Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

I’ve decided to get more regular about updating this blog, partly to make it more attractive to you, dear readers, and partly to help me be more organized about it. To that end, I’m thinking of having several recurring themes: Writing Wednesday, Physics Friday (phear not, it’ll be phun — and include astronomy, planetology, and so on.), Manic Monday. Er, wait, that’s a Bangles song — Miscellaneous Monday, perhaps. And so on.

To kick this off, it being Wednesday (for a while longer in this timezone, at least), something about writing. I’d considered doing this before, and wrote a couple of draft articles for what I was going to call “Writing to Publish” before putting it on hold. There are plenty of writers and writing blogs on the web already — some of them with some quite strange ideas about how the world works, some with some very good information — and I wasn’t sure the world needed another one. But the proprietor of one such encouraged me to go ahead with it, so here we go.

The first of these Writing Wednesday’s will be the first of my “Writing to Publish” articles. I should narrow that down further to “Writing Fiction to Publish”. Writing non-fiction takes quite a different approach, although many of the basics are similar enough to get you by. If you’re looking for tips on writing essays or term papers, you’ve come to the wrong place. Although neatness counts almost everywhere. The full article is here.

I just finished up a great novel workshop with Dean Smith and a handful of other writers in Lincoln City, Oregon. There was a lot of good interaction and hammering on submission packages for our recently-completed novels. My package is now eagerly on its way to the hands of an editor who (I hope) will be eager to see the whole thing.

Yesterday, at the end of the workshop, Dean gave us all a little advice on dealing with inevitable piracy — folks posting our work on the web without our permission. I won’t go into details, it was mostly commonse sense given the realities of the world.

But imagine my surprise when, doing a casual out-of-curiosity search on a couple of key phrases today, I found that a website has already posted a complete (but shoddy) copy of my first Analog story. Shoddy in two senses: they got the byline wrong (they left out my first name) and they changed some typography that was important to the plot and the humor in the original story. The really weird thing is that, given the nature of the rest of the site, it makes no sense at all for them to have posted an SF story — or any fiction — in the first place.

Anyway, I won’t get my knickers in a knot over it. I might not even have minded if they’d got my name right — but please don’t take that as permission to post an author’s stuff without asking.

David Lee Summers, the editor for the upcoming anthology Space Horrors which will include my story “Poetic Justice”, has a sneak peak at the cover for it on his blog here. It’s gorgeous, the smaller image here doesn’t do it justice. It will look even better with the author names on it ;-). There’s a neat personal connection to the cover, too: the artist, Laura Givens, is a long-time friend of Jill’s and mine.

The book is due from Flying Pen Press in time for Halloween this year. David hopes to have a release party at MileHiCon 42 Oct. 22-24th, and perhaps a preview party at CopperCon in Phoenix over Labor Day.

The server hosting this website seems to have been having unsuspected problems for the past few days. After a reboot, a restore, and some tinkering it seems all right now, but some of the recent posts are temporarily missing in action — I restored an older backup of the database until I can figure out just what happened.

No deathless prose was lost (of course not, it wouldn’t be deathless then, would it?) and I’ll back and fill soon. However, “soon” won’t be for about a week since I’ll be heavily involved in a novel workshop (led by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch) in Oregon for the next several days.

On a lighter note, yesterday I got a rewrite request from Stan Schmidt at Analog for a story I submitted a while back. Not a sale yet, but likely to be one after I turn in the revision (mostly trimming it to fit the Probability Zero format).

I heard today that fellow Footprints contributor Lawrence M. Schoen had his story from that volume, “The Moment”, nominated for a Hugo Award. Congratulations Lawrence, and good luck!

The June issue of Analog with my Probability Zero piece “Light Conversation” is now in bookstores. I picked up a copy from a local Barnes & Nobel on the way home from work. It turned out that the cashier is a regular reader of Asimov’s and Analog and asked me to autograph his copy. Cheers, Peter.

The publishing industry has gone through a number of shake-ups over the past couple of decades. Another big one is coming, with the first shots already fired.

Joe Konrath (J.A. Konrath of the Jack Daniels thriller series) has a great blog, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, on which lately he’s been posting about his success selling Kindle versions of some of his books directly on Amazon. Cheap. Last month (March) he made over $4200 selling his ebooks at $1.99 each. No, it’s not J.K. Rowling territory, (what is?) but it’s decent money for (in some cases) books he couldn’t find a publisher for. But go read his blog, I’d just be repeating his points here, but one important thing to note: these are his sales, he is setting that $1.99 price. Books that his publisher is selling on Amazon go for a higher price, and therein is the point.

According to this report, publishers have just “won” a concession from Amazon, where Amazon will allow them to raise prices on ebooks. (Amazon formerly sold them at $9.99, sometimes below their cost from the publisher). So while Konrath et al. are discovering that lower prices sell more books and make them more money (not a surprise to economists), traditional publishers want to raise ebook prices and, one would guess, sell fewer copies and make less money. Okay, they probably don’t want that last part, but it will be an unintended consequence of trying to keep ebooks from cutting into traditional hardcover sales. That latter might even work for a year or two. But it brings me to one more announcement.

The Apple iPad is now shipping. While some reviewers have been a little disappointed with it (there are some things it doesn’t do), it is an ebook (or rather, iBook) platform, and publishers are already lining up to provide content for it. Some of it revolutionary, with interactive texts taking advantage of the iPads color, sound and motion sensitivity. As these make their way into education, we’re going to see a generation of kids raised on reading electronic, rather than paper, books.

We’re already seeing “indie” authors sidestepping traditional publishing houses to bring their work to the public. In the case of those who skip the necessary steps of editing, revision and even just filtration of the good from the bad, the product will be barely worth the electrons it’s stored on — although with the low production and distribution costs of the internet, even a tiny niche could be a moneymaker. For those who have the skill to produce conventionally-publishable stories, together with tech-savvy packaging and marketing, the game is already shifting in their favor.

For myself, I’m not giving up on traditional publishing yet. I like seeing my words printed and bound with nice cover art, all of which somebody else did (and without me paying for it). But that doesn’t prevent me from producing work in parallel that goes directly to Kindle or iBook or epub or whatever. So I’ll be doing both for a while as an experiment. That means I need to, in web terms, generate more content. And on that note I’d better get back to writing. I have a novel to finish.

Okay, forgive the reference to the phone book scene in Steve Martin’s film The Jerk, but I’m just as excited. Martin’s character, Navin Johnson, was excited because his name was (for the first time) in the new phone book. I’m excited because my name — and story — are in the June 2010 issue of Analog. The story is “Light Conversation”, in the Probability Zero section (short, often humorous and definitely improbable pieces). It’s my first sale to Analog, a magazine I’ve been reading since my early teens.

As Martin/Navin puts it in The Jerk, “I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.” I don’t expect that; I know there’s a long slog ahead to make it as a successful fiction writer. But it’s a milestone on the way.

The June issue probably won’t be available on the newsstands for another week or so, as a subscriber I get my copy early. For those who prefer electronic copies, Fictionwise carries Analog. I’ll post a link here when the June issue is available.
Update: According to the May issue, the June issue goes on sale April 6.

I just heard that I will have a story in Space Horrors: Full-Throttle Space Tales #4 coming this Fall/Halloween from Flying Pen Press. This volume is being edited by David Lee Summers, who also put together .Space Pirates, the first volume in the series.

Flying Pen is based in Denver and several writer friends of mine are in previous volumes, so I’m particularly pleased about this. That’s about all I know at the moment. The other volumes in the series, besides Pirates, are Space Sirens and Space Grunts. Check them out.

Updated to add cover preview for Space Horrors, 6/13/10.

Michael Stackpole has been posting recently about what writers should do to best survive the current shake-up in publishing (of which the recent Amazon-Macmillan-Apple fracas is just the latest round). Joe Konrath has been saying many of the same things for a while.

One key point is that writers should be making at least some of their work available as downloads independently of what their publishers are doing. (Contracts permitting, of course. You don’t short out your publisher on something you’ve granted them exclusive e-pub rights to.) As it happens the exclusivity period on a couple of my short stories (“Snowball” from the Footprints anthology for one) is at or near an end, so I’m considering making them available for download here.

That in turn raises all kinds of questions I’ve barely begun to think about. What format(s)? How much (if anything) should I charge, and how? (And a lot of factors go into that decision.) And so on. I’ve set up a poll over there on the right to let you vote on format(s). This is my first use of this plug-in so bear with me if it’s a bit flaky. Even better, go ahead and comment below and tell me what you think.

And hey, if someone wants to nominate “Snowball” for a Hugo, I’ll send them a free copy. 😉

I passed the 50,000 word point in my NaNoWriMo novel sometime today, qualifying me for the win. Yay! But the novel itself is a long way from finished, I have plot threads still dangling. Another ten thousand or so words should do it. With eight more days until the end of NaNoWriMo, that should be easy.

That’s just for the first (or even zeroth) draft. It may qualify for a NaNoWriMo win, but it’s a long way from “finished”. I have a lot of placeholders, what we’d call “stubs” in computer programming. That’s where I’ve just outlined a scene or a necessary sequence of actions that I didn’t feel up to writing at that point, and I’ll go back and expand later. That also includes a couple of characters that I introduced late and don’t have real names or backstories yet, factual details that I need to research, and so on. There are also a few chapters I want to change the sequence of. Plus line edits. But that’s all part of the process.

Congratulations to all the other NaNoWriMoers out there who have already passed (in same cases, totally blown by) 50K. For the rest, keep going! There’s still more than a week left.