Category Archives: Publishing

Discussions about the business of publishing.

Why Yes, I WOULD Cut Off My Nose to Spite My Face, Why Do You Ask?

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 Anyone can be a published writer if all you want to do is make ebook versions of your stories/novels and put them up on Kindle/Nook/iBook/Whatever. I’m not slagging on the idea. I’ll grant you, there’s a time I would have, but times change and it’s adapt or die. Now I do it myself when doing so makes sense to me. However, if you still want to sell stories to professional  science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) markets in the traditional way, deciding between Garamond vs Bookman Old Style is no longer your concern. It’s also no longer about whether your stories please you. Before you see print/online publication, you’ve got to please someone else–the editor.

The traditional SF/F short fiction market is a buyer’s market. Always has been and probably always will be. Even with the explosion of online venues, there are more good stories than there are decent homes for them, for varying values of “decent” and, let’s be honest, varying values of “good.” Fortunately there are enough variances in editorial taste that eventually things usually work out. “Eventually” meaning just that–it can take years to place some stories. “Usually” meaning, sigh, not always. But I’m not here to lament this sad fact, merely to state it, to place what follows in context–The Sh*tlist  Continue reading →

Do-Over

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I was never happy with the original cover of A Warrior of Dreams. It had the right surreal quality, but the presentation made it look a little too much like an afterlife fantasy, which it emphatically was not. So I’ve done…well, not tweaking. More of a makeover.

Edited to Add: As part of my general glee over fixing the cover, I should mention that the Kindle edition is available as a free download today and tomorrow only (2-13-2012 and 2-14-2012). There won’t be any more free promotions for this title, so now’s the time.

Black Kath’s Daughter – Corporeal Edition

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Canemill Publishing Edition

I was a little hesitant to take this step, but as has recently been emphasized to me, not everyone has joined the ebook revolution. Odd that an old print snob like me had to be reminded of this, yet there it is. So. Today I’m announcing that, yes, there will be a trade paper print edition of Black Kath’s Daughter. In fact, it’s already orderable through CreateSpace. The Amazon page should show up in a few days. If you’re one of those people who think Amazon is the root of all evil, you can also order it through your local indie bookstore or even a B&N. It’s a real book. It has ISBNs and everything:

ISBN: 0615594778

EAN13: 978-0615594774

Putting this edition together has been an experience. I mean, I’m glad I did it, I learned a lot, and I won’t swear that I won’t do it again (in truth, I’m pretty sure I will), but it did remind me of just how much I don’t want to be a publisher. Getting a book into print is a lot of work, but that’s the least of it. The big drag is time. I only have so much, and when I’m editing, formatting, designing a cover, and proofing, I’m not writing. If I’m not writing, then what’s the point of all that other stuff?

Anyway, book is published, and I’m writing a new story. The fabric of reality is still holding up. For now. And if there is anything else of mine that now only exists in phosphors that you would like to see get a print edition, let me know. I may not write to the market but I do take requests.

Zen and the Art of Beating Your Head Against a Wall

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Subtitle: What Do You Think You’re Doing?

On another forum not too long ago, a well-known editor was expressing puzzlement. There was a very fine writer whose work he’d been promoting for years, buying their stories, featuring them prominently, doing all that was reasonable to do in an attempt to get readers to understand that this writer is worth paying attention to. And it wasn’t a complete bust by any means–the writer has done well by most standards: prolific, won several awards, publishes all over the place. Yet despite it all, they have no “career” to speak of. Sure, nearly every writer in the short-story field knows their work and most have high respect for it; if you follow the sf/f field at all in short stories, you’d recognize the name. But they have never developed the readership or name-recognition that the editor thought they deserved, and why is that?

Later in the thread the editor, in my opinion, answered his own question–it’s because the writer’s stories are too different. Not too different from what’s being published in the field; so far as I can see the sf/f field has a huge tolerance for the different, especially at short story level. Rather, the problem is that the writer’s stories are too different from each other.  Tone, theme, subject matter, you name it. Any reader could read three or four of the writer’s stories, all excellent, and never once realize that they were all written by the same person. Continue reading →

Patience, Grasshopper

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Patience. Probably one of the most ignored and overlooked items in a writer’s toolbox. Not unrelated to the subject of stubbornness (see persistence), but a different commodity. New writers especially don’t have much use for it. On another board a new writer asked, “If I send in a story now, does it appear in the next issue? How soon do I get paid?” The sound you doubtless heard was a thousand shiny pins forming a queue to pop that lovely balloon. After the realities were explained, you could practically see the fallen crest. “Oh. I didn’t know it was so complicated.” Continue reading →