Drop by the Visiting Writers Page to read their posts.
Paul Garrety
Ben Peek & Stephanie Campisi
Ian Irvine
Sally Newham
Michele Cashmore
Thoraiya Dyer
A A Bell
Lara Morgan
Paul Collins
Glenda Larke
Kylie Chan
Dave Freer
Rhonda Roberts
Edwina Harvey
Nicole Murphy
Lynne Jamneck
Dave Freer
Kate Forsyth
Cat Sparks
There are 6 publication places up for grabs with cash prizes for our favourite three.
First – $500
Second – $250
Third – $100
There’s no entry fee and they are offering feedback if you want to pay for it (entry-plus). They’ll be accepting stories from February first through to June 30 2012.
Back in March 2011, Angry Robot Books, a UK-based publisher that generally only accepts agented submissions, held their first Open Submission Month, an experiment to see whether there were any unrepresented gems floating around the submitosphere that might be of interest.
In one month, they received 994 submissions. Mine was amongst them.
I’d had a somewhat frustrating time when it came to novels. I’d established a pretty solid reputation as a short story writer, at least on an Australian level: I’d sold a bunch of stories in Australia, the US and Europe, won a handful of local awards, and even had a collection published through an American small press. My reputation had been parlayed into teaching and mentoring stints at various industry associations, and I was pretty confident that, when it came to short stories, I knew what I was doing more often than not.
But therein lay the rub. Increasingly, I was confronted by the feeling that my career, such as it was, had reached a cross roads. I could continue to do what I was doing, and do it well enough, and accept that I had reached a natural level I was incapable of exceeding. But I’ve had a bee in my bonnet for a long time, one that demands I at least move towards a full time career in writing, if not actually achieve one. To do that, I needed to sell novels.
I’d come close with my first attempt, which I’d sent to 68 agents the previous year. One had picked it up, but we parted ways after she was unable to place it and didn’t like my second novel. No blood, no foul, and we separated on good terms. That second novel, an anti-fantasy romp entitled The Corpse-Rat King, was the one I sent to Angry Robot.
The deal was simple. Supplicants were invited to submit the first 5 chapters, or 10 000 words, of their novel, along with a synopses. A team of readers would plough through them, and ask to see the full manuscript of anything they believed merited further examination. Should that full manuscript be considered suitable, it would be passed upwards to editing bwana Lee A Harris. If it rocked Lee’s socks, he would take it to the editorial board and make a case for its purchase. Should the editorial board be persuaded then, and only then, would a contract be prepared and Angry Robot Shangri-La be achieved.
No guarantees, but then, only death and taxes and all that (and thanks to superhero comics and Christopher Skase, even they’re not absolutes).
So I submitted my synopses and five, and got on with other things. One of those other things was to continue my pursuit of an agent. I’ve always felt I needed an agent as part of my long-term strategy: whilst I want to write and conduct business to my own benefit, I’m aware of my weaknesses, and time-management is amongst them. An agent could take up much of the slack and apply much greater knowledge than I possess in terms of publishing law, contract negotiations and the like. Not only would I not have to do these things myself, I wouldn’t have to devote the time necessary towards gaining an intimate knowledge of them. I can take care of the creative stuff myself, but a business partner was always going to be a necessary component of building “Battersby, Inc.”
So, while I waited, the novel went out to 58 unsuspecting literary agents. And I got on with other things. Thankfully, I’ve got a lot of good friends who are experienced novelists. I’d been well informed: the novel game is a waiting game. Keep busy, keep working. I was tutoring an online course, and my day job is in the arts, and if you’ve met my family, well… occasionally I slept, and I could just about recite the Monarch Song from Horrible Histories off by heart. Most importantly, I started work on a new novel: Father Muerte & The Divine, a lengthier exploration of the character I’d created in several short stories, and a chance to finally answer many of the mysteries I’d raised in them. I kept busy, and tried not to watch the calendar.
Then word came from Angry Robot. The first reading round was complete. I’d passed. Now they wanted the whole manuscript. I sent it off. Word started filtering back from agents: rejection after dismissal after non-interest. Line after line on my spreadsheet was coloured in appropriately gloomy shades of grey.
I got on with other things.
Four months after submitting, I received a positive response from an agent. Then another. And a third. All liked the book. All were interested in representing it. I hadn’t mentioned Angry Robot. This was all about the book itself. Things looked positive.
Five months after submitting, word from Angry Robot: ‘my’ reader loved the full manuscript, and had passed it on to Bwana Lee. If he liked it, it would go to the publishing board. I’d passed again.
I compared agents, and came to a decision. And got on with other things
Father Muerte & The Divine hit 50 000 words. I joined The Angry Robot Waiting Club, a social forum on the Absolute Write forum boards devoted to the 22 authors who had gone right the way up to editorial and were now just waiting to find out if we were going to take the short, final hop from ‘aspiring’ to published novelist. We waited, together. I could recite all the way up to George IV.
October 26. Almost seven months to the day since I submitted my little package, and Bwana Lee sent me an email.
I’d made it. All the way through. A contract offer was, well, offered. As soon as I signed it and returned it to them, I would officially be an Angry Robot author.
Just one final thing to do: I forwarded the offer to my new agent, Richard Henshaw of the Henshaw Group. And got on with other things. I was right the way up to Victoria, now.
The contract went back. It went forth. It went back again. For six weeks, Richard and Lee negotiated. Angry Robot announced the first two Open Door month authors. One as even called Lee, damn it! Negotiations continued. I waited. My wife and kids began to comment openly about my crankiness.
They say most people drown in sight of shore.
And then it was all over, so quickly it took me two days after I was announced before I got myself together enough to make my own proclamation. The final contract arrived in my inbox, I signed and emailed it back, and my mug was up on the Angry Robot website in less than 18 hours. The Corpse-Rat King will be published in 2012. A sequel, Marching Dead, will follow in 2013.
All of a sudden, after nine months, I was an author with an agent, a two-book deal, and a deadline.
Nine months after submitting my package on the last day of the Open Door month, the landscape of my career has changed completely. Far from hoping for an opportunity, I’m in the position of making the most of one. For the first time in a decade, I’m heading into uncharted career territory. I have a sequel to write, and I need to make sure I’ve got novels to follow after it, so that my second book isn’t my last. I need to build a relationship with my agent, and provide him with materiel with which to approach publishers. The door may be open, but the next few years will determine whether it’s at the front or just the workman’s entrance in the alleyway round the side.
Father Muerte and the Divine, 55 000 words old, has been put aside. 25 000 words of Marching Dead have already been written, as of penning this post. Still, at least I know what I’ll be doing most evenings for the next three years…
(Departs, singing): William, William, Henry, Stephen, Henry, Richard, John, oi! Henry, Ed, Ed, Ed, Rich two, then three more Henrys join our song….
BIO: Lee is the author of over 70 stories in Australia, the US and Europe, with appearances in markets as “Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror”, “Year’s Best Australian SF & F”, and “Writers of the Future”. A collection of his work, entitled “Through Soft Air” from Prime Books. He’s taught at Clarion South and developed and delivered a six-week “Writing the SF Short Story” course for the Australian Writers Marketplace. His work has been praised for its consistent attention to voice and narrative muscle, and has resulted in a number of awards including the Aurealis, Australia Shadows and Australia SF ‘Ditmar’ gongs. He lives in Mandurah, Western Australia, with his wife, writer Lyn Battersby and an increasingly weird mob of kids. He is sadly obsessed with Lego, Nottingham Forest football club, dinosaurs and Daleks. He’s been a stand-up comic, tennis coach, cartoonist, poet, and tax officer in previous times, and he currently works as Arts Officer for a local council, where he gets to play with artists all day. All in all, life is pretty good. More information, and infinitely more lies, can be found at his website or his long-running blog The Battersblog.
Anywhere but here, anywhen but now. Which means we are after stories set on Earth, although it may be an Earth that might have been, or might yet be, one that has gone down a different leg of the famous trousers of time (see the illustration in almost every book about quantum theory).’
All the competition terms and conditions are available at the above link. Best of luck!
Sean the Blogonaut follows up last week’s post with:
Making technology work for you
I mentioned in my previous post that while you should maintain a web presence, incorporating social media that your writing needs to come first. Thankfully we live in the future and there are technical solutions to this quandary.
This post concentrates on Twitter and Paper.li and how you can bend social media to your service as a writer.
My personal approach:
I have been using twitter since Jan 15, 2008, both as a socialising tool and to promote my blogging. It’s still the highest source of referrals on my blog. Once you get beyond a couple of hundred followers though, it becomes nigh on impossible to read every tweet in your stream. It quickly looses its usefulness or becomes a huge time sink.
I quickly abandoned the default twitter web page in favour of third party software that allowed me to filter and break into columns, the various groups of people/interests I followed.
My personal preference was Tweetdeck, but there are others out their including Hootsuite and Seismic. Once you have understood the basics of twitter I’d advise checking out one of these services to streamline your twitter experience – some even incorporate posting to Facebook.
Enter Paper.li
Even with the use of Tweetdeck, I found that I was missing out on a large chunk of news and information, which for a commenter on the state of Speculative fiction was a problem. Enter Paper.li
For those of you who are not aware Paper.li is a service that allows a user to collate tweets with links and automatically generates a “newspaper styled” web page each day (there are twice daily and weekly publication options), featuring these links.
There are thousands of these electronic news papers, covering all the things that people tweet about. Readers can subscribe to individual papers; they don’t even have to be on twitter. The feature list for the service continues to grow and the last few months have seen them release add-ons that allow greater control for curators.
And it’s free.
What prompted me to start a paper?
Initially, I just wanted a central location of the most tweeted information for that day so that I could quickly scan the news and blog on articles that interested me. I formed The Book Bloggers Daily – a paper that collates links from the people on my book blogger list and others who use various keywords associated with book blogging.
Aside from this rather selfish notion of collecting information for me, it soon became apparent what a great tool it could be for promoting authors and their posting or tweeting. Book Blogging was a fairly broad focus though so I stated a second paper focusing purely on Australian Speculative Fiction.
This then expanded to cover both New Zealand and English Speaking South East Asia (largely inspired by the efforts of Charles Tan). The Austral-Asian Spec-Fic Daily is its current form. The Daily is a collection of author and bloggers, tweeting on Speculative fiction and sometimes other interests as well.
I envisaged it being a great way to promote a selection of writers who are disadvantaged because of their location. Australian writers are beginning to reap rewards of exposure at various international conventions, but the American market is still elusive. English speaking South East Asian authors by contrast are almost invisible.
It’s my hope that by curating the daily it might in some way help to raise profiles. For me it creates a central location for authors to promote their work and others, without them actually doing anything but tweeting their interests.
Increased exposure without the legwork.
Should I start my own?
It’s entirely up to you. The service is free and takes almost no technical know-how. I tend to think it’s better to focus or pool resources, so if you can identify a paper that already covers your genre it’s probably worth approaching the person that collates it and asking to have your twitter handle added to their list.
On the other hand you could just construct it as a private (in the sense that you don’t promote it on twitter) paper.
Join me up, Sean!
If tweeting Speculative Fiction authors want to be added to the list they can tweet me at @seandblogonaut . If you are just interested in subscribing there’s a subscription button on the website.
I hope the article has been useful. If you’d like me to expand on any points, I’ll be lurking below in the comments.
Dymocks have launched a publishing arm. Writers need to be informed when they sign up for something like this. Here’s what Writers Beware have to say:
First they quote from the contract, then they critique it.
The Author grants to D Publishing a licence…to exercise, including by way of sub-licence, all rights in the Work other than its first volume and electronic publication rights (Subsidiary Rights). Without limiting the preceding, Subsidiary Rights include:
(a) anthology and quotation rights
(b) condensation e.g. magazines, newspapers and ezines
(c) radio and TV straight reading
(d) sound recording
(e) reprint under sub licence
(f) adaptation in other media, including but not limited to internet, apps or other software, collectively, ‘Licence’.
These terms would be a problem if you encountered them in the contract of any small publisher. From a self-publishing service, they are truly awful. And they’re just the start. Dymocks can also change the terms of the contract at will. It reserves the right to publish tie-in editions, if a film or other media adaptation is made. The royalty structure is confusing (and, from the looks of it, actual royalties will be low). The payment terms for subsidiary rights sales aren’t adequately defined. Royalties are paid and accounted only twice a year. And there’s a confidentiality clause that could preclude authors from sharing sales information.
Rowena has very kindly invited me to discuss how reviewers find an author via their web presence, what they look for on author web sites and finally, what they look for in a book.
Who is Sean and why should I listen to him?
Good question. I am a teacher, a book blogger, interviewer and a reviewer. I have been focussing on speculative fiction for the past year but I have had a life long interest in reading and authors. I review for traditional publishers, small press and conduct audio interviews for Galactic Chat. Now I’m wary of self proclaimed experts so I won’t pretend to be one. I can only let you know how I get to know of authors and their works.
Getting noticed
Cory Doctorow is fond of quoting Tim O’Reilly, “the big problem [for Authors] isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity”. I think it’s always been an issue for authors. It’s just been compounded with the ease of self publishing.
So what follows are some tips for getting someone like me to notice you as a writer and become an honest advocate of your work. I say advocate here because I don’ see myself fitting into that role of an academic, critical reviewer (which isn’t to say I won’t offer constructive criticism). I like finding good talent and letting likeminded people know about it.
Traditional publishers generally do a good job of getting you reviewed, or setting up interviews etcetera. In my experience though, social media and the use of the blogging/internet community is something they are just starting to come to grips with, often trying to seize it as a marketing opportunity, which runs against the grain of the egalitarian book blogging community. In my opinion social media outreach and community engagement with your readers is probably best done by the author. So without further ado here are my information conduits:
Podcasts – Book people talking about the books they love. I owe most of my recent purchases to listening to shows like The Coode Street Podcast, Galactic Suburbia and The Writer and The Critic. If there’s not a podcast that services your genre, consider starting one. If you can, get a mention or even a guest appearance on podcasts by engaging in some of the activities below.
Twitter– is probably my best source of information on what authors are doing and saying. A note here though, Twitter is a social media platform – engage with people. Don’t market your book at them (or do so with subtlety). These are people not customers (yet).
Websites and Blogs – have a web presence, a free blog or a self hosted site with an RSS feed. Have a place where you can talk about your book, yourself and your interests. If I like hanging out discussing things on your blog, I’ll tell others and I’ll link to your blog when you have news.
Goodreads- Get on Goodreads at least as a reader but preferably as an author as well. I have other readers who I respect and who I know have similar tastes to me. I’m informed of what books they are reading and what they think about these books. Make it easy for us to find you there.
None of these are a guarantee and I have missed out some avenues that I don’t use. The point though is to generate multiple pathways to your work, for you to grow a network honestly and organically.
Combine this approach with the works and networks of others and you have a web of mutually supportive connections that will nourish you.
Excellent examples of this approach are the ROR blog, and the various web incarnations of Marianne de Pierres. Watch how authors like Rowena, Marianne and publishers like Alisa Krasnostein contribute to a “rising tide that floats all boats”.
It’s not all work either. I promote my writing on twitter (it’s my biggest source of site visits) but I also spend time just conversing with people socially. All of the above activities require some effort but they also provide something in return.
But, “protect the work”. No good having a web presence without work to promote.
What you can do to help?
Everyone is busy. I know you have just spent the better part of two years getting a book to print, not to mention the carcases of other works abandoned on the journey, but here some things you can do to make it easy for people to sing your praises.
Have a Press Kit, a page including a bio and jpegs of you and your works that bloggers can use in their posts.
Collect links to interviews written and audio on your blog/website in one central location. When I research an author for an interview I listen and read all the other interviews they have done so that I don’t end up going over old ground. I want to ask the author engaging questions that make the experience a new one for them as well as the listener.
Social media buttons, Twitter, Facebook, and Google + make it easy for people to keep track of your pronouncements. I don’t use browser bookmarks any more, I ‘m hooked up to RSS feeds & social media updates.
Use commenting systems that allow users to be notified of new comments – anything that contributes to a community building up around your blog (my recommendation is Intense Debate).
So now that I have noticed you? What do I look for in a book?
Book reviewers, whether we are semi professional bloggers or newspaper columnists are grizzled veterans. We have seen it all before and we can be a hard crowd to please. The craft side of the equation is up to you, it’s something you develop only by doing, but here are some things that I look out for when reading.
Characters:You get me interested and caring about the characters and the premise of you novel/story almost doesn’t matter. Stephen King did this for me in 11.22.63. I couldn’t have cared less about the plan to save President Kennedy, I wanted the guy and the girl to get together and live happily ever after. As a reviewer I’m looking for “real” characters, whether they are orbiting Titan or defending Helms Deep. I want drama and tension and a little romance.
Originality or a new angle: reading lots of work within a genre really opens your eyes to how crowded with ideas it is. So to get yourself noticed, you have to come up with a fresh angle or something original. Trent Jamieson’s Death Works series is a good example of a fresh take on a number of horror/fantasy staples. You have a world that blends mythology, both Classical and Christian, an Australian location, demon possessed zombies, the Grim Reaper and a garnish of self deprecating Aussie humour.
Pacing: for genre fiction you need the novel to be well paced. This can be a steady rhythm or a white knuckle ride. You don’t want to give the reader a chance to put it down because, let’s face it, you are competing against visual mediums and other less taxing forms of entertainment.
An example of excellent pacing in a fantasy setting is Rowena’s King Rolen’s Kin; I’ve mentioned a couple of times that she should try her hand at a techno-thriller. A well paced novel helps the words disappear, immerses us in the story, page count ceases to matter. If you can make me as a reviewer forget that there’s another 300 pages to go I will be eternally thankful.
Emotional engagement: I have a rule that I generally only give five stars to books that get under my skin to the point where I have an emotional experience. To some extent this last point arises out of a combination of those above. Without well developed, believable characters you can’t form an emotional tie, and a book that languishes in the minutiae of a relationship never moving forward will bore the reader.
I read and reviewed Quentin Jardine’s The Loner early this year, presented as a faux biography – the pacing was steady, and the characters interesting and real. It was outside my reading preferences, a tale of a sportsman turned journalist. In the last 30 pages though, it gutted me emotionally, I felt physically ill due to empathy with the main character. Jardine had made those characters so believable and real that I experienced physical symptoms.
It’s rare to get all of these, or all of them in equal measure. And there’s some I am probably missing. But that’s not necessary for entertainment. And truth be told, reviewers aren’t all cut from the same cloth so even a couple of these will get your work talked about.
If you can make a book blogger or a reviewer a fan, then you have a genuine and honest promoter of your work. You may have noticed that I have mentioned writers associated with ROR, it’s not some cosy little in group referencing. I sing their praises when I blog and when I teach because they stick in my head.
It’s fairly easy to tell when someone is promoting for the sake of getting a reward. You want honest advocates of your work and if you can manage to do that you have an honest and organic support team at your disposal that you don’t have to pay.
I have given you some insight into my approach to reviewing and book blogging. Hopefully you can take something away from it. Perhaps, in the spirit of community you’d like to discus your own experiences and opinions in the comments.
For instance what has been your experience with reviewers? Do you have some you trust to recommend books? Has your book been reviewed in such a way that left you gnashing your teeth?
On our last full day in Paris we went to Versailles – completing Aileen’s wish list of things to do, and mine was already complete. We celebrated our last night in the apartment with a bottle of good French champagne and, er, pizzas. Well, we’re half class. It had to be something takeaway, and there’s a really good pizza place right next to the front door of our apartment block. The guy who makes the pizzas is from Bangladesh. Paris is certainly a multicultural world, though mostly African rather than Asian.
Actually, I tell a lie because that wasn’t our last full day, though it should’ve been. We spent the morning packing at leisure – including the bit we’d dreaded. The divan bed when folded out had a tilt on one side, so we made a bigger bed facing the other way by folding out a chair that also converted into a bed. But the way it converted – we couldn’t make sense of it when we tried to turn it back into a chair on our second day. We thought we’d never fix it. But in the end, on the last day, worked it out after about half an hour.
We had a final lunch, went to our local cafe for a final coffee, and said au revoir to our little apartment, au revoir to our local metro and supermarket. Here’s the wooden staircase going up to our apartment (OK, at the end of this write-up, I can’t make the image appear where I want) and our very-close-by metro station (ditto).
We took a taxi to the airport – and the first thing we saw when we looked at the Departures board was that our KLM flight to Amsterdam was ‘annule’ – cancelled! I went to the KLM counter, and they explained we’d already been booked onto an Air France flight going to Hong Kong, followed by a Qantas flight to Sydney. So we didn’t avoid Qantas in the end after all!
We had several hours to kill, because the new flight wasn’t due to depart till 11.40 p.m. And in fact we were still on the tarmac at midnight – hence our last full day. But it turned out better for us because we didn’t have the extra flight and airport stop at Amsterdam, and because our stop in Hong Kong iwas 2 hours instead of the 7 hours we’d have waited at Kuala Lumpur. So we ended up arriving in Sydney more than an hour earlier than the original flights.
We came back to a perfect Australian day – sun shining, blue sky, blue sea (on train journey back to Wollongong). I now know how lucky we were, because when we left Wollongong for Paris, it was the start of a downpour here, and it didn’t stop raining until we came back. Now Paris is suffering the absence-of-Aileen-and-Richard effect – the temperature has dropped and looks set to continue around 7 degrees for days. It’s happened like this other times too. We ought to hire out our weather-enhancing powers!
Meanwhile, here are a few more images from Montreuil, selected from all the ones Gilberte sent me, taken by the official photographer at the event.
Me in steampunk gear, signing.
Me and the lovely Bénédicte at the Hélium stall.
Gilberte standing between Aileen and me, Marie (who helped at the stall) to the left of me, some of the young readers from the Montreuil club at the front, and Valérie and Élodie (librarians and organizers of the club) on the far right.
Now the staircase and metro -
‘ Speculative elements are welcome, so long as they adhere to the rules of the real world. The difference is in the execution; for example, Tomorrow When The War Began is a real-world exploration of war as it could occur today, but The Hunger Games is not.’
A little early morning blogging. Today’s the last day of the Salon de Montreuil, and I’ve got a couple of hours signing to do. Aileen’s already gone off to re-visit Rue Mouffetard, an open air market sort of street we fell in love with when we stayed close by last time in Paris. I think she plans to dawdle from patisserie to patisserie, cafe to cafe.
She’s taken her spoon with her for getting back into the flat. To open the door, you turn the key through two locks, then a little bit extra to draw back the latch – and that last bit is very stiff. Aileen’s long fingers can’t manage it on their own, so we re-discovered the lever principle – she inserts the handle of the spoon through the hole in the part of the key you grip, then presses down on the spoon to turn the key. A triumph of human ingenuity!
OK, many hours later … We’re just warming up after taking an afternoon stroll around Père Lachaise cemetery. It’s an enormous place, bigger than Rookwood in Sydney, and filled with countless ‘sepultures’, which I guess means sepulchres – like miniature houses. All different styles, medieval and Renaissance and classical, some huge and showy, others, well, like little stone sentry boxes. They have a door at the front, often with a metal grille so you can see inside. Sometimes the doors are open or have fallen in, like this sepulchre Aileen’s ghouling around in -
The sepulchres are all packed in close side by side, an enormous city of the dead.
We started out looking for famous names, the sepulchre of Heloise and Abelard, and Moliere and La Fontaine. But after that it got more and more difficult – although we bumbled around looking for Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf and many more, the only other one we actually found was Balzac, the French novelist. Meanwhile, it was growing colder and colder! It was a mostly sunny, but usually also means a cold day – my raincoat and padded jerkin weren’t enough to keep me warm.
Earlier in the day was my last session of signing at the Hélium stall. I shall miss it. I signed quite a few copies after a slow start – but I was also the subject of a great many photos, in my aviator’s helmet and steampunk goggles. Then, saying goodbye to everyone at the end, well, it seemed very strange and a little sad to think that we wouldn’t all be meeting again the next day! But I think Sophie and Gilberte, Bénédicte and Hélène, Cécile and Elsa – I think they’ll all need a week to recover. I had the easy job!
