Simon Haynes

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-24T12:00:00.001+08:00

I hope everyone has a safe holiday season and a prosperous and productive 2012.

As a special pressie from me, Hal Junior: The Secret Signal (Kindle ebook) will be free on Christmas Day (US time zone) http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005L632RG

If you don't have a Kindle there's always the free Kindle reader app for PC, Mac, smartphones and iThings.

Might keep the kids quiet for a couple of hours after Christmas lunch ;-)

Hal Spacejock 5: Legacy publication date

2011-11-17T15:58:00.000+08:00

Earlier today I posted to the Hal Spacejock mailing list, announcing several publication dates. I intend to stick with these, and revealing a deadline in public should do the trick.

First, I'm happy to report that I've finished the first draft of Hal Spacejock 5: Legacy. It still needs editing and polishing, but I'm aiming
for a January/February 2012 release.

I've also finished the first draft of Hal Junior 2: The Missing Case. This one should be out in April/May 2012.

I'm currently working on the first draft of Hal Spacejock 6: Safe Art, which is slated for release in June/July 2012.

Hal Spacejock books 7 and 8 are also in hand.

In each case I'll be releasing ebook editions first, then print.

Apart from my novels, I've just published another couple of stories on Amazon Kindle (Yard Fail and a short-short, Escape Clause), and all of my shorts are now available on Smashwords.

I also have another science fiction short story in the works, and I'm hoping to finish this one in the next few days.

Hey, I almost feel like a real writer again!

Release-a-thon part 2

2011-11-14T22:44:00.000+08:00

This is the second batch of shorts I posted to Amazon today, priced at 99c each. Sleight of Hand was published in Potato Monkey issue 1, back in 2000/2001. The other two have never seen the light of day. (And neither will I, once all those epic fantasy authors get hold of me ...)

Sleight of Hand
After a cosy meal, the protagonist retires to his host's workshop for an after-dinner drink ... and becomes the unwitting subject of an experiment.

Thonn Day
Like The Desolator, every time I write a fantasy tale it comes out as a gigantic p-ss-take on the genre. Farm boy ... check. Forbidden Magick ... check. Sage advice from wise elders ... er, not so much.

Billy's Book
Another knee to the fantasy genre's 'nads. Stable mucker-outer Billy Crump has heard all about farmhands becoming powerful wizards, and he wants a piece of that particular pie. Unfortunately this wizarding business is much harder than it looks ...

Release-a-thon

2011-11-14T16:17:00.000+08:00

It's the middle of NaNoWriMo, so what better way to spend two whole writing days than ... editing six short stories into shape, coming up with covers for each one, and publishing them on Amazon Kindle?

I blame Pauline Nolet, proofreader extraordinaire, who nagged me on Twitter after I happened to mention the unfinished short stories cluttering up my hard drive.

Anyway, the first three are available now for the Kindle minimum price of 99c each. None have ever been published before.

Off Course
An alien invasion fleet picks the wrong golf course.

Updown
Social services call on ten-year-old Daniel, intending to take him away from his home. Danny has other ideas.

Catch of the Day
Ken and Steve reluctantly give up their lawnmowing duties for a weekend of fishing, booze and male bonding. Unfortunately the fish aren't biting, supplies are running low and worst of all ... the beer just ran out. Then, without warning, an alien colony ship arrives in orbit, and that's when Ken's problems REALLY start.

Experimenting with Free

2011-11-09T08:04:00.000+08:00

One of the beauties of digital distribution is that you can give stuff away, at little or no cost to yourself. If you're trying to promote a series of books, reducing the price of the first to 99c - or zero - can hook new fans and increase sales of the whole series.

So, what's my experiment? Right now, Hal Spacejock book one is a free download on Amazon.com, Smashwords, B&N (Nook) and iTunes

Overnight it hit #1 on Amazon's science fiction category, and #2 in humo(r). They maintain separate lists for paid & free books, but there's a kicker ... the free and paid tables are displayed side by side on Amazon's bestseller pages.

Gaining exposure is the toughest challenge most writers face. If you're prepared to give away the first book in a series, or perhaps a short story or two, it could be a cost-effective way of promoting all of your published work.

Has anyone else tried free? If so, how did it work out for you?

Dan DeWitt Fiction: Guest Post by Simon Haynes: Why (and How) I NaNo.

2011-11-07T07:00:00.000+08:00

Dan DeWitt Fiction: Guest Post by Simon Haynes: Why (and How) I NaNo.: Dan here: I'm excited to bring you this guest post. It's relevant to all who are participating in NaNoWriMo (especially first-timers), an...

Nano day 6 - Hal fragment #3 (Sample Sunday)

2011-11-06T18:41:00.000+08:00

Hal eyed his oxygen indicator. Even if they got his suit free, he'd barely make the ship.
There was a flash of light as Clunk approached the cavern. The robot's shiny head appeared through the jumbled rocks at the entrance, and Hal smiled to himself. The situation was tricky, but Clunk was always resourceful. He'd know what to do!
"I don't know how we're going to get you out of this," said Clunk, inspecting the metal shard. "Removing all these barbs will take far too long, and cutting the suit will release the last of your air."
"I was hoping for something a bit more positive," said Hal. "You know, unpick the tape, carefully peel back the fabric, patch it up as we go. That sort of thing."
Clunk shook his head. "No, we'll have to cut it off."
"Eh! That's a bit extreme, isn't it?"
"It's the only solution. The longer we spend here, the more likely Sandy will run out of air too."
"No! You'll have to find another way."
"I'm very sorry, Mr Spacejock. Time is of the essence."
"But --"
Clunk raised his right hand, holding it in the beam from his chest lamp. The plasteel skin parted along the side of his palm, revealing a fine-toothed blade. "Hold still please."
"No, wait! You go back with Sandy and I'll take my chances. I'm sure I can get it free!"
"This is the only way." Clunk bent over Hal's leg, saw at the ready.
"Don't I get anaesthetic?"
"Trust me, this won't hurt a bit."
Hal screwed his eyes shut, clenched his fists and gritted his teeth. There was a gentle pressure on his shin, and he steeled himself for the bite of the saw. Instead, he felt rapid vibrations, and he realised Clunk was using some kind of self-healing surgical blade. The vibrations continued for several seconds, and then the pressure was gone.
"All done," said Clunk. "Let's go."

Nano day 4 - another Hal 5 fragment.

2011-11-04T17:22:00.000+08:00

A fragment from today's NaNoWriMo effort. (As before, it's unedited, unpolished, etc, and may not make it into the finished novel.)
This is from Hal Spacejock book 5, not Hal Junior!

Hal sailed across the surface of the asteroid, watching it fall away beneath him. The further he travelled the darker it got, and before long he'd be invisible to the others. Would Clunk be able to round him up in the Volante? Could the ship's sensors pick up an insignificant human sailing through space? It didn't seem likely, even if he waved his arms and flashed for all he was worth.
Splot!
Something whacked him in the rear, a painful blow like a whip across the back of his leg. Hal was still recovering when his peaceful flight ended in a vicious tug. The suit tightened, and his eyes crossed as someone applied the biggest space-wedgie in the history of the universe.
There was another tug, then another, and when Hal looked down he discovered he was moving backwards. They were reeling him in like a prize catch! He crossed his arms, resigned to the embarrassing spectacle, and only unfolded them when he was deposited on the landing platform. When he twisted to inspect the damage he saw the safety line attached to his suit with a big dollop of instant glue. "Gee, thanks Clunk. Did you have to shoot me in the arse?"
"I merely aimed for the biggest target."
Sandy snorted.
"It was also the least likely to suffer permanent damage," said Clunk, who was struggling to keep a straight face. He snipped the safety line, leaving the blob behind. In the gloom it looked like a giant barnacle attached to Hal's right buttock. "If your pride was the only casualty ..."
"Yes, all right. Can we get on with it?"
"Certainly. Only this time perhaps you could use the railing?"

Hal Junior giveaway

2011-11-03T15:18:00.000+08:00

I'm offering a free copy of Hal Junior to one lucky reader of this blog. Let me know in comments why you'd like a copy and I'll pick one out at random on the 11th of November 2011.

You can find out more about Hal Junior: The Secret Signal here.

Terms and Conditions (please read before entering):

This draw is open to residents of the UK, USA, Canada and Australia only.
* If the winner lives in Australia I'll post the book myself.
* If you're the winner and you live in the UK, Canada or US, your copy will be ordered & delivered via the relevant Amazon store. (This involves adding Hal Junior to your wishlist, which means you'll need an Amazon account to claim your prize.)

Nanowrimo day one - Hal 5

2011-11-01T17:33:00.000+08:00

Here's a fragment of today's nanowrimo, unedited, unproofed and raw. Enjoy!

The Tiger finally passed out of range, and with Traffic Control's grudging permission the Volante docked with the space station. Hal charged out as soon as the airlock opened. He didn't know where to go or what to do when he got there, but that wasn't the point. Speed was of the essence.
As he dashed from the ship he almost ran into a welcobot. It was waiting in the boarding tube, all friendly eyes and fake smile. "Why hello, fine sir!" it said, extending a white-gloved welcoming-hand. "Can I interest you in a rundown of our facilities?"
Hal put two hands on the welcobot's head and vaulted right over it. His feet pounded the boarding tube carpet as he ran full tilt for the exit, rocking the tunnel in his wake. The welcobot oohed and aahed as it tried to maintain its balance, then toppled over and landed flat on its back. It lay there with its little rubber wheels spinning in space, shaking hands with thin air.
"Left, Mr Spacejock!" called Clunk, while Sandy helped the welcobot to its feet. "It's the other way!"
Hal skidded to a halt, did a quick U-turn and ran in the opposite direction. The welcobot had darted up to the main tunnel and was now waiting for him, its smile a touch less friendly and its large shaking-hand at the ready. Hal feigned a pass to the left, then darted right at the last second. The welcobot lunged, Hal leapt and there was a rip of tortured fabric as the mechanical fingers tore the pocket out of his flightsuit. What exactly it was trying to grab and shake Hal didn't like to think.
He pieced his flightsuit together and met up with the others further along the main corridor. Clunk was studying the information package they'd been given at the hotel. He inspected every page carefully, turning each one as though they were made out of the finest parchment. Hal wanted to grab it and rip through the pages until he found what they were after, and he restrained himself with difficulty. "Well?" demanded Hal. "What's the plan?"
"Historical records are on level three, corridor eighteen. There's an elevator just round the corner."
"Let's go!"

And so it begins

2011-10-31T08:37:00.005+08:00

Update 10.55am (31st October ...) LOL, started Nanowrimo one day early. Who stole my calendar?

It's 8:30am on November 1st, and I have two NaNoWriMo forms in front of me. The first shows 30 rows with a blank space for the number of words written during each day. The second is an intraday progress form, broken down into hours from 9am until 11pm. (You can download both forms from this page)

I'll deal with the second form first. The idea is to write 500 words per hour, starting at the top of the hour and finishing when I have the 500. Then I get to do whatever I want (work, coffee, chocolate) until the beginning of the next hour. If you have a day job, just block out the hours you work and do your writing in the rest. (You need about 4 hours to do your daily NaNo wordcount, but should only use about 15-20 minutes of each hour for actual writing. E.g. 6pm until 10pm, or 6am to 7.30am, 30 mins at lunch, then another 1 1/2 hours at night.)

By the way, during Nano I recommend oven-cooked meals, not things you have to babysit every step of the way. Roasts and pies and one-tray meals are in, steaks and stir fry and so on are out. There are plenty of simple recipe ideas on my website, many of them ideal for Nanowrimo. (E.g. chicken rice one night, then chicken wraps the next with the leftovers.)

Now, I'm already breaking a rule by writing this instead of getting on with my wordcount, but I'm actually starting at 9am today. By then the rest of the household will have gone out and left me in peace.

Delayed YAY! post

2011-10-28T12:59:00.000+08:00

At the end of September I received my first copies of Hal Junior. I took pics, then realised I'd misplaced the XD card reader for my camera.

Well, I just found it and the pics were still sitting on the card:

PIP part 3 - Adjusting the look of your PDF

2011-10-25T09:06:00.002+08:00

In the previous post I showed you how easy it is to create a PDF from yWriter5.

I also left you with a cliffhanger: those doubled-up chapter headings. And you're probably wondering how you change the layout when yWriter doesn't seem to have any formatting options. (E.g. paper size, gutters, etc.)

I don't want to throw lots of code at you, so I'll cover the basics in this article and move on to more detail in future.

For now you need to know one thing: where yWriter is concerned you adjust your layout by altering a special text file called a LaTeX header. (You can also override layout on the fly, e.g. in the middle of a scene or chapter, but we'll get to that later.)

In yWriter5, click the Project menu, then Project Settings. This is where you enter the title of your novel, the author's name, and various other novel-specific values like deadline dates. Click the LaTeX tab and you'll see the following:

The Header File textbox is blank, which means yWriter will use the default. This is a file called 'LaTeXDefaultHeader.txt' which yWriter creates in the project folder every time you start a new project.

What you need to do is make a copy of the default header file, then tell yWriter to use the new file instead. Here's how: First, click the Open Project Folder button. Then rename LaTeXDefaultHeader. (I suggest something like LaTeXNameOfProject.txt)

When you've renamed it, click the [...] button and select the new file.

Now click the Edit button to open the header in Notepad. Woah! Nobody told me there'd be codes like these!

That shows my modified Latex file which you can download here. To update yours with mine, open the downloaded file, copy the contents, and paste them into your renamed LaTeX file. Then save your file.

Save the project settings, press Ctrl+Alt+X, open the exported Tex file and press Ctrl+Shift+F5 to generate and view the PDF. It's similar to the one you saw in the previous article, but this time the chapter headings should be correct.

Here's the layout I used for Hal Junior. It's ideal for shorter books with chapter titles. (Instead of 'Chapter 1', 'Chapter 2', etc, I used proper chapter titles like 'The Secret Signal')

In the next article I'll explain how to tweak the codes in the header, and where to find more information on the LaTeX memoir class.

Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock Series and Hal Junior: The Secret Signal. By day he's a computer programmer and author, and by night he's the same only sleepier.

Free is good ...

2011-10-24T09:09:00.000+08:00

A straightforward cargo delivery takes a left turn when Hal Spacejock gets sidetracked. But with 200 shares in a worthless company on offer, who wouldn't step into a makeshift teleporter which has already claimed one victim? Hal and Clunk, stars of the Hal Spacejock comedy series, feature in this brand new 8000-word short story. 'Framed' slots in any time after Second Course.

Hal Spacejock Framed is now a free download on Smashwords.

Enjoy!

First steps - TeX scenes (PIP)

2011-10-23T09:00:00.002+08:00

This is the second post in my Publishing in Print (PIP) series. Today I'm going to explain how to define a TeX scene in yWriter.

Why would you want to do this? Well, TeX can create an automatic table of contents for your novel with a single command, so why don't we have a go at that? (I'm using the word 'novel', but yWriter can be used for non-fiction too.)

First things first. Create a new chapter in yWriter, move it to the very top, and double-click it. Change the chapter title to @TOC.

The @ stops yWriter exporting the chapter title (which we don't need, since LaTex supplies one.)

Add a scene to the TOC chapter and paste this in:

<TEX>
\thispagestyle{empty}
\tableofcontents

To explain: the <TEX> keyword tells yWriter NOT to convert the rest of the scene during TeX export, and it also suppresses the scene when you're exporting to other formats. (HTML ebook for now, others to follow.)

The <TEX> keyword must be the very first thing in your scene. First line, first characters. (There's another pair of keywords you can use to include TeX code in the middle of a regular scene, but I'll cover those later.)

As for the other two commands:

\thispagestyle{empty} is a TeX statement which suppresses headers and footers and page numbers.

\tableofcontents should be obvious: This is the command which tells the TeX parser to create a table of contents at this position.

Save and close the scene, then right-click your @TOC chapter and select 'Mark as last chapter of frontmatter'. This is important for page numbering reasons, amongst others. Later on, if you add more front matter after the TOC chapter, make sure you apply this setting again.

Now press Ctrl+Alt+X to export, double-click the tex file and (in TeXnicCenter) press Ctrl+Shift+F5 to generate and view it as a PDF. Sometimes the table of contents comes up blank the first time. If so, close your PDF viewer and press Ctrl+Shift+F5 again.

Did it work? If it did, you should have a table of contents for your novel.

That's the end of this tutorial, but here's one useful tip:

If you press Ctrl+Alt+X in yWriter5 when the Tex file is already open, TeXnicCenter will display a dialog asking whether you want to refresh from the new file. Just click yes. This is very handy when you're making small changes to layout in yWriter5.

On the other hand the next step of the process (generating the PDF) should only be done after you've closed the PDF viewer.

One last thing: you may be seeing double chapter headings in your PDF. I'll show you how to fix this in the next article.

Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock Series and Hal Junior: The Secret Signal. By day he's a computer programmer and author, and by night he's the same only sleepier.

New blog series: publishing in print (PIP) via LSI/Createspace

2011-10-22T08:33:00.001+08:00

Over the past month or so I've blogged about editing, polishing, proofing and publicity for the self-pubbed (or indie-pubbed) writer. One thing I haven't really covered in detail is ... getting your work into print. As in generating the PDF you have to upload to Createspace and/or Lightning Source so they can generate printed copies of your work.

I realise the world is hurtling towards ebooks, but there are still segments of the market where paperbacks rule. One of those is middle grade fiction, and since that's the genre for Hal Junior, I had to generate a hard copy as well as an ebook.

There's no substitute for getting your interior layout designed by a pro, but this article is written for those of you focusing primarily on ebooks. If you're considering putting out a paper version as a kind of sideline, it's hard to justify the expense of interior design against potential sales. And remember, if the book takes off you can always hire a pro and get it redone. (Or wait for a publisher to swoop on the print rights and let THEM pay for it ...)

Warning: I'm going to be talking about yWriter in this series of posts. It's freeware, so you don't have to pay anything, but it is Windows-only. (You can also run it on Linux and on the Mac, using the Mono runtime library, but it's not bulletproof.)

The second part of the puzzle is a collection of software called the ProTeXt TeX distribution (also for Windows. Sorry, no idea about Mac and Linux.) This is a 750mb download (yikes!) which contains a whole bunch of programs and addons which you don't actually have to do anything with. Just download and install the thing for now.

If you've just installed yWriter5 and don't have a project to load, follow these instructions to import a work in progress.

Once you have a project loaded, press Ctrl+Alt+X on the yWriter main screen. yWriter will instantly generate a TEX file of your project. Double-click this TEX file to open it in TeXnic Centre, and press Ctrl+Shift+F5 in that software to generate and view the PDF.

The result is a very basic book block, not ready for uploading yet, but I thought it would be good to show the process before we delve into the fine detail. We're not going to use TeXnic Centre for much - all the hard work will be done using yWriter5.

Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock Series and Hal Junior: The Secret Signal. By day he's a computer programmer and author, and by night he's the same only sleepier.

Your thoughts on ebooks for Middle Grade readers

2011-10-17T11:44:00.000+08:00

I'm interested in the pros and cons of publishing ebooks for younger readers. My original plan was paperback only, because I didn't think dedicated e-readers would have made it to younger readers yet, but my daughters convinced me to release an ebook because a lot of their friends use smart phones and laptops to read with.

Has anyone else published in both print and ebook, and what were your findings?

A close shave

2011-10-15T13:19:00.000+08:00

Three months ago I sent Hal Junior queries off to a couple of publishers, and submitted the full manuscript to a third. One of the emails was just to see whether the publisher was open to submissions or not, because their guidelines weren't clear. The other query was a proper one, with a cover letter, outline and synopsis. The third submission (full manuscript) also followed the guidelines.

All three publishers had a similar message on their websites: if you don't hear anything in three or four months, we're not interested.

Two months later I decided to get Hal Junior ready for release. I would spend the rest of August and the whole of September polishing, working with an editor, working with a cover artist and organising the internal art, and if I hadn't heard anything from the publishers by September 30 I'd go ahead and release Hal Junior myself. If they DID get back to me I could put my self-pub plans on hold while I weighed up my options.

Then everything changed: In September I got the rights back to my Hal Spacejock novels. Instead of setting up an Indie press to publish one new title (Hal Junior), I now had five books to publish. And next year I'd have Hal Spacejock 5 and at least one more Hal Junior.

I wrote to the publisher holding the full manuscript and asked them to delete my query if they hadn't looked at it yet. They came back promptly and that was that. I wasn't fussed about the two queries since it was now over two months down the track, and I figured they'd have got back to me by now. (I guessed - wrongly - that publishers might prioritise queries from established authors. If I were a publisher I'd have a query email on my site for use by previously-published authors, but I guess they expect us to have agents. I DID have an agent, but he doesn't rep junior fiction. Anyway ...)

Hal Junior was released on October the 1st and is already scoring some very nice 4- and 5-star reviews on blogs, Amazon, Goodreads and LibraryThing. I love the cover, I love how the book turned out and I know I used every minute of every day to get that book published.

So yesterday I got an email from one of the remaining publishers, expressing an interest in the novel and requesting a full. Whoops, too slow. I sent back an apologetic email, saying I would have pulled the query had I realised it was still in their queue. Hopefully they won't be too annoyed.

Did I miss a wonderful opportunity? No, I don't see it like that. Chances are they'd have kept the manuscript for several months before passing.

But Simon, every author wants to work with a trade publisher!

I'm going to let you into a secret: The reason Hal Spacejock 5 was taking so long (3 years and counting ...) is because I lost interest in publishing. The prospect of going through the lengthy process a fifth time was too much. This isn't a reflection on my publisher, who were a joy to work with ... it's just the way I am. Fun becomes meh, meh becomes a chore, and I avoid chores like authors the world over.

When I submitted Hal Junior to those three publishers I did it because it was What Authors Do, but my heart wasn't in it. I was hoping they'd say no so I could get on with my plans.

And it's working. Since deciding to self-publish I've been up at 6am or 7am, seven days a week, eager to get at the computer and work on my latest idea. I'm fired up about my writing, I'm working on Hal 5 again, and I'm enjoying every minute working in my new business.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not belittling trade publishing. Back in 2005, when I first saw Hal Spacejock on the shelves of every bookstore I visited it was one of the best times of my life. Pursuing trade publication is an important goal for a novelist, but once you've achieved that goal it makes sense to set a new one.

'More of the same' is not something you'll find in my resumé.

Giveaways for Hal Junior: The Secret Signal

2011-10-14T09:05:00.000+08:00

I'm currently offering 5 signed paperback copies via LibraryThing's Member Giveaway program (currently a 1 in 20 chance of scoring) and another 5 signed copies via Goodreads.

Both giveaways close October 23.

I'm also running a Twitter contest where you simply have to retweet the following to be in the running:

I want to #WinHalJunior with @spacejock http://t.co/hSg90eEH

That one closes 15th October.

Good luck!

Galaxy Games blog tour

2011-10-08T14:43:00.002+08:00

Galaxy Games author Greg R. Fishbone and I had a chat yesterday to discuss junior science fiction, publishing, childhood and writing for kids. Enjoy!

GREG: Okay, let's welcome everyone to our middle-grade science fiction author chat. I'm Greg R. Fishbone, author of the Galaxy Games series from the Tu Books imprint of Lee & Low Books. The first book, THE CHALLENGERS, starts the story of an international team of Earth kids competing against teams of alien kids from across the galaxy.

SIMON: Hi everyone. I'm Simon Haynes, Australian author of the adult/teen Hal Spacejock series (Fremantle Press) AND a brand new novel for middle-grade readers: Hal Junior The Secret Signal. Hal Junior lives aboard a space station in the distant future, and the novel covers the events immediately after a supply ship docks. There's a plot against the space station, a ton of laughs and a home made space cannon.

GREG: I'm looking forward to learning more about the science fiction market in Australia and how it may be different from or similar to that here in the United States.

SIMON: I think the lack of middle-grade SF might be a worldwide phenomenon. In Australia, as everywhere else, publishers release books with appeal to the widest potential market. Numerous people have told me MG SF doesn't sell because it doesn't appeal to the majority of younger readers.

GREG: I've definitely heard from young readers and from those trying to put books into their hands that middle-grade SF is hard to find on the shelves.

SIMON: Yes - it's hard to sell lots of MG SF when it barely exists. After I'd written Hal Junior I cast around for similar titles (it's handy to have a reference when trying to describe a new novel) and some of the suggestions were chalk and cheese.

SIMON: E.g. Hal Jnr is 200 pages, 30,000 words and 40+ small illustrations (some sight gags, some diagrams of airlocks and recycling processes.) People were suggesting books with 70 pages, written with sparse sentences barely five words long.

GREG: So there's a market for SF chapter books but not middle grade? Interesting.

SIMON: I was out there looking for meaty science fiction for younger readers, but mostly they seemed to be simplistic early-reader books. That's why I was interested in Galaxy Games, because it looked like we could feed off each others promotional efforts.

GREG: If there's a dearth of science fiction for middle grades, I'd think that humorous sci-fi would be even more of a specialized niche to find.

SIMON: Absolutely.

GREG: What about Young Adult? There seems to be a lot more in that age range here, especially dystopias.

SIMON: YA is a whole new ball game. Teenagers, romantic elements, angst ... I didn't enjoy living through the experience and I'm certainly not going to write about it!

SIMON: MG involves school, friends, family. A lot of YA is about becoming an adult. Much more serious.

GREG: I agree. The borderline is fuzzy sometimes, but MG is where my comfort zone is as an author. But you've also written for adults, correct?

SIMON: Yes, the Hal Spacejock series. The first was released in 2005, and there have been three more since then. They don't feature zany comedy like Hitchhiker's Guide, they're just about a regular guy who starts off with a small problem and turns it into something huge and overwhelming. E.g. in one book he places an order for 100 coffee makers instead of one, and the consequences bring three planets to the brink of war.

GREG: Like Arthur Dent?

SIMON: One reviewer described Hal Spacejock as Dent, Zaphod and Ford Prefect all rolled into one.

GREG: Sounds like a lot of fun.

SIMON: I loved writing them, but they're a huge amount of work. Writing MG was a breath of fresh air, and I'm really enjoying the new challenge.

GREG: What's the biggest difference between writing for adults and writing for kids?

SIMON: For me, not too much. I already write in a fairly plain style, and I believe description is something you write when you run out of plot ideas. With the junior books I stuck to one point of view and one plot, and of course they feature a younger character. As for content and style, I spent part of my childhood in rural Spain which was casual and very free. I hope I've brought some of that to Hal Junior.

GREG: Is there a Spanish feel to the book?

SIMON: No, not at all. That was a red herring ;-)

GREG: Is it particularly Australian?

SIMON: Not Australian either. I grew up across three countries, travelled to more than 80, attended about 12 different schools and learned three different languages so I've seen my share of cultures. My family is like the United Nations.

GREG: Where were you when I was putting together my international team of child athletes? :D

SIMON: Hah ;-)

SIMON: When I mentioned growing up in Spain, I meant the freedom I had as a kid: going off camping for 2-3 days when I was 9 or 10, having an air rifle, riding a motorbike.

SIMON: Life is very restricted for many kids these days, due to dangers real or imagined. They're kept in cotton wool a bit (I'm guilty of this myself with our daughters). Hal actually gets into serious danger a few times in the book.

GREG: It's a dangerous galaxy.

SIMON: Yes, space is dangerous in a way that our everyday lives aren't. Open the wrong door, pull the wrong lever and you could die. Obviously I'm not suggesting kids go live in space, but it's a great setting for a novel. That's why there should be more junior SF.

GREG: The world is full of new and strange experiences. The galaxy, even moreso.

SIMON: So tell me about Galaxy Games. Why would I recommend your book to the local primary school? (Primary = years 1-8 in Australia)

GREG: Galaxy Games combines science fiction with sports in a fun and exciting way. I wanted to put a team of kids into the biggest game I could imagine, and there was no way to make that happen by staying on Earth. The events of the first book involve first contact with aliens and all the repercussions for the entire human race. There's a lot in there for a kid to like and to think about.

SIMON: Sports are always popular in books, and it's one of the first areas where kids learn about competing, trying your best, and the thrill of winning. And, of course, the crushing sense of defeat. Gotta keep things real! Plus everyone loves the underdog who pulls through against the odds.

GREG: Very true. And there's always a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

SIMON: You just described Hal Spacejock. (Originally Hal Junior was supposed to be Hal Spacejock as a 10-year-old, but that idea went out the window when a beta reader said Junior was way smarter than the adult he was supposed to grow into! I toyed with the idea of a dumb-down ray, but in the end I made Hal Jnr a new character.

GREG: Kids like reading about smart kids, or at least kids who can outsmart adults.

SIMON: I saw that in a boy's review for Hal Junior. He loved the fact Hal Jnr was smart but didn't have any interest in doing his homework, and he could get around Teacher & his parents when he tried. Not the best role model, but it's fiction! Of course, teachers haven't seen my insulting pic of them in the book yet ... there's a gruesome face with Teacher crossed out and Space Monster written underneath ;-) The sort of thing we all used to draw in our exercise books.

GREG: Kids love reading about kids who can bend the rules, or have the rules not apply to them. And when I say, "Kids love this or that," what I really mean is that I loved that stuff when I was a young reader. I assume kids today still do.

SIMON: That gets back to my childhood in Spain in the 70's. We had rules, but we also had a ton of freedom. E.g.I nearly got run down by a police car when I was riding a moped (no license or helmet), and when he pulled me over I pretended I didn't understand a word of Spanish. He shrugged and let me off.

GREG: Sounds like a wild way to grow up. I'm jealous.

GREG: Do you do your own artwork?

SIMON: Not important stuff like the cover! Internal art ... there's a story behind that. There are three very good artists in my immediate family, but I didn't want to ask them to draw a bunch of art when I was still shopping the novel around.

So, I did rough pencil sketches to keep myself busy. Then, when I made the decision to self-publish, I had a very short timeframe to get all the art done. I wanted one illustration per chapter (about 25 all up), and every one of my family members was already flat out.

I took the sketches, loaded them into Corel Draw and traced them manually with vectors. Then I smoothed them out, added detail, and figured they'd actually come out okay.

Ended up with 42 illustrations - a nice sfnal number!

GREG: Very cool. I did something similar with my first book, THE PENGUINS OF DOOM. I had included some doodles with my manuscript to give the publisher an idea of what she might get a real artist to do--but instead, she liked my style of art for the book. I'm very happy that someone else did the art for Galaxy Games, though.

SIMON: Yes, pro art is always a good idea. The cover artist for Hal Junior also did the covers for Hal Spacejock (commissioned by my publisher.) Cover art is one area where authors should definitely leave it to the pros!

GREG: Now I was very interested that you're self-publishing the Hal Jr. series, spinning it off from what had been a traditionally-published series. It seems like more and more authors are going that route.

SIMON: Yes, I've been running a series of blog posts about the process. I did self-publish way back in 2001, but that was too soon and I was more than pleased to get picked up by a traditional publisher. It was a great learning experience and I made a lot of industry contacts which are now proving vital. E.g. bookstore owners, librarians, distributors, reviewers ... many would think twice before taking on a self-pubbed book, if they showed any interest at all, but in my case they already know I've been fairly successful with the Hal Spacejock books.

SIMON: The same thing is being repeated all over the planet. Authors are seeing their existing series cancelled because bookstores won't order in the earlier books, and they're asking themselves if this is the best way to bring their work to the public.

GREG: Was it hard to act as publisher and author for the same work? It would seem like two very different hats to wear.

SIMON: Sure, but my background is small business, wholesale, marketing ... Once the artistic side is done I put on my three piece suit and grow a ponytail and start running things up the flagpole to see who salutes.

SIMON: One of the reasons I decided to self-publish is because I get over 120,000 visitors per month to my various websites, mostly to grab copies of all my free software (e.g. yWriter) or read my articles on publishing and writing a novel. (A lot of my articles are the #1 search result on Google these days.) The traffic keeps growing and I can easily include a cover in the sidebar ...

GREG: Very impressive! It certainly helps to have a platform.

SIMON: On the other hand they're mostly interested in writing and/or software, perhaps not MG science fiction. It can't hurt to get the name out there though.

GREG: I think a lot of adults who enjoy science fiction are looking for gateway books to get their children into the genre, so they can share their common interest. I think these books are something that can be cross-generational.

SIMON: Yes, that's how I approached the Spacejock publisher with Hal Junior. I told them it was a way to revitalise the adult series ... get kids interested with Hal Junior, and when they're a couple of years older they're shoe-ins for the Hal Spacejock books.

SIMON: Unfortunately the Spacejock publisher didn't bite. Scratch that - I was actually quite pleased they didn't because I was already wondering why I was approaching publishers with my new series when I could go it alone.

Two months after sending out my queries, I wrote back to each publisher asking them to delete my submissions.

GREG: Did you use a professional editor or did you self-edit?

SIMON: Definitely used a professional, but only after months of self-editing. I'm a perfectionist, and I fret over every word of every sentence, often going through 20+ printed drafts. (I have stacks of hand-edited manuscripts to prove it.) When I start changing sentences back I know it's time to get professional help. (And hire an editor.)

GREG: I knew we had a lot in common!

SIMON: You too huh?

GREG: If it were up to me, I'd never finish. I enjoy revision almost too much.

SIMON: When I read a sentence it's not just words, meaning and humo(u)r. It also has to have the right rhythm. (That sentence doesn't. Let me try again.) It must also have the right cadence. (Bit Better).

I have a sing-song version of the text going through my mind while I'm writing, and I reinforce it when I edit.

GREG: There are a lot of elements that have to be right. Characters, language, humor, style--and in science fiction, the science has to be right as well.

SIMON: Yes, although I'm not a scientist which makes writing adult SF a bit harder. (Computer scientist, yes. That's not relevant!) I use a fair bit of hand-waving, and my characters aren't scientists either so why would they discuss how a hyperdrive works? I avoid writing about noises in space, and I've researched how an explosion in space evolves from the initial bang. No shockwave, but particles fly forever. Fascinating! Very intense, very quick flash.

GREG: Lots of cool stuff when you look into it. I find it helps to have an interest in science and the ability to do at least some cursory research on a lay person level.

SIMON: (As a kid I played with fireworks all the time.)

SIMON: BTW what's your own background?

GREG: I read science fiction and fantasy as a kid, wrote it in college, kept writing it in law school. It's what I've always wanted to do, really, but I knew it wouldn't be much of a day job.

SIMON: That's for sure. During school visits I sometimes talk about the life of an author, and by the time I've finished there's usually one holdout who still wants to be a writer while the rest want to be police officers, stock brokers, teachers, you - name - it.

GREG: I've heard a theory once that we have about one storyteller for about every thirty people because that's how we evolved--thirty people in a tribe, sitting around a fire, listening to one voice.

SIMON: Interesting - I hadn't heard that one before! Coincidentally it works out one per classroom, which is about right.

GREG: We should probably wrap up the chat. Any other topics you want to hit on our way out?

SIMON: I think we've covered most things. Maybe people can ask questions in the comments and one or the other of us can answer there?

GREG: Sounds good. This was fun.

SIMON: Yes, thanks for the chat!

And here's your all-important puzzle piece for the Galaxy Games blog tour competition:

Guest post & giveaway offer

2011-10-08T12:35:00.000+08:00

If you have a blog and you'd like me to do a guest post or an interview, let me know. Writing a novel, writing for kids, publishing, author visits, NaNoWriMo, yWriter (my novel writing software) ... or give me a topic! I respond pretty quickly, and as a bonus I can offer a free copy* of Hal Junior: The Secret Signal to your blog readers. (I'll leave it to you to pick the winner, but see below for the conditions.)

Giveaway conditions:
* I can post books within Australia easily enough, but due to postage costs overseas copies will be gifted via Amazon. That means the giveaway will need to go to a reader(s) with an Amazon account and a US or UK delivery address, and they'll need to add the book to their wishlist. For everyone else I'm happy to supply Hal Junior in epub/mobi/PDF format.

My thoughts on mainstream publishing

2011-10-07T09:26:00.000+08:00

Just because I chose to self-publish Hal Junior doesn't mean I think traditional publishing is broken. If you're writing in a genre with a big potential audience - Fantasy or Paranormal for example - then I don't see the point of going it alone when persistence and talent may eventually secure a contract with a decent trade publisher.

What I'm trying to say is this: If you've always dreamt of selling your work to a big publisher and working with their team to make your novel a success, don't give up on that dream just because some authors are finding success with ebooks and self-pub. The two are not mutually exclusive, and in fact the more published authors abandon ship for the lure of self-publishing, the more new authors those big publishing houses are going to need. But you probably realised that already.

Okay, that works for popular genres, but what happens to oddball novels? Crossovers, niche titles, anything which doesn't fit into a marketing category? If you've hunted high and low but can't find any recent titles similar to yours, there's a good chance you're writing for a smaller audience. Let's say, oh I don't know, maybe science fiction comedy. Or middle-grade science fiction, for that matter.

One suggestion, put to me more than once over the years, was that I abandon my scifi comedy series and write something people would buy ... like Fantasy or Paranormal. Nuts to that! Why on earth would I force myself to write in a genre which I don't even read? Do you want to know what happens when I try to write epic fantasy? See my short story, The Desolator (originally published in Andromeda Spaceways #6).

When switching genres is out of the question, and big publishers aren't interested in your chosen genre, what do you do? You could spend ten or fifteen years on the submission/rejection merry-go-round, or you could self-publish and prove the market exists.

In the meantime, keep writing new novels.

Recent guest posts

2011-10-05T08:46:00.000+08:00

Apart from being a lot of fun (who doesn't enjoy their moment on the soapbox?), writing guest posts is an effective way to reach new people. I've been busy answering interview questions and writing posts on topics close to my heart.

If you have a favourite topic, seek out blogs on the same subject and offer them a guest post. The worst that can happen is they say no. There are plenty of upsides though, for both guest and host. They get free content and extra traffic, and you get a bit of publicity. It's just like one of those symbiotic relationships we had to study in biology.

Some of my recent appearances:

I have a guest post on SFsignal.com : Where's all the junior science fiction?

Yesterday I had a guest post on the Boomerang Books website (George Ivanoff's blog) on the importance of editing for self-published writers.

And a week or so back I had a guest post on the Kids Book Review website which explains why I switched from adult to junior fiction.

Several more to come ... stay tuned!

The Challengers blog tour

2011-10-01T07:57:00.000+08:00

Celebrate the release of The Challengers by Greg R. Fishbone! This is the first book of the Galaxy Games series (Lee & Low Books). In this hilarious middle-grade romp through space, eleven-year-old Tyler Sato leads a team of kids representing all of Earth in a sports tournament against alien kids from across the galaxy.

Book Info

Series: Galaxy Games
Title: The Challengers
Hardcover ISBN: 978-60060-660-1
Author: Greg R. Fishbone
Illustrator: Ethen Beavers
Publisher: Tu Books / Lee & Low Books
Ages: 9-12

The Challengers is available now from online and offline booksellers and as an ebook.

Great Galactic Blog Tour
Join Greg during the month of October for the Great Galactic Blog Tour! Every day for 31 days, Greg will spotlight a different children's literature blog with book giveaways, author interviews, in-character interviews, excerpts, deleted scenes, and more. Happening right now is the Launch Day Giveaway. There are lots of ways to enter!

Puzzle Piece #1
The site of the day will also feature one of 31 "puzzle pieces" that will lead one reader to a grand prize. Here is the first piece in the contest:

Calling indie bookstores

2011-09-30T16:43:00.000+08:00

Hal Junior: The Secret Signal is launching this weekend. (Conflux 7, Sunday 2nd October, during the lunch break. It's Mary Victoria's book launch but she graciously offered to share.)

The book is already available through various online sellers, but I'm keen to get it into Aussie bookstores. In this country science fiction has played second fiddle to wizards and vampires for years now, and the phrase 'Australian junior science fiction' brings up as many results as a land title search on Jupiter.

My plan has been to approach Aussie independents and franchise chain stores via Facebook, Twitter and the good old postal service, telling them about my new book and pointing out the lack of competition. So far the response has been great, and it's certainly been keeping me busy.

Hal Junior will be distributed by a number of companies including Dennis Jones & Associates and James Bennett. Unfortunately none of these distributors have the book on their lists yet, and if asked they probably won't know a thing about it. (Their reps concentrate on releases by major publishers, and Hal Junior is a low-profile indie release. Plus it can take 4-6 weeks for a new title to propagate.)

So, until the ISBN is recognised by their system I'll just fill orders myself. Not something you have to bother with when you sign to a major publisher, but who didn't like playing shop as a child? ;-)

My long-term goal is not to ship more Hal Junior books, it's about writing and releasing book two. (Roll on NaNoWriMo 2011!) All my current efforts involve trying to build enough momentum so the first book will roll along on its own. Fingers crossed!

DIY publicity

2011-09-26T09:33:00.000+08:00

All authors, whether trade- or self-pubbed, have to shoulder some of the publicity burden. How much you take on depends on the state of your finances, the amount of spare time you can scrape up, and also relies to some extent on your goals.

For example, if your book has a tight focus on a particular group (say, F1 enthusiasts) there's little point spamming writing groups up and down the internet. You'd be better off joining motor racing forums and joining in discussions, ensuring you have a carefully-crafted signature line.

I've looked at a bunch of different publicity options, including:

Goodreads advertising
Google adwords
BookRooster reviews service
Sending out review copies
Blogging & author website updates
Approaching local stores
Offering guest blogs
Goodreads giveaways (print copies only)
Librarything Member giveaways (print or ebook)
Widgets and bookmarks
... and many more.

Why so many different places? Because most people don't pay any attention the first couple of times they see something mentioned, and you need those fleeting glimpses to add up over time. When it seems everyone is talking about a particular book, everyone DOES start talking about a particular book. We're odd like that.

So, what have I found? Straight-out advertising is the easiest way to get your book mentioned, but people know you (or your publisher) are paying for the privilege, so it's low on credibility.

The BookRooster service is an interesting one. There's a misconception that you're 'buying' positive reviews, but that's not the case. You pay your money, send in an epub copy of your work, and BookRooster makes it available to their members, all of whom have volunteered to read and review books. Your book is offered until it garners ten reviews, and BookRooster reviewers are instructed to post genuine, honest reviews.You might get ten one-star reviews, ten five-star, or (most likely) a mix. I've given it a shot with Hal Junior, and I'll let you know how it goes.

Sending out review copies can be time-consuming and expensive. Unless you're posting to the majors, you'll need to contact potential reviewers, offer your book, and wait for a response (and a mailing address). I contacted two or three dozen, after carefully checking their review policies to ensure my book was a match for their site. Only one third responded, although most of those agreed to receive a review copy.

Blogging about your book and posting updates to your website are good ideas, in theory, but if you don't have many visitors you're talking to an empty room. It's worth having an effective landing page for your book, with buy links, a cover shot and so on. Your blog will also receive visitors when people occasionally follow you back from other sites where you've left comments.

Approaching local stores is something all authors should do, whether trade- or self-published. There's nothing like hand-selling to drive your sales, and for self-pubbed authors it's handy to have a store where you can send buyers. (I rarely sell my own books. It's better to give the sale to a store.)

Offering guest blogs is an effective way to gain exposure. I've been blogging about the dearth of junior science fiction, the reasons I chose to self-publish my new series, the importance of editing and pro cover art with self-pubbed books, and so on.

I mentioned widgets and bookmarks, and in the past I've been known to commission all kinds of weird items to promote my books. In the end, though, I've decided that the best advert for your book is ... your book.

Yes, finally we come to the giveaways. When I was promoting my Hal Spacejock books a few years ago neither Goodreads or LT offered member giveaways, although Hal 4 was included in one of the very early LT Early Readers promos. It takes five minutes to set up a giveaway, and you can offer any number of books targeted to specific countries. LT Members Giveaway even allows you to offer ebook editions, which is basically free promotion.

Back in the day I used to offer signed copies of Hal Spacejock via my website, carefully collecting email addresses and mailing out lists of winners every month. LT and Goodreads have reduced this to a much simpler system, and Goodreads even selects the 'winners' based on whether they have similar titles in their libraries. Plus, the fact these winners are present on GR and LT increases your chances of a review.

To summarise this post, there are many ways to spend money trying to promote a novel. It's possible every dollar spent on promoting fiction is a total waste of money, but I like to play the long game. For example, I'm planning at least five books in the Hal Junior series, so raising awareness of the first should pay back later, when future titles are released and wavering buyers can see a bunch of reviews for the earlier books.

It's all coming together

2011-09-25T10:59:00.000+08:00

After months of hard work by a whole bunch of people (thanks Dion, Satima, Pauline and many others!) I was very proud to get the first author copies of Hal Junior: The Secret Signal on Friday. There's nothing like holding your own book, opening a page at random and seeing your own words in print ... especially when many of them are spelt correctly.

I took some happy snaps only to discover I'd lost the thingy which downloads data from my camera. (The USB port broke earlier this year so I use a card reader instead. Which I've lost. Where's Clunk when you need him?)

The first batch of books vanished quicker than a 2kg tub of icecream in the hands of my kids, sent off to reviewers and goodreads giveaway winners. (Hopefully I sent the books and not the icecream.)

After holding a copy of your own work, the next buzz comes from seeing it listed online, available for sale. Amazon and B&N are already selling copies, and it's only a matter of time before Book Depository and various Aussie bookstores list Hal Junior as well. (For the impatient, I've put up an order page for signed copies.)

The third buzz comes from reviews - at least, the favourable ones. You can't appeal to every reader, so all you can do is write the best book possible and hope it reaches the people who will enjoy it the most. There's a mix of anticipation and dread while awaiting early reviews. Were the first readers too gentle? Have I missed a gaping plot hole. Fear not! Reviewers will soon tell me.

The final buzz comes from realising my work is done. The Secret Signal is out there, sink or swim, and after a couple of weeks obsessively googling every mention of the book I'll be able to let go and move on to my next task. Hal Spacejock 5!

Why the price difference?

2011-09-23T17:18:00.000+08:00

If you look at the back cover of Hal Junior, or search out the various catalogue pages on the web, you'll discover a discrepancy in the price. The UK price is 5.99, the US price is $6.99 and the Australian price is ... $16.95. Woah! I thought we were at parity with the USD?

A small part of the difference can be explained by the higher printing costs in Australia. (Australian minimum wages and commercial rents are much higher than the US.)

The other issue is distribution. In Australia, stores, schools and libraries usually buy from distributors at 40% off the cover price. Distributors buy from the publisher at 55% off the cover price. So, a shop pays $10.17 for a $16.95 book, including about $1 GST. The distributor pays $7.62 including about 70c GST. In each case the difference is their gross profit.

Take the GST off the 55% discount price and you come back to $6.90 or so, which is the US retail price. Given printing in Australia costs almost twice as much, you can see that authors make less selling a book for $16.95 in Australia than they do selling the same title for $6.99 in the US!

You may ask yourself why Australian shops don't buy direct from publishers. Some do, but for accounting and transport reasons it's easier to buy from two or three sources. (This is a HUGE country with a tiny population of 20-odd million.) It's not just books either ... this system applies to most products in Australia.

Okay, so what if authors sell their books direct to the public? They could sell them for $9.95 and make more than they would selling at $16.95 via a shop!

Nice idea, but distributors and shops aren't going to carry and promote a book if authors undercut them by a huge margin. (When I signed a contract for my previous series there was a clause forbidding me from selling copies myself.)

Plus I'm supposed to be writing books, not packing and mailing them.

So what's the solution? One is to go out and invent a teleporter, so books can be moved around the vast Australian continent quickly and cheaply. A slightly less complicated answer is to keep the price at $16.95 but offer free postage. (Alas, postage in Australia is expensive too.)

It's not an ideal situation, and you can see why online shopping has caught on in Australia in such a huge way. You can't open a newspaper without seeing an article on the suffering of retailers, or the enormous rise in parcels handled by Australia Post.

I hope that goes some way towards explaining the price discrepancy. I don't like it either, but I have to work within the same system.

Junior fiction ebooks. Is there a market?

2011-09-08T10:26:00.000+08:00

I've thought about this one quite a bit over the past few months. Teens have their smartphones, many of which can be used with the Kindle software, but what about younger readers?

My instinct (and some very cursory market research) says no. Most parents are unwilling to place a dedicated $150-$200 e-reading device into the hands of their children, not when a $10-$15 paperback is almost bulletproof by comparison. (I don't mean all kids are careless or clumsy, but accidents happen and the humble school bag tends to be a concrete mixer and compactor all in one.)

I think Pottermore will change this up a bit, but it depends how much the HP ebooks sell for. (I've heard people saying 'who's going to buy the ebook when they already have a print copy?' ... um, do you know how many NEW kids there are each year? It's an endless market.)

But that's beside the point. There's one very good reason to offer middle-grade books in cheap ebook formats: parents. They can read a preview (or buy the whole ebook), and order the paperback if they think it's suitable for their kids or grandkids. Think of it as e-browsing.

There's another reason too: Many adults enjoy teen or middle-grade fiction, but wouldn't be seen dead reading them in public. Stick them on the Kindle, and who's to know?

Sample or no sample?

2011-09-07T18:17:00.000+08:00

No matter how beautiful the cover, nor how compelling the blurb, if the first chapter doesn't resonate with the reader they're not going to buy the book.* If it's a typo-strewn train wreck they're even less likely to shell out for a copy.**

Having said that, there are compelling reasons to post a sample:

If people read the sample and can't stand it, they're unlikely to hunt down every online listing and leave scathing reviews. Now imagine they shelled out 5, 10 or 20 bucks on an ebook or paperback, sight unseen.

If they read the sample and enjoy it, you've probably made a sale.

A poor cover and/or title can give people the wrong impression. If they get past those and read the first chapter, you've been given a second chance to impress.

Same with a wonky blurb. If it makes the novel sound like something it isn't, a sample chapter or two can undo the damage.

So how much of a sample should you post? Enough to give them an idea, not so much that they're wondering when it's going to end. (Especially if the sample has to be read on a computer screen.) I think two or three chapters is plenty.

So what prompted my thoughts on sample chapters? I've just been tussling with this very subject, that's what. I've been thinking to myself, "If I've written a lousy book I'll just try and sell it on the cover art, the blurb and the press release." I've also been thinking "What if the emperor has no clothes? If I upload a sample and everyone thinks it's crap, I'll be a laughing stock. And nude!"

Sooner or later you have to take the risk: Here are the first two chapters of Hal Junior: The Secret Signal.

And relax, I'll make sure I'm wearing my space jocks.

* Unless it's a gift for someone else.

** Unless it's a gift for someone they don't like.

Hal Junior: The Secret Signal now available (Kindle/epub/PDF)

2011-09-06T14:43:00.001+08:00

Hal Junior is now available in various ebook formats (All $4.99):

On Amazon Kindle: US, UK and DE.

If you prefer epub or PDF with your mobi file, you can get all three directly from my site.

Enjoy!

PS Paperback soon. Official release isn't until October 1 so consider this a sneak preview ...

Tying it all together (IPJA)

2011-09-04T14:16:00.001+08:00

I've been going back and forth between the Bowkerlink and LightningSource web sites for a few days now.

Bowkerlink is where you register your title, linking it with the pre-purchased ISBN and specifying publication info for the books in print database. (Category, page count, cover image, type of book, retail price, etc.)

On the other hand, LSI is where you upload your cover and text files. And set the retail price, discount, etc.

All this overlap is making my brain hurt. For example, both sites allow you to specify the retail price and discount, but there's no info explaining which takes precedence.

Does LSI feed their data to Bowker, or do you have to manually add LSI as the distributor on Bowkerlink? No idea!

I'm not the first person facing this confusion, but searching the web hasn't turned up much. I found a book on Amazon covering the topic, but it's only available as a print title and by the time it arrives I'll be well past my deadline.

Tomorrow I'll probably give in and email customer support at LSI, but I really prefer to figure these things out for myself.

Indie- or self-pub?

2011-09-03T08:22:00.001+08:00

There's some confusion over these terms. Indie publishing sounds cool, whereas self-pub has a stigma going back years. It's no surprise many self-pubbed authors are calling themselves indie published.

I resisted at first because self-pub is what I've always called it. You're publishing your own work. Nobody else is doing it for you.

Then I saw a post which brough up a good point: is it self-pub when you pay for cover art, editing, proofing and layout? Those people are doing a professional job, and it seems a bit odd for the author to claim their work under the 'self-pub' banner.

There's another point of view as well. If you set up your own imprint, purchase a block of ISBNs and go into business, this entity is still technically a publisher even if it only exists to publish your own work. Bowker and Lightning Source certainly think I am.

That's the stage I'm at now: I have my own imprint and I hired pros to get my book ready. I should probably stop calling it 'self-published' and start calling it 'indie-published' instead.

Cover art for Hal Junior: The Secret Signal

2011-09-01T20:14:00.000+08:00

Cover art time! I reckon Dion Hamill did a fantastic job with this.

New book: Marketing for AUTHORS

2011-09-01T15:16:00.000+08:00

I have a guest spot (case study) in a new Kindle book: Marketing For Authors

Quote:

"How will you get the 10,000 customers? How will you get to number one on Amazon? And how on earth will you clear your spare room of all that stock? The answer is with carefully planned marketing campaigns, a healthy dose of legwork, and a commitment to years of shameless self-promotion. While it's not always easy, this guide gives your shortcuts and tools that will save you years and tears."

It's a little known fact that it's up to authors to market themselves and their books. Whether you are published via a mainstream publishing house, self-published or even working your way through your first manuscript, this workshop is essential for every author who wishes to forward-plan for prosperity.

Anita Revel and written and published 17 books, including marketing guides for various industries. Based on her own experience, the advice in this workshop will help you plan your way to more sales with minimum fuss.

I just bought my copy. Go check it out!

Behaving yourself on forums: a guide for self-published authors

2011-09-01T07:03:00.000+08:00

The other day I was browsing Kindleboards and I came across a discussion about BMBs. (Buy My Book posts, the scourge of internet discussion forums.)

Someone asked why BMBs were so annoying to forum regulars, and I posted the following:

A forum is like a semi-private party. You can wander in and pick up the threads of various conversations before joining in with your own intelligent observations, or

YOU CAN MARCH IN WEARING SANDWICH BOARDS WITH A MEGAPHONE IN ONE HAND AND A COPY OF YOUR BOOK IN THE OTHER.

Now guess why the other people at the party get annoyed.

Because of this behaviour many forums now have separate 'author threads', and regulars flag any BMBs outside this area. It's like ants in the kitchen: when you see one of the little blighters nosing around you know a thousand more are on the way. Every ant must go! Outside in the garden they can do what they like, but inside the house they're a pest to be exterminated.

If you take one thing from this post let it be this: don't be an ant in the kitchen. Don't carry your megaphone and sandwich board into private parties. Don't lose your message under ludicrous metaphors.

Boot camp for self-published authors

2011-08-31T14:00:00.000+08:00

What if I could tell you about a secret society which can open doors for you? Give your books a leg-up in the competitive bookselling trade?

Actually, it's not a society and it's not even secret, but it is damned hard to get in. I'm talking about trade publishing.

These days there are quite a few self-pubbed authors who have never been within a hundred miles of a publishing contract. I found one today, quite by accident, when I was going through the latest catalogue from my local bookstore. Something caught my eye and I went off to google the author. Turns out it was self-pubbed on Amazon and has now been picked up by major publishers around the world. (And all credit to the author for their success.)

There are also plenty of self- and indie-published authors who started out with trade publishers but - for whatever reason - are no longer with them. It doesn't matter what their current status is, indie or trade published, what matters is that having been trade published is like having a backstage pass.

An example: I approached a distributor who supplies local schools. As a self-pubbed author they might have considered my book, assuming it was available through their regular distributors, but chances are they'd have said no. On the other hand, I'm a previously-trade-published author who has - in the past - been invited to speak about my work at several of their functions. They've had my work on their shelves for years. As far as they're concerned I'm the same author with a new publisher.

That's just one example. Libraries, bookstores, all the schools I've visited (hundreds of which have my books in their libraries) ... each contact I've made as a trade-published author is ten times more important now I'm self-published.

Plenty of authors are now urging new writers to skip the rejection merry-go-round and build their careers via ebooks. We know it can work because we've all seen the success stories. All I'm saying is, if you're not a fantastic marketer and you'd rather write novels than sell them, consider going through 3 or 4 years of writer boot camp: that's agent hunting, querying, and hopefully trade publishing.

Who knows, with so many writers turning to self-publishing, maybe it's a little easier to get published now than it has been for some time?

Bringing people to your site

2011-08-30T10:39:00.000+08:00

One way is to write a really great book, so everyone talks about it and you don't have to do a minute of self-promo for the rest of your life.

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

Spamming will only get you a bad name. Hitting your facebook friends and twitter followers with the same BMB posts over and over again will drive them away. Littering forums with Kindle links and snips from reviews posted by your best buddies is bad, very bad. Advertising fiction doesn't really work. CC'ing press releases to everyone you've ever received an email from is not good. So what does work?

Having more than one offering - that's good. Genuine reviews on amazon & smashwords are useful, but they won't help people to find your work in the first place. Blog reviews are great, as mentioned in previous posts. An effective website is good too - a cover shot, a synopsis, your bio, a press page with a downloadable press release, a sample ... all of these things help. A blog can be good, but it if you write about publishing and being an author, most of your readers will be writers (hi writers!) many of whom aren't interested in your genre or your novels. Fact of life.

A giveaway, posted to your website and linked from facebook and twitter - that can be effective. Free ebook copies on request. Desktop wallpaper featuring a design linked to your novel's cover art (clear this with the artist first, and provide several sizes.)

These are just some ideas. I've been posting articles on writing and publishing to my site for the past seven or eight years, and my website is the top result in many, many google searches. When I put up the page for Hal Junior, my new science fiction novel for kids, it went straight to number one for various searches (mostly Google Australia, but I'll take that ...)

When an aussie parent, teacher or librarian goes to Google and types in junior science fiction, then clicks 'pages from Australia', my yet-to-be-released novel is the very first hit. What's that worth in publicity terms? Even on google.co.uk it's top of page 2, and it's the first actual book after several links to publisher and review sites.

It's taken years for me to generate the traffic and inbound links to achieve this, and who knows whether it's going to be useful long-term? I'm just pointing out that if your website provides things people are interested in, rather than being just a sales page for your novel, they will share the link and send others to have a look.

And on that note, have you seen the weekly science fiction comedy web comic featuring Hal Spacejock? It's only been out four days and it's already #10 in the google search results ...

Getting reviews: self-published authors

2011-08-29T12:36:00.000+08:00

Ah, the biggie. "Yes I could self-publish, but how will I get my name out there? Who's going to buy a book from an unknown author?"

First, make sure the writing, editing and cover are top notch. If you want to compete with the majors your product has to be in the same league. I don't mean it has to be the most beautiful literary creation in the history of the universe, just that it needs to look professional. When you flip through the pages and examine the back cover, it should be close to something you'd see in a bookstore.

Okay, it's professional. How do you get people to buy it? Reviews, reviews, reviews. Word of mouth. More reviews.

You can approach major review sites, but they're unlikely to review self-pubbed books. Personally I'd concentrate on bloggers. There are lots out there, and as long as you read their review policies and act like a professional (there's that word again), you'll be fine. Many will post reviews to their blog, Amazon, Goodreads, Shelfari, LibraryThing and others. Every one of these multiplies your exposure. Many will allow you to quote snippets from their reviews, properly attributed, which is gold when you're trying to convince people your book is worth reading.

If they only accept paperbacks, don't try and talk them into ebooks. If they only accept ebooks, don't try and post them paperbacks. If they accept either, ask which they prefer. This is all common sense but you'd be amazed how many people think they're the exception. (What if you've published an ebook and your chosen reviewer doesn't accept them? Find another who does!)

I wrote a query letter which explained who I was and what I'd published in the past. I told them why I was excited about my new book and asked whether they'd care for a review copy. Then I thanked them for their time, attached a press release (optional) and hit send. (A word of warning: one reviewer wrote a brief reply with a link to her reviewer policy, reminding me she didn't accept e-copies. She hadn't realised the attachment was a press release, not my novel. In future I wouldn't attach anything.)

Wherever possible I start my email with their name, as long as I can find it, and if there was anything relevant to my novel in their contact page I'll mention it. For example, someone mentioned they loved Middle Grade science fiction and couldn't get enough of it. I altered my email for that reviewer so SF and MG were right there in the very first sentence.

Remember you're not fighting a battle here. If they don't want self-pub books, don't try and convince them otherwise. Some self-pub authors are combative, resentful, insecure and overly protective of their work, and your chosen reviewer has probably had to deal with all of those responses and more. Be professional, and know when to move on.

Other bloggers say they will only review books they enjoy. Cherish these people! If your novel isn't up to scratch, it's better to be widely ignored than tagged with one- or two- star reviews all over the internet. By the same token, don't send follow-up emails asking when they're going to review your book. They're not getting paid to review it. They owe you nothing.

Lastly, how do you find reviewers? I picked a novel in the same genre and searched on the title, the author, and the word 'review'. Google allows you to search blogs instead of websites, and there you go. Don't pick a really famous author because that'll return thousands of hits, many of them one-off reviews by fans.

So, that's my review plan laid out for all to see. If anyone has any feedback or comments, let me know! (If you don't have blogger I'm also on Facebook and Google+, or you can email me.)

Remember: reviewers are a precious resource. Don't annoy them, because they have even longer memories than authors do ;-)

Another way to increase your audience (SPJA)

2011-08-28T12:53:00.001+08:00

Years ago, before Kindles and Nooks were even lines on a trademark application form, I was eager to make a name for myself. Like many in those days I turned to short fiction, which allowed me to experiment with different styles and genres without dedicating a year or more to each project.

I started about a hundred short stories, finished about a dozen and sold maybe six. Over the years, as I battled with obscurity, my wife would suggest tidying up and publishing more of these stories. I was focused on novels and didn't listen. (She also told me again and again that I should be writing children's fiction. One of these days I'll ask her to sign me as a client, because she's a much better career advisor than anyone else I know!)

Anyway, JA Konrath agrees with her: To build a presence you need a fan base, and if you're only writing novels it's way too long between drinks. Short fiction, assuming you're any good at the form, allows you to tickle your average reader like a trout, keeping them busy while you reach for the net. (Sorry readers. I don't really believe you're fishy.)

On the other hand, spamming forums and blogs with BMBs (Buy My Book! posts) is like chucking dynamite in the river. A few readers may float to the surface, dazed and disoriented, but they're not going to be long term fans.

Before you embark on a short fiction writing spree I recommend reading up on the form. Short stories should be self-contained, not just a chapter from the middle of a WIP. That means beginning, middle and end ... with the end the most important. They often focus on one character, one plot idea, one climax.

(I'm not trying to teach experienced short story writers how to go about their business here - just giving pointers.)

It can be harder to write an effective short story than a novel. Not in terms of effort or amount of work, it's just that you have a lot of room to move in a novel. You can spend whole paragraphs and chapters on background information and flashbacks, detailed characterisations and so on. In a short story you do the opposite: economical and sparse. Get in, entertain, get out.

So, I've taken all the advice (Konrath's AND my wife's) and started writing short fiction again. After years writing scenes and vignettes featuring Hal and Clunk, without really knowing what to do with them, I'm finally in a position to capitalise on all that hard work.

Recently I released my first ever Hal Spacejock short story (science fiction comedy), putting it on Kindle, Smashwords and my own site. I'll be writing more, and when I have enough I'll release them as a collection, maybe even in print. It's all good marketing, but more importantly I'm really enjoying the process.

Blog tours

2011-08-28T07:56:00.000+08:00

Opinion is divided on blog tours, but I think the change of scenery can freshup up a blog. I'll be hosting Greg R. Fishbone next month, and I've agreed to appear on a couple of other blogs myself.

If you have a blog and would like me to drop by with a guest post, feel free to contact me. October would be good, what with my upcoming release and all ;-)

Dares and Deadlines

2011-08-27T12:10:00.001+08:00

I can be an impetuous fellow at times. Right in the middle of editing Hal Junior and writing Hal book 5, I opened up the unfinished Hal Spacejock short story I wrote a couple of weeks ago. (Back then I was waiting to hear about the reversion of my rights to the series and was at a loose end.)

JA Konrath talks about the need to branch out and make more fiction available, and I agree. I've put a handful of shorts on Amazon and Smashwords but they're older things which were previously published in magazines. I've never sat down to write something for e-publication.

Anyway, this short story was 6000 words and the last two paragraphs were a bunch of ideas for the ending. I got a few chuckles out of it, but I knew it needed another 2000 words and I also knew I didn't have the time right now. Then I mentioned it on Facebook and a couple of people suggested I get on with it.

That's where the dare comes in: I rashly promised to write the missing ending, polish it and upload it to Amazon and Smashwords by Sunday night.

It's midday Saturday and I completed the 2000 words almost an hour ago. Amazing what you can achieve with a tight deadline, isn't it? Sure, I got up at 6.30 and haven't stopped for a breather, but I've finished a short story! I think the last time I did that was 2001.

I've just bashed a rough cover into shape and added all the publication details to my yWriter project, and I'm about to run off a printed copy and take it somewhere quiet with a red pen and a cup of coffee. Two passes ought to be enough, and it looks like I'll be able to share it in plenty of time.

I reckon a 99c price point is just right for a short story, and who knows - if this proves popular there could be more.

Update: Now available on Smashwords, Amazon (also UK & DE) and my own website

Why my release date is October 2011

2011-08-26T09:46:00.003+08:00

Because Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is coming out in November.

SPJA - Yes, but what's your message?

2011-08-25T14:51:00.000+08:00

When I was a kid, books were funny, adventurous, scary and entertaining. Kids got in trouble, dug themselves out of trouble, looked out for each other and basically enjoyed life. There were home-made catapults, risky behaviour, maybe a bit of aggro but it all worked out in the end.

I'm sure there are many new books which follow the same pattern, but boy are there lots of books with a Message. I don't mean subliminal, either - it's right there in the sales blurb so parents can collect the whole set: Social issues, hot topics, environmental messages ... let's wrap it in a plot and pitch it.

If kids' novels need a message to succeed then I'm in trouble, because the only message in Hal Junior is 'what's for lunch?'

SPJA - Keeping track of everything

2011-08-24T08:32:00.000+08:00

Right at this moment I'm in the middle of preparing Hal Junior for print and ebook release. Polishing the text is straightforward, and arranging the cover art involves a few emails and discussions. It's all the other publisher hats which can get overwhelming.

From the start I've been using Freemind, as per an earlier blog post. I set up nodes for various tasks (publicity) then sub-nodes (reviewers), then sub-sub nodes (Australia, UK, USA, etc), and then under each of those I add even more nodes: to contact, awaiting reply, heard back. Under heard back I have yes and no, and finally under Yes I have their details - website, contact email, address.

I can collapse the entire publicity node by clicking it, which means you can be looking at a screen with a few simple headings one minute - ebook version, print version, publicity, advertising, cover art, website, etc - and then you start clicking and before you know it the whole page explodes into a mad spider's nightmare.

The other good thing about Freemind (apart from the 'free' part) is that you can apply icons to your nodes. I use green ticks for items I've done, but there are also crosses, smilies, etc. You can also bold a node with Ctrl+B, and Ctrl+plus and Ctrl+minus make the font bigger or smaller, making the important ones easier to spot.

It's a handy tool, and when you add hyperlinks (to websites) and local links (to open files from your PC with a click), it's a fantastic dashboard for your entire self-pub enterprise.

A letter to reviewers

2011-08-23T13:54:00.001+08:00

As you know (Bob), reviewers are swamped by self-published books and many refuse to consider them. However, times are changing and that self-published book they're dismissing out of hand might not be the unedited mess they're expecting. With that in mind, I thought I'd explain myself in a cover letter to one particular reviewer, and after I'd written the thing I decided to share.

I'm Simon Haynes, a stay-at-home dad with a love of writing.

I gave up my day job in 2005, and have been here for my two daughters as they went through upper primary and now high school*. (The eldest graduates in a couple of months ... gulp.) Over the years I've got by with my programming skills and the occasional royalty cheque. Sometimes a struggle, sometimes stressful but always a family.

Anyway ... I've had four comedy scifi novels published by Fremantle Press since 2005. They were distributed by Penguin Australia across Australia and New Zealand, and they've been moderately successful. For example, book one had three printings and a couple of the others made the shortlist for prestigious genre awards.

Since my first novel came out I've done a load of school visits to enthuse about writing, most of them for upper primary ages. Alas my books weren't really suitable for the audience, since Hal Spacejock was written for ages 15+. This changed last year, when I decided to start a new series for kids.

I had an absolute blast writing the first book, drawing on the wild things my brother and I used to get up to growing up in the south of Spain. When I'm writing, if I don't have tears of laughter running down my face I'm not doing it properly.

I talk about growing up when I do my school visits, much to teachers' horror. Fortunately the book omits my alleged experiences with home made explosives, unlicensed air rifles, overhead power lines, scavenging for neat stuff at the local tip, riding motorbikes without a helmet at fourteen (and falling off, and treating my own gravel rash) and so on and so on. How I made it to adulthood is beyond belief, but boy do I have a lot of material for future novels. I've already used plenty in the Hal Spacejock series, but somehow there's an endless reservoir.

Anyway, Hal Junior: The Secret Signal is my first kids' novel, and it'll be released in October ... but there's a bit of a twist.

It's really tough maintaining an open-ended series. No sooner would I release one Hal Spacejock book than the previous one would disappear from the shops. People weren't buying the new books because they couldn't find the first one, and it was impossible to attract new readers.

I was supposed to be writing Hal Spacejock book five instead of embarking on a whole new series, but I couldn't get motivated when I knew it would fail in the shops. Given the upheaval in the bookselling trade things began to look worse and worse, and in the end I approached my publisher for meeting. I went in there intending to ask for my electronic rights back (determined to e-publish Hal Spacejock for the US and UK markets), but they'd already decided not to proceed with book five. So .. freedom!

I fired off a few queries for my new series, then started thinking. Why go through the same demoralising process all over again? I know the Hal Spacejock cover artist personally - indeed, I suggested him to my publisher. I know two very good editors. I'm a computer programmer with 25 years experience and have oodles of small business skills. I have dozens of people willing to proofread and give me feedback along the way. My publisher calls me the one-man-marketing machine.

You can see where this is going - yes, Hal Junior is a self-published title. I'm one of the new wave of midlist authors ditching trade publishers to branch out on our own. I'm hiring the professionals who usually work on my novels and handling the business and publicity side myself. I'm also re-releasing all the Hal Spacejock novels to date in new, revised editions.

That's my story in a large nutshell. All I really wanted to ask is whether you're interested in a review copy but I'm afraid this email got out of hand. I believe Hal Junior is a very funny, very fast-moving scifi comedy for 9-12 year olds, and obviously I don't want it to languish in a digital catalogue, unread and unknown to the kids I wrote it for.

Hal Junior will be available through regular Australian trade distributors: TheNile.com.au, Emporium Books Online, Dennis Jones & Associates, ALS Library Services, James Bennett, and DA Information Services.

There are many more outlets overseas, all listed on the home page.

Hal Junior won't be stocked in bookstores but my plan is to target schools directly. I have good contacts in that area, some of them already involved in feedback for the book. If I'm right about the book, word of mouth will do the trick.

Sorry about the monster email - just trying to cover all bases!

If you're willing to take a chance on my work, please contact me for a review copy. If Hal Junior pans out I may be able to work from home long enough to see both my lovely daughters through university.

Cheers
Simon Haynes
--
Author & Programmer
Spacejock Software: FCharts, yWriter and more (www.spacejock.com)
Hal Spacejock: Think Spinal Tap, not Benny Hill (www.spacejock.com.au)
Hal Junior: My new series for kids (www.haljunior.com)

* In Australia, High School runs from year 8 to year 12 (Graduates are usually 17 or 18, although my eldest will be 16.)

SPJA - Structural Editing

2011-08-22T09:32:00.001+08:00

Editing is one of the biggies when it comes to self-published fiction, and the confusing thing is that there are many kinds of editing. Terms like proofing, editing and copyediting are sometimes used interchangeably, which doesn't help.

Deanna Hoak, a freelance copyeditor, has a blog post on Proofreading vs. Copyediting which should be required reading. (This is where I must recommend Pauline Nolet, who worked on my Hal Spacejock novels.)

When talking about editing, I'm referring to structural editing, and instead of going on and on about the subject I'll just point you to Jodi Cleghorn's blog post. (Don't you just love the labour-saving hyperlink device?)

Okay, now we're on the same page. Many self-published books need structural editing, most need copyediting, and they all need proofing.

How much you spend depends on your budget, your desire to make your book as professional as possible, and your publication schedule.

Structural editing can by provided by people you know. Just get your book into their hands, warn them it's an early draft, and ask them to point out one or more of the items from Jodi's post. The important thing is to tell them you're not asking for a pat on the back (or a raspberry). You don't have to overload your readers with a big list of things to look for - maybe split the tasks so that one person is just reporting back the most boring scenes in the book, or all the places they stopped reading and put the book down, or where they stopped reading and never got back into it.

This is why structural editing can be fraught, especially if you're precious about your work (or your relationships!) It's also why you must regard this as a first draft. I can't emphasise that enough. Tell your readers you want them to tear it apart, because this is an early version of your novel which can only improve with their help.

You'll have to convince yourself of the same thing, because if you start getting defensive and arguing with your first readers, you're sunk. We all know artistes who refuse to touch a word of their perfect prose - well, us working writers suck it up and get on with it.

By the way, you can't rewrite a novel and give it back to the original first readers. Even if they agree to read it they won't be coming at it fresh, and at best they'll skim it. Instead, give it to another set of readers. If you don't have many people to ask you can always split the book into chunks, write a brief summary of What Has Gone Before, and hand each person half a dozen chapters along with the relevant summary. Next time around, give them a different half dozen.

I always promise a signed copy of the book and I mention my first readers in the acknowledgements. (Always check with them first. Some prefer first name only, some don't want to be listed.) If you're not going for a print edition, consider a one-off ebook with a custom opening page thanking the person for their help.

That's freebies, what about a structural edit you have to pay for? I've detailed the process my editor and I went through in a website article called 'Working with an editor' This was on the publisher's dime, and the work I handed in was complex and intricate and needed a fair bit of untangling. What I'm saying is, don't expect anything that thorough without a large cheque (or check.) Each pass through the book is another edit, and in the article I also mention copyediting and proofing, which are separate stages.

SPJA - different types of self-publishing

2011-08-22T09:09:00.000+08:00

If you're following my SPJA (self-publishing journey acronym) series, I need to make one thing clear: My goal is to release a new junior/middle-grade science fiction series which is indistinguishable from similar titles released by major publishers. I'm hiring the same professionals the publishers do, and I'm asking them to do the same job.

If your intention is to publish your writing so you can share copies with family and close friends, you're reading the wrong blog. There's absolutely no point spending hundreds (or thousands) of dollars producing something which is going to sell ten or fifty copies. You can get by with generic cover templates, clipart and the spell check & grammar tools in Word or OpenOffice.

Next: If you want to publish a professional novel but can't write fiction to a professional standard, you need to hone your craft before wasting good money on a fantastic cover and centimetre-perfect proofing. You cannot take lousy writing, polish it up, slap a cover on it and sell heaps of copies. (Yeah, I know .. insert obligatory 'What about Big Name Author X?' gag.) Contrary to popular belief, fairies and angels don't die en masse when a lousy novel is self-published and heavily promoted (aka spammed) across writing forums and Facebook. It's just hard to get other people to buy it, and if they do they'll probably litter the amazon listing with one-star reviews.

How do you judge whether you're writing professionally? Hell, I don't know. I thought I was ready after I sold a few short stories to paying markets, but looking back at my work from 1999/2000 has me backing away with my eyes firmly closed and my hands warding off evil.

Actually, there is a way: manuscript evaluation. For a first novel and an author with no publication credits of any kind, I'd say the evaluation is absolutely essential. Think of it as a driving license.

Like many things in life, you can pay for it or you can butter people up until you get it for nothing. If you pay for it you get a pro job with a guaranteed outcome. If you want to go for free, you need to join a writing forum and participate in the 'submit your work' section, reading and reviewing other peoples fiction before you unleash your efforts on them. (A ratio of five reviews to one submission is acceptable, but check the forum rules.)

The only problem with the free method is that people will sometimes go easy on you, hoping you'll do the same for them. It can become a bit of a ra-ra love-in, where nobody has a bad word for anyone else. If you scan the forum and everyone's on first name terms, awarding each other gold stars for average-looking efforts, move on.

Define your goals (SPJA)

2011-08-21T09:40:00.000+08:00

When I first decided to self-publish the Hal Junior series my intention was to be as low key as possible. Edit and polish the book, give it a suitable cover, register the ISBN and make it available on Kindle and in print editions. I was thinking Createspace for the paperbacks, which limited distribution to the US, and I had some vague ideas about looking for POD companies in the UK and eventually, Australia.

In the meantime I was planning to ship 50 or 100 copies from Createspace (US) to Perth, and thanks to the high Aussie dollar it was pretty cost effective.

Then I got an email from friend and local small press publisher, T. (hey T!). I'd emailed about order forms - the wholesale ones you send to bookstores and libraries and so on - and mentioned I was thinking of shipping in a few copies. T suggested I look at Lightning Source International. What was the first thing I saw when I opened the LSI web page? We just opened an Australian office - with local printing.

That's when I wrote to the publishers sitting on my Hal Junior subs, asking them to hit the delete button. It's also the point where my 'low key' plan went straight out the window.

As long as you register an ISBN, LSI books are available to every library, bookstore and school in most countries worldwide. It's POD, so they're not stocked anywhere - I won't be doing book signings at local stores, for example - but LSI's prices, and the way they allow publishers to set the trade discount, give me global reach at a very competitive price.

I can sell Hal Jnr in Australia for $11.95 and pocket five to ten times the usual trade royalties. Most kids' books sell for $14.95 and up here. If I sell 500 copies, that's the same income as 5000 through a major publisher ... plus I'll never go out of print. And finally, there's the ebook editions as layer of cream on top of a very nice cake. No lie!

With all this rather good news pouring in, 'low key' just didn't cut it. I got serious about editing and cover art (more on these in later blogs)

I've also been reaching out to Junior Fic/Middle Grade bloggers, reviewers & teacher librarians, promising future review copies and/or guest posts as applicable. If you fit these categories (or promote Junior/Middle Grade spec fiction in any way) please leave a comment or contact me.

So that 'Define your goals' part ... what are you trying to achieve by self-publishing your work? Low key release or all-out assault on the market?

SPJA, week three

2011-08-20T13:43:00.000+08:00

Now we're live - I'm writing this post at the end of week three. SPJA = self pub journey acronym

During this week I made a momentous (and very late) decision. I was playing around with the new ebook covers and I decided to see what they'd look like with a portion of Dion Hamill's Hal Spacejock from the cover of Hal 3. I snipped out just Hal's head and shoulders, with Jasmin standing next to him, and ... wow! It looked fantastic. (I can't share it because it's a rough hack job and the artist probably wouldn't appreciate me doing this to his work.) What I can do is show you the original cover (left) and the new cover (right) and you can sort of picture the middle third of the original cut out and expanded to cover the black background in the new cover. (Ignore the WASFF award pasted all over the front...)

Anyway, five minutes later I tracked down Dion's email, told him about the re-releases, and asked if he was interested in doing new covers. Impulsive, moi? I also asked about professional cover art for Hal Junior.

Dion is a traditional artist - pencil sketch first, then - I believe - acrylic on board. You can see examples of his work on his website.

Dion wrote back, and let's just say we're organising things. Because Hal Junior is slated for October (ebook and print), it turns out we'll need to do that cover first. Dion was very keen, and he's already got an idea which he's working on as I type this.

Proofing is always an issue for self-published works, but I had a cunning plan. I offer review copies of the first book through my site, and when I send them out I offer the next in the series as a freebie if you find a typo. One eagle-eyed reader scored all four, one after the other, and as a bonus I've offered them a signed copy when the first book is available in print. I uploaded replacement ebook versions of Hal 1 and 2 right away.

While that was happening starting work on DOC versions for Smashwords. Kindle is a given if you want to sell ebooks, thanks to its dominance, but I've read varying opinions on Smashwords. My take on it? Smashwords = distribution to the places Amazon cannot reach, like iTunes and other 3rd parties. Can't be a bad thing, and it's only a few hours work to prepare the file for upload.

I finished that last night, and during the day I also worked on Hal Spacejock 5. I know where this book is going now, and all the Hal activity has rekindled my passion. It's just so awe-inspiring to know the whole process is in my hands: I can finish Hal 5 by Christmas and publish it in January or February if I work hard enough. That's optimistic, but you don't get anywhere without deadlines.

To round off week three, this morning I had an email from a Hal Junior first reader (She's a fan of the adult series.) We hooked up on Skype to discuss her findings: She really enjoyed the book but found a bunch of typos and had a few questions. I ended up with two pages of things to look at, which is great. I also sent her an e-copy of Hal 4, and will send a signed Hal Jnr when I get my first copies.

All in all, three frantic weeks. There are now 20 reviews for Hal Spacejock book one on Amazon, and they're all four and five stars. That's great until someone thinks 'hah - I'll soon fix THAT'.

I'm sure I've missed a lot of stuff but the Freemind map is keeping me sane.

The SPJA, week two

2011-08-20T12:42:00.000+08:00

SPJA = Self Publishing Journey Acronym.

Week two

Week two was a busy one. I decided to read Hal Spacejock and fix any little rough patches. I hadn't read it since 2003 and let's just say it took a while. I smoothed a few rough patches, broke a few long scenes into smaller ones, and inserted some new gags & puns. It's over 80,000 words, which doesn't sound much compared to a fantasy door stop but is plenty when you're weighing up every sentence.

There was also the small matter of transferring data to my Spacejock Handbook (another Freemind file, this one packed with place names, items, characters, products and companies from the four books. It's a very useful approach for series writers, and my editor suggested it a couple of years back after she'd had to contend with commsets, comm-sets, comsets and communication devices - many of them in the same book.)

When the final polishing was done I used the new proofing export from yWriter5 and loaded the resulting whole-of-novel RTF into OpenOffice for spelling and grammar checking. Afterwards I saved the RTF and imported the scene content back into yWriter.

I added a neat trick to yWriter recently: you can tag a scene as 'html', and the contents will be exported to the ebook file as-is, without any further processing. This allows me to set up the title page, copyright, series list and so on using manual html codes (centering, bold, italics, font sizes ... even inline images)

The resulting HTML file I converted with Calibre, the open source ebook library software. This generates a mobi file suitable for uploading to Amazon. No steps in between - you just click export in yWriter, convert the file with Calibre, that's it.

I uploaded Hal Spacejock using the Kindle Digital Publishing dashboard, entered the correct ISBN, added the cover and then set the price. (I won't be discussing ebook pricing now. There's plenty out there on the subject.)

Within an hour the dashboard showed the book's ASIN, and I could use that to bring up an embryonic ebook page on amazon.com. In my todo-list I had a section called 'do this when you have the amazon ebook page link', and I went through performing all the steps - adding the link to my website, mainly. Once the amazon page was fully active I shared it on Google+ and Facebook, and updated my sig on various writing & reading forums.

The final part of week one involved sending Hal Junior out for a little more feedback. I'm too close to it to spot flaws, and this is where you need someone else to give you the bad news. I still have to do a 'humour draft', which is where I apply a laughter polish to the whole book, refining the jokes so they're maximised. I never do this stage until the text is done, because I don't like to waste time being funny if I'm going to cut the whole chapter a week later. Let me tell you, writing comedy is really hard work.

Self pub week one

2011-08-20T12:18:00.000+08:00

I've decided to blog about my self-publishing experience. I went through all this ten years ago so I know the process, but others might get some use out of my steps, mis-steps and findings. I'll try and keep you up to date along the way, until we arrive at the destination together.

This particular post is a bit of a retrospective, because in the scheme of things I'm already into week three.

(Before I start, a little background: I self-published three novels about 7 or 8 years ago, wound up with a publishing contract, saw four novels trade published across Australia and New Zealand between 2004 and 2008, then got the rights back. When I say I'm self publishing, I'm actually re-releasing those four trade-published novels to new markets. But wait, there's more... as a bonus I will also be self-publishing an entirely new middle-grade science fiction series. As a double bonus, I'm also going to be releasing POD editions using Lightning Source (LSI) so you'll get those gory details too. Now, back to the plot ...)

Week one on the SPJA (self-pub-journey-acronym) was nice and organised, with all my effort going into the huge spidery freemind diagram which will guide me through the entire process.

I created nodes for each book, then sub-nodes for the ebook and print releases, and then really went to town. This is just a tiny fragment:

I felt like Rimmer preparing for an exam, only I trust the outcome will be slightly better. The great thing is that I can tick the nodes I've completed, collapse whole trees and easily shift things about.

During week one I registered ISBNs for Hal 1-4 in ebook and print (the latter excluding Aus & NZ), and also for Hal Junior ebook and print. I still have a block of ISBNs from 2001, which gave me a head start. If you're beginning with a blank slate you'll need to organise this.

A brief aside: Should you go for your own ISBNs, or just publish to Kindle and Smashwords without bothering? Answer: Are you publishing a book or sharing your work? If you're publishing a book - really publishing it - get the ISBNs. On the other hand, if you're on a tight budget and you're not planning a print release, skip the ISBNs.

You'll need one for Kindle, one for Smashwords Epub, and another for the print edition if you're going to issue one. (The latter can be reused across printers, e.g. LSI and/or Createspace, as long as the edition is identical. You do need different ones for the Kindle and Epub editions.)

Once you get the ISBNs you have to register them with Bowker. This involves filling out a form with the book details, thus linking them to the ISBN. These details go into a universal catalogue (which is why you need distinct numbers.)

Paperwork complete, the next item on the agenda was cover art and design. Everyone, and I mean everyone, recommends hiring a professional, but I went ahead and did this step myself. My focus was on getting the ebooks up quickly, and I just wanted a cover where you could read the title and subtitle from the other side of the room. Unlike print editions, with ebooks you have this great 'redo' button where you can easily upload a replacement cover.

I know it's stark and very black, but it'll do as a placeholder. Because the books have already been released and reviewed I have a huge file of blurbs and snips to pick from, and I reckon a blurb is worth a thousand images. (More on covers later - we're still on week one.)

The final step in week one was to go over the ideas I had for Hal Junior cover art. I wanted a thumbnail or a pic embedded in each chapter, and I'd already gone through the book marking sections. I didn't want grand sweeping vistas, just line art of items mentioned in the text, or visual gags, or diagrams explaining things more fully. (E.g. the closed loop food recycling system on board ships & space stations.) Having a picture meant I didn't have to info-dump every couple of paras.

Hey, maybe adult spec fic authors should learn to draw!

Kindle editions out now (Hal 1 & 2)

2011-08-19T15:20:00.000+08:00

Hal Spacejock (book one) and Second Course (book two) are now available for purchase worldwide via amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and amazon.de. They're DRM-free, no rights restrictions, and each contains 80,000+ words of frenetic, lunatic science fiction.

Check the first link for the biggest selection of customer reviews. All those 5- and 4-star ratings certainly put a smile on the dial.

Hal Spacejock:
Hal 1 Amazon.com ($3.99)
Hal 1 Amazon.co.uk (GBP 3.40)
Hal 1 Amazon.de (EURO 3.40)

Hal Spacejock Second Course:
Hal 2 Amazon.com ($3.99)
Hal 2 Amazon.co.uk (GBP 3.40)
Hal 2 Amazon.de (EURO 3.40)

Just Desserts and No Free Lunch have already been uploaded, and should be visible RSN.

Publishing an ongoing series

2011-08-18T12:49:00.001+08:00

I'm a series author and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I love coming up with new ideas and seeing how my characters react. I love referring to previous events in passing, usually mocking myself in the process. (In book four, one of my characters points out they've already had enough mis-adventures to fill three lousy novels.)

Unfortunately the bookselling trade isn't geared for an open-ended, ongoing series, so if you're writing one, there are a few things you need to know:

First, no publisher is going to offer you a contract for six, or ten, or fifteen series books, even if you've already written them. You'll be lucky to get a contract for three, and that's if they form a self-contained trilogy.

It costs a fortune to edit, proof, design, publish and market a book. Publishers are basically big money gamblers: they weigh up the odds on each title, put up their stake and roll the dice. If the title does well they collect on the bet - as does the author. On the other hand, a poor throw means losses.

There are many, many reasons why a book fails to do as well as the publisher expected. It could be the cover, the blurbs, the writing style, the theme, the genre, the competition, bad luck ... and a hundred more. Most often, it just fails to make a big enough splash. (Let's face it - when ten thousand books are launched across the publishing spectrum, mathematically speaking only a handful can become bestsellers.)

No problem, you think. Books two and three will gee things up, and then people will seek out the first. I'm afraid not, because your first book will no longer be sitting on bookstore shelves.

Picture a conveyor belt of books entering one side of a huge warehouse. The belt is stacked with row after row of books. There are big piles of some (headline authors) and small piles of the rest (midlist and newbies)

Let's fill the warehouse with people - our bookstore customers - lined up three deep on either side of the belt. Now and then they grab a copy when something takes their fancy.

At the far end of the warehouse the belt goes into a giant mulching machine. Once a book reaches that point, it's done.

Twenty years ago this belt was one or two feet wide and it moved pretty slowly. There was plenty of time for buyers to inspect all the books, and if they missed something they could chase it down and grab a copy.

Ten years ago the belt was four feet wide, and it was moving twice as fast. There was still time to find a particular title, but it was harder.

Now the belt is 20 feet wide and it's moving at 200 miles per hour. Books appear and disappear so fast they're shipped from the printers to the recyclers, with a brief detour to bookstores along the way.

I'm not suggesting the ratios in this example are entirely accurate, nor that it's precisely how things work. I just want you to picture that 200 mph conveyor belt stacked with books when you're telling yourself that the release of books two and three in your series will drive people to book one.

So what's the solution?

I can't speak for everyone else, but I'm planning 15-20 novels in one of my series, and possibly 5-10 in the other. As per my blog of a few days ago, I believe the time is right for me to skip publishers altogether and hire the professionals myself. (Editing, cover and interior are the three biggies. For ebooks interior design is less important, provided you know exactly what you're doing. On the other hand, getting the guts of an ebook designed for you is much, much cheaper than paying someone to lay out a printed book.)

Am I expecting to outsell trade publishers? Hell no. But I'll make five to ten times as much per copy, so I can afford to sell only 1/10th as many. On top of that, I'm hardly going to can my own series because it's not selling enough copies.

Believe me, if you indie-publish and make a success of it, agents and publishers will come calling. When they do, you may have six or seven books they can release in rapid succession, increasing your chances of building that all-important audience.

To me, it's the way to go. I've never been comfortable with the glacial pace of publishing, and this way I work to my own schedule, please my own fans, and build my own career.

The future of the Hal Spacejock series

2011-08-16T13:04:00.000+08:00

For six years now I've tried as hard as I could to make the Hal Spacejock books available to readers in the UK and USA. I signed with a literary agent in England, I talked my publisher into selling the ebooks via my site, I ran monthly competitions and posted copies all over the world at my own expense, but in the end it just didn't happen.

Until now.

I just re-acquired the worldwide rights to my Hal Spacejock novels. Kindle editions will be available as soon as Amazon finishes processing the upload (24-48 hours?), and I've signed with Lightning Source to offer trade paperbacks via their UK and US printing facilities.

The printed editions will probably take a month or two, but expect to see them before October. I'm very excited about this, as you can imagine.

I realise POD printing isn't the same as books in shops, but I've set the UK price to GBP7.99 and the US price to $11.95, which I believe is reasonable for 350-380 page 5.25" x 8" trade paperbacks. (Correct me in the comments if I'm wrong.)

The ebooks will be 3.99 or 4.99, depending. I know there's a lot of noise about .99c ebooks, and I may occasionally drop the price over 24 hours as a special, but I think $4 or $5 is a reasonable price for an 80,000 word professionally-edited novel.

Why I'm self-publishing

2011-08-15T06:21:00.002+08:00

Over the past 12 months I've been working on a new science fiction series for younger readers (junior/upper primary/middle grade). I've had a lot of fun with it, and when I was reasonably happy with the first book I sent it to my current publisher to see if they were interested.

Although they really liked the book they recommended I take it to a bigger company, for reasons including distribution and the fact I was planning to write two or more of these a year.

I duly submitted the manuscript to a larger publisher in June, but over the next two months I started thinking. (Dangerous pastime...)

(c)2011 Simon Haynes

Eventually I came to the conclusion that I'd rather self-publish my new series. I'm planning a whole run of them, and the way the book-selling trade is set up it's next to impossible to launch and maintain an ongoing series. (I shouldn't complain because it's even worse in TV land, where amazing shows like Firefly are cancelled because they didn't sell enough shaving cream or nappies.)

So, I withdrew my submission, dusted off my old imprint, dug out my block of ISBNs and signed up with a POD company. I've been prepping Hal Junior: The Secret Signal, and the first book in the series will be released in October 2011 on the Kindle, on Smashwords and in print (using LSI). Hal Junior will be available worldwide.

This certainly won't be my first foray into self-pub, and I'm sure it won't be the last. At heart I'm equal parts businessman and artist, and I love to get my hands dirty with the product.

Once this title is published I'll be able to focus on my next project. Over the next few weeks I'll also be blogging a lot more about my experiences.

Hal Junior - getting closer

2011-08-06T22:09:00.000+08:00

A Hal moment of my own

2011-07-25T11:48:00.002+08:00

For the past decade I've been writing novels about a broke, error-prone freighter pilot called Hal Spacejock. 'Error prone' explains why he's forced to land his spaceship on the remotest landing pads in the dodgiest spaceports ... and I use 'land' in the broad, all-empassing, 'well, at least we survived' sort of way. *

Over the past twelve months I've become a cycling nut, riding everywhere on a bike even when a car was clearly the better option. (A 30km round trip to deliver a large metal frame to a powdercoater springs to mind.)

These two facts ARE related, and I'm about to tell you why.

Picture the scene. I'm returning from a shopping centre and it's raining heavily. Naturally, I'm riding my bike. You'd think I was caught out by the weather, perhaps riding to the shops when it was sunny only to watch in horror as storm clouds gathered. Nah, it was raining heavily when I set out on my 20km ride. The phrases 'cycling nut' and 'even when a car was clearly the better option' should have clued you in.

Clad in wet weather gear, squinting against the driving rain, I was negotiating a bike path Slartibartfast would be proud of. I don't know why, but in Western Australia they design dual-use bike paths by flinging wet spaghetti at maps and tracing the contours with an HB pencil. I don't know why they bother putting lots of gears on bikes, because you rarely get out of second before the next 45-degree bend. But I digress.

There I am, rowing home on two wheels, when I encounter yet another bend in the path. At the time I was shaking my helmet to get the drops off, and thus distracted I missed the six-inch drop and the deep, soft sand on the side of the path. Actually, I missed it but the front wheel didn't.

I was travelling at 30km/h, which is pretty nippy for a heavily-laden bike with panniers, but as I went over the handlebars I still had time to grin at the shocked look on the face of an approaching dog-walker. She was at least a hundred meters away, so she was unlikely to get hurt by collatoral damage from my fall, but obviously she hadn't been expecting this impromptu circus act.

By now I'm eight or ten feet in the air, which is a novel experience even for me. (I'm 6'3", and I ride an XL size bike. When sitting in the saddle I tower over other riders like an SUV owner in a sea of convertables.)

As I describe a graceful arc, arms outstretched, I glance back to make sure my bike isn't going to hit anything. The bike is upside down, cartwheeling, but I don't think it's going to hit me. It still hasn't dawned on me that I'm going to hit something, and very soon.

I'm still in mid-air, and I'm wondering how I can incorporate a bike crash into my next novel. Then I remember I've already made Hal Spacejock fall off a jetbike, a fence, several buildings and a planet or two. All of them were really funny at the time.

The ground approaches, and I put my hands out. Now, at this point I should note that I never ride without my fingerless gloves. They're specially designed with a thick pad over the palm, and I wear them because I went over the handlebars of a motorbike when I was fifteen and not having the use of my hands for a couple of weeks was very frustrating.

At this point, time sped up. I felt the ground on my hands, I absorbed the impact by bringing them sharply towards my face, I rolled right and used the momentum to drive me to my feet. The bike slithered to a stop alongside me, I bent to pick it up, then climbed aboard and rode past the dog-walker, who was still rooted to the spot with her mouth wide open.

For two days I had a very minor ache in my right shoulder, but I got off very lightly. I'm still riding my bike when a car would be the better option, and I have full use of my hands.

* Hal 1

Where next for Hal Junior?

2011-06-16T14:41:00.002+08:00

When my current publisher passed on the Hal Junior series (see my previous blog post) I realised I was sitting at a fork in the road. Start the submission/rejection merry-go-round, or go straight to ebook?

I must admit I was tempted by the idea of publishing an ebook right away. Commission a cover and internal art, edit and polish the text and then make the work available to all and sundry via the magic of Amazon, Smashwords and my own website. I've already published a number of short stories this way, and my ebook-generating scripts could be rejigged in a matter of minutes.

If this were an adult series I wouldn't have hesitated: you'd be able to buy & download the ebook right now. Unfortunately I don't think the market for kids ebooks is there yet - lack of dedicated readers in kids' hands, most kids books seem to be bought as gifts, etc, etc.

Therefore I have two queries for my junior Hal Spacejock novel out at the moment, and one submission. Each of these Australian publishers specify a 3-4 month response time, and I'm not expecting any favours just because I've been published before.

If I haven't heard anything positive by the first week in September I'm going to prepare the ebook edition of Hal Spacejock Jnr book one. If nothing else I'll be able to put that one out of my mind and move on to book two.

(Cue overwhelming sense of deja vu. A decade ago I went through the exact same process with the adult Hal Spacejock series, only back then we didn't have dedicated ebook readers. I put out an ebook version first, followed by a POD edition, and there were three books in the series available before I finally scored a publishing deal in 2004.)

Slings 'n' arrows 'n' silver linings

2011-06-02T11:19:00.002+08:00

This was a bit long for Twitter, so I've turned it into a blog post of sorts.

I've mentioned my new Hal Spacejock Junior series a few times, and a while back I decided to post all the ups and downs I encountered on the way to eventual (hopefully) publication. Today was a down and an up.

I submitted the first book to the Hal Spacejock publisher a couple of months ago, then put it out of my mind to get on with other things. The response came this morning, and the upshot was something along these lines: We loved the book, we're pleased you offered it to us first but we think it needs to go to a bigger publisher.

I'm not kidding here, my initial reaction was 'bring it on!' I loved writing this book, I believe the series has a big future and now that future lies squarely in my own hands.

So, I have some homework to do. I'm going to make a list of aussie publishers putting out kids books and find out who to approach, and then it's submission time.

I'll keep you posted.

Writing Children's fiction

2011-03-18T13:14:00.003+08:00

In my article on how to get published I mention how important it is not to get hung up on selling your first novel. Sometimes it takes three or four completed novels before a writer brings it all together and makes that all-important sale.

There's nothing to say those three or four novels have to be full length adult works.

By way of example, last year I finally sat down to write the junior SF novel I'd had on the back-burner for a couple of years, and it was so much fun I went straight on to write a second novel in the series ... and half of the third. It was a different experience to writing my adult novels - lighter, more enjoyable ... and quicker.

After a few months of editing I put aside the junior novels and went back to my current adult work ... and what a revelation that was. I usually strive for clean, unvarnished prose with a minimum of description (x10 when it comes to junior fic) but I realised I could easily cut 10-15% of Hal Spacejock book 5 just by tighting up the writing.

And that's why I'm going to suggest the following. If you have one or two adult novels doing the rounds and can't face writing another just yet, why not write a childrens book? I aimed for middle grade (roughly ages 9-12), and my goal was 25,000 words of fast-moving and entertaining reading. I had a lot of fun with it, and it made a nice change from the vastly more complex adult novels with their multiple viewpoints, twisty subplots, and sheer word count.

Most of us have kids, or neices & nephews, or grandkids, or someone in the 9-12 age group. I didn't stress about writing the next Big Thing (as if!), I just pictured a couple of my younger relatives reading the book, and wrote the sort of story I hoped they'd enjoy.

Changing gears to write a shorter childrens book may just give you the tools you need to sharpen your adult works. If it doesn't work out, so what? I told myself 25,000 words was a nice bit of practice, if nothing else.

Hal Spacejock ebooks and signed copies

2011-03-01T15:53:00.000+08:00

Just a quick update - My publisher has kindly allowed me to sell Hal Spacejock ebooks and signed copies via my website.

The ebooks are 4.99 each (mobi, epub and txt format included) or 15.99 for all four. When your payment goes through the ebooks are automatically emailed to you as attachments.

The paperbacks are all signed copies.

Details here: http://www.spacejock.com.au/BuyHal.html

Exercise is good for you, laziness is not

2010-11-18T20:13:00.004+08:00

Near the end of July I got off my backside and started using my pushbike to run local errands - shopping, post, banking, whatever. After a few days I realised I was riding up to 20km on some trips, and right there I made a mid-year resolution to ride at least 20km every single day. It's fun to pull up Google Earth and map cycling routes, there are no parking or traffic worries, life seems more leisurely and you get more time to think than you do in a car.

So, back in July my character sheet read something like this:

Weight: 92kg (202lb)
Height: 190cm or 6'3"
BMI: just under 25
Avg blood pressure: 160/90 (mild hypertension)
Resting heart rate: mid-70's.
Wii Fit age: about 64 (imparted with unseemly good cheer)
Armour Class: 1*

That's what 5 years working from home at the computer screen does to you, even if you watch what you eat.

When I started I couldn't ride 3km without getting out of breath, feeling like my legs were falling off, and panting like a dog in the midday sun.

Since July I've ridden 2600km/1600 miles, or 22km/14miles per day. My longest trip was 65km (40 miles), and last weekend I did 130km or 80 miles across both days.

Bearing in mind it can take three years to develop the right cycling legs, what's the new improved Simon like?

Nowadays it takes 5km before I'm even warmed up, and I can ride for at least three hours non-stop at a decent pace. I can still sprint at 40-45km/h by the end of it too.

Weight: 82kg (180lb) - down 10kg/22lb
Height: 190cm or 6'3" (surprise!)
BMI: just over 22
Avg blood pressure: 119/79 (Optimum!)
Resting heart rate: 59-60
Wii Fit age: 33 years old!
Armour Class: 8*

The results have been so great my new target is 80kg and I'm definitely going to continue riding at least 20km per day. I'm also saving a lot of fuel: I now use about one tank of fuel in my car every three months.

So, if you have fond memories of childhood cycling and your fitness is getting a bit iffy, why not have yourself measured for a bike (2nd hand is fine) and get out there? Take care, obviously, and I suggest a refresher course on your local rules of the road, because they vary a lot from state to state and from one country to the next.

PS the title of this post comes from a song on a Wombles album.

* Just checking you're awake.

Short intermission

2010-11-14T15:11:00.001+08:00

October 2009 - I decided against participating in NanoWrimo 2009 because I needed to finish editing Hal 5 into shape.

October 2010 - Same, only one year later. (And believe me, I put a lot of work into Hal 5 during that time.)

The problem is I really, really liked Hal 4 and yet it's important the next book be even better. That's a hell of a challenge when you're working on an early draft of what is supposed to be your most amazing work ever - it's unpolished, it's incomplete, there's very little humour and it feels like you have a mountain to climb.

So, three days before November 1 I had a brainwave. Why NOT do Nanowrimo 2010? For some time now I've wanted to write one or more Hal Spacejock Junior novels featuring my character as a ten-year-old. My wife has been advising me to do this for ages, and over the past five years I've probably done ten author visits to primary schools for every one appearance for adult readers, despite the fact Hal Spacejock was written for the teen/adult market. (E.g. Hitchhiker's Guide)

In the end I decided Nano is just one month - and Hal 5 is already a year late anyway. I figured I'd knock off two 25,000 word junior novels (let's call them parts 1 and 2 of the same book to satisfy the nano nitpicks) and then go back to Hal 5 on the 1st December.

So, what progress? I'll tell you what progress .. it's day 14 and I've just capped off the completed first draft of Hal Junior book one (26,000 words) by writing a killer ending. It's so refreshing to have one viewpoint character and no subplots.

In a few minutes I'll make a start on book two, which is like ... wow.

Only problem is, now I have to top book one ;-)

Simon Says ...

2010-08-14T18:32:00.004+08:00

I'm on Twitter these days.

I'm also doing a lot of bike riding, and I've been taking snaps around Perth to show that Western Australia isn't all red dust, mining and desert:

Near the Leach Hwy/Kwinana freeway intersection:

Near the Riverton shops/library:

Bike path near the library:

Bike path near Riverton bridge:

Kent St weir:

Boardwalk in Applecross:

Bike path suspended below the freeway bridge:

Bike path suspended below the freeway bridge:

Kindle - first impressions

2010-05-04T09:14:00.004+08:00

I ordered a Kindle from Amazon recently, using a bit of store credit and a bit of my own hard-earned. I've been tempted by the Sony Reader in the past but there have been so many different models and revisions I never knew which to look for. Sometimes you can have too much choice.

First things first: I don't like the gleaming white plastic frame around the Kindle screen. In a well-lit environment it just makes the 'e-paper' screen look dull grey. What they should have done is make the frame a duller grey than the paper, so the paper looked crisp and white. (When this thing's out of warranty I'm going to investigate taking it apart and applying a coat of grey to the case.)

Once your eyes filter out the crisp white border it's easy to forget you're reading an ebook. I've had great success converting text and html files using the free version of the Mobipocket reader (runs on Windows, don't know about others) and the Kindle shows up as a removable drive when you connect it using the supplied USB cable, which makes tranferring ebooks a snip.

The text display is excellent, by the way. I believe it uses 16 shades of grey, which means anti-aliased fonts, and I had no trouble reading at the default font size. If you need larger fonts you just hit the text button and use the four-way control to navigate the menu. Easy!

There's a brief flicker when you change pages, but if you time it right you can blink at the same time. Refresh eyes & screen together - works for me.

The device comes with wireless networking which apparently uses the mobile phone network, and it also includes a basic web browser. Nowhere on Amazon (or repeated web searches) could I find any reference to data charges, but I can't believe it's a free-for-all. I do know the Kindle was already linked to my Amazon account when I unpacked it, so I've disabled all wireless features on the thing until I know for sure. (I downloaded a few pages, and will wait a few weeks to see whether my Amazon account shows any new charges.)

The storage space is around two gigs, which translates to a humongous mountain of reading material. Get onto Project Gutenberg, download a selection of ebooks, put them through yBook2 to reformat them, then export to plain text with the paragraphs all sorted. What a way to catch up on a few thousand classics - starting with Three Men in a Boat.

I found the Kindle comfortable to hold and use, so no problems there. It's a solid device, well-made and sleek but not too heavy.

Unfortunately the Kindle has a very slim USB connector which doesn't match any of my other gadgets, which means when I'm out and about with the laptop I can't use the single cable I carry for my digital camera, TV tuner dongle, backup drive, etc. Not a major issue, just a minor irritant. Plus the Kindle cable is very long, whereas you only need a short one if you just want to apply a quick charge from the laptop. (The US version comes with a wall wart, but overseas editions have to make do with USB only.)

In summary, I'm very happy with my Kindle. I have over 3000 paperbacks stuffed into my house, and I can see myself replacing many of them over the next few years. Obviously I'll always keep hold of treasured books, because it's not all about the words. For example, I have a complete set of Famous Five novels in hardback, some of them first editions, and my 1955 copy of 'Martin Magnus on Mars' took me almost 20 years to find. But there are many other books in my collection which don't have that sort of history, and I'd be happy to store those as electronic files in case I ever wanted to read them again.

First pic of the Apple Tablet?

2010-01-27T10:48:00.001+08:00

I know everyone's going crazy about this thing, so I decided to post an exclusive pic:

New Year Resolve

2009-12-28T14:48:00.003+08:00

I'm aiming to finish Hal 5, natch. I've been working on other projects for two months now, mostly programming ones, but I'm beginning to feel the pull of the WIP once more.

To say I've missed a deadline is an understatement, but I have to write my novels a certain way. First, I get a rough draft together over a period of months. I keep working on it until I'm sick of the thing, and then put it away hoping never to see it again. Two or three months later all memories of the hours, days and weeks of solid writing and plotting have washed away, and I'm able to pick up the draft and tackle it with an editor's eye, rather than your typical tortured creative writer's one.

But Simon, you say, this is your fifth novel. Surely you know the routine by now?

The reason it's taken me this long to work out my routine is because I had to rewrite my first three novels for publication, which is why they only took 4-5 months each. I figured I could knock out new books in eight months tops, making one a year including the publisher's side of things.

Book four (Hal Spacejock No Free Lunch) emerged from the smoking wreckage of three different NanoWrimo efforts, so again I started with actual wreckage to rebuild - even then it took me 18 months rather than 8.

With Hal 5 the wreckage was still tumbling while I was trying to fix the thing up, and that made things impossible.

So, I'm sitting here with a pile of manuscript wreckage on my desk, and it's barely smoking at all. I'm just about ready to pile in with the bobcat, shovel and dynamite, and I'm looking forward to it.

Big Sky Writers Festival - report

2009-09-14T10:34:00.005+08:00

Earlier this year I received an invitation to the Big Sky 09 writers festival, to be held by the Geraldton-Greenough regional library over three days in September. Geraldton is a coastal city abour 450km North-West of Perth, Western Australia, and in aussie outback terms 450km is a round trip to the shops. Accommodation & travel were all included, and it sounded like a great chance to meet some fellow authors and participate in panels on writing and science fiction.

I just got home last night, and I wanted to write a quick report on the festival while it's still fresh in my mind.

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday last week preparing for a 2 1/2 hour 'meet the author' session (my first event of the festival), packed on Wednesday night and left home midday on Thursday. I brimmed the fuel tank just before I left, because my car generally does 450km on a full load, and 4 1/2 hours later I drove into Geraldton.

The library put me up at the Mantra apartments next to the marina, and I shared a very nice suite with all-round funny man and author, Jon Doust. (Jon is also with Fremantle Press, who recently launched his novel, Boy on a Wire - keep an eye out for it!)

The apartment was great - two bedrooms each with an ensuite bathroom, plus a lounge and a fully-equipped kitchen. There was the usual mini-bar stuff, but the Festival organisers had also loaded the fridge with goodies. There was fresh bread and the other basics, plus a fruit bowl, local olives and so on. Nice welcome.

The first evening was a catered dinner at the beautifully renovated home of Susan Smith, city librarian. I met the staff from the Geraldton library, which was great, and also most of the other authors & guests. Afterwards I did taxi-duties and chauffered Robert Drewe & Verity James and (someone else - sorry, forgot who!) to their accommodation (I was the only author to drive up from Perth - the others caught a plane. Me, I like to be mobile and free.)

Friday morning I drove to the Geraldton library for my first session. The library was huge and roomy, with a mezzanine floor and a wonderful light, airy atmosphere. The session was in the Council rooms next door, and I talked about writing & science fiction to a group of 30 lower-secondary students from a couple of the local schools. There were some good questions, a few laughs and a paper plane throwing session outside afterwards, which we managed to get in just before the skies opened.

I usually speak for 45-50 minutes in these sessions, but this time it was programmed for 2 1/2 hours with a 20 min refreshments break. That's why I spent two days working out what I was going to say, and how I was going to keep the audience awake. I extended my notes, and stretched the first 1/3rd of the material over the first half of the session, as well as throwing in a couple of readings ... including the first page of Hal Spacejock 5. By stretching out the first part I knew I could speed up in the second half, which is far better than rushing at the beginning and trying to extend & revamp the material to last another 20 mins at the end.

I did get one question about writing which left me searching for an answer: "What do you do if your parents won't let you write at home?" Over the course of each year I probably address a thousand students at various talks. On average, a handful are interested in writing fiction, and maybe one (or none) will go on to write later in life. So, when you hear from a student who is desperate to write but isn't allowed to, it really knocks you flat. Parents, if your child is keen to write - or has an interest in anything creative at all - please encourage them. If you don't, there's an excellent chance they won't dedicate their first novel to you ...

Friday evening was the gala opening, with Verity James as MC and an eloquent astronomer as guest speaker. All the authors were hauled up into the limelight, blinking in the glare of publicity, and then Jim Fisher entertained the crowd with a performance.

Afterwards it was off to the Geraldton Club for a buffet dinner with some amazing delicacies. Great conversation about books & reading, and fellow SF author Lara Morgan was on hand to help me push the SF barrow. (It was a table of eight, but unfortunately I don't have any names. I know the lady to my left was with the State Library of WA, I discussed kids with the lady to my right, and enthused about Asimov's Foundation series with a guy opposite.)

When we left it was pouring with rain so I lent Shelley Gare my jacket, dashed for the car, and then drove her and Jon Doust back to the Mantra. Stayed up very late watching episodes from season one of Bones.

Saturday morning I attended the keynote address by Anita Heiss, who gave an interesting talk about the Aboriginal perspective on astronomy and the night sky, and she then spotlighted her 'seven sisters' - seven Indigenous Australian authors and poets making a big name for themselves.

I disappeared from the festival for a couple of hours, and ended up driving around Geraldton. Haven't seen the place since 1985, and I decided it was time to update my memories.

Also did fascinating things like putting the washing on. (Told you the apartment had everything.)

At 1pm Liz Byrski launched her latest novel, Bad Behaviour, and I picked up a copy and had it signed for my mum. Liz signed it 'to the mother of Spacejock', which was a nice touch ;-)

At 2:15 there was a panel on the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. The panelists were Leonie Norrington, Liz Byrski, Jon Doust, Dean Alston and myself, and Verity James kept us all in line (and did a great job, too.)

Liz described the planet Geriatrica and Dean unveiled Hornbaggia, and between them they had the audience in stitches. Leonie shared a story about the white ghost, and I managed to find some deep space pics of thousands of galaxies, and we had those running on the projector in the background. Windows XP refused to cooperate, so I'd booted my laptop into Ubuntu - as luck would have it Ubu has a fantastic intergalactic screensaver, so that was a nice touch.

Radio Mama in Geraldton was broadcasting the panel live, and I saw the staff cringing every time the discussion ran off the rails, through the train yard and straight into the buffers. Which was often.

Later that evening I attended a dinner at Central West TAFE, where Kate Lamont shared her incredible knowledge of wine & food. Cast your eye at the menu:

Unbelievable. I usually don't drink, but I had a taster of each wine and they matched the food perfectly. (Although the word 'food' simply isn't appropriate.)

The table I was on was a real United Nations, with people either born in, living in or originating from places like Malta, Germany, Bulgaria, the UK and ... Geraldton. Having grown up in Spain and the UK myself, it was great to compare stories.

I drove two of my table companions home, then hit the apartment. Checkout was to be 10am the next day, so I stuck some pots of water in the freezer - I knew I wouldn't be home until 8pm Sunday night, and that meant keeping a few odds and ends cool in the boot of my car for around 10 hours. After packing bags and so on, I watched a few more eps of Bones. (I doubt I got more than five hours sleep a night while I was away.)

And then it was Sunday, the final day of the festival. There was a monthly trash and treasure fair so I wandered around for twenty minutes, mainly to soak up the sun. A few people had remarked how pale I was looking, which isn't surprising when you work from home and you're stuck in front of a computer most of the time. That, plus the lack of sleep I suppose.

At 11am I headed back to the Geraldton Universities Centre, where I had a panel with Lara Morgan on writing science fiction and fantasy. We sat in the middle of the table with the audience arranged in a circle, which was a good setup, and there was much discussion about writing techniques, plotting, editing and so on.

After the panel I was sporting a fantastic headache, which I'd had all day but which was now really hitting hard. The final event on the program was a 4-hour picnic lunch at Nukara, a bush venue 26km North of Geraldton. I originally planned to attend for an hour or so before setting out on my 4 1/2 hour drive home, but when I realised it was a 50km round trip, and factored in my headache, I was on the point of giving my apologies and driving straight home.

In the end I told the headache to get lost, told myself 50km was practically the end of the driveway in country WA terms, and drove out to Nukara. The first 6kmh were spent crawling through the suburbs at about 60km/h, but then the road narrowed and the speed limit went up to a more reasonable 110.

Flew through the countryside enjoying the rises, dips and tight corners:

Nukara wasn't what I expected at all. I thought it would be a wildflower nursury, but it was a rustic bush venue with a weathervane the likes of which I've never seen before:

(Yes, they're 44 gallon drums)

Had a very nice lunch with the other authors - spicy chicken wings, meatballs with chilli dip, ham roll, salad, coleslaw, everything. The lunch tray was enormous, and we all had a whole one to ourselves. (Someone must have researched authors and hit my recipe page, then decided we do nothing but write, talk and eat. Fair enough ...)

I stayed for an hour or so and listened to Anita Heiss, Liz Byrski and Verity James, chiming in now and then. Eventually I decided I'd better hit the road, else I'd be barrelling through the outback at 110 in pitch darkness for most of the trip. Not that I mind darkness, but it's much easier to overtake 35-metre-long road trains when you can see which way the road is turning.

I said my goodbyes, and then Lara mentioned her partner Grant had bought along all four of his Hal Spacejock books. They were well-thumbed and clearly well-read, and I happily signed the lot. I said goodbye to the other authors, organisers and library staff, then drove into Geraldton, filled up with gas, texted my wife to say I'd be back in 4 hours and 31 mins, then hit the road.

The drive back was actually quite entertaining. I was following a four wheel drive for some time, and a bright yellow VW 'New Beetle' was trying to overtake. The vee dub got past, and when I zoomed past the 4wd I overtook the beetle as well. They sped up, and we spent the next 200 kmh playing catch. (If I got ahead, they'd catch up, but each time we hit an overtaking lane I slowed a little so they could get past if they wanted, only for them to drop back again.)

Then we stopped at a roadhouse where I topped up my coffee, and that was the last I saw of the bright yellow bug. I don't even know who was driving, and for all I know it was someone from the Festival. Hope you had a safe trip, whoever you were.

Got home, said hi to the family, handed over gifts, gave them a potted summary, and then I packed away my gear.

I had a great time at the festival, the libary staff were terrific organisers and I really enjoyed all the different conversations and perspectives from a group of authors I wouldn't normally run into.

Big Sky? Big thanks from me, that's for sure.

Still writing

2009-06-29T22:25:00.000+08:00

If you're wondering where I am, the answer is ... writing. I set myself a breakneck pace to get the Hal Spacejock 5 draft finished and that leaves little time for other forms of writing - such as email and blogging. (And people wonder why I embrace my twitter account like a drowning man...)

Anyway, my Hal 5 schedule looks something like this:

By July 3: Finish the rough draft. (Still have 4 chapters to write, one per day)
By July 15: Finish the first edit. Much cutting, pasting, chopping, wailing.
By July 31: Send the finished second edit+ off to my first readers for comment
By August 15: Complete the third edit and read through all the first reader feedback
By August 31: Complete the twentieth edit* and send the MS to my editor.

+ Last time they got the twentieth edit. This one's going to be an eye-opener ...

* That's going to be a busy 2 weeks.

Writin' night

2009-06-05T22:43:00.003+08:00

Tonight was a good night for writing ... it was funny, it was sad, it was moving, it had a terrific plot and the characters were great. Then I stopped watching Deadwood and started working on the novel instead.

MythOS launch interview

2009-05-27T14:52:00.000+08:00

Today marks the release of Kelly McCullough’s latest book MythOS, and you'll find a new interview on the SF Novelists site.

How to plot a novel ... now with extra plot!

2009-05-23T17:41:00.003+08:00

Not sure whether you've seen my article on How to plot a novel, but there's a tantilising pic of a completed outline where the font is just too small to read.

I keep getting emails from people asking me to make the pic bigger so they can read the text, or to provide the Freemind outline it belongs to. In the past I've said no because the outline was written for my own use and could contain just about anything. The pic was deliberately designed so it couldn't be read.

However, tonight I caved in and skimmed the plot outline for objectionable or actionable content, and after a cleanup I've uploaded the file to my website.

You'll find a link to the file on the article page, and I've also included an html version of the file. It should be a decent example of a plot outline, and if you're curious to see how much it differs from the finished novel you're welcome to buy the ebook version of Hal Spacejock book four.

Obviously the plot outline contains major spoilers, so I'd read the book before the outline!

Writing: you call that a scene?

2009-05-14T23:03:00.003+08:00

I posted a version of this to the yWriter 5 group earlier today, but realised it might be useful to others outside that list.

I've been working extra hard on my novel for the past week or so, and after much editing and re-editing I suddenly realised that working on dozens of scenes with 1500-3000 words in each is not much fun. After a few dozen changes to each scene, usually involving a bunch of new notes and comments, it's impossible to do anything with such big chunks of text unless I reread them to work out what I've stuck in there - and all that re-reading takes time.

So, today I took a dozen scenes from my WIP and broke them down into 35-45 much shorter snippets, each containing just 200-400 words. Each snippet is a logical piece of a scene, encompassing one or more events, and the description field in yWriter5 tells me exactly what that scene contains.

Obviously they'll be combined back into larger scenes again before the book is done, but in the meantime I can work on much smaller chunks of text, which makes it much easier to edit them (How long does it take to re-read 200 words? Most emails are longer than that!), and who can possibly procrastinate about sitting down to write 200-300 words of fiction? Especially when you have a one-line sentence telling you what those 200-300 words have to achieve.

It's all trickery of the mind, but the brain is all that stands between a writer and their next completed novel, so I say get tricking.

Hal 4 powers on

2009-05-09T15:48:00.000+08:00

Great news for the Hal Spacejock series ... the 2009 Ditmar Awards ballot has just been announced, and Hal Spacejock No Free Lunch (Book 4) is a finalist in the Best Novel category.

Last month Hal Spacejock No Free Lunch took out the WA Science Fiction Foundation 'Tin Duck' award for best SF/F/H novel of 2008. Earlier this year it was one of only five finalists in the Aurealis Awards Best SF Novel cateogory. Last year it was a number one bestseller at Fantastic Planet.

I'm a highly self-critical writer and I'm never completely happy with my work, always believing there are so many ways I could improve if I could only see through the writerly fog and understand where I'm going wrong. Therefore it's really encouraging to get all this external validation, and as long as it keeps my publisher happy and they keep asking me for more novels, I'll always have a chance to get a Hal Spacejock book just right ;-)

Congrats to everyone on the ballot and commiserations if you missed out.

Ker-thunk

2009-05-07T08:43:00.004+08:00

I love that moment where you've been working on a novel for months, you've written two thirds of the draft, and you suddenly get a flash of inspiration which allows you to greatly improve a sub-par subplot. Not only that, you also manage to tie it firmly to the main plot AND foreshadow upcoming events.

This happens to me with every book I write, which is why I'm happy to write chapters and scenes even if the plot isn't quite there. A plot outline should be organic, like a nice green vine, and every author should pack a pair of shears and grafting tape.

Words are free, and you can write as many of them as you want without paying taxes, so bash those scenes out in volume and you never know where you'll end up.

The biggest mistake is to not start writing until the plot is perfect, or to stop writing because you're not sure what should happen next. Write it anyway!

News roundup

2009-04-27T17:58:00.002+08:00

I've been twittering lately, hence the lack of blog posts.

First bit of news: an award!

Hal Spacejock No Free Lunch won the WASFF 'Tin Duck' award for best professional long work at Swancon last weekend. This is the second WASFF award in a row for the series, after Hal Spacejock Just Desserts won the same award last year.

It's a very handsome trophy, although it was a real pain to photograph because it's solid glass!

Second bit of news: Big Media coverage!

There was a column in the Weekend Australian on electronic books, and Rosemary Sorensen mentioned the ebook release of Hal Spacejock No Free Lunch.

Third bit of news: Still working on Hal Spacejock 5.

Hal 5 update

2009-04-09T22:38:00.000+08:00

Just thought I'd take a quick break from tiling, grouting and painting to post a blog about writing. (For once)

One of the reasons I've leapt into decorating with such glee is that it's a great chance to let my mind wander. No deadlines, lots of repetitive work, and a feeling that when I finally get back to writing this novel I'll be able to give it 100%

The other reason is because whole plot lines can appear while you're mixing a bucket of tile adhesive, applying a third coat of varnish to jarrah or slapping acrylic paint onto the walls. (Given that heady cocktail of chemicals and carcinogens, you won't be surprised to hear those plot lines can vanish again just as quickly.)

Anyway, after more than four weeks tiling, decorating, &c, what has my fallow mind come up with? I changed the first name of one of the characers in the book. That's it.

On the plus side, it's a really good name.

Where's Simon?

2009-03-26T14:07:00.001+09:00

These days, mostly on Twitter: http://twitter.com/spacejock

Brevity and random scattered thoughts suit the way my brain works.

JA Konrath on piracy & ebooks

2009-03-23T07:25:00.003+09:00

JA Konrath is currently on a blog tour, posting on different sites every day in March to promote the release of Afraid, a horror novel he wrote under the name Jack Kilborn. I put my hand up to participate in the blog tour, and when it came to the topic I said 'give me something on ebooks'.

Here's JA Konrath's article on the subject ...

Let's talk about illegal downloading and ebooks.

As of this writing, you can Google "JA Konrath"+torrent and get over two thousand hits. Add in Usenet, eMule, Limewire, and other file sharing clients, and there are a whole lot of people downloading my ebooks and audiobooks without permission. Last year it was less than a thousand. The year before, just a few hundred.

While I love used books, many authors hate them. Some authors aren't keen on libraries, either. After all, authors only make money for each new book sold. If the books are traded, resold, or lent out, they feel they're losing money.

These authors are in for quite a shock in the upcoming years.

Once ebook readers come down in price and become as prevalent as iPods, the 4 billion dollar a year used book industry will be the least of their worries. One $10 ebook download will be up on the torrent sites the day it is released, if not leaked sooner, and will be shared by thousands.

This industry will go digital. DRM doesn't work. People don't consider file-sharing to be stealing. Sales will drop, guaranteed.

Technically, it's impossible to count illegal downloads as lost sales, because chances are most people stealing a copy wouldn't pay for a copy. If they had no way to get it for free, they'd do without it.

At least, that's how I feel about the majority of stuff I steal on the net.

But can we really blame the consumers? Or can the publishers take some of the blame? In this economy, can anyone even afford to pat $25 for a hardcover that will entertain them for 9 hours, when that same money can be used to buy dinner and rent 2 dvds?

Books are overpriced. So is music. And we all know what happened there.

The music industry blew it. Here they had a free distribution system set up by fans. No more production costs. No more shipping charges. No more wholesalers and retailers taking part of the profit. But instead of figuring out how to work within this system, they tried to shut it down and created a hydra.

If Google (with their Kindle), and Sony (with their Ereader), were smart, they'd begin signing writers exclusively to their platforms, split the royalties 50/50 with the writers, and charge a dollar or two for ebook downloads. An easy-to-access online store, well organized and cheap, could cut down on pirating.

Of course, if they were really smart, they'd give the books away for free and charge advertisers for spots. Then piracy wouldn't be a factor.

But print, as we know it, is doomed. The publishing business model is broken, books are too expensive and increasingly harder to find on store shelves, and the ebook revolution is just around the corner.

We can bemoan the change, but we can't fight it, even with contract renegotiations. The used book industry is peanuts compared to the ability of one ebook buyer to distribute thousands of copies for free.

And telling folks that stealing is bad isn't going to change a thing, any more than it did for music. Copy protection won't change a thing either.

Here's a fun thought experiment about new technologies: Pretend print books never existed. What advantage would they have over ebooks?

Let's say we grew up with ebook devices, like my son is growing up with his iPod. Would print even exist?

Ebook devices are still too expensive. But when they come down to under a hundred bucks, and are scratch proof and waterproof, then print no longer has any advantages. Ebooks can be cheaper or free, faster to acquire, you can adjust the font size and type, read without a light, carry 5000 books at once, the books can be interactive and searchable with extra content like DVDs, and the list goes on.

If such a device existed, would there be a single reason to invent print
books? What's the advantage of printing, shipping, and killing 40 million trees a year? (and that's just for the book industry, not newspapers or magazines.)

But we grew up with print books, so we're reluctant to give them up. That is, until we actually try a Kindle 2 and go nuts over that the same way we went nuts over out first iPod.

Some steps are being made in this direction. Amazon, and Sony (which just made a deal with Google for their library of public domain books) are now publishers.

Agents, and all of the big publishers, are anxious to hop into bed with them, rather than consider alternatives. No publisher that I'm aware of has been able to generate much in the way of website traffic and online sales.

But if Random House suddenly made it's entire backlist available online as pdfs for 99 cents a download, that could change the playing field.

They won't, of course. It isn't in their best interest to go digital. They consider erights to be subsidiary, not primary. While everyone is very interested in ebooks, no one believes it will actually replace print, so no one is taking steps to prepare for that.

Smart companies look ahead and change accordingly, even if it means abandoning what originally made them companies. But often, people spend so much energy clinging to the now, they don't have any hands left to reach for what's coming.

But all this is going to do is make it easier for the thieves. Unless Amazon, Sony, and all of the publishers make the ebooks cheap, they'll be stolen.

Actually, they'll be stolen anyway, but the cheaper the book, the more copies that will sell. Why should I search for and download a torrent when I can get the book with a click of a button for 99 cents?

Then again, I have filled my iPod, and it wasn't using iTunes. Chances are, even if books are cheap, they'll still be stolen. But without wholesalers, retailers, or distributors to take a cut, it makes no sense why an author shouldn't make half of the one dollar download, or more. In fact, do we even need publishers any more? Why not just hire a freelancer to copyedit, then the entire dollar goes to the author?

Publishers are falling into the same trap that a lot of companies fall into when new technology comes along, which is: How can I make sure I'm still relevant?

So their business models obviously include themselves.

But what do publishers really do for writers? They print, distribute, and promote. With all the costs along the way, they profit about $3 on a $24 hardcover, same as the author.

Now there are much lower costs. Printing and distributing, which involves shipping and giving percentages to middle-men, are all but gone now.

So what exactly do we need publishers for in an ebook world? What service are they providing?

None at all.

Amazon realizes this. Why should they share money with a publisher for
an ebook? Why not publish the ebook themselves?

But Amazon is still taking a healthy cut, because they feel they're using their distribution system.

Sorry, Amazon, but $10 for an ebook is too much. People are going to steal it. And their distribution, while the only real game in town (except for Sony), still isn't that great. Amazon doesn't sell that many books, and they don't sell that many ebooks.

But has anyone actually compared cheap ebooks to free ebooks to see which people prefer?

I have.

As an experiment, I'm offering an ebook download on my website for 99 cents.

In four weeks, 183 people have downloaded it. Not bad for a midlist author. But I have several hundred thousand books in print, so 183 is actually pretty minuscule.

Also, as an experiment, I've been offering free ebook downloads on my website.

As of today, my free ebooks (not excerpts, these are full books) have been downloaded 16,534 times.

If I'd sold ad space in those ebooks, I could have made some money--a lot more than the 183 ebooks I sold.

So, even at 99 cents per book, even if the author made the entire 99 cents, I'm pretty sure free is the way to go.

Project Gutenberg has over 120,000 ebook downloads per day, for free.

If Amazon thinks they can compete with free, they're crazy.

------------

JA Konrath is currently on a blog tour, posting on different sites every
day in March to promote the release of Afraid, a horror novel he wrote
under the name Jack Kilborn. Visit him at www.JAKonrath.com

DRM-free ebooks interview

2009-03-16T08:04:00.001+09:00

Teleread.org recently posted my article on the harm high prices and DRM (copyright protection) may be doing to ebook sales. You're welcome to drop over there and leave a comment.

I also submitted the Teleread article link to Slashdot, where it's sitting in the queue awaiting a few more votes. I don't usually ask for this kind of thing, but if you have a Slashdot account and feel the article deserves wider exposure, feel free to click the + next to the article header ("SF author Simon Haynes argues against ebook DRM") on this page.

(You can only vote once.)

Flycon 2009

2009-03-13T20:03:00.000+09:00

Pinched from Chris Dolley's blog because I'm up to my elbows in floor tile adhesive...

FlyCon – the worldwide online SF/F con – starts today at midnight (Australia, EST) and 9am (US Eastern Time) and finishes at 5pm Monday in Australia and around midnight the day before in San Francisco. Panels and author chats are running continuously plus there’s a dealer’s room and a masquerade (photos on Flickr)

All in all it's everything you get at a con but without the hotel bill, the registration fees, the travel, the delays and the cold that follows you home.

Authors attending include Geoff Ryman, Kate Elliot, Sherwood Smith, Karen Miller, Roberta Gellis, Alma Alexander, Devon Monk, Marie Brennan, Sarah Zettel, Jennifer Fallon, Chaz Brenchley, Jack Dann, Sara Douglass, Jeri Smith-Ready, Lisa Mantchev, Simon Haynes, Pati Nagle, Dave Freer and SC Butler.

The schedule is here and I have a panel at 9am EST if you want to come and heckle. (That's 7am my time - talk about dedication to the cause, especially on a weekend ...)

The Hal Spacejock ebooks: how to score a free copy of Hal #2

2009-03-09T07:59:00.003+09:00

Last year my publisher released Hal Spacejock book one as a free ebook, and we've seen just over 50,000 downloads to date.

As of today the rest of the series is available in DRM-free ebook format at a super-low price of A$5 each. (Approx US$3.50) That means you can grab the entire series for A$15 (approx US$10), which is less than the price of a single paperback, and way less than the international postage on one book.

Now for the good bit: I've wangled a superb freebie for anyone willing to share the good news. All you have to do is blog or tweet about the release of the Hal Spacejock ebooks (before the end of March 2009), then let me know you've linked to the news.

In return I'll email you a free ebook of Hal Spacejock Second Course, the second title in the series. Call it an incentive, a big thank-you, a 'review copy' or an outright bribe. I know Hal would!

There's an info page which you're welcome to cut and paste details from, or you can just link to it instead: http://www.spacejock.com.au/HalSpacejockEbooks.html (or http://tinyurl.com/sjbook if space is tight.)

You'll also find a custom mission patch for this very important launch.

Why important? Well, if these DRM-free ebooks prove a big success then other publishers will follow our lead. That'll lead to a bigger choice of titles which you'll be able to read anywhere, rather than the current system of DRM-locked ebooks which only work on specific devices.

A vote for Hal Spacejock is a vote for cheap, DRM-free ebooks. To place your vote, buff up the credit card or Paypal account and step right this way.

Incidentally, on the DRM front teleread.org just published an article in which I state my case against ebook DRM.

Hope fanzine part 1

2009-02-20T14:19:00.003+09:00

Hope is a new multi-part fanzine raising money for bushfire relief in the Australian state of Victoria. Issue #1 is now available in a PDF edition in return for donations.

Hope #1 contains contributions from Mo Ali, Sophie Ambrose, R.J. Astruc, Lyn Battersby, K.K. Bishop, Matthew Chrulew, Stephen Dedman, Mark S. Deniz, d.n.l, Paul Haines, Simon Haynes, Kathleen Jennings, Ju Landeesse, Damian Magee, David A. McIntee, Simon Petrie, Andrew Phillips, Gillian Polack, Robert Shearman and Daniel Smith. The cover is by Rebecca Handcock.

This is going to a really good cause, which is why I sent in a previously unpublished short story of mine. It's the first short I've submitted anywhere for 7 or 8 years.

Please consider making a donation to the appeal so you can pick up a copy of this fanzine. The suggested minimum is only A$5 (around US$3.50), and I'd really appreciate it if you can help out.

Hal 5 progress (really)

2009-02-19T07:45:00.000+09:00

Still picking out floor tiles, still programming under contract, but yesterday I managed to write a little Hal 5 as well.

It seems to me I forget my working process with every book. For two weeks I've been reluctant to touch the messy, confusing draft because every scene in my project needed a ton of rewrites to match the outline. Yesterday I remembered what I did for Hal 4 (and 3, and 2, and 1) ... instead of taking 2000 words and editing them to match the new outline, just write the 2000 words again from scratch. It's probably two hours work either way, and writing them fresh is so much easier.

Anyway, this time I'm jotting down notes for a how-to manual, and for the next novel I hope to have a simple guide which will get me through the toughest part. (That would be turning 30,000-40,000 words of mismatched, disjointed scenes into a 100,000 word first draft. Last month the toughest part was plotting, and next month the toughest part will be turning a rough draft into a first edit. It never ends, I tell you ...)

Hal 5 progress

2009-02-11T10:31:00.003+09:00

Words written in the past two weeks: 0
Tiled floors jackhammered up: 2
Contract programming jobs completed: 2

I'm currently contemplating the laying of 60 sq/m of tiles. Kitchen, PC area, entrance and two hallways. I've also taken on another programming job.

Re the tiles, we'd just about decided on a 450x450 marble-look tile, layed square, which is the easiest way to go. However, all along I've had a hankering for a picture-frame effect. This is where you lay one row of half-tiles all around the edge of the room, then put down a thin decorative strip (optional), and then lay all the tiles in the middle of this frame on the diagonal.

It's at least double the amount of work, the decorative border will add about 30% to the cost of the job, but it looks very special when done right. On the plus side, I'm saving over $2000 by doing all the work myself, and I've successfully laid a large area of tiles before now so I'm happy I can handle it.

Anyway, if you don't see many writing updates, that's the reason ..

More on the decorating

2009-02-07T12:18:00.001+09:00

First thing my daughter said when see saw me like this?

"Are you my mummy?"

Warmed my SF-centered heart, that did.

Progress

2009-02-07T10:14:00.002+09:00

Words written today: 0
Tile floors jackhammered up: 1/2

Sometimes it's not about the writing.

C.C. Finlay's Patriot Witch - Free download

2009-02-05T23:58:00.001+09:00

Now this sounds like a good idea ... promote a series by giving away the first book as a free download ;-)

Yes, author and his publisher, Del Rey, are offering the first book in the Traitor to the Crown series as a freebie:

The year is 1775. On the surface, Proctor Brown appears to be an ordinary young man working the family farm in New England. He is a minuteman, a member of the local militia, determined to defend the rights of the colonies. Yet Proctor is so much more. Magic is in his blood, a dark secret passed down from generation to generation. But Proctor’s mother has taught him to hide his talents, lest he be labeled a witch and find himself dangling at the end of a rope.

Click and download - no registration rqd.

Feel free to repost, twitter, sms or shout the news.

Getting closer and closer ...

2009-02-04T14:15:00.002+09:00

Bookmark this page

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Flashbacks

2009-01-30T23:52:00.003+09:00

Five books into the series and it's finally time for a Hal Spacejock novel with flashback scenes.

I wrote a sequence of flashback scenes for this novel during NanoWrimo 2007, but until five minutes ago I didn't think I'd be using them. Now I've changed my mind. (Until I decide not to use them again.)

At the very least I'll get a blog post out of them.

I'm a very linear writer, and I like cause and effect. This minor thing happens, which causes that other slightly more alarming issue. A character overreacts and creates a much bigger problem which then leads to ... you get the idea.

Hal 5 is a mystery steeped in earlier events, and I have to choose between having characters in the present gradually uncovering what happened, or writing scenes set in the past, so the reader experiences the events as they happen.

Let me tell you that reading scenes where characters recap past events can be pretty dull. You can lose immediacy (and readers) very quickly.

On the other hand, if you jump straight in and throw flashbacks at the reader you run the risk of alienating them with a sudden change of location and a new batch of characters they've never met before. Overwhelm your readers and they'll feel like they're starting a whole new novel every time there's a flashback, and that can get tiring too.

What's the answer? Stuffed if I know. I'm not going to leap around all over the place, just flash back to one set of characters at a fixed point in time, based in the same location each time. I'm hoping I can cue the reader in to the flashback pretty quickly, and not by using strange dates or times in the chapter headings. (Those are useless unless you remember what date & time the previous chapter was set in. I'd rather authors just came out and said "Twelve years earlier ..." than put Jan 1958 instead of April 1970.)

I think it'll work, but I won't know until the first draft is done. It should be interesting to try it out, though.

The plotting treadmill

2009-01-29T08:41:00.002+09:00

I'm working on the fifth book in a series, and I think I'm slowly gaining an understanding of how to actually plot and write a novel.

Each book has a tortuous gestation period, which consists of me machine-gunning ideas at endless sheets of paper, then gathering up the smoking ruins and attacking them with a mental machete. My plot outlines get printed, scrawled on, stuffed back into the computer, printed and reprinted until (and I believe this is the key), I've memorised every nuance in the three to four page outline.

It makes sense, doesn't it? How can you insert foreshadowing for chapter seven events in chapter three, if this foreshadowing conflicts with events in chapters 19, 27 and 30? You can't be scanning and re-scanning pages of text to test the ramifications of every new idea.

I reckon it's 4-6 weeks before the general shape of the plot sinks in. This means not only the 4 pages of short scene titles, but the 10+ pages of lengthier descriptions too. Actors who regularly memorise parts for entire plays will be scoffing at this, but don't forget the plot of a novel is an ever-changing thing. The bits I remember most clearly were probably written out three weeks ago. Characters go missing and new ones take their place. A previously friendly sidekick is now a mortal enemy.

Once I have a finished outline I print it off and read it fresh, as though I'd never seen it before. Is it clear? Consistent? Does everything make sense? No, usually not. I may see the first mention of 'the robot', and so I scrawl an answer to the question "Which robot?" in the margin. If there are minor details I underline them, and later on I'll move those to the broader scene descriptions rather than the focused lines of summary.

After entering these changes I'll print off the summary again, and repeat the process until I'm happy.

Eventually this four page document will contain a clear and precise outline of the novel, with motivations and decisions explained rationally. That's the document I send my editor for comment, and the real work begins when she emails me back.

Electronic Hal

2009-01-25T11:09:00.001+09:00

Newsdate: Mid-February 2009
What: Hal Spacejock books 2-4 released as low-cost ebooks.
Where: Right about here
Why you should care: Can't buy them in the shops, can you? (Outside Australia)
What you should do: Repost this news.

I'm facing several months of hard work on Hal Spacejock #5, and if you want to motivate me you can really help by making the upcoming ebook release an Earth-shaking, record-breaking event.

I want to show my publisher they made the right choice in releasing the entire Hal Spacejock series in ebook format, and that means generating publicity, bringing traffic to the Hal Spacejock website, and ultimately selling copies of the three new releases.

So, if you can blog or twitter or stand outside and shout about Hal Spacejock's new ebooks, it would be most welcome.

The news page for the release is below, and I'll be updating it regularly:

http://www.spacejock.com.au/HalSpacejockEbooks.html

I'm also happy to guest-blog about ebooks, publishing, the Hal Spacejock series or my writing software.

So, let's bring on the electronic Hal!

Aurealis

2009-01-24T21:29:00.000+09:00

Congratulations to the winners in all categories - it was a hell of a field, and the judges must have been working themselves to the bone to come up with a shortlist and then the eventual winners.

Commiserations also to those who didn't quite make it to the finish, which includes Hal & Clunk.

I bought myself a box of cherry bakewells to be eaten in the event that H&C didn't win, so I'm full up with icky goodness now ;-)

Now my focus shifts from awards to the upcoming ebook release of Hal Spacejock books 2-4, and I'm still writing Hal 5, adding new scenes and plot tweaks every day.

Interview with David B. Coe

2009-01-24T10:00:00.001+09:00

David B. Coe (www.davidbcoe.com) is the Crawford Award-winning author of ten fantasy novels and several short stories. A refugee from academia, David has a Ph.D. in history and has taught at the university level. In a life prior to that prior life, he was a political consultant. The Horsemen's Gambit is the second book in his Blood of the Southlands trilogy. It was published on January 20, 2009, which is good because there wasn't anything else of importance happening that day to draw attention away from the book's release....

Read the interview here

Subscribe and win

2009-01-21T17:45:00.000+09:00

Just a quick note to let you know that my publisher, Fremantle Press, is about to launch an e-newsletter and are offering a freebie as per below to encourage people to
sign-up.

The newsletter will be released monthly and will feature:

*author, poet, photographer and artist interviews for both new and backlist titles
*news items regarding our authors and their books
*author and illustrator events
*a spotlight on interesting author blogs and websites
*new release titles for each month

Subscribe to the Fremantle Press e-newsletter before 20 February 2008 for your chance to win. Ten subscribers will get to pick any book from the Fremantle Press catalogue.

The monthly Fremantle Press newsletter features news, author and artist interviews, author events and more.

Just enter your email address into the "Join our mailing list" box on the home page. Winners will be notified by email.

Which beginning?

2009-01-17T10:08:00.003+09:00

If you've followed the Hal Spacejock series you'll know that each book opens with Hal in the flight deck sipping a coffee. This gives me a chance to introduce the regular characters over the first page or two, which helps bring new readers who may not have seen the earlier books up to speed.

It's also a nice bit of calm before all hell breaks loose.

With book five I have a killer opening (A) which sends up the usual one, but if I use it I'll need to come up with a link (B) to the current dramatic opening (C), which involves driving rain, fog, and a soggy sofa.

If I do this, B will need to be as short as possible.

Unfortunately, C starts in the middle of a lengthy job, on a planet, while A is best suited to an in-flight situation. B could turn out to be a bunch of arriving and job description scenes, which I really want to avoid. Otherwise A could be on the planet, but then Hal should be doing something else, not sitting in the flight deck.

Hmm.

The other problem with the sendup opening is that it's heavy on the double-entendres, and I don't want to give Parents/TLs/booksellers the wrong impression if they skim page 1.

What to do, what to do? I suspect I have to write a really good pair of Bs before I can decide.

EDIT: Four sentences. That's all I needed for B, and it's turned out just fine. Isn't it funny how a scene you've written seems to be set in stone, when in fact it's only cast from jelly?

Interview with S. C. Butler

2009-01-14T18:21:00.003+09:00

S.C. Butler is a former Wall Street bond trader who always preferred Middle-earth to the Chicago Board of Trade. Currently he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and a whippet. His website is www.valingstoneways.com.

What was your inspiration for writing Queen Ferris?

Queen Ferris is the second book in my Stoneways trilogy, which includes Reiffen’s Choice, and the third book, The Magicians’ Daughter, due out in April. The trilogy’s name says it all. I always liked Dwarves more than Elves, so I decided to write a book that way. With caves.

Who are your favorite authors now and when you were growing up?

My favorite authors are Heinlein, Trollope, Tolkien, Lewis, Austen, Flaubert, Van Vogt, Vonnegut, Niven…

What is it about fantasy/science fiction that attracts you?

Fantasy and science fiction interest me for different reasons. I read fantasy for the story and the characters – it’s not that much different from why I read any sort of book. Science fiction is different, however. Science fiction I read for cool ideas and a sense of Wow!

Why did you decide to make Reiffen a Mage?

Because the Stoneways trilogy is a story about power, and what’s more powerful, in any tradition and at any time, than a magician?

What sort of research did you do to write this book?

Since it’s a fantasy, I did very little research. I checked out a few technologies to see if they were appropriate to the level of some of the cultures – in Queen Ferris, different cultures have different technological levels. The Dwarves, for example, have gas filled airships for traveling beneath the bottom of the world. The humans don’t.

Reiffen and his friends and love maple candy. Is that your favorite too?

Nope. Just syrup on waffles.

What are you writing now?

A story in which one of the main characters from Queen Ferris comes to our world. The working title is Avender in America.

Did you always want to write? Or did you stumble into it?

I always wanted to write. My earliest juvenilia dates back to when I was about ten years old. (Boy, is that stuff awful.) But it took me a long time to sell anything. 28 years from my first submission to my first sale. Of course, that will happen when you only write novels and get busy with a job and family. The job and my family were always my first priority.

What does a typical writing day look like for you? How long do you write, that sort of thing?

My typical writing day depends on what part of the wip I’m working on. If it’s rough draft time, I try to write a minimum of 1200 words a day, which can take anything from two to ten hours, depending on my mood, how well I’ve imagined the scene, or whether I’ve burned myself out writing too much the day before. Rewrites, however, tend to be more predictably productive, running about four to six hours of work. I find writing to be exhausting.

Where do you write?

At home at my desk, on my laptop, with anything from punk to classical on my boom box. However I get many of my ideas while taking long walks, and often write a book’s songs and poetry while walking as well.

What is easiest/hardest for you as a writer?

It’s all hard. The only easy part is being done.

What is the purpose of fantasy/science fiction, if any?

In my opinion, it’s the same as any other fiction: for readers to enjoy. Readers can enjoy books in many ways, from the cerebral and intellectual to the escapist and just plain fun. The point is in the enjoyment.

Both Reiffen’s Choice and Queen Ferris are available in hardcover and mass market paperback from Tor books. You can find them at most bookstores specializing in spec fic, or at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Hal Spacejock ebooks ahoy

2009-01-10T12:26:00.005+09:00

I had a meeting with my publisher just before Christmas, where we discussed a few things about the Hal Spacejock series. The main topic was ebooks.

I'm a strong believer in DRM-free ebooks, and I also believe the price point should reflect the fact there's zero cost required to pump out each copy of an ebook. I put this to my publisher, and they were happy to go along.

You may not be aware that the first book in the Hal Spacejock series is available as a free download. It was released as a freebie when book 4 (Hal Spacejock No Free Lunch) hit the shops, and to date it's been downloaded over 40,000 times.

However, there are two questions which land in my inbox again and again:

1. When can I buy the Hal Spacejock books in (insert country here)?

2. Can I buy the rest of the series as ebooks?

The answer to question one is ... no idea. Sorry.

The answer to question two is ... next month.

Yes, Hal Spacejock books 2, 3 and 4 will be released as low-cost, DRM-free ebooks in February 2009, barring any last-minute hitches.

Text, RTF and HTML files will be included, and most likely a Mobireader PDB as well.

As for the price, the target is A$5 or so, which translates to US$3.50 at the current exchange rate. (Don't hold me to that - it might be a little bit more depending on payment processing costs.)

So there you go - both of my ebook goals met. Now I just have to pray people buy the things so my publisher doesn't see me as a deluded idiot with the business sense of a certain inept freighter pilot.

However, with all three books selling for less than the cost of one paperback, anyone with more business sense than an inept freighter pilot will see that it's going to be a pretty good deal.

(While you're waiting for the Hal ebooks, why not pick up the latest issue of Andromeda Spaceways as a very low cost PDF?)

Plotting, plotting, plotting

2009-01-07T09:48:00.002+09:00

Question: How do you take three half-completed attempts at a novel, half a dozen plot outlines and a folder full of ideas, and distill it all down to a two page outline?

Answer: Very slowly.

The secret is that you have to be prepared to throw out anything which doesn't fit, even if you consider it the best chapter/scene/piece of dialogue you've written in your entire life. If you try and work that stellar scene into a novel where it doesn't belong, the next thing you know you've had to add half a dozen chapters around it to make it fit. Bad author, bad.

For example, I have 50,000 words of 2007 NanoWrimo novel just begging to be used, and after the latest update to my Hal plot outline I reckon I'll only be keeping around 3000 words of it. That chunk will need to be rewritten too, with a different location and different characters.

Worse, there's a 25,000 word chunk from 2004, which was originally intended to be the framework for Hal 4. I'll be ditching nearly all of it, and keeping just one or two ideas.

THIS plot outline is what matters. I don't care how many months I spent grinding out tens of thousands of words, and all those false starts are just distractions. THIS is the novel I'm working on now.

You have to be ruthless. That's all there is to it.

As for practical advice, the way I come up with a plot is like this: Over a period of several weeks I write and rewrite the entire outline from scratch, from memory. I start each version small and add more and more detail, until I end up with a 2500-3000 word document. It's liberating to start anew each time, because it allows me to bypass problems with the previous iteration. I can experiment with different ideas too.

It usually takes me a dozen versions of the plot before I can even approach some kind of ending to the novel, but I'm not fussed because the real ending never comes out until I've written 70-80% of the first draft. (I do a lot of drafts, so it's easy to rewrite earlier events to suit the ending I've decided on. I always know who the bad guy is and why they're doing Bad Things, but the actual resolution is never set in concrete.)

Once I'm happy with the outline, sans ending, I convert the whole thing into a yWriter document with empty scenes and chapters. Then I just start writing scenes in whatever order takes my fancy, updating them from Outline to Draft in the scene settings as I go. I can print off an outline any time, and the work schedule tells me how many scenes I need to write each day.

How long to write the novel? About 2-3 months on and off. But that's another blog post.