SF writers and fans are so cool...

Excuse my for being a grumpy old bastard, but I absolutely refuse to spell that word as 'kewel'. I mean, come on, kids, what's up with that? And while I'm ranting here, why do you young doofuses all wear your baseball caps backwards? To show what nonconformists you are? (That's called 'irony'. Look it up..)

Anyway, today I had an actual hugo-nominated SF writer in my cab, one Cathrynne M. Valente. I've fallen out of touch with much of modern SF, and I'm sad to say I hadn't heard of her before, but after talking to her (briefly), I googled her, and I'll probably wind up being a fan. Her novella sounds very intriguing, and she was a very nice person.

And she mentioned my name in her Twitter feed. How ccol is that?

(I must confess--I don't really "get" Twitter... But I digress...)

Anyway, how could I not be  a fan?

And speaking of fans, just last Sunday (Father's Day), I picked up a woman in Flat Rock going into Hendersonville to visit her dad at a rest home. I happened to mention that I was thinking of getting my brother a copy of the John Carter DVD for Father's Day, and we wound up having a pretty far-reaching conversation that touched on E. E. Smith as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert A. Heinlein, and Andre Norton.

I don't usually get to have too many literary conversations in the cab, but that's two in less than a week...

Pretty damn cool...

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, Part 2

There was a very interesting post on Joe Konrath's blog yesterday. I'm still in the process of absorbing all the implications it raised.

In a nutshell, the only constants in this publishing dance we're all engaged in are writers and readers. Everything else is variable.

That had already occurred to me, actually.

It's perfectly true that things are always changing. Two months ago I had only the very faint hope that I might someday sell something to Tor or Baen. Today I already have my first e-book out, and it's just been approved for the Smashwords Premium Catalogue. Which means it'll be available on quite a few websites other than Smashwords soon, including Apple, Sony, Barnes and Noble, and a number of others. If Borders was still in business it would be available there, too, and by the end of the year it will also be available on Amazon. I don't have to do anything further to facilitate any of this. It's already a done deal.

Now, some writers are apparently afraid that all this great new stuff will change suddenly or go away entirely.

Well, yeah, things always go away. We don't have any control over that. Smashwords could go bust tomorrow. Amazon could drop their royalty rate from 70% to, let us say, 10%. There aren't any guarantees. Like I said, that had already occurred to me.

I don't think any of that is very likely right now. But what do I know? Let's just say nothing would surprise me.

I do think it's silly for writers to wring their hands and worry themselves over stuff they can't change. I think they're fixating on the wrong thing. They're focusing on how they get published, when they should actually be focusing on how they find, build, and continue to reach their potential readership.

It's not too soon to prepare for change, of course. That's why I'll be going back to Joe Konrath's blog today and trying to fully absorb all that was said there yesterday.

I'm a huge beneficiary of the largesse of strangers right now. Smashwords has let me put out my e-book, my way (that's their slogan, in fact) to occupy virtual shelf-space alongside everybody from Stephen King and John Grisham to Mary Shelley and Katherine Stockett. For free. Blogspot has given me this very website, also for free, where I could even sell things if I wanted (like e-books—mine, and maybe yours; someday we might not even need Smashwords or Amazon).

These things are assets. I'm grateful for them. And as long as I've got them, I intend to take advantage of them.

That's all for now. Thanks for dropping by.

My book is available at Smashwords!

Finally! Looks like my little roadside pop stand is open for business at last.

Take a peek at my book here.

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.

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.

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.