Take a look at what is undoubtedly the oddest addition yet to my brag shelf*. These are my contributor copies of the paperback version of a play by Victor Cilinca that I helped translate into English from the original Romanian (without speaking a word of actual Romanian myself) over a decade ago.

How’s that for a snappy sales pitch?

Victor's play was actually translated into English by Petru Iamandi, and I was brought in at the end of the process to give a native English speaker's polish to the final draft. It makes the play a very odd read for me. Effectively, my job was to pretend to be Victor, but in English. I remember trying to push my own predilections to the background, at the same time as trying to make sure that suppressing my own instincts didn't also end up creating a flat and lifeless script.

I'm pleased to see, many years later, that I wasn't wholly successful. For the most part, I kept my head down and stayed invisible. Re-reading the play now though, it makes me smile when, very occasionally, I stumble across a phrasing or timing that's pure me. It demonstrates why I'll never be able to pick up regular work of this sort, sure, but I like seeking myself peeking round the curtain.

As for the play itself, it's set below stairs at Elsinore, an environment where Polonius is lord and master. It's a stylised, slightly surreal piece - a dark satire in which some of the characters are half aware of their fictional status. One of the aspects that makes me happiest, because it's become far more relevant in the years since the play was written, is how the play satirises the invasive modern media's role in shaping society. In that regard, it's eerily prescient.

I hope some of you might pick up a copy, especially the actors and directors out there. Polonius has never been performed in English, and I'm certain Victor would be interested in seeing it premiered...

Go and grab a copy from the book page here.

*All authors have brag shelves. They are exactly what you imagine them to be. You can tell the relationship status of any given author by the location of the brag shelf. If it's discreetly tucked away somewhere, your author is likely to be in a long term relationship or married. If it's prominently displayed on entry to the residence (or worse still, in the bedroom), your author is likely to be single.

As I previously mentioned, I'm delighted to find myself on the table of contents for the upcoming anthology World's Collider, edited by the splendid Mr Richard Salter. The book is pitched as a novel in many voices, with each story contributing to an overall narrative of the world's decline (caused by an explosion at the Large Hadron Collider, which rips a hole in reality and lets... things... in). It's all systems go on this project at the moment, as plans are devised and authors begin a tentative delve into the first draft of their stories, so I thought it would be good jump back in time a few months and find out how I got there.

As is the case with many shared world projects, the submission guidelines asked not for a completed story, but instead for a short 'pitch' of a couple of hundred words, a thumbnail sketch of the imagined story, showing the beginning, middle, and end. There are lots of reasons to put an anthology together in this way, and one of the biggest is that nobody wants to waste anybody else's time. The guidelines about the event Mr Salter wants to chronicle were necessarily specific to the book he's putting together. For an author, this means that any story written is going to be extremely difficult to try to sell elsewhere, if they were to be rejected from this book. By asking for pitches instead, the editor saves us the agony of having to write something that might never be seen anywhere else.

In addition, with the accepted stories not yet written, it affords the greatest opportunity for the writers to cross-pollinate each other's work with references back and forward, to try to give that sought after 'one story, lots of writers' feel. It makes a lot of sense, then, for the stories to be written after everyone has been introduced, and a proper conversation is begun.

Historically, pitching ideas is not my strength. I struggle enormously to compress a 5000 word story into a couple of hundred, and come up with a snappy compressed version that makes editors want to read the whole thing. Richard Salter is one of the first editors to buy a story from me based on a pitch - it was a few years ago, when he was putting together the (now extremely coveted and hard to find - good luck!) Doctor Who anthology Short Trips: Transmissions. Having been invited to pitch, and having had an idea that I thought might be interesting (hey, what if the whole adventure takes place in an Internet chat room?), every attempt I made to render the story as a readable pitch made me want to weep at how bad it sounded.

So I cheated, wrote the whole story, crossed my fingers, and sent it in. A big risk, because nobody else had a licence to publish Doctor Who fiction at the time, and the story wouldn't work if I took the Doctor out. Could've have been time spent writing something I could never show anybody. It's a good thing Richard liked the story, then.

However, it's not an approach I'd recommend. At some point, unless writing thousands and thousands of words you can never sell appeals, you need to knuckle down and work pitches out. I've had opportunity now to pitch for a few more things, including the Iris Wildthyme books from Obverse and World's Collider. My success rate is on the up, as my bibliography clearly shows, but I can't claim to hit the mark every time.

On this occasion, I did. It helps that I know the editor from previous experience (and have also been published alongside him). That doesn't predispose him to buy my story (he's a well connected sort, and many of his submissions came from excellent writers that he asked to pitch, and many were rejected), but it gives me a small advantage in interpreting what he was trying to do with the book. I had an idea that the successful tales might be ones that held the most opportunities for being customised to a story arc. Not easy, as I had no idea what the arc might actually be, so I made sure the story was both a self-contained thing, and that it contained some very flexible writing devices that would let me back reference and drop clues when I knew what the other authors were up to.

Tricky balancing act, but on this occasion, I clearly got something right. To be honest, I haven't asked Richard whether it was the self-contained story, the flexible elements, or a bit of both that got it over the line in the face of stiff competition. I probably don't want to know, until the story is finished.

With the pitch submitted, it was the usual waiting game, until the announcement on 3rd of October this year. I was in. And boy, was I in good company...

It was at this point that the conversation began. But that's another blog post. Stick around, and I'll let you eavesdrop.

And in the meantime, the book has its own Facebook page. You really should go and like it.

My final post about publishing, and striving to be a full time writer.It follows three other posts, here, here, and here. They give the background to this, so check them out first.

You might well wonder why I've been blogging about the state of the publishing industry, and what I see as the ramifications of that. It's because I still hope to write full time, one day. I'm tired of the scattergun approach though. It doesn't work for me. I can't just keep pitching stones in random directions, and hoping to strike lucky.

A while ago, a wrote this blog. It had a deadline in it. The deadline has moved on (see the above). That's how long I gave myself to either move closer to making the ambition a real thing, or quit*. Because I can't just sit back, cross my fingers, and hope I'm doing the right thing, I decided to spend a while looking at publishing, in order to give myself the best chance of doing the right thing. I don't know yet what's going to tell me whether I've moved further toward making the ambition reality yet, but I suspect it will either be a crushing disappointment in what I achieve in the next 1071 days, or a sense of genuine excitement in how far I've come. That's will be what defines success or failure, and cause me to push on or abandon the road.

As you can tell from the last post, that road for me depends on whether I'm right in suspecting that the only thing I can do to make things work is earn the trust of readers. That's a big deal for me. I genuinely believe that any success a relatively unknown writer might develop can only come from a partnership with readers. I have to write things you'll enjoy. You have to find out that I'm doing just that, and come to expect it of me enough to look forward to buying what I write.

That trust always has to start somewhere, and if you've been reading along with this, I hope you'll let it be here. Find out if I'm an author you could begin to trust. I encourage you to do so, because you might be reader who will come to trust me. That's what we both want.

To that end, please consider buying the new edition of Cuckoo. I don't ask this lightly. You have eyes, ears, and a brain, and I know that if I let you down with this book, you won't be back for more. I said as much in the last post.

Maybe I won't let you down though, and maybe it will spark just a flicker of what might later become confidence in my stories. I want you to be somebody who sees my name on a book, and knows from that moment that you're going to enjoy what's coming next.

If you're somebody who has already read and liked the book, and is beginning to think you might like more things I write, please consider putting a reader review on Amazon or Goodreads, or maybe just tell your friends about the book, on or offline.

Before I sign off, I see that these articles seem to have been shared a few places. If you've come here not knowing who I am, but want to keep up to date with my writing and see if it's for you, either bookmark my website, follow my author page on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter. And thanks for reading.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get to get back to step 1 of the plan, and write some words.

*I don't mean quitting writing fiction, you understand. I couldn't if I wanted to. I mean quit the ambition, potter along as a hobbyist, and put my energies into something else I can achieve that might make me happy.

This is post number three. It follows, naturally enough, from two previous posts, here and here. You should read those first, to understand where I'm coming from with this one. They're slightly speculative, in that they're my thoughts on what's happening in publishing now, and what might happen next. They present grim reading for new authors, I'll be the first to admit, but without understanding the situation and extrapolating what might be coming next, those new authors are going to become a generation of talented hobbyists. There are always going to be the handful who are hit by lightning and shoot upwards at short notice, making the rest of us weep with jealousy, but if you actually hope for a career in writing fiction (and that's what I'm talking about - you can be a reasonably successful part time writer, if you've other ways to draw an income), then you can't sit back and wait for that to be you.

Because it won't ever be.

Instead, you have to treat your writing as a business, I think (and bear in mind, these three little articles are me thinking things through, to try to help myself - they're not some guaranteed 'how to guide' based on my incipient genius, and I may well have got everything wrong, with much disillusionment to follow). This is counter-intuitive for most writers, who have always considered themselves artists rather than businessmen. You can't really do that anymore, at least not if you really want to progress. The very suggestion that you might be best off treating yourself as a small business that you want to grow is a huge mental leap. A lot of people won't be able to get it. That's what agents are for! That's what publishers are for! For my own view on where that leaves you in the coming years, see previous articles. In summary, it leaves you screwed.

As this whole thing is about setting out my own stall, I should get on with it.

One thing I'll repeat from the previous entries, which is the single biggest thing an author needs to deal with these days. From the reader's point of view, and for the first time in publishing history, everything is competing with everything else, with the same ease of availability, all of the time. Somebody interested in horror fiction can pick up their Kindle and download my novel Cuckoo, sure. Equally, they could choose to download Carrie, or Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus, or Rosemary's Baby, or The Strange Case of Jekyll & Hyde... etc. Quibblers can point to titles you can't yet get for your electronic reader, but give it a year or two. Everything. All of the time.

I'm not going to try to tell anybody that my horror novel is going to hit the spot more sweetly than the best of King, Shelly, Levin, or Stevenson. People will laugh at me, and I'll be completely discredited in a heartbeat. Bang goes my chance of selling anything at all. That doesn't mean the right people might not like to try my work though. My job is to give them the opportunity and motive to find out.

This is what I'm going to try, over the next couple of years. A lot of it updates old advice for a new environment. Some it is, at the moment, horribly vague - a placeholder, to come back to. Your mileage may vary, but feel free to discuss.

1. Write Lots Of Words

More than ever, in fact. In order to achieve half of the below, I need lots and lots of new words. And they need to be consistently good ones. While all of these thoughts are more about how the business of being a writer is changing, it remains the fact that it's all irrelevant if you can't write good stories that people will enjoy reading.  I'm not the person to tell you how to become a good writer. There are far better sources of advice than me. All I can tell you is that the work needs to be done. Until you're a good writer (and nobody is, right at the start, although they might have the potential to become one), none of this matters to you. Worse, if you're premature in making your work available before it's ready, you risk fundamentally discrediting yourself and your future work. Readers have all the power, and the Internet is eternal. A bunch of awful reader reviews online, pointing out error heaped upon error in self-published works, is something that will live with you for the rest of your career. Google, and its successors, will ensure it. The Interweb gives you no second chances. Every author gets badly reviewed, but if you get dozens of people decrying your name, for stupid stuff that should never have hit the market, hell mend you. See above for what you're competing against. All of the time.

2. Accept That Readers Control The Market

Per previous articles, they really do. Publishers are at the mercy of readers, and in my view, only those in a relationship or partnership with their readers have much of a future. Retailers have power as well, but they're in the business of making readers happy, and bend with the prevailing winds.

3. Find Your Readers

This is the mission statement. The author's job, after writing something that some readers will enjoy, is to find those readers. This used to be the job of the publisher and agent, while the writer got on with the creative stuff. That's less the case than ever. See previous posts. So how do you find new readers? Given that shouting at people about how good you are is unlikely to engender much in the way of respect (and, of course, sales), you need to earn them.

1. Write Short Stories - This is going to make my long suffering lady groan. Whenever I proudly announce that I've sold a short story, she asks how much for. Short stories are the loss leader of the writer's repertoire. Even at 'professional rates', I get paid a pittance for them. That's not the point though. Short stories, especially for somebody like myself who doesn't have  a large and enthusiastic fan base already, are a first step to growing one. This is one reason I need to write an awful lot words. To get the most of having a novel published, I need people who are already going to be interested enough to go and grab that novel. This, in the first instance, is why I need to make a lot of words happen. I need not only novels and other work under my own name for people to dive into, but I need to throw out enough 'samples' to readers who might be interested in my stuff. Of course, from the writing point of view, a short story is a beautiful and self-contained challenge in its own right. We're talking business here, though. In a 'business model' of writing, short stories are there to attract a reader's attention. For that reason, I'd better trust that I can stay good at writing them.
2. Place Short Stories Intelligently - Unless you're incredibly prolific, a scattergun approach isn't a good idea. If you can, and if your work is good enough to give you the option, I think it's better to target your readers quite specifically. From my point of view, much of what I write is horror. That's not enough though - the genre is big, and there's a maxim in advertising that you need to put something in front of people at least three times before anybody takes notice. That includes my name, as an author. Think of how many author names you've discovered because you've read two or three separate things they've written, until finally their name clicks as somebody you start to trust to write the things you like. That's when you might actively start looking for other things they've written to check out. An example from my own history, that I'm modelling this on. A while ago, I sold a short story to Shroud Publishing's Beneath the Surface anthology. This led indirectly to Shroud publishing my novella Hiram Grange and the Nymphs of Krakow, and serialising my novel Craven Place in their digital edition. Shroud is a publisher with its own cultivated readership - people who enjoy and trust the publisher, and come back for more of what they do. I've sold another (I think cracking) short story to them for an upcoming edition of their magazine. Some of their readers are going to start registering my name as an author that they enjoy, and maybe grab a copy of Cuckoo. I can't make them, but some of them are going to start to trust me of their own accord. See my previous post for the heightened role trust and relationships have in the new publishing. You can't fake it, but you can put yourself in a position where you can facilitate it, if it's going to happen at all. Of course, it wouldn't be possible if Tim and other editors at Shroud didn't like my fiction, but every relationship starts with an introduction, and I can choose to send what I write to publishers who readers are already excited about, and give myself the best chance.
3. Place Novels Intelligently - For me, this means avoiding massive publishers who are going to throw my work into a crowded market in the hope that I sink or swim. Publishers who are trusted by their readers are far more valuable to me, because of the opportunity they provide to develop that much discussed level of trust. If a publisher has built a base of readers who trust them, those readers are more likely than anybody else to give my fiction a go, if the publisher has invested in me. The old maxim in publishing is that, to give yourself the best chance, you should be submitting your novels to the biggest publishers in the business, and working your way down until somebody says yes. It's always been a reasonable bit of advice. For the reasons I gave yesterday, I no longer think it counts. When The December Book is finished next month (finally!), the publishers I'll be looking for are independents with their own reader bases. As an author, per the above, I hope I'll bring my own readers to that book too. This approach will not net me a massive advance, but I want to grow, remember? Finding readers, and letting them find me, is a slow business. So is building trust. Once you've got it though, it doesn't go away unless you yourself forget it's there. If you have readers who trust you, and you fail to value that by driving them to buy something substandard, then you've earned their disloyalty. Remember your competition? Everything. All of the time.
4. Diversify - For somebody like me, a genre author, there's no future in one corner of the ghetto. If I can't introduce my work to an increasingly broad range of readers, there's no way to grow (this drives me back to step 1.). I don't just want to develop a relationship with people who call themselves horror fans though. I want to grow more than that. Writing is writing. Stories are stories. Most people who read Stephen King books don't call themselves horror fans either, though they know are enjoying horror fiction in that moment of reading one of his books. They're just readers, who like his stories. To achieve the same, I have to go and find readers who won't otherwise find me. A recent example from my own career, that I intend to use as a model going forward. I had an Iris Wildthyme story published last year by Obverse Books. Obverse is another independent publisher with a growing dedicated fanbase that's distinct (but connected to and drawn from) the fanbase of the authors they publish and the properties they develop. Some of those readers really enjoyed my tale 'The Story Eater' in Iris: Abroad. I have another Iris story coming out later this year, in Wildthyme in Purple. A few of the people who enjoyed 'The Story Eater' might also find themselves liking 'The Many Lives of Zorro'. That's the point where a handful of Obverse readers might also become, separately, my readers too, because they're starting to trust me. They're not readers who will have had much experience of the places where my darker fictions are usually published, but they might start checking them out. The small group of readers who trust me to write things they'll enjoy reading might grow, by a handful, and that's how growth works.
5. Diversify More - It's not enough to write novels and short stories, not if I want to one day live off my writing. I have to find other outlets. Theatre, radio, TV, film, who knows? Right now, I have no idea where to start, but I'm going to learn, and then I'm going to try it. Without additional sources of income for things I can enjoy writing, I'll never get to call this my job. Scary, but true. I'm starting from scratch on this one. I'm too long in the tooth to write 'anything as long as there's money involved'. I'm going to have to explore avenues that interest me from scratch. I've nothing else to say about this right now, because I don't know how to do it yet. I'll work something out, and soon.
6. Innovate - This plan, such as it is, requires that I leave room for innovation and new things to come along. The business of publishing fiction is only just starting to evolve - the Kindle is only part of the process, not the end. There's going to be a lot of industry watching from here on in, trying to work out how to make the most of new opportunities. I've got some ideas, but they'll change with the landscape, so nothing more on them here.
7. Avoid Preaching - Eight tweets a day about my latest endeavour is going to turn people off. So is jumping up and down on a message board shouting about how good my book is. I'll continue to politely let people know about my books through these venues, because if people don't know then they can't buy. However, nobody is going to be bullied or cajoled into buying Cuckoo, because everything else is also available to them, all of the time, and they know what they like. Only when they already trust me will my announcement make them want to buy a book. As with everybody else these days, I'm on FB, Twitter, Google+, etc. However, while I'll let people there know what I'm up to, I'm going to have to concentrate on building that trust in the first place, rather than waste my efforts mindless yelling. Everybody knows that social networks can help sell a book. A lot of people forget that only when people other than the author are the ones sharing a book and talking about it does anybody prick up their ears. If you enjoy my work, share it with your friends and contacts. That works. If I do it with my own stuff though, I look like a tool.

That's it. All I've got. In a publishing landscape that's controlled by the reader, who can choose to buy anything all of the time, all an author can build on is trust. Basic 'money where your mouth is' stuff. I can do my best to make sure I don't put out stories that are going to disappoint the people who like my work. I can value any trust that people place in me. I can try to put my work in places where more readers might begin developing that trust.

I'm not a fan of Ryan Star. I've only ever heard his track 'Brand New Day' (because it's the opening theme of the brilliant, sadly cancelled, Lie To Me). I wrote this whole thing while listening to it. It's incredibly appropriate.

I've written one last article, to finish things off, and I hope you check it out.

Following on from the previous post, things need to change for authors and publishers. The current system is in terminal decline. The centre cannot hold. What route forward is there, for anybody involved? Is this the end of publishers, and full time writers?

Could be. Really could.

The publishing industry is based on blunt traditionalism. Publishers are not innovators, because innovation has never before been a route to success. In publishing, until recently, you did it as it has always been done, as best as you were able to do. The printing press changed little for centuries, except in terms of production speeds. The publisher's job was to anticipate what readers want to buy, and produce as much of it as they thought they would sell. They controlled demand, because they controlled the product. Information was under leash. Sure, word of mouth has always been a factor in selling books, but people can only talk about what they've read, and they could only read what the publishers printed. Same thing with reviewers - they could only review, gloriously other otherwise, those books which a publisher was willing to print and bind. Nothing wrong with any of that, but because it was the same for decades, the ability to innovate stagnated. Publishing houses were full of people whose skills revolved around the effective implementation of an unchanging system. While there was a limited amount of innovation, it manifested mostly through identifying new books which took the public by surprise (and even at the top end, much or publishing has depended not on finding something new, but on finding something the same as the current 'big thing'). The infrastructure behind everything stayed the same.

Not anymore. The big publishers are shaking themselves apart in the attempt to adapt. They're massive dinosaurs, until recently the rulers of their world, too big, skilled, and established within their environment not to flourish. However, to extend the metaphor, an enormous meteor has just smashed into that terrain, and within a very short time it's become impossible for them to survive. They're too dependent on the terrain that was, and only their size is giving them the little strength they have to stagger a few steps further down the road. Soon, they'll collapse and die.

Going to abandon the metaphor (oh, it's a tempting one though), except to say that this isn't the end of life in publishing. That's what evolution is for.

To go back to my previous question, why do we need publishers? As importantly, what are they going to be for in ten years time? I don't need them to produce my book for me (it's cheap to do on paper, through print on demand technology, and if you have just a little technical know-how or the patience to read up, it's also cheap to make ebooks). Distribution, through online retailers is also cheap and easy. Making people buy your book is no harder as a author publishing your own title than it is as an author being published by somebody else who is expects you to find ways to drive interest in the book (ie, it's very hard indeed, regardless which side of the fence you're working on). Through the power of the Interweb, anybody willing to invest a little (and oh dear god, you self-published authors out there, please take heed of this) can find a professional cover designer to make their books look as good as anything put out by the big houses, and a professional editor to make sure the content is as good as it can be. And so on. An author willing to invest a little, and work a lot, doesn't need a publisher to make a book. Alas, lots of self-published authors don't bother with these simple safeguards. Natural selection, and the fact that readers have eyes and brains, will limit what they can hope to achieve for themselves.

So publishers have to change what they're for. If I haven't made you slash your own wrists yet, and if you have a close look at what is happening in publishing, you'll even see the beginning of what this means, right now in the independent press. Three good examples are Angry Robot Books, Abaddon Books, and Snowbooks. These are publishers that know what they like, and they're good at representing themselves, the publishers, as an identity. They talk to their readers, and the tone of that dialogue helps to identify them further. People are fans of Angry Robot Books. They're fans of Snowbooks. They're fans of Abaddon Books.

You think many people are fans of Penguin?

Think on it. The publishers have fans, readers who trust them. Those readers are then led to individual authors, because that publisher trusts that author enough to represent their 'brand'. Once, 'genre' helped readers to find writers. Now, with every horror author who is or has published or been published competing with each on a level playing field, it's not enough to be a 'horror author'. The choice is still too big for a new author to 'break out' of the pack. However, a new Angry Robot horror author is going to excite the fans of the publisher. They're going to be curious. They're going to pick up that author, and see if they get as excited as they did the last few times they tried an Angry Robot author. They might tell their friends. They might grab more of that author's books from other publishers, or even self-published stuff.

Suddenly, because the publisher is an agent (direct to the readers) of the author, acting on their behalf for mutual gain, there's an entry point to the 'market'.

I think that's the future of publishing. Highly speculative, of course. Total guesswork, in many ways. But as I've described, readers have the bulk of the power now (because they can get everything, whenever they want). Publishers can only exist where readers have a reason to trust them, and trust is a very personal thing. Because of that, I think publishing is about to follow the leaders of the Independent press, and become smaller, more personal, and in many ways, more intimate. Oh - and the other thing about trust, is that it breeds loyalty. If a publisher and a reader have a 'relationship' of sorts, it's that much harder for the reader to resort to piracy. The betrayal is a more personal thing, on a fundamental level. A reader of Penguin original novels might not think twice about pirating a book from a big, faceless publisher. An Angry Robot fan might hesitate.

As you can see, I think we're in the dying days of big, corporate publishing. That doesn't mean that those publishers who act now, with strong principles of identity and trust, can't flourish in their own right (at a certain economy of scale). Those I've named as examples might not themselves survive as publishers (natural selection will always be at work), although I hope they do, and this isn't a business model that can be 'faked', but it might just work...

The only 'big player' to have worked this out is Amazon, which not happy with owning a lion's share of the tools commonly used to self-publish, has decided to be a traditional publisher as well. It's no accident either that the giant is getting the ball rolling by publishing significantly in genres which have more dedicated fan bases. It will work, too. Amazon, for a while, will derive profits from the devices you read on, the books you're using them to read, and the means by which you're purchasing them. As the biggest retailer in town, they can also make sure their own books get constant exposure to the reader. It's incredibly clever market domination, and because of the percentage of the revenue they're taking from the reading experience, they can still offer good author advances compared to everyone else. What Amazon will never be able to command is trust, because only the blindest fool these days trusts business goliaths. The rest of publishing, if they shift now, can do that one thing that Amazon can't. They can form a bond with the reader.

So, in my brave new world, the traditional publishing giants are about to become extinct. Retailer-publishers like Amazon (and maybe Apple and B&N have enough clout to do the same if they put their mind to it and get their act together) and their future competitors will take their place entirely. Traditional publishing will, like the dinosours, evolve into things more nimble and specialised, and if they're happy with that shape and size, might actually flourish. It will be a quantum shift, but there are some bright, bright people taking the first steps along those lines.

As for authors themselves, how can they position themselves among all this seismic activity? Is full time writing a future possibility? Well, those giants will still exist, and for a short while they're going to pay competitive advances. Not for long though. It remains the case that all things are available, all of the time, and Amazon for one doesn't care. It takes a cut from the Kindle edition of my novel Cuckoo, as well as a cut from a title it puts out itself, so it wins every which way. Don't expect those big advances to stay. It needs competition, and right now that's not on the horizon.

The new wave of publisher/agents will be able to pay small advances, but they'll remain insufficient to feed your family on. I don't know the answer to this, but I'm going to have to take a risk, and work out how I see the cards falling. What can I, as an author who hasn't already made a sufficient name for myself to write full time, actually do to enhance my chances? I need to commit to something now, so that I can put time and effort into making it work. Could be time and effort wasted, but you get nothing for nothing.

I wasn't going to do a third part to all this, but I might as well set out my stall fully. Not all of the old rules are dead, I think. Some, that have been dormant for a while, are revived. A lot more requires an level of entrepreneurial innovation authors haven't had to take charge of before.

Part three is the most speculative essay of all... and it's what I'm going to try to do to give myself the best chance I can.

*shudder*

Been a nasty, wolfish couple of weeks in the real world. All calming down a bit now, thank goodness. Sometimes you need to make a seismic shift in your world view, and it can take some time for your head to catch up with the facts. Back on track now though.

However, I have a backlog of things to blog about, so prepare for a couple of days worth of World's Collider, All Hallow's Read, and more. Today though, let me close a couple of tabs in my browser that got me thinking long and hard, and natter a bit about the wolf crouched outside the door of the publishing industry. I've a lot of heavily conflicted thoughts about this, so bear with me over the next couple of posts.

For those of you not in the know, the business of writing and publishing books is in absolute turmoil right now, and authors and publishers are both struggling with some difficult questions about how they can survive in this new world. Most of this is related to the long tail theory of economics that now dominates publishing. That's a graph of it, above. Basically, the Internet makes everything as available as everything else, 99% of the time. On the web, you have no more trouble getting a copy of my novel Cuckoo than you do Neil Gaiman's American Gods. That, you would think, is a good thing for the author, but you'd only be half right. Such a vast choice has all sorts of repercussions, for the industry as a whole.

It's the dream of most writers to be doing what they do full time. That's an increasingly difficult prospect, unless you're right at the top of the food chain (and of all the authors with books available, only a tiny amount have the level of fandom that can put them there). One big problem is the advance. To write full time, you need to pay the bills. Advances - that big chunk of cash you get when you sell a book to a paying publisher, and which they hope will be earned back through sales - are diminishing everywhere, and have vanished in some places. More will follow.

To be fair, this is not solely the fault of electronic publishing, though we'll come to that soon. Advances have been eroding for a while, thanks to the massive power gained by the major distributors. It used to be the case that, to sell a single copy of a book, that book had to be sitting in a book shop somewhere (duh!). The first hurdle for a new author was to leave the hard to find underworld of what was then the small press (who might have websites and a cadre of fans, but were rarely able to get books into stores), and get their books in front of the public. That's one of the reasons big publishers used to be of high value. With many competing book retail outlets seeking in-demand titles to sell to their customers, publishers held the key to the kingdom. They could set the rules of the game. It was, of course, still possible to be picked up by a big publisher, be well distributed, and have your book flop anyway, but that was the law of the jungle. To have a chance, you needed to be distributed well.

Then the big chains came along (Borders, Waterstone, B&N), and put many smaller competitors out of business. Amazon arose soon after, and stuck the knife in. Suddenly, a small group of massive retailers held almost all of the buying power, and could set the terms. Even the big publishers were caught off guard. Now, to sell even a copy of a book, you had to accede to the terms and conditions of the big retailers. Not being on Amazon was unthinkable, as everybody shops there. That meant that Amazon (and the big high street chains and supermarkerts) could demand a bigger and bigger cut of the cover price (over 60% in many cases). That meant less money going into the banks of publishers. That meant less money being handed out to authors in the form of advances. It had begun. Already, the midlist was feeling the squeeze - everybody from those authors not quite on the bestseller lists, down.

Then electronic publishing came into its own, and the problem worsened considerably for both publishers and authors. A vast number of electronic publishing contracts beget no advance at all. You're working for royalties only. Sometimes, because of the slightly (yes - only slightly) lower overheads of electronic publishing, the royalty rates look good on paper. 70% of the cover price, instead of less than 10%? Sign me up!

Except everything is as available as everything else, all of the time. Customers have an enormous range of choice these days - more than they can ever read, all at the click of a button, with no need to expend much effort at all. The job of making a book stand out reverts more and more to the author, and becomes a case of marketing over everything else. Well and good, but there and hundred of thousands of authors, all trying to make their book stand out. A handful succeed, but marketing tricks are only novel once (when everybody else spots something that works for one person, and tries it, it loses all power because the customers get bored of it). There might be room for another couple of 'hits' to come out of Twitter marketing, for example, but that door is closing if it hasn't already. Everybody uses Twitter for marketing. It's almost lost its value for that purpose. It can still help to make people aware that you exist, but that's different from engendering sales.

The end result of all this (which I've simplified enormously) is*:

• Those at the top of the food chain, with big fanbases and wide distribution, will be fine for the forseeable future. Neil Gaiman need not worry too much about his next pay cheque.
• The midlist cannot continue to exist as it has. Advances, where they exist, aren't enough to live on. More and more sales come from the long tail in the graph above - dribbles of royalty-based sales over longer periods of time. These payments might peak and fall, but their unreliability makes full time writing almost impossible.
• The newest writers struggle even for advances. They begin life in the long tail, and the idea of making a living from their work is ever more distant.
• Publishers face the prospect of redundancy. What are they for? Look at what I did with Cuckoo, for example. The book is available in all formats, looks as good as most things on paper or in electronic form, and has been brilliantly reviewed. What's more, all of the profit comes straight to me, as the publisher. I don't need to share. There are overheads, to be sure - paying for professional cover designs, professional proof readers, handing over a proportion of sales to retailers, and so forth (and the risks of getting it wrong, looking like a hack, and losing countless potential readers is high), but after a month or so, Cuckoo is close to breaking even, and then I'll be in the long tail of tiny profits, like everybody else. How would a publisher have brought extra value to that? Marketing budgets go on the big hitters. Nobody else really feels the benefit.
• Agents... oh, I shudder at the thought. An agent lives off a percentage of the percentage that an author makes from his work. They therefore need a 'stable' of in credit authors from which to make a living wage for themselves. Unless they have a big hitter up their sleeve (Stephen King's agent can probably rest easy for now, though he or she had better keep him happy...), they must be looking at their future in abject horror. What's more, the economics of this devalue the work that an agent actually does. An agent is there to push the author towards publishers, to negotiate good contracts, and to protect the author from both his own worst excesses, and the industry's. If you've got a big hitter earning you a chunk of change, you can devote the time needed to do that. Without one... well, if your stable of authors is generating less income (thanks to being in competition with everything that there is, all of the time), you need to increase the stable to make up the shortfall, because you have bills to pay too. With a bigger stable, you've less time to devote to the least successful authors, and that diminishes the value of seeking an agent at all. Who wants to give away 15% per cent of their shrinking income, if they're not seeing the benefit of doing so. It's basic law of diminishing returns stuff.
• Finally, there is piracy to consider. It's on the rise, and is easier than ever now that epublishing has a big chunk of the market. The reading public's preference for books made of paper was the only thing stopping pirates from doing exactly what they've done to music and movies. The Kindle, and its competitors, have changed that. It's both sad and entirely understandable that customers don't often care if authors get paid, unless they're close to the industry or the individuals affected. Harsh, but true. And why should they? Books will still be written, by those who love to write them. There will still be new titles. Old titles will still be available, easily, all of the time. There will be no drought of reading matter. If it's as easy to download a book from an illegal bit torrent as it is from Amazon, without the bank account feeling the strain, why not do that (per the above, I know why not, but the majority of customers will never see the harm they're doing)? Those small royalties generated over time from epublishing will become smaller still, because if it's easy not to pay, then customers much prefer that. There are many noble arguments about people discovering artists and authors through piracy, then subsequently paying for other work by them. Against the above economics though, those arguments don't really hold up for a second. Back in the day, if I had to give away ten paperbacks to get one person to actually buy one back, I would be in a unsustainable position. Obvious really. If you teach people that not paying is fine, why should they ever reverse that opinion? It's the new starts and midlist writers, who are scrabbling for pennies already, who get most hurt by this.

All pretty grim, isn't it? Part two of this rambling series of thoughts is here. I don't have solutions. Some of what is grim here remains grim however you serve it up. Some other things can be addressed with a rethink. That needs to be done though, and soon. These are desperate times for everybody except the readers, who don't know any different, and probably can't be told. The old ways are dead. We need to find the new ones, urgently.

In the meantime, you can prevent me from taking a hot bath with a razor blade, by purchasing a copy of Cuckoo.

*in my opinion, as I see it, from my own guesswork, etc, etc...

Over the last few weeks, I've been deleting increasing numbers of 'Friend Requests' on Facebook, for the simple reason that I don't know who the senders are. I suspect that some of them are you, and that you've hunted me down because you like something I've written. If this is the case, please accept my apologies. On the face of it, you appear to be some of the finest people known to man, and your collective taste and judgement is a message of hope to the world. However, what I've always preferred to use Facebook for is keeping up to date with people I actually know, or am at least acquainted with.

On the other hand, I can tell from the traffic coming into my website that a lot of people really are using Facebook to track my scribblings and book news. It's easy to see why. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, has the stated aim of making the social network your first stop for absolutely everything. I hear that at this very moment he is developing an application which will not only alert you to the correct times of day to defecate in order to keep your bowels in good order, but will alert all your friends to your compliance or otherwise with the application's helpful suggestions (with options to upload photographs).

So, damned if I do, damned if I don't. I don't really want to inflict all the writing stuff on friends who aren't interested (I never intended for FB to be a sales channel), but there are clearly people who DO want to to keep up to date that way. My new author page is the solution. Take the following steps, as applicable.

Readers who want writing news: Go and like the page. That simple. Updates will appear in your regular FB experience. If you're already my 'friend', but are really just there to hear about new stories and books, feel free to unfriend my personal profile at the same time. I won't mind.

Friends who also want writing news: Go and like the page, but keep me friended too. I'll try not to cross-post to both too often, so you don't get double tapped with information.

Friends who couldn't give a stuff what I write, and can't understand why I don't get a manly hobby like playing football or kicking puppies: Stay friends, and don't like the author page. You'll have minimal exposure to my writerly ways.

Friends who aren't on Facebook: Hi Michael. Got your email. Hope you're well. Everybody else, select from the above.

There, that should keep everybody happy. Oh, except the Google+ crowd. I am there. Hunt me down. I don't know what to do with it yet, but I'll work it out.

Now do what you must do.

I've been putting so much time and effort sorting out the re-release of Cuckoo lately, that it's felt that nothing much else is happening. Not so! Today, for example, I returned the edits of my upcoming Iris Wildthyme story to Obverse Books. The story is due to appear, in a couple of months, in the anthology Wildthyme in Purple. Mark Manley provides the beautiful painted cover.

Many of the Iris anthologies have a loose theme, and in this case it's pulp fiction. My own tale is called 'The Many Lives of Zorro'. It has some tremendously swashed buckles in it, along with both derring and do. I wrote the tale earlier this year, giving me an excuse to both read and watch Zorro stories and call it 'research'.

The result, I hope, is as much a Zorro story as an Iris one, a tip of the hat to the character in all his many iterations. The wild inconsistencies in how Zorro and his world have been portrayed down the years are very much part of the story, letting me play as much with the Douglas Fairbanks Jnr version as Johnston McCulley's original print hero. I grew up with Zorro - saturday afternoon reruns of the Guy Williams black and white series from the sixties, mostly - and I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed his adventures. Getting to write one, at the same time as getting to write a new tale for Ms. Wildthyme and Panda, was a bit of a treat. I smiled a lot while I scribbled it down, listening mostly to the James Horner soundtrack to the Banderas/Hopkins Zorro movie from the nineties. I smiled again today when I reread it. Made me feel like a big kid. I hope it does the same for you.

It's too soon for pre-orders of the book, which will be out as a neat little hardback towards the end of they year, but I hope you'll check it out when it comes. There's something inherently Christmassy about a new Iris book. Until then, you can still grab a copy of last year's Iris: Abroad, which has my tale 'The Story Eater' in it. I can't recommend it enough.

In other news, it's time to pause and take stock. I've a couple of days away (and probably won't have email, if you're trying to get in touch with me) to do so, which is well timed. I need to get back to the December Book badly - it's been almost entirely on hold while I've been sorting Cuckoo out - and there are more things in the pipeline. Always more things. I'm not complaining. Things make me happy.

I've also another vacation coming up, a week in Dubai at the start of October, so there's an enforced break on the horizon. That's a good thing. It's difficult to find reasons to stop pushing when you're doing something as essentially self-driven as writing, and without such pre-planned breaks, I'd risk burn out or madness in short order. Last time I came back from a break, I revised and released Cuckoo, making it available for the first time in almost a decade. I've got plans for my return this time too, but we'll see what happens.

And of course, I can't close a blog so soon after relaunching my first novel without pointing you towards it and hoping you've a couple of quid spare to make it your own. Go see.

Back in a couple of days. Be good to each other.

The revised edition of my novel Cuckoo launches on Wednesday 31st August 2011 on the Kindle at Amazon, and in all ebook formats via Smashwords. Over the following days, it will also turn up in the iBookstore, the Nook store, the Sony reader store, the Stanza store... you get the idea. Whatever you prefer to read your ebooks on, there will be an edition of Cuckoo to suit. The paperback will follow just as soon as I've seen a proof copy I'm happy for you to pay money for.

The cover design is by the ridiculously talented Emma Barnes, of snowangels.org. It's got ideas from the covers of both previous editions of the novel, but I think it's easily the best art the book has ever sat beneath. Wait until you see the full wraparound on the paperback...

Now is probably the right time to point the non-ebook owners among you to the Kindle free apps site. You can download free Kindle reading software for the PC, the Mac, the iPhone/iPod, Android, and mobiles running Windows 7. Once you have the software installed, you can grab the book for the cover price, without ever needing to buy an actual Kindle, and read it on whatever you already own. Although I've got a Kindle, I also have the reading software on my iPhone. I read Paul Finch's Stronghold on it in Thailand. It's, for want of a better word, neat.

I've been asked several times now how revised this revised version of the novel is. The answer is both "quite a bit" and "not very much at all". A lot of phrasing and grammar use has changed, for example, because as you'd hope I'm a less clumsy writer than I was fifteen years ago. For the most part, the plot is the same. The world has changed a bit since I wrote the first edition, with technology and communications at the forefront of that, and so there are some tweaks and additions to reflect today's world (originally only one character had a mobile phone, for example - inconceivable today!), and the ending of the book is perhaps a little murkier than it was. Not different, just less... erm... overt. There you go. It's different, but also very much the same.

I am unable to comment further on rumours that the more curious of you might already be able to find Cuckoo on Amazon in the Kindle store, with a bit of searching. And that rumour that there appear to already have been some sales of it before I've even properly announced it? Couldn't possibly say...

Launch day is Wednesday. Bring a bottle. I'll be announcing other cool things to go along with the book, including a mini-blog tour, and a chance to win some freaking cool gear from Apex Books.

If you're a book reviewer, and want to try your hand with Cuckoo, I can provide copies in whatever electronic format takes your fancy, from PDF to .mobi and .epub. Leave a comment (your email won't be published) with your preference, and I'll get back to you ASAP.

My head's still spinning. December Book in one hand. Cuckoo in the other. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right...

You get the idea.

Above is a Wordle, a neat word diagram dragged together from the most frequently used words found in my short story 'Sharan Gali'. You can grab the story in the charity anthology Kizuna, along with a massive seventy-five others, and all profits go straight to orphans being looked after in the wake of the massive tsunami and earthquakes that hit Japan earlier this year. It's hard to imagine what life is supposed to be like for a child whose family has been destroyed by the actual planet they're living on. It's a lot easier to do something simple to start the long process of putting them back on their feet.

At the moment, you can get the book at:

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Or other Amazons of your choice.