Flash Fiction : Light Years (25/100)

... the ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Respect

Why do some magazines and publishers treat writers so badly?

Running a magazine or publishing house is, I'm sure, a lot of work. Often thankless, unpaid work. But still, most people who do so manage to treat writers submitting work to them with respect. Some sense of fellow-feeling. And then there are those that don't. I seem to have seen a lot of these of late. Markets that just don't bother replying, don't even bother responding to queries. What is it with these people?

I don't expect receipt of a submission to be acknowledged, althought it's impressive when that does happen. But for electronic submissions, it's hard to understand why this isn't the norm. It's, what, five minutes work to set up a few email rules to do that? I don't even expect a reply if the market decide they're rejecting my submission - if they've made it clear in their guidelines that's what they do. If they say I'm rejected if I haven't heard anything back in three months, then I know where I am. It's the ones that don't say that, don't communicate in any way that are so galling. I think they treat writers disrespectfully.

My usual response is just to strike those markets of my list of places to submit to. They'll regret it when I'm on the bestseller list! But it's tempting, very tempting, to name and shame more. In the past, on occasion, I have, and it's been quite an interesting experience, with writers having the same experiences with particular magazines speaking up too. Should we do this more? Is it unprofessional to out them or is it fair play? It's certainly cathartic ...

There are some fantastic magazines out there that use email, forums, blogs, Twitter or even the good old postal service to stay in touch with their (potential) contributors. They treat writers with respect. I think they should all be like that. And if they can't they shouldn't be trying.

Flash Fiction : Light Years (24/100)

... with ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Publishing on the Kindle - Amazon DTP (part 3)

A quick recap : I've been investigating how easy it is to publish a work of fiction onto the Kindle. Partly out of technical interest and partly as an attempt to get up to speed with the world of e-readers, which I've so far ignored.

In Part 1 I explained that Amazon have recently opened up their Digital Text Platform (DTP) to the whole world, meaning that anyone can now publish their work for electronic delivery to the 1.5 million Kindle owners out there. In Part 2 I discovered that getting your work onto the Amazon site and thus onto the Kindle is actually very, very easy. An SF short story of mine, The Armageddon Machine, is up there now.

But wait a moment! Isn't this self-publishing? Run away!

Well, yes it is, and that's something I generally shun. I'm quite clear that, right now, the best approach to getting, say, a novel published is to find an agent who likes it enough to represent it to publishers. The Armageddon Machine, however, is a self-contained short story (technically a novelette) that has been previously published by an SF magazine, so I felt like it had already proved itself. I wasn't trying to find an agent for it. In effect, I saw publishing it on the Kindle as part of my attempts to platform-build - just as you could say writing stuff on a blog is. I'm not sure how far I'd go with this. If I'd written a novel that was looking for an agent it would clearly be madness to self-publish it. But what about a short story set in the same world or involving the same characters? Might that be a good candidate for e-publishing in an attempt to build up some interest in the novel? I'm not sure. What do you think?

Anyway, the story is out there, sitting alongside everything else that writers have chosen to publish. How do you go about getting people to actually pay to download it? Without the backing of a conventional publisher, what can you do to market the work?

As I said in my last post, and somewhat to my surprise, the story started selling without me doing anything. Not in vast numbers. Not enough for me to buy that beach-front property in the Bahamas quite yet, but some. Part of this, I'm sure, is to do with the way I posted the book onto DTP. I made sure I gave it an eye-catching cover and I also laboured long and hard over the blurb. I also had a good review of the story from it's previous incarnation in a magazine, so I quoted from that too.

You also get to categorize your story when you post it and I took great care over this. I imagine it was through this that some readers found my story. Anyone browsing through "SF short stories" available on the Kindle, for example, would find mine.

What you really need, though, is reviews. Hopefully good ones! The Amazon star system seems to me crucial in getting visibility on their site. So, if anyone wants a free copy of a "masterful, compelling" Golden Age SF story to review please do let me know. I was tempted to post the third-party review I already had of the story as an independent Amazon review, but that felt just a little close to cheating. In the end I settled for embedding a quote from the review in my description, properly attributed to the original reviewer.

I then looked into spreading the word about the story. There are forums on the Amazon site you can post to announce yourself and your work, which I did, although I have no way of knowing how useful this was. There is a lot of discussion on these boards and I dare so you could dive in and put a lot of work into engaging with the community and marketing yourself.

I also found quite a few third-party sites that deal with the Kindle, reviewing works and providing a place for Kindle users to find out about new stuff. Examples are Kindle News and Reviews, Red Adept's Kindle Book Review Blog and the Kindle Boards forums. I submitted or posted to each of these to see whether they had any effect. I'm sure you could use Google to find other, similar services. It seems to me you can put as much effort into all this as you feel like. The more you do, the more success you'll probably have, but there comes a point when it eats into that valuable writing time ...

So, after all this, how do I feel about self-publishing to the Kindle? If I had a new short story or a novel, would I take the traditional route of submitting it to magazines/agents/book publishers, or would I skip all that and just self-publish? I suppose everyone will have their own answer to this. For me, the traditional approach is certainly preferable. The kudos, encouragement and thrill of being published by someone with a discerning editorial policy far outweighs all the inevitable disappointments involved in taking this route. A great many self-published works are simply ignored - never bought, never read. A great many of them will be crap. But I am going to start paying more attention to the rights I'm selling/giving away with new works as I might want to have the option of e-publishing them myself at a later date. I think it's probably a good idea to try and keep your options open.

As a final note, I'm conscious that I've only covered the Kindle here and that there are other e-readers out there. All the Apple iWhatevers for a start. How easy is it to publish fiction for those? That, as they say, is a story for another time ...

Flash Fiction : Light Years (23/100)

... alone ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Prolific Blogger Award

I don't think of myself as a particularly prolific blogger, but I'm delighted to report that Megan Payne over at the fantastic Odds and Ends and Scattered Bits thinks I am! She's very kindly awarded me the Prolific Blogger Award. Thanks Megs! Obviously, I'm now going to add to the prolificacy by blogging about it ...

As ever, there are rules attached to these things :

• Every winner is expected to pass on this award to at least seven other deserving prolific bloggers.
• Each Prolific Blogger is asked to link to the blog from which he/she has received this award.
• Every Prolific Blogger is asked to link back to this post, which explains the origins of the award.
• Every Prolific Blogger is asked to visit the post listed in rule #3 and add his/her name to the "Mr. Linky" at the bottom

So, I get to nominate seven other wonderful blogs. Here's my list. All are highly recommended :

• Pink Tea and Paper - definitely prolific and always an entertaining writing blog.
• Emerging Writer - for the view from Ireland.
• The Science of Fiction - prolific SF writer and blogger.
• Ten Lives and Second Chances - writing and cats. Possibly the writer is a cat?
• Fairyhedgehog - Books, words, writing and more cats.
• Rebecca Knight, Writer in Progress - full of fascinating and engaging posts.
• PC Games and Reviews - for keeping me up to date and introducing me to the wonderful Plants vs. Zombies. Brains!

Thanks all!

Flash Fiction : Light Years (22/100)

... I'm ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

A Plug for DailyWritingTips.com

A brief bit of self-promotion!

I've recently become a regular contributor to the lovely DailyWritingTips.com blog. This blog is chock-a-block with useful hints and tips for the writer and is highly recommended. Obviously!

Although my remit is wide-ranging and I can post articles on any writing-related subject, my main focus is on word misusage. A couple of my recent articles, for example, have been on the misuse of "epicentre" and "best foot forward". It's a lot of fun to do as I rather enjoy spotting lexical mistakes (which, ahem, friends will be aware of). Which is not to say I promise never to make any myself!

So, well worth a look. And if anyone has any ideas or suggestions for tips they'd like to share with the wider world do let me know ...

Writing Advice from Dreamland

I had a dream last night in which one of the agents to whom I have submitted my novel Hedge Witch replied saying that she liked it very much and wanted to represent it, but that (a) it was too long and needed to be cut down from 100,000 words to 80,000 words and that (b) the chapters needed to be reordered. At the start of the book, the narrative follows two girls, one from our world and one from another. I open with the girl from the other world as this suits the flow of events but my dream-agent felt that it would be a more appealing book if I opened with the girl from our world.

Now I'm no believer in oneiromancy but I'm sure our own subconscious feelings and thoughts do sometimes manifest themselves in our dreams. I once had a dream-consultation with Gregory House (Hugh Laurie's acerbic doctor in the TV show House) in which he told me in no uncertain terms that the reason I was having so many headaches was all the caffeine I was consuming. I needed to cut down. He was really quite sarcastic. Unnecessarily so, I thought. I can still hear him now. Let me think, caffeine, headaches, caffeine, headaches, isn't there some sort of connection there? And, of course, he was quite correct. I needed to cut down and knew it. I woke up and decided it was time to switch to decaff.

So, is my subconscious telling me something important about Hedge Witch? I've been through numerous drafts of that book and had decided it was finished, done, as good as I could make it. Now I'm wondering whether it needs another redraft. Hmm. What I'm hoping is that a real agent gets back to me and says what the one in my dream said ...