photo credit: victor_nuno

I’ve had some

time to mull over the response that the post previous to this one received, including some comments that I thought raised new points, so I thought I’d add a couple of additional ideas that had occurred to me since posting it.

Writer-publisher

Mark Welker raised two important issues in his comment: the perceived negative effect that self-publishing is having on the furtherance of new creative discussions, and the necessity in separating writer and publicist. With regards to the former, Mark says:

But I wonder why there’s so much focus on the product over the process. Seems like we’re falling over ourselves to get people to buy and read our words – and not as much concerned with whether what we are writing is actually contributing to some creative discussion. There seems so many echoes of the same impulse.

This is a difficult one to assess on a purely quantitative level, and I’m not sure how much it has to do with self-publishing. The way I see it, new writers almost always imitate the writing that has gone before them to some extent. And in fact, it could be said that editors of journals and publishing firms alike encourage this, what with needing to pander to a kind of literary fashion in order to sell units. Truly new writing is a rare thing, and it often takes either a work of pure genius or a very brave editor to see it through to the publication stage. If we assume that a lot of self-publication is coming from emerging or recently-emerged writers, this would account for the common perception that a lot of what is being released is trying to reinvent the wheel; whether that wheel is popular-genre-shaped, GAN-shaped, or otherwise. But along with enabling these legions of imitators, self-publication also enables truly new writing to bypass the (again, perceived) timidity of market-ruled editors and be released into the wild far faster than it might have in the traditional cycle of literary fashion. When viewed as a method of disseminating new ideas and ways of writing rather than making a buck, self-publishing suddenly becomes a whole lot more important. Of course, an experimental novel or collection still faces the same problems getting noticed as outlined in my initial post, so whether we’ll see any noticeable acceleration in literary movement occurrence remains to be seen.

Moving onto the separation of writer and publicist. There’s a bit of a divide when considering this question, but in my opinion if you are going it alone, you need to separate your writer-self and your publicist-self. At least during the act of creation. A writer-publicist is not the same thing as singer-songwriter; there’s no synergy between the two. My justification for this is that the constant reference to some imagined press-release will stifle your writing and lead your stories down the path of remaining pleasing to an imagined audience. While I do think that stories should be written for an audience — even if that audience is yourself — I don’t think that writing for an advertisement is a healthy thing (and I’ve blogged about this previously). Some gurus will tell you otherwise, insisting that the only stories worth writing are ones that can be sold, but that’s their prerogative. And this is my blog, so bugger them. Once your story is written, edited, and polished to a high shine, then you can think of ways to push it on the public. Until then, write the story the way it wants to be written.

Filtrate

Another thing that I missed out on discussing was a point raised in the previously-linked blog by Alan Baxter:

There’s one simple difference – all the fiction I’ve made available to read here is previously published somewhere (with a couple of exceptions that I’ll talk about in a minute). Some of it is older stuff published in non-paying markets, but it’s still stuff I’m proud of. Other stories are published in better markets and the links here are directly to sites where the story can be found. The point is that it made it past an editor, so I’ve got unbiased, third party confirmation that it’s worth a read.

Essentially, Alan is using publication in journals and e-zines as a way of filtering what writing he shows to readers. By showing that the writing he is putting up has been vetted by an external third party, it adds a legitimacy to the writing which might encourage visitors to his website to spend a bit of time reading his fiction. This is a relatively common way to go about things, used by a whole bunch of indie and emerging writers all over the place, including my meagre offerings at my ‘About’ page. But in terms of self-publishing, it offers yet another method of getting quality work out there.

In my experience, most publications only claim first publication rights, whether electronic or print, and possibly the right to reprint in a future anthology. So there’s nothing stopping you from gathering up the stories that you have had previously published and binding them together in a collection, with the tag-line of ‘Published stories: 20XX – 20XY’. In other words, use the taste and reputation of editors to provide a filter to the very best examples of your work. They use you to fill pages, so why not use them to select pieces? Obviously this whole argument operates on the assumption that you have a collection of stories that have appeared in journals whose previous content/editors you respect. Obtaining such a portfolio of work can be a years-long endeavour. But it absolutely guarantees that you have a bunch of tight stories ready to bind up and sell.

Anyway, I’m going to wrap it up there, as I’d like to avoid this site turning into one of those ubiquitous writer’s advice blogs. I’ll be back to more regular (read: boring personal crap) content next time, I swear. As always, feel free to chime in with any reactions.

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1. Self-publishing and some advice for emerging writers
2. Thailand: Thoughts

photo credit: gruntzooki

I’ve been seeing

a lot of conversation going on lately about self-publishing and how it relates to emerging writers. This is a topic that I’m quite interested in, having both considered the possibility of self-publishing and applied the term ‘emerging’ to myself and my writing. So I thought I’d take a moment and explore my own thoughts surrounding the subject and give some advice on how to make the best of the current scene.

Broadly speaking, I’m in favour of self-publishing as a thing. As far as I’m concerned, the more options an artist has to distribute their art, the better. And writers have produced some of my most favouritest art ever. Print-on-demand services are great, in that they are putting the power to publish in the hands of people who have the willingness to do so. Not to mention the fact that they are more environmentally friendly, as there are no pallets full of returns to be pulped. The great advantage of the open-armed nature of the self-publishing market is that anyone with a bit of tech-savvy can release a book. This fact is also cited as its great disadvantage, in that there is no filter of taste to keep the good, solid examples in and let the slush flow through. And those that cite this disadvantage have a point: there is already a lot of slush out in the wild. I’m not going to argue the fact that there is, statistically, more crap writing than good writing in the self-publishing world. It’s self-evident. To prove it to yourself, just spend more than five seconds trawling the Kindle boards or Smashwords. Not only that, but the average self-published book would hardly be called profitable, and more often than not a self-published book does not even come close to earning out the number of loving hours poured into it. So what’s the reason behind this lack of quality? Why don’t good self-published books earn out? And what can emerging writers do to keep from falling into the same traps?

Quality assurance

When looking at the self-publishing industry, analysts often cite other indie industries as examples of how self-propelled creative arts can work. Industries such as the short film or music industries, where a self-funded project can often lead to big deals for indie darlings. But there’s a difference between these industries and self-publishing, and it has to do with skill. Any person with a basic education can successfully perform the physical act of writing. A person with a masters in literature can certainly do it, but primary school kids can too. There is no threshold of time spent practising to complete the physical, pen-to-paper (or fingertip-to-keyboard) act of writing. It’s not like the music industry, where you need to spend a lot of time getting to the point where you can play even one song properly. Or the film industry, where the price of access to quality equipment can mean that only those dedicated to the craft get allocated time to use it. The beauty of writing is that it doesn’t have any of those in-built thresholds. And of course, that’s one of the best things about writing and language; anyone can do it, using just about any material on hand that can make a mark on another. It’s much like the visual fine arts in that regard.

Of course, with fine arts, it’s very easy to identify talent. Often an artist can easily measure themselves against the physical world that they are trying to represent. And with the extremely high standard of visual literacy demanded by our modern world, even the average Jean can tell you whether they like your amateur efforts and how you might improve them. But with writing, it’s quite difficult to get the kind of feedback loop that might enable an emerging writer to grow. After all, how often have you seen writers posting work online with a preamble saying that their friend/family member had said it was really good? The combination of the ease with which writing can be physically performed and a lack of access to honest feedback means that quite often, pieces of writing are self-published without any kind of quality control; the kind of quality control that traditional publishing routes more or less represent. Of course, there is some quality control in self-publishing in the form of the hivemind of readers that rate titles they read (or which their friends tell them to rate), but it’s not exactly as precise as an editor with years of experience.

Earning out

So that’s my intepretation of the ‘why’ behind the lack of quality. The earning out part is a bit less complicated, but interesting to talk about. Intuitively, we all know why a lot of people won’t be making any more money on their self-published book  than their day job earns them in an hour, and it’s to do with signal-to-noise ratios. When you release your shiny new e-book , it drops into a huge reserve of similar books that haven’t sold any copies. And trying to lift it out of that reserve is a bloody difficult thing to do. It’s the reason why people hire and pay the wages for marketers and promoters–getting enough signal attached to your book to boost it out of the noise and into the public eye. But in self-publishing market, you haven’t got a salary to give a marketer, you’ve just got yourself. And not everyone can sell themselves. It’s a hard thing to do, both in a technical sense and a personal sense. Technically speaking, a writer has to have the Internet savvy to build a social network without coming off as a spammer. That takes care and patience, but I’d say it’s achievable by most who grew up with the Internet. But on a personal level, you have to have the confidence in your writing ability to see the whole thing through. You have to have faith that your book isn’t like the millions of other slush pile wannabes. Yours is the real deal, and here’s reasons a), b), and c) why the reader should buy it.

Achieving both of those things without skittering to the wayside is hard, and some players start with an advantage. In an interview talking about his successful experiment with self-publishing, Lee Goldberg (author of the Mr. Monk series of books) talks about a ‘gold rush mentality’ regarding e-books at the moment. The seductive narratives of the few fortunate people who have been able to make a living selling e-books have lead to ‘…thousands of authors who will be lucky if they can give away ten books-a-month at 99 cents each’. That’s because they don’t have the networking skills (read: publicist) or the core fan-base that an already-established author has. Getting those famed 1,000 true fans is an uphill battle, and it’s certainly not guaranteed. Garnering enough momentum and five-star reviews is very often a game of chance, and the conditions that a self-published writer needs to fulfil on any given day to become an Internet phenomenon are as difficult to predict as the Melbourne weather. But there are a few things that I believe are essential to giving at least a bit of weight to the die.

Emergent behaviour

So what can emerging writers do to avoid falling into a sea of anonymity? There have been quite a few articles discussing this lately, the reading of which prompted me to write this post. First up was Benjamin Solah’s post mourning a lack of sales of his self-published e-book, Sanity Juxtaposed. There were a few choice quotes from the comments, but the one that was picked up by Alan Baxter in his constructive post and which I think represents the first point that I want to make is this one made by Jason Fischer:

My two cents is this: trunk stories belong in your trunk. You either take them apart and make them good enough to sell, or you leave them there.

The problem with Ben’s e-book was that it was, as stated in its description, not his best work. It was bits and pieces that he had written but not polished, pieces that were unpublished and languishing on his hard-drive before they were put in the collection. The temptation for emerging writers to have something with their name on it out there for people to buy and read is one that is rooted in the issues of validation and insecurity (which I’ve covered in a previous post). But that yearning for validation sometimes ends up rushing the writer into releasing work that isn’t exemplary of their best ability. As Lee Goldberg puts it, just because you can publish for free with a mouse-click doesn’t mean that you should. There’s another angle to this argument, in that sometimes writers will reserve their best writing for querying traditional publishing avenues, and use the electronic route to release the stuff they aren’t as proud of. This is based on the misguided preconception that e-books and self-published works are inherently worth less than getting print on paper through a traditional publisher*. All of which brings me to my first recommendation for emerging writers looking to self-publish: if you are going to self-publish, make it your best work. This is also known in the programming community as ‘garbage in, garbage out’. If you release a piece of writing that isn’t up to standard, don’t be surprised when no-one wants to buy it. The definition of ‘up to standard’ may vary between groups, but I’d recommend at least a few redrafts and an edit by someone whose writing you respect.

So that’s the first thing, only release good writing. Not exactly rocket surgery. The second bit of advice comes from the desk of a guy named Chuck Wendig, whose to-the-point missive entitled ‘Why Your Self-Published Book May Suck A Bag Of Dicks‘ (and its follow-up) cuts very close to the bone. In it, he extols the virtues of good book cover design, well written book descriptions and synopses, getting someone (anyone) to edit your book, and making sure your sample excerpt gives the best possible hook to potential readers. In other words, professionalism in the presentation of your product to customers. That’s right, your piece of finely-wrought prose is a product. I’m going to say it again, in bold, just to be sure. Your writing is a product. If you are taking the self-publishing route, you absolutely cannot afford to kid yourself about this. There is no reason why your writing, no matter how amazing it is, should rise to the top of the slush pile. There is no buoyancy ascribed to it based on its artistic merit. A lamentable fact, but a fact nonetheless. So it makes sense to polish the presentation of your product as much, if not more, than the polishing of your writing. Anything less is shooting yourself in the foot before trying to run a marathon. Publishers know this, that’s why they spend millions of dollars on expensive ad campaigns to get booksellers on board with their latest best seller. It’s why they’ve started investing in book trailers, and why they invite managers of book stores to expensive, canapé-fuelled slide shows of their latest catalogues. So find yourself a designer who can create an eye-catching cover, a PR person who can find the best combination of wow-words to convince a stranger to click through to the sample, and polish that excerpt until it can’t stand its own glow. And if you can’t find family or friends who can fill those roles for a carton, be prepared to spend some money. People can, will, and do judge books by their cover.

Exception handling

Of course, there are exceptions to these bits of advice, just like there are exceptions to any rule. If you’re writing something because it’s fun and ridiculous and you just want a few of your friends to be amused by it, hell, don’t let me stop you throwing it out on the Interwoobles. That kind of writing can be awesome and light and breezy and completely separate from the writing you look to publish. Just take a peek at my ‘Unpublications‘ page. Seriously, go look at it, I finally figured out how to put up a recording there. Those are examples of passion projects. They were fun little pieces that I enjoyed writing, but would never, ever find a place in the current Australian journal landscape**. Alternatively, if you’re writing a cookbook for members of your family as a novel (hah) Christmas present, you probably don’t give a shit about sales ranks.

A final disclaimer, now that I’m done. I’ve never self-published anything of mine. But what I have done is watched a lot of people make the attempt, some successfully and some not successfully. And I think I’ve learned enough to be able to make a decent attempt if I ever decided to. I guess that means you should take everything I’ve said with a hearty pinch of salt, but it’s the Internet and you really should have been doing that anyway.

Anyway, that’s enough from me. If you have any comments or thoughts about stuff I’ve missed, please feel free to comment. I’d particularly like to hear the perspectives of people who have gone through with the whole thing and can tell me how applicable (or not) my advice is.

—

*This is nonsense, you and I know that. Words are worth exactly how much they are worth, regardless of the medium they are presented through.

**The tragedy of which is a topic for another post, perhaps.

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story compares to the ones your Dad read you when you were a kid. (:

Cian And Teddy Go To The Custard Factory

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

(Note: Turns out you can’t upload videos longer than 10 minutes to YouTube, so I spent a good couple of hours dicking around with video convertors and podcasting plugins getting this thing to work. But work it does, at least on my computer.)

(Additional note: This won’t work in RSS feeds, so click the ‘video’ link to get to the post)

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photo credit: kern.justin

At the end

of every month, I’ll be posting an entry summing up the sneakily-updated ‘Reading‘ and ‘Watching‘ pages, where I review concert, books, and movies as I experience them. I’m not as good as others when it comes to writing full reviews, but I think these give my opinions in appropriately bite-sized proportions. I hope you find something you like!

Reading:

Journals:

The Reader produced by the Emerging Writer’s Festival–A brilliant little resource full of tales of advice and stories that illustrate where you can go with your writing should you heed it. There are valuable lessons to be learned about the industry itself that ‘emerging writers’ (a term whose origin and definition is discussed within) can lap up with ease. Highly recommended, and can be bought here.

The Sleepers Almanac No. 5 produced by Sleepers Publishing–I’d never bought a Sleepers Almanac before now, but if this is the quality of Australian short stories that is the norm in their productions, I may have to change that. This is top quality stuff, with stories that will leave you laughing, commiserating, scratching your head, and enjoying every word. From the moment it opens with the heart-breaking ‘Cameraman’ by Peta Murray it is evident that this is the cream of the crop. I particularly enjoyed the sparkle of an illegal marriage in ‘Elvis, Husbands, And other Men In Costumes: A Memoir’ by Liza Monroy, the everyday surreal tale of ‘The Day of the Hen’ by Tony Birch, the confused tension of ‘Attack of the Tiny Miracles’ by Max Barry, an amazing exploration of a relationship in ‘We Must Catch Up’ by Virginia Peters, the list goes on, but honestly I was wowed by just about every story I read. Highly, highly recommended.

Books:

Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam–This collection of short stories by Melbourne writer Amsterdam is grouped around post-apocalyptic settings. But rather than focussing on the logistics of a post-apocalyptic society, Amsterdam relates the lives of his protagonists with only the occasional, necessary nod to the broken world in which they live in. This is human drama taken to a bold new place, as far away from the popular household minutiae fiction that we’ve come to expect from today’s literary cabal as can be. And yet, Amsterdam still manages some beautiful turns of phrase throughout. The plots can be somewhat relegated to the background in favour of bringing characterisation to the fore, but they serve their purpose and do just as much to illustrate the bleak march as anything else. And hey, it’s not science fiction, so genre-haters can still read this without feeling guilty. I recommend picking this up for an east-west plane trip.

The Lack Brothers by Malcolm McKay–A very Gaiman-esque tale (think American Gods set in Britain and with Angels interfering with the fates of men rather than deities). It is crude at times, but perfectly within its rights to be so. The characters are brilliantly realistic and the plot tight. It holds the dubious honour for being the only book to have ever made me walk into a sign. Great holiday reading.

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde–This was a very brave departure for Fforde, whose Nursery Crimes and Next Tuesday series are so beloved by his fans that you’d expect him to continue expanding their universes, much like Pratchett did with the Discworld. Instead, he’s made a diversion into a fascinatingly imagined world where the spectrum of colour (yes, that’s colour with a ‘u’, thank God. If an American had written this I dare say I’d have thumped it down in anger before the second page) that a person is able to see dictates their place in society. It’s a very ambitious concept, full of opportunities for concept loopholes. Fforde not only carries it off, but he does so with his customary wit and twisting plots that will have you guessing until the very end. While this book is less revelatory than a lot of his others, there is a reason: the series will be expanded into two sequels that will continue the tale of Eddie Russet and Jane Grey. Think Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom crossed with Pratchett’s Discworld, by way of Orwell’s 1984. If that combination appeals to you then I’d suggest picking up Shades of Grey as soon as you can.

Graphic Novels/Comics:

Logicomix by Christos H. Papadimitriou, Apostolos Doxiadis, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie Di Donna–An intriguing graphic novel about the life and times of Bertrand Russell. I had bought it expecting something of a tutorial in the language of logic, but found myself engrossed in the personal life and questions raised by the historical characters and the constantly meta-conversing authors themselves. It may not be for everyone, but I enjoyed it.

Watching:

Movies:

Five Minutes of Heaven–This movie is being presented as part of the Perth International Arts Festival movie line-up this year, and to be honest, I went in expecting to come out horribly depressed. This may be because it’s a film about Northern Ireland and films about Northern Ireland are generally depressing, especially when they deal with that period of Northern Ireland history commonly known as ‘The Troubles‘. Liam Neeson plays Alistair Little, a man who, as a teenager, shot and killed the brother of James Nesbitt’s Joe Griffin. Griffin was merely a boy then, and suffered greatly from the event due to his mother’s grief taking the form of blaming him for not doing something to stop Little. The film shows the event and then cuts to modern day, where a reality television show about redemption and forgiveness has brought the two men together after 33 years. The performances of Neeson and Nesbitt are brilliant in portraying both men as scarred and tense. Both have carried their demons over the huge number of years, and to be able to accurately bring that out (almost manically in Nesbitt’s case, brooding in Neeson’s) in any number of nuances of expression and voice is an achievement. While it’s by no means a cheery movie, you won’t walk away from this one quite as depressed as you think you might.

Avatar–There’s not much I can say about this that hasn’t already been said, argued, trolled, reposted, or tweeted about. The CGI was amazing, the 3D was implemented better than the one other 3D movie I’ve seen, the story was unwaveringly predictable and the racist undercurrents evident, and there were numerous cuts that could have been made to speed up the action and not batter us over the head with the ‘lessons’ to be learned. But overall, it wasn’t a waste of money.

Zombieland–Saw this on the plane back from a trip to Sydney and it made me giggle quite a few times. The Bill Murray section was hilarious, and the ongoing reminder of the Rules were great. As much as I love the use of zombie apocalypses as a background for human dramas, I wouldn’t mind if this one should bring to a close that little sub-genre. Also, props to the main protag for being as close to being Michael Cera as you can be without actually being Michael Cera.

Concerts:

Cat Power, Astor Theatre–If there is a reason you go to live shows, then Cat Power perfectly exemplifies it. You cannot possibly emulate the depth and breadth of the power of her voice with a digital recording. You might get close with an LP, but it’d still lose some undefinable element in the grooves. I tried to capture the grace with which she delivers herself in my last review of her live show but to be honest this is one area which our language fails. The Astor was an interesting choice of venue, especially considering its odd mix of both seated and standing room, meaning that anyone who got early and sat in the seats in the first three or four rows got a barrier of people standing in front of them when the main act came on. We were in the middle and so unaffected. A little bit bizzare that. Anyway, yes, still mighty impressed with Ms. Marshall, and I urge anyone who wants to see a powerful performance to try and catch her.

Them Crooked Vultures, Challenge Stadium–Let’s be honest, with names like Josh Homme, Dave Grohl, and John Paul Jones you can’t really go wrong with a band. Another in the long list of super groups that have popped up lately, Them Crooked Vultures were loud, proud, and incredibly polished. The years of experience shared between all of them showed in a performance that was pure rock. Yes, they were showmen to the extreme, bordering on showing off in the form of various unnecessarily long solos. But hey, that’s rock ‘n’ roll baby. I’d never been to Challenge Stadium before, but it served the purpose well, with decent acoustics and a good crowd. Great gig, and they deserve their super status.

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photo credit: richt…

There’s something Zen

about laying down fourteen or so remote mines on the integral supports of a structure and then pressing the ‘B-for-boom’ button. And that’s a very fortunate thing, since the act of destroying buildings in a wide spectrum of thought-out and frantic ways is the main gameplay mechanic in Red Faction: Guerilla. The way that the building sways gently under the initial shock wave, then comes tearing down as metal bends and glass shatters appeals directly to my physics background, as well as being a mechanic that encourages the kind of gleeful holyshitlookwhatIdid giggling that has been missing in most of the single-player games I’ve played since Burnout 3. If you like blowing shit up, then the equation for your next car trip is simple: shopping centre – $100 = RF:G + hours of entertainment.

Of course as in all video games there is a glass ceiling of meaningful statistics to assign to various industry-standard  attributes. In RF:G’s case, while it rolled a strong 8 in Gameplay, it sucked out on the Story and Voiceacting stats, a mere 2 and 3 in each. The wunderkind engineer that fixes up all the new weapons you use to do the aforementioned blowing of shit up is the most offensive. Or should I say ‘aww-fensive’, as she’s somehow developed a very bloody posh British accent despite being a self-confessed Mars-born baby. Unfortunately she acts as a gateway between your character’s initial measley remote charges and assault rifle and the thermo-friggin’-nuclear rocket launcher and quantum singularity charges that you receive later in the game. So you’ll have to excuse her, or be prepared with the mute button everytime you approach her workbench.

The feel of an open world is maintained to relative success, with changes to the environment (read: great big holes where buildings used to be) persisting throughout the game. As you complete objectives and liberate the downtrodden Martians you will gain more and more ground support, which leads to objectives becoming easier to complete. Abuse that gift by letting citizens die and you’ll find yourself alone versus an army of special forces quite intent on ripping you limb from limb with the power of bullets alone. The AI is actually quite tough and your character can die quickly when out-positioned, so if you don’t use your environment effectively for cover and large-scale destruction, you’re in for a lot of replays.

Not that it matters much. Between rigging a suicide death truck with ten remote charges and watching it roll up to a guard post to detonate, engaging a mechanical walker complete with jetpack to run through building, and deconstructing enemies atom by atom with the nano death-ray (which I take special privilege to LOL at given my degree in nanotech), you’re not going to care if you have to replay the occasional mission. It’s a solid game with a distinguishing mechanic that pushes it beyond a generic idea to something that is genuinely enjoyable to play. I’ve yet to really push at multiplayer but I’m assured it’s a blast. Ho ho. Four out of five compromises of structural integrity from me.

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