Psychedelia Gothique

One of the most important early steps in marketing a self-published book is approaching reviewers so that when your book does become available, there is already a bit of a buzz on the street and online, letting readers know that it’s worth checking out. For years, indie authors were unable to get reviews from the more respected book review venues like Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal. Those publications were inundated by requests and ultimately saw the potential to create new revenue streams by offering to review indie books for a fee. In doing that, they had to ensure that their own labour costs were covered, reviewers could be paid, and there was a bit of a profit to be made at the end of the day.     All in all, these have been positive developments, creating a more cohesive (if ever-evolving) sense of community in the literary world. They had to hire more reviewers and since most reviewers are also writers. The increased opportunity to write reviews for...

Modern media makes it so easy to publish a novel, I figure in a few years anyone who’s ever put pen to paper will be able to publish one if they have a mind to. Can’t spell? No problem, here’s a super duper spell checker that can translate into 145 languages and spell correctly in all of them. And clean up your grammar. Can’t come up with a story? Just enter a few ideas and the AI will come up with a story for you – one that’s never been told before. You’ll just need to tweak it and call it your own. Don’t know anything about typesetting? Well, organizations like Draft 2 Digital already have that figured out – right here, right now. Just go to their website, upload your story – include the cover you bought at the buy-a-cover site and presto, Pick a date and your book will be available from all the retailers, and it will cost you nothing but future royalties. Brilliant. Every aspect of the writer’s craft is becoming automated. Copy-editing and proof-reading software already ex...

For all the talk about e-books taking over the world, I can’t help but notice what I consider a serious swing in the other direction. When I was lining up beta readers for The Human Template , I gave most of the local readers a choice between electronic or hardcopy versions of the novel.   Only one of the thirteen people asked for an electronic copy. He turned out to be the only one of the beta readers who didn’t actually follow through and read the book. I will say that a number of people since that time have asked to read it and half of the people who received hardcopies still haven’t finished it. But the scales still definitely tip towards the hardcopy side. A good number of the people who read the hardcopy gave it back when they were done, which is quite understandable given the fact that many of them are condo dwellers with very little space to store things like books. Even as a bit of a book collector, I make a point of thinning out my shelves on a regular basis, keeping ...

Do you know the difference between flotsam and jetsam? Flotsam is wreckage - stuff lost at sea as a direct result of a disaster - whereas Jetsam is useful stuff thrown overboard to lighten the load. Flotsam is, at best, useful for keeping survivors briefly afloat, but for the most part it just gives you slivers; while jetsam is the sort of thing beachcombers spend their lives looking for.  Welcome to the Age of Jetsam - where we're all waiting to see what useful things are being jettisoned during the storm we are currently weathering. And what, after all is said and done, might be salvageable.   Even before the pandemic, I heard stories about the sad state of the publishing industry.  Now that retailers in general are in survival mode, with many restaurants, specialty stores, nightclubs, and other businesses surrendering to the economic chaos of the moment, I've started to hear the inevitable stories of authors not getting paid, bookstores and printers going bel...

Are We There Yet? As a young writer, I thought of writing a book as a very cut and dried thing. You type the words “The End” on your manuscript and send it to your agent or publisher and soon your book would appear on shelves with a professional and hopefully attractive cover.   If you were lucky, it would come out in hardcover and become available in libraries. I never factored in the editing, proofreading and all the other things that go into publishing a novel. I remember being astonished when Dean Wesley Smith told me at an SF convention that the “pipeline” from submitting your manuscript to seeing it published direct to paperback was about two years from the time it was sold to a publisher. If you were starting from scratch, the path would be more like two years to find an agent; another year for the agent to sell it; then two more years while it went through the full editing process;   substantive editing, copy editing, proofreading. So five years after typing “The E...

I’ve been writing fiction since Junior High School, took creative writing in university and starting publishing short stories (and a few poems) in the 1980s.  I never tried writing a novel until I was in my forties, and the path was fraught with hazards, the road, littered with unfinished manuscripts. Here we are in 2019, and I am just finishing the fourth draft of my first novel to go beyond first draft. Was it worth all the angst and self-flagellation I’ve put myself through over the years? Am I qualified to make that call before I have actually published it and received reader and market feedback? Can I do it credibly? Hmm. Okay, be that way. I’ll do it anyway. 1)       The best reason to write a novel is because you can’t not write it. You persevere through the obstacles, risk alienating your family (because you need that private time to write), and face 100+ rejections when you try to try to find an agent and a publisher. And then you...

Transversions and Everything After In the mid-1990s, Sally McBride and I dreamed up, published and edited a well-known and respected small press magazine called TransVersions: Literature of the Fantastic . Over the course of six years, we were fortunate to publish stories by new authors and established pros. Being one of the highest profile genre magazines publishing poetry, we received a wonderful offer from Governor-General Award winning poet and Canadian SF icon, Phyllis Gotlieb to become our poetry editor. Over the course of 11 issues, we published stories by a pretty impressive list of authors, including  Gemma Files - author of Experimental Film ; David Nickle – author of Eutopia and Volk ;  Jeff Vandermeer – author of Annihilation and the Southern Reach trilogy; James Sallis – author of Drive ;  Robert J. Sawyer – author of Flash Forward ; and over 100 others. Many of our contributors went on to great success (Sallis and Sawyer were already well known...

A View from the Cheap Seats In most ways, the internet enhances every writers life by making it cheaper and more enjoyable to do what we do. But it complicates life in many hidden ways, especially for writers who have worked for decades to get as good as they are – only to come up against a market that is completely flooded with work by everyone on the planet who thinks they can write – which, in these days of high educational standards and low employment – is most of us in the civilized world. Things Any Writer Older than 45 Will Probably Remember: It used to be that sending out queries for a novel, to either agents or publishers, was an extremely time consuming, labour intensive proposition, and potentially a very expensive one. Imagine having to individually type out every copy of every manuscript. Multiply that by the number of copies created. Spilling a coffee could create several days work, because the last thing you wanted to do with a manuscript was show how ...