the ebook is fading away as a force in the commercial publishing world. Please note that, unlike TimeSplash, which still garners the odd flattering review and earns me the occasional interview, but which is still drifting down the rankings,  the novellas had no publicity at all, and yet they are gaining in popularity. It is still true that, over their respective lifetimes, TimeSplash the ebook has earned me many, many times what the self-pubbed novellas have, but that may not always be true, the way things are going.

So I gathered up a few short stories – which have the same characters and world as the novellas – into a 30K-word collection, and published that at Smashwords too. It went 'live' yesterday. Partly it was as a sort of 'thank you' to all those people who are buying my novellas and might be wanting more, partly it's another experiment, to see if adding a third book will increase the momentum still further.

That short story collection is my fifth self-published book by the way.  (I also did a children's story called Hangin' With the Monkeys under my own name – another genre I never intend to exploit commercially – and a collection of short stories – mostly from my already-published 'backlist' – called Placid Point.) I will be watching its progress with interest. Shame I can't tell you what it's called, so you could go and buy it. On the other hand, maybe I'd better stick to my no publicity policy since it seems to be working so well.

Review: Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson

Galileo shows the Doge of Venice how to use a telescope

It's a shame that Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson is a science fiction novel. It didn't have to be. The story is nine parts a dramatised biography of Galileo Galilei and one part sci-fi. What's more, the sci-fi part is a rather thin and unsatisfying tale about humanity's readiness for alien contact, which could easily have been left out altogether. Taking out the sci-fi would leave behind an excellent, intelligent, and highly-readable biography of the man many think of as the world's first scientist. And the shame is that, because this very good dramatisation of Galileo's life is threaded with a rather ordinary sci-fi sub-plot, most readers will turn their noses up at it and leave it on the shelf.

Kim Stanley Robinson is arguably the world's leading writer of 'hard' science fiction at the moment. Why is that? Not just because he gets the science right and not just because he writes about things nerds like me like to think about. It is also because he is an excellent writer. For this reason, he can write a biography of Galileo that is immersive and gripping. Even though we all know how it ends, we still feel the great scientist's every triumph and failure, we still want things to come out right for our protagonist. Although Galileo can be as stupid and obnoxious as any of us – maybe more than most – Robinson makes us believe that there is a core to the man from which great integrity and courage shine out to illuminate his life.

It is a book with no heroes or villains: just greater and lesser spirits. The horrible, grinding oppression of the Catholic church, the awful system of privilege and patronage that Galileo must live within, the patriarchal culture that robs him of the personal fulfilment that could have been his, are all presented not as abstract, sociological themes, but through the motivated actions of individuals, doing what they must because of who they are.

In particular, Robinson stays true to his protagonist's own beliefs. Even at the end, there is no condemnation of the Catholic church in Galileo's mouth. He goes to his death believing in the Church and proclaiming himself a good Catholic. The people whose church offices give them the power to suppress ideas and to oppress people, are another matter entirely. Galileo roundly criticises their treachery, their ignorance, and their stupidity. Of course, as with any biography, the author can never reconcile every action of the protagonist with the character they have built to explain them. Galileo's blatant lies to the Inquisition remain a mystery to Robinson and to the reader. Was it contempt, inspired by hubris? We might never know. For such reasons, biographies can be unsatisfying, but in Galileo's Dream, Robinson appears to have integrated the many facets of his complicated and brilliant subject into as coherent a character as any biographer is ever likely to achieve.

So what about that troublesome sci-fi story? It takes place in a future that is some fourteen hundred years on from Galileo's time, with a magical, timeslip-style technology that can transport Galileo there while still leaving him (unconscious) at home. At first it seems this is all just an excuse to give the reader a close-up tour of the Galilean moons, which our hero is just discovering in his own time. It is telling that despite the truly exotic nature of these moons, as settings, they seem quite sketchy and lifeless compared to Venice, Florence, Rome, Arcetri, and the other locations of Glaileo's early Seventeenth Century.

Later, it emerges there is a crisis in the future Jovian system to do with an alien entity that lives in Europa's ocean. However, the emergence of a future character who is a psychotherapist, and who spends some time exploring Galileo's past relationships with women, makes one wonder yet again, whether the sci-fi plot has become just a rather elaborate vehicle for adding a bit more biographical detail. Whatever it is there for, the sci-fi story isn't particularly good, or interesting, and has nothing like the engagement or character development of the main story, which is Galileo's life. In fact, I found the future segments increasingly unwanted and couldn't wait to get back to the biography.

I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but Galileo's Dream would have been so much better without the science fiction elements. What's more, Robinson deserves a far larger audience for this book than the sci-fi label is likely to give him. It's a big, fat slab of a book and it wouldn't hurt at all to remove the chunk dedicated to Galileo's future adventures. Even so, it is well worth reading.

The Graham Storrs Daily – Read All About It!

First there were blogs. Then there were RSS feeds. Then there were feed readers. Now, there is Paper.li!

Never heard of it? Well, it hasn't been around long, and you'd prbably have to be into Twitter to notice it. If you are, you've probably seen tweets saying "The Fred Bloggs Daily is out now!", or "The #Winelover Daily is out now!", or whatever, and wondered briefly what that was all about. You might even have clicked through to find a sort of newspapery thing full of short intros to what might be interesting articles about wine, or sci-fi, or whatever the "Daily" in question said it was about.

I started noticing these announcements and I was confused about the thing at first, too, until I saw that each Daily had a "Create a paper" button on it. So I clicked it and had a go at setting one up and it suddenly all made sense.

Basically you just register a Twitter account with paper.li and it does the rest. Each day, it looks at all the people you follow, then extracts bits from a selection of their blogs, sorts them into categories, and assembles them in a newspaper-like format. If you have a lot of people you follow, and they are all in broadly the same field (as mine all are) it seems to work pretty well. Which is a huge compliment to the people at Paper.li who programmed the thing.

I'm not sure if anyone at all is reading it – it doesn't provide any stats – and, if they are, whether they're enjoying it, but it is great for me as it provides a random overview of the blogs of the people I follow each day – a pretty good digest of what I'm interested in, in fact! If you'd like to see what I mean, take a look at http://paper.li/graywave. It is updated every 24 hours so whatever you look at will be current.

You can tweak your Daily to focus on other topics (for example, I subscribe to The #Atheist Daily myself) by giving it a hashtag to follow instead of it just following the people you follow. There are already #Writer dailies and #Scifi dailies and so on to subscribe to. But I think it is the personal Dailies that I find most interesting. Since their content is drawn from the people the owner is following on Twitter, each Daily really is a snapshot of that person's interests. Of course, someone who auto-follows or is indiscriminate about who they follow will see that lack of focus reflected in their Daily. I have been careful only to follow people in particular fields who are particularly interesting and I think that gives my Daily a nice coherence.

Well, I like it anyway. But then I would, wouldn't I?

The Fickle Finger of Fate

Hey! I won a prize. Yes, me. I'm like you, I never win anything. And it wasn't a contest, there was no skill involved. My name just came out of a hat. Pure, unadulterated, blind luck.

The prize was a copy of the Yin and Yang Books edited by Jodi Cleghorn and Paul Anderson. It's published by eMergent Publishing and is part of their Chinese Whisperings imprint's series of anthologies. These collections are themed, but the stories in them are also interlinked – a fact that strikes me as just as daunting for the writers as for the editors. I haven't read it yet (except the prologue, which was very promising) but I'm looking forward to it.

It was clearly my Destiny to read this book. Kismet. Fate. The Will of God. My Doom.

I'll let you know how I get on.

The Yin Book and the Yang Book

More About The New York Review of Books

This is NYJB's press release for their new website launch, reproduced almost verbatim.

New York Journal of Books Launches to Fill a Gap

New York, NY, October 11, 2010 — Book lovers everywhere now have an exciting new resource for book reviews they can trust. The New York Journal of Books (www.nyjournalofbooks.com) launched on October 6 to meet the need for original online reviews of the same quality as disappearing print reviews.

"We intend to fill the gap that has resulted from the contraction, and in some cases the total elimination, of esteemed print book reviews," says founder Ted Sturtz. "Unrestrained by page counts and printing costs, we are dedicated to delivering the most comprehensive detailed book reviews in North America written by credentialed reviewers whose knowledge, insight, voice, and measure of the written word permeate our book profiles."

Thanks to the broad expertise of the NYJB's team of reviewers, the free site features an eclectic selection of titles sourced from independent publishers as well as imprints of the largest publishers. To help readers make their book selections, reviews are enhanced with rich media, such as video, audio and book browsing.

Visitors to NYJB will also enjoy the immediacy possible only online. Going forward, reviews will be posted at midnight on the date a book is released. When users discover books they want to read, they'll find that the ability to purchase is conveniently a click away for a truly one-stop experience.

NYJB Publisher, Lisa Rojany Buccieri, author of more than 100 books for children and young adults, lead author of Writing Children's Books for Dummies, and owner of Editorial Services of Los Angeles, noted "fierce attention to the editing and new reviewer selection process will ensure that, as the volume of reviews grows, the quality of reviews will be maintained."  She added, "At the same time, we also take great joy in the panorama of reviewers on our panel and their truly unique voices.  They don't simply judge books. They engage, inform, and even entertain our readers."

Advertisers on the site have the choice of appearing on major landing pages to reach a broad audience, or appearing in specific genres (for example, romance or military) that reach a highly targeted demographic or enthusiasts and professionals (for example, cooking, wine, or technology).

For more info: media@nyjournalobooks.com

About NYJB Reviewers

Our more than 130 credentialed reviewers have published: 4,000+ book reviews, 500+ books, 500+ short stories, 20,000+ articles, 12+ screenplays and 24+ plays. They have received more than 75 literary and professional awards.

Meet a few:

Kenneth Allard is a former army colonel, West Point faculty member and dean of the National War College. For almost a decade, he served as an on-air military analyst with NBC News and is the author of four books and an occasional contributor to The Daily Beast.
Dorothy Seymour Mills is the author of Chasing Baseball: Our Obsession with Its History, Numbers, People and Places (McFarland, 2010).  Her late husband was the acclaimed author of many baseball history titles, yet it was recently revealed that Dorothy was the actual author of much of the content of those books. As a result, Oxford University Press, for the first time in its history, changed the attribution of a scholarly work (actually three of them) to include Dorothy's name as an author.
Andrew Rosenbaum has been a journalist for twenty years at Euromoney, Time, MSN Money, covering politics, business, and finance.  He currently resides in France
Jon Land is the bestselling author of dozens of books in the crime/thriller genre, including The Seven Sins, Strong Enough to Die and Strong Justice.
Pól Ó Conghaile is a travel writer based in Ireland who has published in CondeNet, Guardian/Observer, Irish Independent, The Globe & Mail (Canada), The Irish Echo (US), Village Magazine and others. He has three times been named Irish Travel Journalist of the Year.
Lezlie Patterson, is a syndicated romance novel reviewer for McClatchy newspapers.

The New York Journal of Books is Looking Good

Yesterday, the New York Journal of Books launched its completely revamped website. The old startup-stopgap-wordpress look is out and a new custom-built and completely awesome site has taken its place.

I've been a contributor to NYJB for some months now – almost from inception. When I saw their request for reviewers, I was immediately won over by the concept: reviewers needed to be qualified in the genres they would be reviewing, and preferably published in those genres, reviews would therefore be well-informed and authoritative, and they have in-house editing to ensure quality. Later, they added this extra bonus for publishers: as often as possible, reviews would appear on the same day that the book is launched.

I've written lots of reviews in my life, but I have never before worked with a professional review magazine. I have to say it is a pleasure. I work hard when I write a review. I read carefully, I re-read as necessary, I do a lot of research, and I strive to be fair, accurate, informative and interesting. The New York Journal of Books is the kind of place I like my reviews to appear; I know they will be in good company and that they will be treated with the same seriousness with which they were created.

If you want to see all my reviews on NYJB, you can visit my reviewer's page (they're not all listed yet but will be soon.) And the site has this great feature: you can subscribe to individual reviewers to be notified when they write a new review. You will need to register to use this feature but it is well worth it. NYJB has a review panel of 130+ expert reviewers and some of them will be covering just the genres you are inetersted in hearing about.

Although it is only just starting to make an impact and to get the respect it deserves – with readers and with publishers – the New York Journal of Books has all the signs of a publication that is going places. It has been fascinating and exciting to be a small part of it as it has grown and to watch it's vision bearing fruit. The new site is a big milestone on that journey.

What do Publishers Offer Writers That Self-Publishing Does Not?

What does a novelist need from a publisher? The question might sound a bit daft but, when publishing your own writing is so easy and so cheap, and finding a publisher is so hard, a writer really needs a good answer to this question. A related question is, what does a novelist need from an agent? Again, finding an agent is a lot of work and there is no guarantee of success, so the sensible writer really should be asking whether it is worth it. I want to tackle each in turn, looking at the services each provides and the costs and benefits of each compared to self-publishing. So, today, let's look at what it takes to do it yourself.

Going It Alone

First, to establish some kind of baseline, let's say you are interested in having your novels appear in print, in English, in all the main markets (US, UK, Canada, Australia) and you'd also like an ebook edition, available globally from all the major online retailers, and, in the future maybe, an audiobook edition (on disc and by download)  and sales in translation in various other countries.

You need professional editing. I'm sorry, you do. I don't care how good you think you are. Try it just once and you will be convinced. You could pay for this outright or do a royalty deal with an editor. Let's say it costs you US$1500 to get the editing done. (You can probably get it done for much less if you shop around.) You will also need cover art. This is much cheaper and you can probably get a good job done for US$100 or so. If professional graphic designers are too expensive, find a starving student. There really is no way to avoid these costs so, if you're self-publishing, you must just suck it up.

After that, setting up and publishing an ebook is essentially free, and very easy. If you use a service like Smashwords (and are happy to say they are your publisher) you can even get a free ISBN.  They take 15% off the top of every sale but handle all the ecommerce side, don't ask for any rights, and are non-exclusive. They have distribution deals with many large players so global distribution in mutiple formats is covered.

For print, you would probably go print-on-demand (POD) and there are many services that will let you do this with no set-up costs. Print books (unlike ebooks) don't just format themselves. You will need to design the book – choose the fonts, the layout, the size, and so on. Book design is a skill that some people believe is essential to create a high-quality printed book. I absolutely agree. However, most books you read could have been put together by anyone with a copy of Word and a couple of hours to spare. My advice, unless you have an artistic bent and a good eye for aesthetics, find a book you like the look of  and copy it's style. It's an area where an amateur with decent word-processing skills can get results that are quite acceptable. The POD company will effectively sell you each copy for the cost of production plus a profit margin. You can then add your own margin and resell the book (through Amazon, say.) Some are affilliated to retail sites. You will probably want an ISBN (which enables listing in catalogues) and the cost of these very much depends on where you live. Some countries issue them for free, some charge you a small fortune. Are they worth it? If you want to try to sell through (physical) bookshops, and many of the big online outlets, then yes. If you're only selling through your own website, then no. If they're free or cheap where you live, get one.

So far, you've spent less than US$2,000 and your book is on sale in print and electronically around the world. Is anyone buying it? Almost certainly not. Figures (which are a couple of years old now) show that the average self-published print book sells 150 copies. That includes the enthusiasts who do print runs of thousands of books which then fill up their garage forever (still counts as ssales as far as the printers are concerned), and the few, the very few, successes who sell a thousand or two thousand copies. Sales in double-digits are quite normal. If you're selling at a $5 markup on the printer's price, you are probably going to spend four times more on production than you recover in sales.

So you need to think about promotion. You need to print at least 50 copies of the book to give away free to reviewers (another unavoidable cost which just pushed your outlay up past US$2,500.) If you're lucky, you'll get a handful of reviews out of this. Most of the reviewers you want – the big newspapers, the literary magazines, the genre magazines, the big websites and blogs – will not even look at a self-published book. So you're left with the small-fry, and your social networking buddies. Work damned hard, do the blog tours and the blog interviews and the Twitter and Facebook promotions, pester your local book shops to hold a book signing or two, run a launch party, send out press releases, and so on and so on, and you might make a few thousand people aware of your book. Maybe one per cent of those people will buy a copy. If your book is really, really good, this is where it has a chance to take off, because now you have done all the promotion you can, and it's down to other people to mention your book to their friends, write about it on their blogs, and generally spread the word. If it's anything less than excellent, this is the point where your book flops. You spent $2,500, you sold 150 copies, you lost nearly $2,000, and spent every spare minute you had for the best part of six months on publishing and promoting it.

Better luck next time.

In a future post I will come back to the questions of what a novelist needs from a publisher and an agent.

What Are The Ingredients For Great Science Fiction?

I've just been reading a blog post by Mike Brotherton which presents (yet another) definition of science fiction. This is Mike's suggestion:

"Science fiction is a kind of story in which science or technology plays a central role, both in terms of plot and theme, and the science or technology elements are beyond our current knowledge or capabilities (without violating what we already know), permitting the exploration of novel ideas and the reaction of humanity to them."

You w...

Review: 3 Dead Princes: An Anarchist Fairytale

Three's a good start.

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books on 15th September 2010)

Danbert Nobacon, whose penname seems to be derived from an old knock-knock joke, is best known for his part in the rock band Chumbawamba. ("I get knocked down, then I get up again." Yes, that's the one.) He describes his first book, 3 Dead Princes, illustrated by cult moviemaker Alex Cox, as "an unfairy tale for nine to ninety-nine year olds."

And if you're already...

Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale/Its infinite variety…

… other genres cloy

The appetites they feed, SF makes hungry

Where most it satisfies

I'm pretty sure Shakespeare would have said something like this if he'd been at Worldcon this year. (I like to think that, if he were still around, the Bard of Avon would have been writing sci-fi.)

Age and custom were on my mind a lot as I hung out at the Melbourne Convention Centre absorbing the sights and sounds of my first ever Worldcon. It was great to see – even to talk to! – some of the...