Tag: Writing

Are indie authors the rock stars of publishing?

A survey of independent (self-published) authors shows several interesting features of the market.  Report is from CREATe at the University of Glasgow, commissioned by ALLi, the alliance of independent authors, and the Self Publishing Formula.

The headline figures for indie authors was a median income of $12,755 for 2022, which is higher than a similar survey of traditionally published authors (reported here), and an increase on the indie author 2021 figure.

(The median means half of all authors earn more and half less than the median figure.)

The indie market offers good opportunities with more women than men answering the survey (traditional publishing is roughly equal), women earning more than men, and LGBTQA+ authors earning more than those outside that community.  However, both black and disabled authors earned significantly less than others.  The argument that self-publishing widens access to the reader clearly has some truth, but not universally. Benefit could work in different ways – the LGBTQA+ authors also appeared to write primarily in community tagged genres.

As with traditional publishing and many creative endeavours, the rewards are unevenly divided – 1% of authors received 31% of income.  And those who had been self-publishing the longest, and with the most works available, tended to do better.

These figures refer to authors who spend at least half their working time on writing and allied activities.

The report notes that many of the successful indie authors make money from direct liaison with their readers – crowdfunding, subscriptions, paid content newsletters, patron platforms etc. At a time where reaching your fans directly and cheaply, owning a mailing list becomes ever more important – however you publish.

Analysis: “Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity.”

ALLI, the alliance of independent authors said the survey showed that independent authors earned more.

However, this needs to be interpreted with caution. This is income, not income after costs.  CREATe has yet to study the difference in costs between traditionally published and indie published authors.

An independent author must pay for their own editing, cover design, printing, advanced copies, and promotion etc. A traditional author largely doesn’t – the exception being perhaps promotion.  If an independent author advertises, they directly raise their own income more than a traditional author would. (Independent authors receive a cut on each sale.  Traditional authors receive a lower cut, but are usually paid a lump sum assuming a certain level of sales, even if they never make that. Trad authors advertising their books benefits their publisher more than them.)

A very large number of independent authors lose money on their publishing career. One might ask how many of them filled in the survey?

What is clear is that independent publishing is a world away from thirty years ago – where it was a bit quixotic, although some still made it work. Now a businesslike author who writes fast, to a specific audience, probably in series, and promotes their work well, can get their work into print quicker, stay in print as long as they want, and generate a significant income. Traditional publishing has probably got more vexing for many of its authors. But there’s no guarantee, just as with in traditional publishing.

Photo: Vitalina, Pexels

Autocorrect Insanity

With the news that new producers of enhanced autocorrect machines (purporting to be Artifical Intelligence) are taking creative content and using it to train their autocorrect machines…

A copyright reminder.

Everything on this site is or anything written by me posted anywhere on the web is copyright. Any of this scraped and used by an AI is breach of my copyright, and possibly other people’s rights too.

A retrospective fee of £100 a word plus expenses will be levied.

Where does Cory’s spaceship land?

Doug Johnstone’s The Shape Between Us has an alien land in Scotland, adding to the large number of alien landings whose story is shaped by where they land, and who finds them.

ET lands in Modesto California, since it is a story about Spielberg’s childhood. Superman in Smallville, Kansas, for his Jewish creators wanted him to be an immigrant but raised by an all American family.

I have often mused on how Pilot, Cory’s mother, might have landed somewhere else, and the infinite stories that flowed from that.  To write is to choose.

Contains mild spoilers for Our Child of The Stars and Our Child of Two Worlds – spelling out some things not spelled out before.

Cory’s mother, the Pilot, flies Forager Ship Four towards a lush world of green and blue and white. A world of war, a world of summer and winter. Her son Little Blue Frog is unconscious, and her best friend and her child are already dead.  Her body is wracked with pain, she cannot shake off the pain from the wounds of so many deaths.  She knows she is alone dying.

Behind her, the huge colony ship tries a desperate move.  It launches one of its engines into the swarm of alien machines and detonates it…

A swarm of murderous alien machines heads for Earth, dragging a meteor as a shield.  What havoc it could wreak… Can she, dare she, destroy them as they fall?

This is a primitive planet, gripped by the psychosis that violence is an appropriate response to feeling beings.  She may need to hide.  Where on that world does she land…?

In the beginning, was a small New England town. The characters were American, except for the small purple boy with a heart of gold and a dreadful secret. His adoptive mother named him Cory.  The characters and the setting existed before there was thought of anything as fancy as a book or two.  I had a short story that obeyed Aristotle’s unities – a few characters, and the whole action in one place and on one day. 

What if Pilot, dying, bereaved, not wholly rational, had landed somewhere else?

Fellow writers challenged me why I did not move the setting – set it in the country I knew from experience, perhaps the Meteor striking somewhere in Somerset with an improbable name like Abbot’s Balcony or Fester St James, with the Ship down in the Bristol Channel.   A story set in the UK in 1969, where the times were a changing too.  I was a little younger than Cory is, not remembering the Moon Landings but I did remember Apollo 13. 

How different the flavour of the book would have been! Maybe I should have written a book of optimism and starry-eyed hope about Britain…

In part I set it in Amber Grove, New York, because that was as exotic as I felt up to – and because the characters came as liberal North-Eastern Americans and weren’t up for changing.

Fall leaves New England

Where does Cory land and who finds him first?

Infinite books spread out.  In many, Pilot’s gamble fails and Cory dies. Where there is no medical attention, his death is all but certain.  In many, the authorities learn of the boy, and in every one of those he becomes a plaything of the powerful.  How many governments would rush to tell the world and how many to keep him a secret?  How many keep him tucked away as Molly feared, like a lab rat?  How many see him first as a person?

Perhaps some of these stories are not too dreadful for him. Maybe even in an unkind world and for cynical reasons, those around him are still kind. If the President’s scientific advisor Dr Pfeiffer gets hold of him… he’s an ambitious and conceited Cold-Warrior but a kind and almost indulgent father. Many options will be nightmares for Cory and for me thinking of them. 

Of course, Cory is not human.  He has ways to flee captivity, before his powers are known.  Afterwards I see little chance.

Look at an equal area map of the world.  Look how much is Russia, China and their satellites.  Look how much of it is Africa.  Imagine Cory on the Serengeti, laughing at elephants, or staring at the blazing stars in longing… not knowing which star is home.

Imagine Cory’s first Earth winter – sledding in Alberta with other children, or skating a frozen pond in some Communist dacha… He does not like the stern men who come, but the Grandmothers are kind. 

He might have learned Danish or Igbo or Minnan or one of the countless tongues of Papua New Guinea.

He could have fallen into a hot war… into ignorant or criminal hands…  

Cory is a child who has known nothing but love.  He will be a challenge to all of us, our systems and our hypocrisies, wherever he lands.  What would Harold Wilson have done, or Pierre Trudeau?  Indira Gandhi or Seretse Khama?  How quickly the great powers would move on a lesser power – with threats and bribes.

Cory in Japan, Cory among the Amish, Cory bought and sold…

Alien ships tend to deposit their precious cargo in rural places – not just because there is more rural to land in, but for plot convenience.  Imagine the Ship being seen over a city.  Imagine trying to hide him in a Brazilian favela, or Manhattan.  But even cities have possibilities.

There are some stories it is perhaps not mine to tell.  I have a secret wish, where a kind and strong-minded widow with children of her own takes him in. She has a small circle who know their place, how people like them exist under a ration of tolerance, who know how to keep their mouths shut.  Her son is a hothead, a loudmouth who renounced the name she gave him for an African name, but he is smart and he knows people on both sides of the law.  Her older daughter is sleeping with a white slacker, connected to the seedier bits of youth culture.  She would use those connections, and her church. The youngest daughter would love Cory in this story as much as she does in mine.

Somehow the wheel turns, and Cory is taken in by Diane Alexander… a teacher, a Black woman, a widow, head of one of the few Black families in Amber Grove. Molly, her crazy friend and neighbour would soon find out, and help with this bewitching child, but Diane would be Earth Mom.

Maybe when the big money comes calling, the film will follow that story instead.

Testimonial: Manuscript Assessment

Zoltan Tasi /Unsplash

S, a Young Adult/Historical Fantasy (Sept ’22)

The feedback you gave was well thought out, perceptive and very useful. It was also at an appropriate level for a draft 2 as it focussed on whether the story and characters were working rather than primarily on the prose level. The pointers you did give on the latter were both enough and useful. 

It reassured me that the setting, characters, and structure of the plot largely worked although you did make some important suggestions to strengthen and make more credible the key developments of the last third of the book.

(Approx 3000 words of feedback including a synopsis as I saw it, the themes, positives and negatives in a report, and copious notes in the margins.)

Why not check out my services for writers!?

Newsletter published

My recent newsletter talks about progress on the book and has a long series of short pieces about Artifical Intelligence, including asking how far the Luddites were right.

I suppose progress happens, but how why and to what benefit is a legitimate question. In the last forty years I have become much more awate that when something is invented, how and why it is used and who makes the decisions is the real issue.

An example I don’t give is genetically modified crops – there was a lot of hysteria about human safety which was not justified, leading to blanket bans in many countries – obscuring some much broader issues which had some real weight to them.

I share across various platforms but I really do need regular subscribers to the newsletter as with the changing, deteriorating, state of social media, being able to keep in touch matters to any author (except the super successful ones).

It is free, you can unsibscribe at any time, rarely more than once a month, and gives access to giveaways, tip-offs, competitions, free fiction and who knows what else.

Photo: Me being interviewed by the very smart Bryony Pearce at SciFi Weekender.

“Playing Just A Minute with Nina Wadia”

SciFiEtc Weekend SFW XIV was well organised, friendly and entertaining – and a bit bonkers. It describes itself as a SFFH weekend or a Geek Camp or a party. They were kind enough to invite me and Sarah and we had a great time. And I got to play Just A Minute with Nina Wadia.

I am struck by the difficulty of describing SFW both to people who go to other SFFH ‘conventions’ and those who lump them all together.

What they have in common is assembling people who are enthusiasts for the fantastic – people who have different tastes in books, shows, films, T-shirts, and art can still recognise a common ‘geekium’.

There are common elements

-lots of people cosplaying – wearing elaborate costumes. This makes me feel ‘I am with my people’ even if I don’t do it myself.

-talks, interviews, panel discussions, Q+As.

-different interests reflected particularly in the bigger events– film, TV, books, comics, games.

-entertainment of various forms – from folk music to rap, from standup to puppet theatre – all with some SFFH references

-guests who are working in the field, or who stay involved despite their professional life having moved on. So sometimes actors from series in the 70s 80s and 90s.

These events can be overwhelming or small and focused, they can be commercial and hardnosed, or run so much for the fans that they put off commercial and professional attendees.

SFW had the wonderful thing common to many enthusiasms that ‘everyone here treats this incredibly seriously’ but also with a firm core of ‘of course we don’t take ourselves too seriously’. In fact, never trust any group of people who aren’t happy to laugh at themselves.

It put a lot of emphasis on the entertainment – we were in a holiday camp. Guests like me in the Writer strand were treated as important but also expected to be accessible to the other attendees. For example, I was delighted to be given an hour where I went round six tables of 6-8 people and talked with them for ten minutes each.

I had an intelligent interview with Bryony Pearce (author in several genres) and Q+A –  a panel discussion on fandom such as how far do fans own a topic and is that always good – numerous slots selling my books and talking about what was on people’s minds and…

And I got to Play Just A Minute with Nina Wadia. It was a riot.

So Nina Wadia was there because she was in the Sandman TV series, which is very big, and was a first timer at any SFFH event. She was lovely and hilarious – and I’m not sure she was expecting the friendly warmth and enthusiasm and minor insanity she got.

Just a Minute was played as a full contact sport – like all these things you are singing for your supper and so we tried to give the audience entertainment. Nina, briefed on the rules only as we entered the stage but well able to stage a tantrum where required, me – listened to the game as a child – and author Bryony Pearce and actor Chase Masterton who are convention regulars and utterly ruthless players but charming and delightful with it!  I got plenty of laughs, which was a relief – sometimes my being funny mode doesn’t switch on. The result depended more on whose buzzer was working than anything else.

It was all great and people seemed interested.  I don’t think I got snappy, although I did have to disagree with the person who thought it was ‘a shame’ no one read Asimov any more.   

All the artists had the option to meet up for dinner which meant we got to know each other better.. Extrovert mode takes it out of me and a quiet night was appreciated. Shout out in particular to Anna Stephens (prolific author and fanfic advocate), and Simon Kurt Unsworth (horror writer and calm voice of reason on panels) and Benjamin his son and also a horror writer/collaborator. And Sam and David and Matt from Area 51 and everyone else who worked on making it happen.

Why Our Child of the Stars is not ‘a YA novel’

My two novels are suitable for strong readers aged 12+.

I don’t consider them to be Young Adult Novels.

I don’t have a problem with Young Adult Novels – I have read a good number which are as good as anything not labelled YA and indeed, address issues which are not often enough addressed in mainstream work. Famously the Hunger Games attacked class, poverty, and state inspired violence glorified on TV at a time when many adult novels were on much less political themes. I might write a YA novel.

The wikipedia entry for YA genre is good but to my mind does not go far enough.

“Young adult fiction (YA) is a category of fiction written for readers from 12 to 18 years of age. While the genre is primarily targeted at adolescents, approximately half of YA readers are adults.

The subject matter and genres of YA correlate with the age and experience of the protagonist. The genres available in YA are expansive and include most of those found in adult fiction. Common themes related to YA include friendship, first love, relationships, and identity. Stories that focus on the specific challenges of youth are sometimes referred to as problem novels or coming-of-age novels.

Young adult fiction was developed to soften the transition between children’s novels and adult literature.” (In fact, ‘juvenile novels’ were a thing long before the YA term existed..)

For me, A YA novel usually has one or more teenagers as the **main** protagonist, and contains in some measure that teenager working out themselves and their relationships with world. My work covers the following main characters

Gene and Molly start the book in their twenties

Cory an alien is a child in the first book and early adolescent towards the end of the second book – although exact matching with his species is difficult.

Dr Pfeiffer, an adult well into his professional career, at least his late forties.

An alien adult.

So I don’t mind Young Adults reading my books, I hope they do. But I don’t see it is a specific YA book written at least half for that audience. Hope that makes sense.

Review – About Writing by Gareth Powell

Gareth Powell’s About Writing leaps into the recommended list for anyone thinking about writing a book, or if more experienced, wanting to check their own thinking about doing so.  While obviously written by someone who specialises in SFF/horror, it is definitely broad enough to be widely useful, and includes notes on other genres.

About Writing – from Gareth’s website

The book has the warm, passionate, and pragmatic approach that Powell embodies in his online persona. It mixes short pithy challenges with longer, well argued chapters. 

If I was looking for a credible book on how to write novels, I’d expect the following.

The person who wrote it has actually written several successful novels (or shepherded many books to success as editor or agent.)

They have had enough experience of self-publishing and traditional publishing to talk sense about both, and hybrid forms too.

In setting out how they write, they explain why, and they don’t assert that is the only way to do it. (Since, empirically, many highly successful authors write in very different ways).

It should touch on all the challenges of starting and finishing that first book, and also, what comes after.

About Writing does all this and more, and it is hard to fault.

Powell talks about the different bits of being an author.  How ideas come, how creativity can be nurtured, how to unlock yourself when stuck.  And also the discipline and hard work needed to finish the draft and go on to make the book as good as it can be. Writers must soar to the stars with empathy and imagination then have the hard intellectual work figuring out how to restructure or reframe the vision to make better sense or take fewer words.

A book about writing needs to look at the whole picture. Powell is realistic but not defeatist about the financial challenges of writing and he talks about the business side.  There is the vexed issue of promotion and having a public side.

Powell is sound on the personal. Writing books is a mental marathon and you need to look after yourself – the need to stay well read, to look after body and mind, to keep up connectivity offline with your friends and family. But also he’s right that’s there is joy, community and friendship to be found in the writing world. 

Finally, Powell gives us a manifesto, a case for creativity and writing stories as a great social good – a case for trying to be optimistic as a means to create a better future – and I love his parable that the Ugly Ducklings just need to get together and be who they are. Swans, nah.

I wish I had had this book when I started. 

Should genres police who can write them?

This post contains modest spoilers for Klara and the Sun, and The Fear Index.

Some people in the literary world are massive snobs.  They assume that romance, or crime, which sell vastly more than other genres, must be bad.

It is interesting that Austen, Eliot and Dickens were not considered ‘great literary writing’ by the literary greats of their day.

Science fiction and fantasy are considered weird books for unwashed boys despite having many diverse enthusiastic readers. The genre feeds a great many successful TV series and movies, and the electronic games industry. And as a lifelong reader, it interesting to see journalists wrestling with issues of ethics and technology which I first met in ‘books with rockets on the cover’. John Brunner for example wrote books which kind of got how fast, disjointed, and alienated modern life might become. Where wars are fought online and while computers know all about you, they can be hacked.

People who write in genre can be quite prickly about it. A big chunk of the literary world puts it down. It can lead to genre peeps getting protective when people breeze in and talk rubbish about it.

For example, a literary author – let us call him Ian – who has stopped having much interesting to say decades ago – decides to write a book about a robot who develops feelings.  To do this he has to explain that he is writing literary fiction and therefore addressing things much better than (sniff) science fiction. In further defensive interviews it appears he has not read any SF published in the last twenty-five years or any by a woman.

The science fiction world is scathing. Including me.

The moral question of what we owe a being we created is the theme of Frankenstein and its myriad successors.  The issue of what happens when an artificial person develops feelings and seeks independence drives the plot of Rossum’s Universal Robots, the 1920s Czech play which gave us the word Robot. And myriad successors.

This and similar debacles fuels the idea that, say, science fiction is a body of knowledge only the adept should tackle.  Enthusiasts say no one should write it unless they read it widely and know its canon and its roots.  Perhaps we should go so far as to say you should read terrible writers because they were once ‘important’. We are a guild, with sacred mysteries, and people should stay in their own lane.

I think this is a mistake.  It conflates three issues.

Should writers tackle themes they think are of interest? Yes. The creative imagination shouldn’t be full of demarcation disputes. It is good if people see the role of artificial intelligence and want to write about its possibilities for good and ill.

Should writers be informed about the existing works on that issue -, whatever that is? Obviously, that’s helpful.  Is it essential? No. There are so many books on some themes I couldn’t hope to read more than 5% of them. But if you think you are doing something imaginative and new, worth checking?

Should writers puff themselves about their originality with no knowledge of the genre?  Well, that’s a conceited belly flop into the cold custard.  

A better author, the late, great Iain Banks, wrote in both literary and science fiction worlds, and he said that anyone can write a detective story. To have the butler do it as a brilliant twist, they must expect and deserve mockery. (1)

It’s a good sign of someone not having read widely if they claim originality for ideas which turn up constantly. (“Magic and science in the same book” and “orcs are good really” being two of them.)

I have just read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, whose narrator is an Artificial Friend, brought into the home of a teenage girl.  It is science fiction because it asks – what are the consequences of scientific advances?

In this book Klara is a wonderfully off-centre narrator, and clearly sentient. The introduction of AI has led to widespread economic disruption.  It is also revealed that society allows some children to be mentally ‘lifted’ – a process which is clearly imperfect – and which creates a divided society between those families which can afford the process and the rest. (Just because we could, should we?)

Many writers would have written big symbolic clashes about these issues. What we have is a story of how it affects a couple of families, seen through a sympathetic but otherly observer, and where we readers have to fill in the gaps. It’s science fiction in a literary mode. And like Frankenstein it asks what we owe the people we create?

Another example I quote is Robert Harris’ the Fear Index, a thriller about an AI which trades on the stock market which develops sentience. It is a wonderful monster, because it figures out a better way to do what it needs to than its creators. It has no interest in hurting humans or helping them. It just does what it needs to boost its returns… (Just as computers which play Go develop werid moves no human ever thought of, driving the human players to re-engineer their own game as they play.)

So science fiction is good and matters. I don’t think as a writer I should tell people what they can write.  I reserve the right to mock them if they claim originality for well-trodden ideas. After all, science fiction writers often revisit well-trodden ideas themselves.

It is infuriating when a well known writer slums it in SF and gets paid well in attention, respect, and cash, when a far better writer does not. I don’t think our anger should quite extend to being against outside writers who make an effort and do it well.

My own books sought to reach a wider audience than convinced science fiction readers. I don’t think I have ever been guilty of running the genre down. It’s a big galaxy with room for a great many approaches.

(1) It is interesting that the first comment that the butler being the murderer is a terrible cliché appears to predate any real work in which this was the plot.

Photo of robot bewildered by literary snobs by Alex Knight Pexels