Look to the Future, part 3

Okay, so I'm a published writer now, in the sense that my first book is available to the public.

So far, it has sold just one copy on Smashwords (so you could also say I've already made my first buck in this business). And as of midnight tonight [this particular paragraph was written on Tuesday, August 30], it will have been out for two whole weeks, officially.

But I didn't choose Smashwords because I expected a lot of sales there. I chose it because I was broke, and they're a free service.

And because of all the places they'll eventually distribute my book to. It's actually a pretty amazing deal they're offering.

They're very up front about your financial prospects with them, including the fact that their own retail operation is very small potatoes. 80% of your sales, they hasten to assure you right at the beginning, will come from retailers other than Smashwords itself. Keep your expectations low, they caution you, Many authors never even sell a single book, they point out.

Fair enough. But still--I'm human enough to have entertained fantasies of being an immediate breakout phenomenon with unprecedented sales right off the bat.

Sigh. Okay. So that didn't happen.

But my book has now qualified for the Smashwords Premium Catalogue, which means it will soon be distributed to Barnes and Noble, the Apple iBookstore, Sony, Kobo, and--by the end of the year--Amazon. And then there's Stanza, which seems to be a way for people to read books on their cell phones--not that I can see why anybody would want to do that, but if Stanza can earn me a few extra bucks I will gladly go along with the gag.

None of this stuff is totally instantaneous. My book has already appeared at Diesel ebooks, but so far it isn't available anywhere else (besides Smashwords), although it's been distributed to Kobo and should show up there any minute now.

I looked at my Smashwords account page earlier this evening, and my book won't be distributed to anybody else, though, until the end of this week.

So. Not instantaneous, but not unreasonably delayed, either. In my opinion.

Reports of sales won't be instantaneous either, and neither will royalty statements. But Smashwords does pay out royalties four times a year, which is much better than traditional NYC-based print publishing ever managed. And likewise, data about sales seems to be on a much faster track than it generally was with traditional publishing.

As fascinated as I am by all this stuff, none of it is really under my direct control. So what am I doing to secure my future?

Writing like mad, that's what.

Anyway, I'm planning to write like mad. Just as soon as I give my trailer a good cleaning. And wash my truck.

Oh, and I mustn't neglect maintaining my presence in the blogoshpere. Gotta keep my name out there, and all that. And there sure are a lot of interesting blog convos going on right now.

Maybe too many.

Still. The best way for me to move forward is to write, publish, and repeat--a formula I first encountered on Kris Rusch's website. So that's what I'm going to be doing.

Soon. Any day now.

At some point I'll also take the opportunity to learn more about computer art and graphics, because I do feel compelled to keep on creating my own covers.

Likewise, there will come a time when I'll need to embrace learning what it really means to be publisher as well as writer. Smashwords is certainly my home base for now, but somewhere down the line it might be advantageous for me to deal with all the various sales outlets directly.

And then there's the POD option. CreateSpace or Lightning Source? I'll need to check that out, because eventually I also want to offer a hardcover print version of my book, on Amazon, at least, since POD makes it so very possible for indie writers like me to do so.

And one of my own personal priorities will be marketing to libraries. How to do that? I'm confident that the quality of a POD book these days will be more than acceptable to potential buyers. But how exactly does one go about cracking the library market?

Wow, I've still got a lot to learn.

But I won't really need to know how to create a spiffy cover, or to make my hardcover edition attractive to librarians, until I have written--at the least--two more actual additional books.

So. Write, publish, and repeat. Let the buyers and readers find you in their own good time. And let the chips fall where they may.

That's the strategy I'll be embracing.

For now.

Just as soon as I can finish cleaning out my truck.

Look to the Future

Let me repeat something that's already been said elsewhere: publishing is moving into the future at lightspeed velocity.

Writing and storytelling? Not so much. These ancient and honorable arts remain durable, though they may soon take radical new forms—but if you're a practiced practitioner thereof, trust me, you're still gonna be in demand—even if you ain't that all that radical.

But on the business side, wow, I feel like a spectator at an insanely rapid sporting match where the rules keep changing daily and new players can join the game at any moment. You may not even notice them until you collide with them unexpectedly.

A heck of a lot of stuff has happened this week.

John Locke, of whom I'd never heard before a month ago, and whose work I have not yet had a chance to read, just got an Indie writer's dream deal. He keeps all of his e-rights, and all of his more traditional other rights, and Simon and Schuster will print, distribute, and promote his books in paper form. I don't actually know if he got an advance (probably), or has to submit to editing (that's optional, I'm guessing, but he might want to take advantage of that), or if they'll supply the cover art (almost certainly, but he probably retains the final say-so), but any way you slice it, that seems like a really good deal to me.

It's just that I really didn't think such a thing was possible. I thought we were all lined up over here, and they were all dug in over there.

Just shows what I know.

But I'll damn sure be keeping it in mind. I'd like to have a print publisher someday, but I don't want to give up my e-rights. And I'll bet I'm not the only one who feels that way.

I'm reminded of an interview with musician Steve Miller that I saw in Guitar Player magazine back in the 1970s:

"--but what we did was we really revolutionized the contract. Everybody wanted us; we had we had three major companies really bidding for us. They could see that we were better than most of the bands that were around at that time. So we negotiated for about ten months, and we got all of our studio costs, half the advance, a five album contract; we were given complete control over pictures, advertising, anything they did on us. It had to be approved by us, which was unheard of then. Plus, we got a really hot royalty. We were making twice what the Beatles or the [Jefferson] Airplane were making on royalties. Then we turned around and just gave it away to Quicksilver [Messenger Service] and everybody else--[we] said, "Hey, this is what a contract is." Because it was my attitude that record companies had always historically cheated musicians."

In other news, Smashwords has finally announced that they'll be distributing to Amazon by the end of this year.

For me, these are welcome tidings. The next item on my agenda was going to be investigating what it would take to publish on Amazon—I'm aware of their "Amazon Direct" option, but I don't yet know the specifics (though I'll certainly investigate the matter when I can find the time)—but my gut tells me I'm better off just focusing on my writing now, because there's no way I can have my next book ready for publication any sooner than late November anyway, and if Smashwords is at last ready to put my books on Amazon, I'm just as happy to let them.

So for now, I'm thinking, the future looks bright.

Left Brain, Right Brain

I'm adopting a several new approaches to my writing—or at least I'm thinking about doing so.

In the past, I've always just jumped right in and started writing. This is the approach Stephen King recommends in his book, On Writing, and it seems to be the way Robert A. Heinlein worked, as well, as documented in Grumbles from the Grave—but it's certainly not the way every writer works, and it may not even be the way most writers work. I wonder if anyone's ever taken a survey?

Sometimes, in my case, there has been a kind of pre-planning document that came first, where I sort of told myself a bit about the story in order to get it clear in my mind (or at least enough about it to get started), and sometimes, later on, when I've gotten stuck I've had to do a similar bit of writing about the next part— the part I was having trouble focusing on—in order to continue.

More often, though, I've actually started with worldbuilding and exposition and so forth before I even had much of a story.

Saviors of the Galaxy is a case in point. In the first draft, the conversation between the human and the alien he meets in a bar was considerably longer then what it wound up being because the human was explaining what the hell he was doing way out in that part of the galaxy to me, as well as to the alien. Once I had it all straight, I was able to cut that scene considerably.

And it may still be too long—it just might be a little too much infodumping to lay on a reader all at once. In the end, I decided to keep it because I felt it was interesting infodumping, and because I felt I had whittled it down to a bare minimum, but I don't think I'll be doing much of that sort of thing in the future.

If you want to see what I'm talking about first-hand, the first 35% of my book Incident on Sugar Sand Roand and other stories is free for anyone to sample, and it includes the scene I'm talking about. If you care to take the time, I'd love to hear what you think.

Anyway, what I think I'll be doing from now on is making the pre-planning document (a sort of mutant hybrid between a synopsis and an outline, with lots of cryptic notes to myself) a definite first stage of any serious project, and putting a little more work into it.

I did just exactly this recently, during the week I was without a computer. First I wrote (on paper, with a pen) quite a bit about the universe the story was going to be set in. This was satisfying to the creative side of my brain, and I generally did this at night.

The next morning I would look at what I had come up with, and if I felt that warm creative glow I would continue—but if I didn't, I would look at what I had with a more critical eye, checking for lapses in logic or continuity or whatever. This was satisfying to the analytical side of my brain, and it's something you have to do at some point anyway. Better to do it before you've gone too far down a wrong turn, I've come to think.

Next I wrote a bit about my characters. I had hazy, vague notions about them, but they came into sharp focus once I'd written a little bit about them—a cave girl and a barbarian swordsman, from two different cultures—and three or four paragraphs apiece was all I needed to write.

Then came the story itself, and this is really the first time I've tried to think one through in advance. I'm not talking about plotting, a story, or structuring it so much as discovering it for myself for the first time—in essence, it's a really abbreviated, condensed first draft that I'm talking about here. Writing is creative, in my way of looking at things, and plotting is more analytical—and I agree with Stephen King that it's not exactly trustworthy.

Thinking about it all and setting it down, though—telling myself the story, in other words—was again satisfying to my creative half.

But toward the end I got a little stuck for a bit. The girl, Teshua, and the barbarian, Denegor, had reached Denegor's home city, and Teshua was out of the predicament that had driven the tale up until then.

At this point I started to flounder a bit. What came next?

I flirted with the idea of having Denegor sell Teshua to a brothel—but really, I wondered, what was the point? He's a barbarian, to be sure, but he's not really such a bad guy...

That was when I found myself involuntarily switching gears again from creative to analytical. It's not something you want to do in the same writing session, usually, or at least that's how I feel about it, but this time it was helpful; I was able to clear the blockage that was stopping me. The theme of the story, I realized, was hope. Poor Teshua has been driven from her home into a big wide scary universe she has some mistaken notions about, but she never gives in to despair. Why not?

Because she has hope. It's internal, and the loss of everything else in her life doesn't take it away. Of course she can never rely on anything outside herself again, and that does include Denegor—but it's also true for him; and Teshua realizes this whether he does or not.

At that point I was able to come up with a much more satisfying conclusion to the whole segment.

What I'm going to do next is transcribe the story in detail from the notes I've written so far. There will be enough new things to discover, I believe, that it will be fun. I think it will go fast and that I'll probably be able to do it in a warmly creative sort of mood.

And then I'll just leave it alone for a bit.

See, that's another thing I'm changing about the way I work. No more endless tinkering. I still have some early drafts of Saviors of the Galaxy and they're not really that much tighter or better than the finished product, in spite of the fact that I've been fiddling with that story for years. This is in itself a sort of revelation. There are passages I altered a dozen times, to the point where I probably wound up changing it back to what I had in the first place. That's just silly.

As far as I'm able, I've come to think it will be a good idea to keep the two halves of my mind separate, and work on different stages of the work on different days.

So that's what I plan to do. Thanks for taking the time to read, and thanks for stopping by.

Decisions, decisions

I've been making quite a few of them lately, most of them connected with my ongoing journey as a writer.

Earlier this year I was just a lifelong writer with a number of unfinished works-in-progress. There was one in particular I felt pretty good about, a novel called Saviors of the Galaxy that was about two-thirds of the way done.

I was in no particular hurry to finish it, although I'm sure I'd have gotten around to it eventually.

Because--according to the 2010 Writer’s Market--there were only 3 major SF publishers that would look at an unagented manuscript anyway.

I had tried to get a novel published once before, in the mid 90s (when there were many more places where you could submit your work) and I had found the process to be somewhat discouraging, even then.

You sent your novel off to the first publisher on your list. And then you waited.

(Actually, even then few of them would look at a complete manuscript--they wanted to see a "proposal": three chapters and a synopsis. Or, wait a minute, some of them wanted to see a query letter first.

All the writers whose work I admired had lived in a world where you could submit your stuff "over the transom" (so to speak) with some reasonable expectation that it would be given a cursory glance, at least, so the query letter thing and the synopsis thing didn't sit too well with me--but I figured, hey, that's what we're faced with these days, so I'll just have to deal with it.)

The waiting was something you simply had to accept. It would be "unprofessional", you were told, to call them up after six weeks had gone by and politely  ask them if they'd even gotten the thing.

And we all bought into that. We had no choice.

Publishers were "inundated", we were told. It was like we content providers were inflicting some sort of plague on them.

Only when you finally got your manuscript (or proposal) back were you free to then try the next publisher on your list. And start the whole dreary waiting process anew. Because you had to try them one at a time, you see. Simultaneous submissions were not only frowned on, they could get you blacklisted.

In his book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, Orson Scott Card, bless him, tried to make a distinction between simultaneous submissions (not okay, as he admitted) and simultaneous proposals (perfectly all right, he opined), but I was told in no uncertain terms at an SF convention by an editor for Baen that the publishers didn't see it that way. And that you could get a bad name in what was really a pretty small community (New York SF publishing) if you took Card's advice.

When you exhausted all the possibilities on your list, you could start submitting to smaller publishing houses, or try to find an agent (but we were repeatedly told not to bother an agent unless you'd had something accepted somewhere).

I saw all of this as my only path to publication.

Now fast forward to June 17, 2011. That was the day I first learned about indie publishing, when I discovered a new indie publishing board on a writer's forum I frequently visit.

That was when I made my first decision, to forget about traditional publishing and go the indie route. As I said in my very first blog post here, that decision took all of five minutes to make.

My next decisions were to release my first e-book as soon as I humanly could, and to make it an anthology of short pieces I had written over the years.

I'm perfectly well aware that no traditional publisher will release a book of short stories by an unknown writer these days. But I decided to go with what I had on hand, and that decision felt right to me.

Next was my decision to do my own cover. That wasn't so much a decision as a forced necessity--I don't know any artists and I have very little money. But I do have a bit of artistic ability, I think, and I actually rather like what I finally came up with.

Some people may think it's laughable, or that it sucks, but them's the breaks. I'm satisfied with it for now, at least, and nobody has any veto power in the matter.

Then I had to make a decision about the price.

There's been a lot of discussion about price on various blogs, and I was mainly interested in it because it wasn't an abstract debate to me, it was a real actual decision I was going to have to make.

The topic has been more or less beaten to death at this point, so I'll spare you the details of my ruminations. I finally settled on $1.99  as an introductory price, but I'm keeping my options open.

It's been a great deal of fun, this whole journey. And I'll be releasing my first e-book very soon, just as soon as I can get certain computer issues ironed out.

Meantime, thanks for dropping by. 

      

Disaster Strikes!

I'll look back on it as a bump in the road, I'm sure, but my old computer crashed the other night, and apparently no other computer in existence can read the backup floppies I made on it periodically. Talk about your unpleasant surprises.

The Word file of my first book is on its hard drive, the anthology that I was going to submit to Smashwords, as are the 40,000 words or so of the novel I was going to resume working on, and the cover I had already created for it.

On reflection, those are the only things I truly need to retrieve, and my niece's boyfriend is a computer whiz who assures my sister-in-law it shouldn't be much trouble to sort things out.

In the meantime I'm taking the advice of the several indie publishing gurus I admire, and continuing to write. On paper. With a pen.

(I'm able to continue blogging using the computers at my local public library.)

 Oddly enough, I'm enjoying myself.

I went through something like this once before, actually. I used to write on a Brother WP3700 Word Processor with a monochrome monitor, and about a year and a half ago, the cable between the monitor and the main unit went flooey.

No question of replacing it. Have you tried to buy a monochrome monitor lately?

I lost a great deal of the work saved on floppies in its proprietary format that I had done over the years.

Now I'm recreating one of the projects I regretted losing the most. It's all coming back to me, and that's exciting.

It won't be the book it would have been then, I don't think. It will be a better one.

So, all things considered, I'm not unhappy with the situation.

On change in general and the closing of Borders in particular

I'm saddened by the closing of Borders. It seems to me they were a beautifully conceived operation. But unexpected changes took them unawares.

Tell me about it.

It's ironic, but speaking as an aspiring science-fiction writer, change has never been my friend. In the 1980s, when I began seriously contemplating writing as a profession, I used to purchase copies of Locus on a regular basis (if you're an SF writer and you're not familiar with it, you really should be).

In those bygone days of yore, I would often read about promising new writers getting advances in the low five figures.

(The lowest five-figure possibility is $10,000.00— nothing to sneeze at, even today!)

I was greatly heartened by this information. I assumed the situation would remain stable, awaiting the day I could get my act together.

Alas, it was not to be.

There's no need to rehash the whole sad story here. I don't even understand it how all happened. Suffice it to say that advances grew smaller and the number of places where you could submit unagented manuscripts shrank steadily.

You can still catch a break. J. K. Rowling did. But the chances are against it. You'd think nurturing new writers would be considered good business practice, but apparently it's not a priority these days. Everybody's got other things on their minds.

A lot of us have had blinders on, with no choice but to hope for the best. But it's hard to ignore the truth. A crap shoot when nobody's rooting for you is a fool's game.

I'm gonna miss Borders. The publishers will miss them too. Fewer places to buy books means fewer books will be sold. They've hardly started to feel the repercussions, I'm sure.

Another thing I did in the 1980s was purchase all of Robert A. Heinlein's YA novels, the ones I had loved in my youth, in paperback. I got 'em at a grocery store in south Tampa. They were there to buy, so I bought 'em.

You see, it used to be that you could find SF books anyplace they sold paperbacks and magazines. Then things changed, and there was a preponderance of Star Wars and Star Trek books. I don't know how those decisions happen, but that's the way it was.

That's not the way it is now. Now there's nothing. My local grocery store in Hendersonville, North Carolina has a little clone of a big box bookstore in it, half an aisle with books and magazines and chairs to sit on. Paperbacks and hardcovers and magazines, and a nice little wood parquet floor. Somebody spent some money on that setup.

But there aren't any SF books there. Or SF magazines, for that matter. Just top selling writers like Stephen King and Catherine Coulter. That's all you can find there.

No mysteries or westerns, either. You know, I kind of miss westerns.

(There's not even a section for westerns on smashwords. Oh, I know, there's a section for historical fiction. But still.)

I miss record stores, too. I miss browsing through racks of CDs. Fuck that, I miss browsing through racks of vinyl LPs.

　

Those days are long gone.

Borders had a respectable selection of CDs. That's another reason to miss them.

I'm not up on how music consumers get their fix these days. Digital downloads, I presume, but I've never learned how that works. I just know the world has moved on.

I remember being absolutely stunned when the big record store chains closed down. The closing of Borders is just a new version of that changeover. The world has moved on again.

But indie musicians and indie writers now have unprecedented access to their audiences. That's a good thing. I recognize that, even though I still feel like a stranger in a strange land.

It's called serendipity. Nobody planned it. Nobody said hey, let's give all those creative people a break.

But until they figure out a way to close the floodgates--and I'm sure they're busy thinking about it--we've got a window of opportunity.

Let's take advantage of that.

Even as we shed a tear for the way things used to be.

More on the "Tsunami of Crap"

I saw that piece in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. The one that got Rusch & Smith so fired up. I found it an enjoyable read, actually.

I pretty much agreed with him all the way down the line. I just don't see what all the fuss is about.

The title was the most irksome aspect, and, as Ms. Rusch speculated, it might have been foisted on him by an editor.

Otherwise I thought it was an affectionate and humorous look at indie publishing.

I'm aware that somebody stumbling on this blog might think I'm delusional. A long-time unpublished writer is about to release some of his old stories that never sold in an e-book with a goofy-looking cover, and he's all excited about it. He seems to be expecting good things to come of it.

Yep. That sums it up.

I'm one of the people traditional publishing has "protected" you from.

I thought the comparison to American Idol was spot on. Do I really need to point out that it's a popular show with lots of fans who have no wish to be "protected" from it?

And some talented folks have gotten a start there. The same thing will happen with Indie writers.

And I might even be one of them.

Getting there

There's a bit of a learning curve involved, but I'm slowly getting there.

My first book is in a Works word processing file at present. It's all one font, all one size, and all justified to the left.

As I understand it, this will be important when I transfer it to Word.

I'll eventually be able to center the story titles, put them in boldface, and have them be in a slightly larger font size. Other than that, I'm keeping it simple.

I tweaked the cover a bit today; I made the graphics darker, slimmed down the little aliens and gave them some upper body mass and made their faces less cartoonish (not that it matters much at the size most people will view them at) and I put the small tree on the left behind the saucer. Made it darker, too, which also helps make it clear that the tree is some distance away from the larger one. And of course it makes the saucer more prominent; in the first version it looks like it's hovering over the water.

What's left for me to do is to read the smashwords style guide carefully, and also a book about MS Word that I've already checked out from the library. (I do all my writing in the Works word processor but I'm going to use Word to prepare the final file.) And to transcribe most of one story, and to finish another one. Then upload it to Smashwords. It should all happen this week.

The title, as you can see, is Incident on Sugar Sand Road and other stories. The blurb is already written.

The contents of the book will be:

Saviors of the Galaxy
This is a condensed version of the first section of my upcoming novel of the same name. This will be my ongoing series, about a mixed crew of sentients who travel around the galaxy in an old starship.

Incident on Sugar Sand Road
This one is humorous; it's set in 1989, the year it was written, so it's something of a period piece. I sent it to Omni (yeah, I told you it was old!) and got a nice letter back from one Robert K. J. Kilheffer saying that he did find it humorous but that it wasn't right for Omni, and that it was too long.  That's the only feedback I've ever gotten from an editor. Ever. And yes, the version I'm publishing is the drastically shortened version.  It was rejected by most of the other SF magazines before I wised up and took his advice. I even submitted it to Century, a magazine Mr. Kilheffer also edited, and he was kind enough to say he remembered it and still liked it, but that it wasn't right for Century either. Oh, well! I've always had a certain fondness for it. So now it gets to be the title story of a collection.

Farewell Message
This is from the opening chapter of a novel I wrote in the early nineties. I finished it but never submitted it anywhere; I'm not sure why. I'll be taking another look at it soon to see if I want to publish it now. (I love that I suddenly have that option and that freedom!) The premise I actually still find interesting, so it's still alive somewhere in my writer's heart. The title I slapped on it was Moons of Exile, and that's probably the title it will appear under. The only copy I have access to is on paper, so this is the one I'll be transcribing.

Deus Ex Machina
This is set in the same universe as Saviors of the Galaxy. I think an early version of it may still be at Forward Motion.

Holy Warfare
This has languished on the hard drive of my old computer for almost a decade, unfinished. It's the one that starts with the explosion! This is the only actual writing left for me to do--come up with an ending for it.

Three of these stories have appeared in rough draft on the Forward Motion website for writers. A lovely place, that.

So. Like I say. Getting there.

Why some people are in such a dither about indie publishing

It's exciting that we now have the opportunity to share our writing with the whole entire planet.

But it's hardly revolutionary.  I mean, for many years now the world wide web has been making it possible for folks to publish web pages about their cats, or vintage color TVs, or the merits of various regional beers--or whatever else sprang to their merry little minds.  You could spend the rest of your life reading all that shit...

What's different is that now we can charge for the products of our fevered brains. That's what's gotten some folks so upset.

It's all about the money, honey...

The Wacky World of E-books

It's early days, yet.

The presence of E-books in popular culture is only going to increase.

As a science-fiction writer, I suppose it's part of my job description to make predictions.  So here goes:

For one thing--speaking as a baby boomer who's old enough to remember betamax video recorders and quadraphonic sound--they haven't really reached the typical mainstream consumer yet.

Well, there could be varying descriptions of the TMC, I suppose, but trust me--a majority of TMCs are waiting for two things right now: a compatible universal format for all e-books, and more affordable hardware.

I predict those things are coming.  Then we'll see the E-book phenomenon really take off.

And yet, E-book sales at Amazon are already greater than old-fashioned book sales!

If you're a writer, the revolution has arrived. It's sort of obvious. 

But some people don't welcome its coming.  They think (and rightfully so) that if anybody can publish a book just because the want to, that lots of people will. 

And that most of these books will suck.  As J. A. Konrath says, they're worried about a "tsunami of Crap".

To an extent they're right. Let's admit it--a lot of self-published fiction won't be very good (just trying to face the facts here, folks--this doesn't apply to you!).

So what? 

So there are enormous new opportunities for readers and writers, that's what.  I personally fail to see the downside.

I've always felt a lot of traditionally published books were sucky crap anyway.  Why should e-publishing be any different?

I love what Kris Rusch has to say about this:   "The slush pile isn’t some growing, breathing, horrible thing to be avoided.  It’s a tower of hope, of dreams".

It used to be editors who looked at the slush; then they stopped, and supposedly the job was passed along to literary agents.  But now most of them don't look at it either.

Basically, nobody's been looking at it.  Which is why it's so damn hard to break into publishing these days.

So now the readers get the chance to wade through our slush.

They don't have to.  But some of them will.

And I say, thank God somebody's finally taking an interest.

Readers are people who like some books but dislike others.  Editors are people who dislike some books but (hopefully) like others.  Oh, and they get paid for it.  That's all.  End of story.

Maybe somebody out there has written a series of novels about a Vampire Starship Captain.  And every editor who's seen it has passed on it.  (Some of them might have gotten a kick out of it privately, but passed on it anyway because--well, let's not go into all that just now, okay?)

But there might be a few readers out there who would enjoy something like that.  Enough so that maybe now some new writer can make an honest living, and a bunch of readers can scratch a peculiar itch most folks don't have.

Win/win for everybody!

I mean, what's the harm?

Gotta love it...

It's like having a new career, all of a sudden

It's the career I've always dreamed about, too.  Writing for a living.

Dean Wesley Smith recently blogged about the amount of time it takes to write four novels a year.

It comes to something like an hour and twenty minutes a day.

I'm a little slower than Dean, probably--and I do love tinkering and revising, which he sort of advises against--but I imagine I could do three novels a year if I spent two hours a day at it.  Probably.  Even factoring all the time it takes to clean my computer screen.

The thing is, with indie publishing, it's a done deal.  If I just apply the seat of my pants to the surface of the chair and the tips of my fingers to the keyboard, I will produce a product to be offered for sale right alongside Stephen King and John Grisham.

That's heady stuff.

I can write whatever I want.  However much I want.  I can write utter crap and put it out, with no one to stop me.

No one to stop me.  That's an amazing thing.

I've no intention of writing utter crap, by the way.  Just in case you were wondering.

No, if I hope to receive an income from this work, it strikes me that I'd better do the best damned job I can possibly do.

Now, I'm not going to make a habit of blogging much about my personal life here, but today I'll make an exception because it's germane to my topic.

I'm in my late fifties, unemployed, and I live in a trailer park in North Carolina where the newest trailer is well past thirty years old.  I can't afford internet access so I use the computers at the public library.  I get food stamps and unemployment but I'm behind on my rent, and believe me, it's a source of anxiety.  I have 8 cats that I love a lot, but when one of them gets sick I can't afford to take them to the vet--I was going to call the humane society and ask if there was someplace I could take Sugar when she was sick, and if there had been nothing available I'd have tried to work out something with a veterinarian--but obviously, there aren't any guarantees in a situation like mine.

I used to make a sort of modest lower-class living as a ceramic tile mechanic before the economy imploded and the housing market went to hell.  These days I can't even get on at Wal-Mart--I tried.  My last job was working in a factory for minimum wage, and as an English-speaking person I was in the minority.

I've been writing for years, and I've watched in dismay as the number of places you could send an unsolicited manuscript steadily shrank.  And now, as I understand it, the world of traditional publishing is in such a state of upheaval that I might as well not bother with them anyway just now, even if I were so inclined.

So is it any wonder that I greet the world of indie publishing with a great deal of joy and hope?

I've thought long and hard and carefully how I should proceed, and it feels right to me that my first e-book will contain five pieces of my best short fiction, the oldest of which was written in 1989, at an introductory price.

I love it that I'm free to make a decision like that!

I think it's very possible that my income from the book will at least match what I was making at the factory--and I'll be working three or four hours a day sitting down, instead of twelve hours on my feet.

Why wouldn't  I want to be an indie writer?

Things are in flux.

Kristine Kathryn Russch is really doing an extraordinary service for writers.  Check out this post on her blog.

Even though I'm a new unknown writer, I still have preconceived notions about things.  They're generally based on years of reading puclications like Locus and the SFWA bulletin. 

In the 1980s, for instance, new writers sometimes got book advances in the low five figures.  Some of them, anyway.  It was possible.

I always kind of felt I could use some of that action.

Now, since about 2004, I might as well have been living on a deserted island.   I moved to Gainesville from Orlando that year and I could no longer find those publications.

Oh, but I'd occasionally buy a book like The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction.  (Seriously--I'm not making that up, there really was such a book.  It was a useful, entertaining read, too.)  In it I learned that publishers still wanted to see manuscripts that looked like they were produced on typewriters.  Which was no doubt true at the time, but I accept it as graven in stone forever.

Another thing I "learned" in those days was that you couldn't make a living with short fiction; it was wise to concentrate on novels.

Many people still think that.  The news that it's not true hasn't gotten out yet.

God bless Kris Rusch.

So obviously it's a new ballgame.  Many people in the industry are hurting now.  Not just writers--editors and agents too!

Oh yeah, that reminds me, another thing I accepted as gospel:

You have to get an agent.  Can't get anywhere without one.

Now I'm really quite leery of them.

But the more I think about it, the more I like that I can be my own publisher.  It's fun.  I can do whatever I want.  Release a book of old short stories.  Publish that long novella about the amphibious serpent who didn't understand why humans wanted to base a religion around him--some people liked that one, but everybody said the subject matter and the length  (40,000 words) counted against it.  It's be silly to send it anywhere, they said.

I myself felt it was a little offbeat, and kind of preachy in spots--but if I took that stuff out, I removed the story's heart. So I never wrote the ending.

Well, I'm sure gonna write it now.  Because these days, heck, if I released it for 99 cents I'd get something  for it--and something's a lot better than nothing.

Besides, I always kind of liked those characters.  Now at least a few folks will meet them, and I'll at least get some pocket change.

Maybe a whole lot more.

A bit of backpedaling

Yesterday's rant against the publishing industry was maybe a little over the top.

It doesn't really do to demonize anyone.  Or any institution, for that matter.  So I hereby apologize for any bad vibes I may have broadcast.

I've socialized with editors at Science Fiction conventions.  They're generally nice people.  I certainly didn't mean to cast any aspersions their way.

That doesn't mean I've changed my opinion!  The editors aren't in control of their companies these days.  The bean counters are.

When I read on her blog about the contract shenanigans they tried with Kristine Kathryn Rusch, I was stunned.  The woman used to be editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for crying out loud! If they'll pull that sort of crap with her, I can't help but think they'd chew me up and spit me out without a second thought. Or pretty much any of us.  It's dismaying.

And that business about the e-book royalties? That's just horrible.

But I gather SFWA are looking into the situation. So thank goodness for that much. Maybe sanity will eventually prevail.

But all things considered, I'm glad to be an indie writer right now.

Still, I'm wishing everybody in the business well. Peace and love, people, peace and love.

Just wanted to get all that off my chest.

A beginning

Okay, hello out there, all you people reading this!  Welcome.

My name is Michael Edward Walston, and I'm a science fiction writer who is about to embark on a voyage into the realm of indie publishing.

I've been writing for years, and I've seen the number of markets where new writers without agents can submit their work shrink steadily.  Like many others, I have found this to be discouraging.

Then I discovered http://www.smashwords.com/.  This is a website that allows you to publish a book in electronic form--for free--and then charge people for downloading it.  You can set the price yourself, or even give it away for nothing.  If you do charge for it, Smashwords keeps 15% of the take--and they also provide a free distribution channel that allows you to get into other online stores. The ones available change from time to time but they currently include the Apple iBookstore, Sony, Kobo, Borders, Diesel and others--and word is that Amazon will soon be included too.

Offhand, I can't remember the last time my thinking about something changed so drastically in such a short time.  It took maybe five minutes to decide I wanted to go this route instead of continuing to bash my head against the brick wall of "Big Publishing".

I'll have much more to say on this topic in future posts.

Stay tuned.