May the Fourth be With Me in 8 GWC
Yes, it’s that time of year again. You know, that time when I take a look back at the past year and try to see whether I’m making any progress.
It’s not easy. Each year seems pretty much like the one before. But it has been seven full years since I started taking publishing seriously and I think it is pretty obvious that progress has been patchy.
In the past year I’ve published four novels, one commercially and three self-published. I was also shortlisted for an Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. (That’s two years running and I’m beginning to wonder if there is a chance I could actually win one of these puppies.) I also updated and reissued my Placid Point collection (and made it free on most retail sites) and put together another collection of short stories called The Future Below (more about this in a moment).
So, it was a pretty good year. I achieved all my targets as far as publication is concerned and I had two nice surprises (the Aurealis Award shortlisting, and the fact that one of my short stories was used in a charity anthology – something that thrills me).
It was also a year in which I started using a design company to produce book covers for me. All the books I published this year have professionally-designed covers. The Rik Sylver Series (The Credulity Nexus and The Sentience Machine) and the first book of my new Canta Libre trilogy (Emissaries) were designed by Kate Strawson at Dwell Design, and the third book in my Timesplash series (Foresight) was done by the publisher, Pan Macmillan/Momentum. I see absolutely no clear financial advantage to having book covers designed commercially, but I do feel better about the look of my books and, probably for that reason alone, I will keep on paying for a professional designer to do them in future.
Last year was also the time I decided to start up a newsletter. I’ve been resisting this for so long now, thinking it smacked of crass commercialism, but a writer friend finally persuaded me that people really don’t mind being kept up to date and receiving the odd special offer. So I’m giving it a go.
And, today, I release my new short story collection, The Future Below. Some of these stories have been published before but often in obscure magazines or anthologies you probably haven’t read. I’d really like some of these stories to have a wider circulation (like Skyball, and The Shouter and the Chanter) so I’m republishing them. Others just haven’t been seen anywhere before (like Signs of Life and Special) and it was time they got an airing. Two stories (Snowy and Finding the Future) are on sale separately as 99c shorts and I put them in here because I love them and it makes the collection more obviously a bargain since you get both those stories plus 13 others for not much more than the price of both separately.
Anyway, there won’t be a big fanfare over the release of this collection but I’d like to give away a few copies just to mark the end of my seventh year as a serious writer. I’d also like to promote my newsletter. So, if you sign up to my newsletter during May (it’s up there on the top right of this page), you will get a free copy of Placid Point PLUS a free copy of The Future Below.
