1.  Start with short stories.  This one was probably holed below the waterline even ten years ago, to be honest, but at some point before that it certainly used to be the prevailing wisdom that when it came to speculative fiction, one sensible route map for launching a career was to sell some short stories to the magazines and then ‘graduate’ to novel writing.  My impression is that nowadays a much higher proportion of novelists skip the short fiction stage and jump straight to novels.

There are all kinds of reason why it’s changed, but I suspect one of them is that there’s a much higher proportion nowadays of potential sf and fantasy novel readers who don’t pay attention to the short story outlets (new or long-established).  That, in many ways, is a good thing: the potential audience for the spec fic novelist has expanded far beyond the core audience of genre fans.  Personally (and despite rarely writing them myself) I still think short stories have enormous value as a craft-honing exercise for the aspiring writer.

2. You need an agent.  Well now.  This one’s complicated, and still – I’d say – more true than not.  But … but … the writing life’s changing fast, and the role and place of the agent is as much up for re-evaluation as any other aspect of the publishing business, now that the digital revolution is well and truly underway.

There’s the obvious self-publishing issue.  You don’t need an agent to get your novel in front of millions of paying customers now that the e-book is gradually becoming the key medium.  Unless you’re super-sharp and super-confident, and have plenty of time to spare, you probably still need one if and when the time comes to talk contracts with a publishing house (and most of them are, anyway, still very reluctant to look at unagented submissions as far as I know), but even then I wonder what the future holds.

One of my strong suspicions about this brave new digital world is that mid-list authors being published by the big publishing houses are facing an uncertain future.  Even if you can land a contract, my guess is that absolute income for mid-list writers is more likely to decline than rise in coming years, due to some combination of lower overall sales and/or the inevitable continuing downward pressure on e-book prices.  That being the case, sacrificing a non-trivial chunk of your income to an agent might eventually start to look like a really good reason to develop your own bargaining and negotiating skills.  Or your own self-publishing and marketing skills.

3. Advertising doesn’t work for books.  I can remember hearing or reading this repeatedly a few years back.  The consensus in the industry seemed to be that money spent on advertising a book was money that could probably have been more profitably used elsewhere (like buying high profile displays in bookshops, for example).  What actually sold books was word of mouth, covers and name recognition.  Advertising spend (posters, magazine adverts, whatever) existed to mollify self-important superstar authors and to front-load sales rather than increase them in absolute terms.  I’m sure the situation wasn’t as simple as all that, even twenty years ago, but I’m equally sure it’s a whole lot less simple these days.

I’ve heard self-publishers and niche publishers say that Facebook advertising (paid Facebook advertising, not just social networking) can indeed move the sales figures for books.  I can also see a scenario – in this connected, digitised, visual world – in which book trailers and other forms of online advertising, especially those designed to go viral, could have an effect.  But mostly, when it comes to thinking about the future of book advertising, it just looks like one of the ways big publishing houses could justify their existence in a hostile future.  If there’s any way of making book advertising work nowadays, I imagine they’re working and thinking hard to try to find it.

4. Publishers and agents have to love a book to take it on.  I was always slightly sceptical about this one, which you still hear now and again.  Not because I mistrust what publishers and agents say, but because the whole thing’s a business, right?  There are undoubtedly plenty of agents and publishers around who would decline involvement with a book because they don’t personally love it, even if they can see that it’s commercially very promising.  More power to them, I say.  But I’ve no doubt there are also plenty who are very happily, and sensibly, working hard to turn books they’re personally not exactly wild about into the bestsellers they believe they can be.

The very small publishing houses, who have their costs under ferocious control, can afford to be picky and choosy, restricting their publishing projects to those in which love of the material plays a major part.  The giants of the industry, which their overheads and mutlinational corporate masters – maybe not so much, in the testing years to come.  I mean, when the only certainty is uncertainty, would it really make sense to merrily turn down a book that looked like a seriously strong commercial prospect just because you didn’t absolutely adore it yourself?

5.  Aspiring writers shouldn’t try to follow trends.  I can think of a couple of reasons this used to be said, back in the day.  First, the time lag involved in writing a novel, submitting it to agents/publishers, revising it, getting it published and onto bookstore shelves, was so enormous that whatever trend the author had been aiming at had probably gone the way of the Titanic by the time their magnum opus actually saw the light of day.  Second, agents and publishers often seemed to be saying, in public, that what they really wanted to see was new stuff, not retreads of stuff that was already out there.

That trends exist, and persist, and are enormously powerful sales juggernauts seems indisputable these days.  Steampunk and urban fantasy, to name but two.  But what interests me more is the chaotic free-for-all that is the e-book market.  Low-priced, often but not always self-published, novels abound on the e-bestseller charts, and they can very easily be written and published a great deal faster than print books ever could.  Following a trend might starts to look more and more like an entirely sensible strategy, especially given that price and availability are quite clearly non-trivial factors in the aggregate purchasing decisions of e-book consumers, and perhaps more so than anticipated quality.

But me, I’d still say to any aspiring writer: ‘Write whatever you want to write.  If it’s similar to a lot of other stuff already doing well in the market, there’s no harm in that.  If it’s utterly unlike everything that’s ever been published before (unlikely, but you know what I mean), go ahead and write it.  It might turn out to be a triumph or a tragedy, but you’ll never know until you write the thing.’

6.  It’s not about luck.  Creating and sustaining a writing career has, I suspect, always been about three things: talent, persistence and luck.  I used to be pretty confident that luck was the least important of those.  I’m no longer so sure.  I am pretty sure that – even if it wasn’t always the case, which it probably was – persistence is now the only one of the three that’s indispensible.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

Nice little exchange with the author of that same to review in the comments here, in which it turns out we both very much like one specific line in The Edinburgh Dead.  And that line is … wait for it … wait for it …:

‘I’m not wanting any butter.’

Does that strike you as … I don’t know … a bit anti-climactic?  It points up one thing that I’m sure isn’t particular to me.  Lots of writers must have the same thing.  That thing is that the pleasure of writing, the satisfaction that the finished text can give you as its creator, is sometimes as much about the small things – the small victories – as it is the big picture stuff.  That tiny little line of dialogue gave me pleasure when I wrote it – you’ll just have to take make my word for the fact that it’s just the right length, tone and rhythm for its context – and it’s nice that someone else liked it.

(And in case that sounds too self-congratulatory, I’ll just note in passing that the small defeats can be just as frustrating as the small victories are satisfying.  Witness: I can’t spell the word ‘rhythm’.  Never have been able to, probably never will.  Every single time I write the cursed word – including in the last sentence of the previous paragraph – I have to check its spelling.  Pathetic.  I’m already starting to fret it still doesn’t look right … maybe I should just have a quick double-check …)

Over at the Writers Read blog, I’ve got a guest post reporting on what I was reading in November.  It includes Fascist dictators, etchings and horses.

And a very nice giveaway is open for the holidays – for those of you living in the UK and the US, at least.  Over at the Orbit blog you can enter a draw to win one of five sets of five jolly good books.  Including The Edinburgh Dead.  There’s two or three there I’d really like to read myself, but somehow I doubt I’m eligible …

For whatever reason, plenty of excellent books don’t elicit quite that response. My reaction to the vast majority of the books I enjoy is simply that: I enjoy them, and admire the writer’s talent, but don’t get that odd little twinge of aspirational envy. I’m not quite sure exactly how this works, but I think it’s down to specificity. There needs to be some very particular, distinctive element of a book that dazzles me in some way before I’ll get that ‘man, I wish I’d achieved/thought of that’ response. The presence or absence of that response doesn’t make me like a book any more or less, it’s just a subtly different mental reaction to the text. I’m a big fan of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion books, for example, but not in a ‘wish I’d written that’ sense.  (Though I’d be pretty pleased with myself if I had written them …)

Anyway, I was gazing at my bookshelves, and one or two examples of this odd little phenomenom caught my eye.  Books I kind of, but not really, wish I’d written:

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.  For it’s adeptly handled density, visionary sense of an interconnected world and stupendously brilliant title.  Honestly, I’d be satisfied with just coming up with a title for a book as awesomely intriguing, clever and fitting as that.  That the enormous tome backing up that title is every bit as intriguing and clever is very cool.

Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock.  A clear case of writerly envy, this.  The central concept underlying this book, and all its sequels, is one I’ve always found dazzling in its simplicity and elegance: a wood that is larger on the inside than the outside, and has the power to give physical form to the mythic archetypes lurking in the subconscious of all those who enter it.  I would like to have an idea as good and rich in potential as that, please.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.  An historical crime novel that’s about books, religious philosophy, medieval history and a whole lot more.  To make such an intricately put together intellectual puzzle read like a thriller is a work of something close to genius, I reckon.  Any writer with a grain of sense’d be pretty happy to hit such a pinnacle just once in their career.

Regeneration by Pat Barker.  It’s a long time since I read this, but it’s stayed with me as one of my very favourite examples of ‘literary’ fiction.  It’s about young men suffering from shell shock during the First World War, and is good in all sorts of ways, but what impressed me most about it at the time I read it, and still lingers in my mind, is the straightforward clarity with which it is written.  The prose is not at all fancy or convoluted, yet it conveys very powerfully complex emotions and themes.  Very clever.

From Wikipedia, I learn that the following activities add one micromort to your personal doom-tally:

eating 40 tablespoons of peanut butter;

travelling in a canoe for 6 minutes;

drinking the water in Miami for 1 year;

drinking half a litre of wine.

(Among many other interesting statistics).  To which I say: wow, those canoes are killers.

Got me thinking, though, about the fatality risks associated with fulfilling certain specific character roles in epic speculative fiction, particularly of the fantastical or space opera-y kind, but also including things like superhero movies.  Some quick mental arithmetic (actually, none at all), lead me to suggest the following crude approximations, expressed as micromorts per novel/film/story.

Being the main villain: I’ll go with 650,000 micromorts, since most resolutions seem to be of the terminal sort for the big bad.  Taking on that role is an excellent short term strategy, since you’ve a good chance of making it almost all the way to the end, but that last big hurdle – the heroic climax – is a killer.  Literally.  Still, there’s a chance you might be needed for a sequel, so survival remains a possibility.

Being the main hero/heroine: 10,000 micromorts. Good prospect of survival, especially if you have been designed by the invisible author with reader identification in mind and the story is told more or less entirely from your point of view.  (If auditioning for this role, play up your capacity for reader identification for all it’s worth, I’d say).  Again, sequel potential is important.  Death risk probably declines to no more than a few micromorts if sequels beckon; unless you’re in the hands of a slippery creator who thinks a ghost would make a fun protagonist for the next few volumes …

Being the hero/heroine’s mentor: Let’s say 500,000 micromorts.  Bad news for anyone aspiring to be mentor to a future hero: I don’t fancy your chances much.  Sorry.  Obi Wan Kenobi, whoever Sean Connery played in Highlander, Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben, Gandalf (well, not really, but sort of), the list goes on and on …  Precedent is against you.  That’s all I’m saying.

Being the hero/heroine’s love interest: 150,000 micromorts. Pretty safe as roles go, but not an entirely comfortable option.  There exist some cruel creators who might feel a dead lover is the best possible motivation for the central character.  Unfortunately, I can think of no easy way of identifying such creators in advance, so you’ll just have to cross your fingers and hope for the best …

Being the comic relief: Ooooh … 250,000 micromorts.  Dangerous, to be sure, but not quite as dangerous as being a mentor, I think.  Mind you, there exist some comic relief characters for whom 250,000 micromorts would be widely considered an offensively low figure.  I speak of Jar Jar Binks, obviously.

Being a redshirt: 1,000,000 micromorts.  By definition.

Being a character in my Godless World trilogy: This one is in fact based on some (very crude) mathematical analysis.  Specifically, a quick scan of the cast list at the end of Fall of Thanes.  Rather alarmingly, the figure looks to be in excess of 300,000 micromorts.  It’s seriously inflated by the fact that not every named character appears in the cast list, and those that do have a higher than average chance of expiring, but even so … I’m not likely to be getting many volunteers for roles in my future work with that sort of track record.

(A parenthetical afterthought: in the unlikely event that anyone feels tempted to make a comment that incorporates plot spoilers for The Godless World, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.  I’m inclined towards a ‘minimum-spoiling’ comment policy in general and certainly as far as my own work is concerned.)

Cue nostalgia.  I put in my fair share of Dungeoning and Dragoning in my youth, and looking back I’m inclined to think those long sessions of hacking and slaying and spellcasting were some of the better spent parts of it.  The paraphenalia of those days has been in long, more or less forgotten, hibernation, cluttering up drawer space I could probably use more constructively now.  It’s been many, many years since I rolled a 20-sided die in anger and I see no realistic prospect of doing so in the the foreseeable future.  Life, for me and my former gaming companions, no longer includes the luxury of otherwise unallocated hours that could easily be sunk into D&D (or any of the other games that consumed so much of our time back then, which we won’t get into here).

If I had the time, would I actually want to break open the rule books (or the new versions of them, I suppose it would be) again?  I’m not sure.  The idea appeals, in a way: the remembered companionship of it all, the vast realms of exploration and character advancement that always seemed to lurk just beyond the horizon of whatever current adventure was absorbing our attention.  It was good stuff at the time, but I have a feeling it would not be quite so easy now, in my middle age, to buy into it all and take it with at least the modicum of seriousness that is required.

There’s a pretty high proportion of fantasy writers who’ve got D&D lodged somewhere in their personal backstory, and my entirely-unsupported-by-evidence guess would be that quite a few of them were at least as much DM as player.  That was certainly true for me.  It’s that native instinct for world creation, story-shaping.  Except that, of course, one of the beauties of D&D – and it’s many less famous RPG colleagues – is that the players shape the story as much as the DM.  We were never heavily into the role-playing bit of the process, really: very little business was conducted ‘in character’, and things like alignment never weighed too heavily upon anyone’s considerations.  What we were after, I think in hindsight, was just the construction of shared narratives and the joint creation of spectacular or dramatic set-pieces.

Do the legions of World of Warcrafters now populating the internet get the same things out of their gaming as we did back then, clustered around some big table, half-buried beneath paper and dice and books?  I don’t know, but I’m an old-fashioned sort of soul, and I have a nostalgic affection for those shared narratives and moments of high drama that existed only in our minds, created there purely by what we said to each other.  They were not acted out before us on screens; they were only thoughts, midwifed into our heads and rendered mutually consistent  by sets of rules and concepts.  I like that.  D&D might have been a minority interest back then, and now, but for those immersed in its make-believe worlds it was – and no doubt still is – an absorbing, liberating, companionable affair.  I’d never begrudge it any of the time it claimed from me back then.

But it’s not an experience I’ll be reliving any time soon, so that drawer space needs to be freed up, for slabs of tax return documents, or chequebooks, or office supplies.  Boring stuff.  Except the office supplies, which I confess I find quite pleasing in a wholly inexplicable way.  I like boxes of staples, paperclips, labels and all that kind of stuff.  Not much scope for slaying dragons with it, though.

(Note for D&D afficionados and completists: I did, of course, have a Monster Manual, but it’s not shown in the photo above because it was a paperback, and I believe it disintegrated quite some time ago.)

(Further note: in what I remember as a very deliberate act of subversive rebelliousness, I persistently played a female character.  No one else in our group – all blokes – ever did, so far as I remember.  What does this tell us about me?  No idea.)

Every kind word that comes my way from a satisfied reader is, I can say with 100% sincerity, received with the utmost gratitude.  It is a rare and special good fortune to be able to put a story before complete strangers all over the world, and for it to mean something to at least some of them.  Sales figures can only tell you how many copies of something are circulating in the great arteries of the book world; the only thing that can tell you what any one of those copies actually means to its reader is direct feedback from that reader, and that makes it a seriously precious piece of communication for your average doubting, insecure, despondent writer.  So thank you to anyone who’s ever taken the time and trouble to tell me they enjoyed one of my books, however they’ve conveyed that information.

What made me think about this?  Well, this did:

Someone went to a little more time and trouble than is exactly usual to tell me what they thought of Winterbirth: it’s a DIY postcard, mailed from the Philippines, sent via my agent.  Put a smile on my face when it arrived, not just because it’s rather miserably cold and damp here at the moment, and that’s a nice little tropical image by way of comforting contrast, but also because … well, you know, someone sent me a fan postcard, from the Philippines.  I just think that’s cool.  Thank you, if it was you (the signature’s a not very informative little squiggle).

Always good to know that people liked something I’ve written, since there’s usually someone out there expressing the opposite opinion, and everyone needs balance in their life.  For example: my similes are being mocked!

The target in question, for those wanting the short version, is a phrase in Winterbirth: ‘the thought felt like a tapeworm lodged in the gut of his mind’.

How dare they make fun of my wordage!  I ask you, gentle reader, is that really such a terrible construction?  Well … let’s be honest, it’s not having quite the intended effect.  I’ll admit to having a sneaking affection for it as a simile, just because it is (approximately) conveying, in a mildly novel and striking way, what I meant it to convey in its particular context; but it’s possible to be striking in an undesirable sense, and there’s no denying there’s something (actually several somethings, I think) not quite right about it.  A fun little idea, poorly executed by the writer, I fear.  Will try to do better in future.  In the meantime, I am rendered immune to the barbs of mockery by my armour of fan postcards from the Philippines.  Hurray for international snail mail.

First, a wise and insightful (by which I mean complimnetary about my work, obviously) review of Speculative Horizons, Patrick’s St Denis’ anthology coming from Subterranean Press in a couple of months or so.  Apparently orders made through the Subterranean Press website get priority, so that should probably be your first port of call if interested, but it does seem to now be avilable for pre-order through the usual online channels (such as here and here) and they should be able to fill your order assuming it doesn’t sell out elsewhere first.  Either way, get your orders in!  Buy, buy buy!  Or not.  No pressure.

Second, one of the things I like listening to on my tiny little mp3 player: recordings of convention panels.  Yeah, I know.  Most folks like up to the minute tunes from popular musical combos; I like convention panels.  What can I say? (In fact, the truth is, to my knowledge there is not one single piece of music on my mp3 player.  Not a one.  It’s podcasts from top to bottom. Weird, huh?)  Anyway: panels.  You never quite know what you’re going to get with them, but that’s part of the fun.  Wordpunk radio has put out a few recordings from the recent Alt.Fiction event in Derby (which I’d recommend, by the way: I was at the 2008 version, and it was good fun.).  Here they are:

The Publishing Panel

The Writing for Comics Panel

The Authors from BBC Books Panel

The Fantasy Panel

It’s just like you were there yourself!  Virtual conventioneering!  There might be more to come for all I know, but those are the ones they’ve released so far.

Third and finally, I wasted a good two minutes with the entirely pointless I Write Like gizmo.  Here’s the verdicts:

First chapter of Winterbirth: I write like Margaret Mitchell.

Second chapter of The Edinburgh Dead: I write like James Joyce.

The blog post preceding this one: I write like Dan Brown.

So there you have it … wait, What?  Winterbirth is stylistically indistinguishable from Gone With the Wind?  Holy cow.  And as one of the legions of well-intentioned folk who’ve started but never finished Ulysses (and I even quite liked the bits of it I read, just couldn’t bring myself to see it through to the end, and my attention span’s much, much too short these days to launch another attempt on it – in fact, come to think of it, there’s a blog post somewhere in the category: ‘books I really quite like, but despite that never finished’) … anyway, I promise – promise – you The Edinburgh Dead is not remotely Joyceian.  Not remotely.  And surely if my blog posts were Dan Brown duplicates, I’d have an awful lot more readers, wouldn’t I?  And a bigger house, come to that.

There’s a bit more to it than that, obviously, and I’ve been asked about various related issues over the last couple of years. Fortunately, others more focused and organised than me have provided many of the answers out there in internetland, so rather than spouting detailed thoughts on all aspects of the ‘getting published’ craziness, I thought I’d just offer a few briefish comments and point you elsewhere for more intelligent commentary.

First, an important caveat: we’re really talking here only about getting picked up by one of the biggish commercial publishers of speculative fiction in print form, since that’s the only thing I know much about and it’s the only thing I really get asked about. One other important cautionary note: the surveys and information I’ll be linking to below has a pretty heavy emphasis on the situation in the USA. I think some aspects of the situation may be slightly different for aspiring authors chasing UK publication. But it probably is only slightly. That said, onward!

Do I need to get an agent first? Not necessarily, since there are a handful of thoroughly respectable publishers of sf/f who are prepared to consider unagented manuscripts (at least in the States, I think the numbers are even more limited in the UK but I could be wrong). But you probably want an agent, for three main reasons: (a) there are many more thoroughly respectable publishers who will only seriously consider manuscripts brought to them by agents, (b) there is plausible evidence, selflessly collected and analysed by Tobias Buckell, that agented writers get higher advances than unagented ones, and (c) if you’re highly motivated, smart, outgoing and time-rich, you could probably do for yourself much of what an agent can do in terms of figuring out what all the details in that 15+ page publishing contract actually mean, whether the terms are industry standard or not, chasing your publisher to make sure you’re getting paid the right amount at the right time, trying to sell foreign translation rights etc. etc. But maybe you can’t, particularly at the start of your career. And even if you can, is it really a sensible or enjoyable use of your precious time?

As can be seen in the results of Jim C Hines’ survey of published novelists (we’ll be linking to this more than once, trust me!), submitting first to an agent and then leaving the publisher-hunting up to them is still the commonest route to first publication amongst authors.

How do I get an agent? Well the way I did it was by identifying agents who appeared to represent genre fiction in one of the many available comprehensive guides to such folk, and making a few phone calls (and then submitting my work, obviously). Interestingly, those phone calls revealed that quite a few of the agents concerned didn’t in fact want to see any fiction of the sort I was trying to sell – some ever, some just not at that particular time – so it just goes to show you can’t entirely rely on the guide books.

But you can also be a bit smarter and more organised about it than I was. Check out the websites and books of writers working in a similar genre/style to your own. They often reveal who their agent is on the website or in the acknowledgements in their books. At least then you can be certain those agents sometimes represent (and more importantly sell) the kind of stuff you’re producing.

Should I write short stories before trying a novel? Depends. If your expectation is that getting some short stories published is going to significantly enhance your chances of then selling a novel to a big publisher, I’d probably say don’t bother. It might help, but the days when it was almost the expected route to publication, at least in the sf field, are long gone I think. (and Mr Hines’ survey would seem to confirm it’s not at all necessary). BUT … I’m personally fairly convinced that writing short stories made me a somewhat better writer. It can be fun, challenging and educational (which is sort of code for ‘difficult, but in a good way’). It’s also less of a mountain to climb: I’ve heard from one or two people really struggling to start, progress and finish what are intended to be great big long novels, for whatever reason, and in such cases there might be something said for turning to the short stuff just to get into the habit (and the discipline) of getting words down on the page in sufficient quantity to be able to the type ‘The End’.

Do I think xxx sub-genre is a good or bad bet for getting published? [Shrugs]. These things change more or less unpredictably and sometimes quite fast. The sub-genre towards which the aspiring writer should be bending all their will and effort is that of ‘fiction of a commercially publishable standard’. If you hit that target, you’re halfway there. Considerably more than halfway, in fact, given the gloomy reports agents give regarding the average quality of the submissions they receive.

As far as I know, fantasy in general still tends to outsell most other varieties of speculative fiction (there are exceptions, of course – individual sf writers who have sales many fantasy authors, including yours truly, can only dream of). Within fantasy, urban fantasy, or paranormal romance or whatever its being called today, has been doing gangbusters in terms of sales and new authors in recent years. How long that’ll last, I don’t suppose anyone knows, but I suspect it’s a trend that’s got a lot of mileage left in it. Does that mean every apsiring author should be writing in that sub-genre? Well, it probably wouldn’t do your chances any harm, but at the end of the day I imagine the best idea is just to write whatever comes most naturally to you, and whatever enthuses you. The results are likely to be better than if you try to shoehorn yourself into a genre that doesn’t instinctively appeal.

How not to get published. Rather than say anything about this, I’ll just point to an interesting site that contains much sensible commentary on how to avoid the numerous traps, scams and cruel delusions that afflict so many as yet unpublished writers: the Absolute Write forums. It’s an intimidatingly vast site, and it might take a lot of time to find your way through to the most useful or relevant bits of info and advice, but one place to start might be the How Real Publishing Works thread. Again, there’s a USA focus to much of the discussion there, so bear that in mind if you’re geographically elsewhere.

And that’s enough of my waffle for now. The full results of Jom C Hines’ survey come in three parts: Part I, Part II, Part III. All interesting, and recommended reading.