Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

Just a quick note. I’ve uploaded my Footprints story “Snowball” as a PDF but I’m not happy with the formatting, so I’m going to tweak it a bit before publishing the link. I’ll be doing the same with “The Gremlin Gambit”. That last is still available in HTML from MindFlights’ archive.

If I haven’t gotten to this by the weekend, remind me.

Update 4/10/10: These are now available from my Stories page.

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.

Internet shadows, that is, as in a dark network.

My web servers suffered a prolonged network outage because of (a) a change Qwest made that messed up the DSL line, and (b) my old ISP being totally non-responsive so I couldn’t get them to work with Qwest to fix the problem. I ended up changing ISPs, and the new folks (Solucian Networking, if you’re in the greater Denver area) have been wonderfully responsive in working to get all the problems fixed.

The past week, as you might imagine, was extremely frustrating for me but I’m taking steps (such as the new ISP) to ensure it doesn’t happen again. My apologies to those of you who noticed and wondered what happened.

As of today, March 8, I am no longer an Amazon Associate — and neither is anyone else in Colorado. Due to the Colorado legislature’s ill-considered attempt to tax online sales, Amazon has done here the same thing it has done or threatened to do in other states which have considered enacting similar laws, and closed Colorado-based Associates’ accounts, relieving Amazon of the responsibility to collect Colorado sales tax.

Since I didn’t join the Associate program with the intent of making much money (I just figured, since I’m providing links to books of interest anyway, why leave money on the table?) it doesn’t affect my income in any noticeable way. It does mean that I, and every other Colorado resident, can continue to order from Amazon without getting hit by them for sales tax. (Of course, we all declare our out-of-state purchases and send in the appropriate tax ourselves, right?)

I’ll still link to Amazon (or B&N, or other sites as appropriate) for books I think are worthwhile, as a convenience for site visitors.

As one of the few people in the civilized world who hadn’t yet seen Cameron’s Avatar, I finally broke down and went to see it this past weekend. I wasn’t expecting much in the way of original story (Dances with Smu…er, Wolves meets Disney’s Pocahontas), I went because people like my friend Wil McCarthy, who knows how to tell a story, said it was still worth seeing for the 3D visuals. He was right.

One of the details — the kind of thing that lends a subconscious feel of verisimilitude — that I appreciated was the 3D pictures within the picture. Computer displays, photographs taped to a locker, etc, were each themselves in 3D. That’s non-trivial. It’s reminiscent of the myriad display screens visible in many of the scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey. That’s the kind of throwaway detail that adds richness to a movie, or a story. Avatar was visually wonderful. I can hardly wait until someone applies the technology, both the 3D and the motion-capture animation, to a film with a plot worthy of it. (Niven’s Ringworld, perhaps?)

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. 😉

Okay, so it’s a little later than most other people’s New Year’s postings. I’ll be backing and filling a bit.

I’ll be in Colorado Springs for the CoSine SF con this weekend. Always fun and I’m sorry I had to miss it last year. I’m starting the weekend on a high note, I just got the page proofs for my Analog story “Light Conversation”. It looks like it will be in the June 2010 issue, probably on the stands in early April (I just received my subscription copy of the April issue).

Speaking of Analog, congrats to my friend Brad Torgersen on his first sale to Analog, with a novelette, no less. He recently won in the 2009Q3 Writers of the Future Contest too. He’s making a big splash with his first two pro sales. Way to go Brad!