Tag: writing

On indie press: Alan Baxter

~ Tehani

I’ve invited a number of people who have published in indie press in its various forms to write about their experiences. Today’s post comes to us from Alan Baxter, an author who has experienced some different aspects of indie publishing. 

When Tehani asked me for a guest post on indie press I was happy to oblige. I’m a huge fan of the small and indie press scene for a lot of reasons. The people involved are invariably passionate about their work. As a writer that’s very satisfying, as you know those people are buying your work because they love it and they want to share it with others.

The indie scene also gives authors a chance to get things into print or published online that would otherwise never find a home. Indie press can take chances the bigger publishers won’t risk. They can put together themed anthologies that people enjoy but larger presses avoid due to the work involved in getting stories, producing and marketing them. I love to write for that kind of project.

I know for a fact that being published in the small and indie press has directly helped my career. I’ve had people tell me they bought and enjoyed my novels because they had already enjoyed my short fiction. And vice versa, people have sought out my short fiction after reading my novels.

It’s also true that success with indie press helps to generate success in other areas of writing. Bigger publishers will pay more attention to people who have run that indie gauntlet. It’s hard to get noticed otherwise. After all, if an editor of a publication, however small, has bought a story from someone, that author must have some skills worth considering. And the better reputation the indie press has, the more vicarious credibility is passed onto the writers whose work they buy.

I’m still enjoying a slow build in my career. I’m becoming a better writer all the time by practicing my craft and I’m finding success with higher profile publishers as a result. But all this is built on the back of indie and small press success. I’ll never forget that and will always try to write for indie press as often as time allows. They produce quality stuff, from talented authors and their publications are always worth reading. They support authors at all stages of their careers, but especially emerging authors. It’s certainly how I got my start. They deserve our support in return.

Alan Baxter is a British-Australian author living on the south coast of NSW, Australia. He writes dark fantasy, sci fi and horror, rides a motorcycle and loves his dog. He also teaches Kung Fu. His contemporary dark fantasy novels, RealmShift and MageSign, are out through Gryphonwood Press, and his short fiction has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies in Australia, the US and the UK, including the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror. Alan is also a freelance writer, penning reviews, feature articles and opinion. Read extracts from his novels, a novella and short stories at his website – http://www.alanbaxteronline.com – and feel free to tell him what you think. About anything.

Recent publications include Murky Depths, Wily Writers, Pseudopod, Midnight Echo and a variety of anthologies from publishers like Coeur De Lion, Ticonderoga Publications, Dark Prints Press, CSFG Publishing, Seven Realms Publishing, eMergent, and Kayelle Press. Also, the non-fiction writers’ resource, Write The Fight Right.

On indie press: Lee Battersby

~ Tehani

I’ve invited a number of people who have published in indie press to write about their experiences. Today’s post comes to us from Lee Battersby, a well-known name in the Australian speculative fiction field. 

I’ve always loved short stories. My first SF book — which I still own, thirty mumble mumble years later — was a collection called SF Stories for Boys put out by Octopus Books in the 70s. I met Asimov for the first time in that book, and Harry Harrison, and began a thirty year obsession with a just-about-forgotten Australian author named Frank Roberts, whose story “It Could Be You” freaked the bejesus out of me, as well as foreseeing the logical extrapolation of reality TV forty years before the proliferation of shit-awful Mastersurvivorbrotherloser clones forced me to join Murdoch’s evil Pay TV empire.

When I began writing, properly, because I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to write short stories above all. My first publication — a poem — was in 1989, and I’ve written just about everything in the last 20 years: poetry, stand up comedy, jokes, advertising copy, educational material, interviews, reviews, articles, theatre, film scripts, late notes, apologies, novels, death threats, legislation, instruction manuals… But I always come back to short stories. I love to read them, I love to write them. I love to edit collections of them. And when I’m gone, and nobody remembers who I was, and those who do remember are pretending not to so people won’t pity them, I want just one “It Could Be You” left behind to fuck up the mind of someone young in my name. Consider it my black-hearted little gift to the Universe.

Somewhere, whilst I was growing up in small-town Australia, the publishing world changed when I wasn’t looking. The SF magazines that had been the bastion of alternative expression during my youth — all those second hand copies of If and Galaxy and New Worlds I’d been sniffing out — went broke, and those that remained became increasingly conservative. By the time I hit Uni aged 18, every copy of Analog I read felt like every other copy of Analog, and so did Asimov’s, and F&SF, and they were the only ones I could find on a newsstand. Conservative ideas expressed with the most conservative words, in ABC plots where nothing was wild, nothing was untamed, and the ghosts of Sladek and Aldiss and Bester were long forgotten. I’d grown up with the understanding that art existed to push the envelope of what was conceivable, and even if I couldn’t yet articulate it, I could point to Gahan Wilson, to Spike Milligan, to Alice Cooper and HR Giger and David Bowie and Charles Addams and Rene Magritte and shout, “Them! It’s meant to be like them!”

Art is not comfort food. Art should never be comfort food.

But everything I read tasted like the literary equivalent of a microwave cheeseburger: glaggy, half-cooked, and deeply, deeply unsatisfying. And soon enough, you end up sitting on the couch wondering why the hell you spent money on something so awful when, if you’d expended a little bit of effort, you could have made something much more enjoyable from scratch.

In 1990 I bought the first issue of Aurealis in a little newsstand in the centre of Perth because my bus home was late and I ran out of reading material. And promptly had an “It Could Be You” moment. For the first time since I was nine years old, SF fucked me up again.

Not because the stories were at the cutting edge of brilliance (although I remember them as being, on the whole, pretty good). But because they were Australian. There was no internet in 1990, no online ordering, no e-zines, no way for me, as a poverty-stricken student (And I was poor. Bloody poor. Ask me about it sometime) to connect with an SF community: I couldn’t even afford the membership dues for my university SF club. So all I had to go on was what I read, and there was nothing, not a bloody thing, to indicate that Australians wrote SF. Like acting careers and joining the space program, it was just something other people did. In my world, in my family, you didn’t hold such hopes for yourself. My family and I, well, these days the best you can say is that we share the same basic genetic structure and we live on the same continent.

It took me eleven years of doing other things, but when I started writing SF with a sense of purpose in 2001, I aimed for Aurealis. And in doing so, I connected with an SF community that shared my passion for that mad, wild, alternative SF style that had fuelled my childhood imagination (I discovered The Goon Show the same week I was given that first SF book. And people wonder…). One of the writers from that first issue of Aurealis is now a good friend, one is a peer I look up to and whose works continue to inspire me, and one I still see at the occasional convention. But we know each other, and can sit and share a drink should we so choose. It’s hard for people within our genre, I think, to understand how special that is, to be able to form a relationship with an artist outside the scope of their work: we take it for granted because the SF genre has created a tradition of conventions and intimate contact, but there’s still something visceral for me, as an artist who still aspires in so many ways, to share space with those who serve as pathfinders for my own artistic ambitions. And those writers I first read in 1990 are all still writing short stories, and all still stretching the boundaries of what they can accomplish in the short form, in their various ways.

But why the fascination? Why do I still write and read so much in the indie press? For the same reason why my workmates have never heard of the bands I listen to, or the comics I read. Because the core of the genre has become conservative, and the government of our thoughts has become centralised, and the walls of the establishment have become higher, and thicker, and more soundproof. Outside, where the barbarians live, in the small presses, the chances of failure are greater, and the readership is smaller, and an artist can look at the world in a way that scares or damages or inspires the wild thoughts of others, and find a home for those thoughts without worrying what effect it will have on their market penetration. Because the fringe is where the fun is. Magazines live and die like mayflies. Entire careers flourish, flower, and die without a single book deal being struck. Chaos is part of the dynamic. Chaos is part of the charm.

And I love it. I love it all. I love it to the detriment of my career: my peers, those who sold their first stories at roughly the same time as me, and whose careers have similar time lines, are striking those book deals, and publishing their novels, (And good on ’em, too. Just because I love shorts, doesn’t mean I don’t want one of my own) and I have, in many ways, fallen behind them. But I keep turning on the computer to find the guidelines for an anthology of gay-werewolf-pilot stories staring me in the face, and as much as I don’t want to, as much as I know I should be adding another 10 000 words to the novel-in-progress instead, still I wake up one morning and think, “If he’s only gay when he’s in wolf form…” and off I go again.

Lee Battersby is the multiple-award winning author of over 70 stories, in markets throughout the US, Europe and Australia. A collection of his work, entitled Through Soft Air, has been published by Prime Books. He currently lives in Mandurah, Western Australia, with his wife, writer Lyn Battersby, and an ever-changing roster of weird kids. He currently divides his writing time between novels and short stories, and tutors the SF Short Story course for the Australian Writers Marketplace Online. He can be found at www.leebattersby.com and is unhealthily addicted to Lego and Daleks. 

On indie press: Tansy Rayner Roberts

~ Tehani

I’ve invited a number of people who have published in indie press and gone on to become professionals in the field to write about their experiences. Here, Tansy Rayner Roberts shares her experience.

Indie press caught me when I fell.

We didn’t call it indie press so much back then, in the early days of the new millennium. Before a firm rebranding, it was small press and proud. But after my first professionally published novels sank, crashed and burned and I found myself having to reassess whether I was a writer or not, it was small press that gave me a community to belong to while I built my skills up to the next level.

I embraced the short story, and wrote a bunch of them, mostly published in tiny little ‘zines that few people had heard of then, let alone now. I also joined the Andromeda Spaceways collective and learned about publishing a magazine from the ground up (spoiler: it’s really hard work).  Later I edited YA e-zine Shiny and played in the New Ceres paddling pool, two projects that were integral to the launch of (World Fantasy Award nominated) Alisa Krasnostein’s indie publishing house, Twelfth Planet Press. My goals kept shifting: I wanted to make sure I had something published somewhere, every year, and then it was all about getting that novel career back, and one of the things that had to be sacrificed was my involvement in making small press happen for other people.

Also, there were babies. Actual babies that needed my time and attention. (spoiler: they are hard work too. Who knew?)

Then, finally, the novel career came back, and contracts were signed. Deadlines. Real books with actual distribution and publicists and that sort of thing. I was playing in the Big Kids Playground again.

But just because I had promised myself not to get involved in the making of small or indie press again didn’t mean that some of my work didn’t have a place there. As Alisa built up Twelfth Planet Press into something that was attracting global attention, my stories found a home there, one after the other, until I realised that what with all my novel deadlines and baby juggling, I was pretty much only writing short fiction when Alisa asked me to. And it seemed, I had finally got good at it – after years of writing short fiction that sank without a trace, the stories I sent to Twelfth Planet Press started to get attention. Award nominations. Positive reviews. When you haven’t had those things for a long time, they make you giddy!

I wrote a story I loved, “Siren Beat”, for a friend’s charity anthology project, and when that didn’t get picked up by a publisher, Alisa gave “Siren Beat” a home. It won me my first international award. When she asked me to produce a four story collection for her Twelve Planets project, I knew that I had to do it, even if it meant taking a chunk of precious time out of my novel deadlines, which had become a little bit deadlier upon the birth of my second daughter.

Without the existence of Twelfth Planet Press, I wouldn’t have written those stories, into which I poured all of my love and obsessions and annoyances with Roman history, the other career path that I had been passionate about, a decade ago. Love and Romanpunk is a beautiful book, and one that has absolutely no place with a big pro publisher. It also gave me a breath between big fat fantasy novels, and serves as a wonderful introduction to the kind of work I write, for those people who are likely to balk at a big fat fantasy novel or three.

I get so irritated that the current wave of self-publishing has taken on the label ‘indie’ and devalued it. To me, indie publishing involves a publisher who finds the work that will appeal to a niche audience, the editor who hones it and makes it better, the cover artist and designer, the proof readers. And sure, some of those are the same people, and it’s very likely none of them are getting paid for their work (yet) but it’s a business that contributes some amazing work to the field. To me, indie publishing is the field that brought me the gorgeous restaurant novels by Poppy Z Brite, the collections of Kelly Link, Glitter Rose by Marianne de Pierres, and the WisCon Chronicles. Maybe I’m just some grumpy old pedant railing against the internet, but I don’t see why self-publishing needs to take terminology that means something else, not when the stigma is peeling away from the self-publishing process in big wet chunks.

Self publishing is hot right now. But it’s not indie publishing, to me.

All this is not to say I haven’t had my dramas and disasters with indie publishing. Contracts to e-publish with no end clause, and a publisher who refused to negotiate any detail of said contract, forcing me to remove the work for publication. A publisher who dropped out of contact more than half a decade ago and yet still think they have the rights to put my work on the Kindle. Publishers who never produce the actual product, editors who don’t understand how the editing process works, and on one particularly awful occasion, a friendship lost because the author-publisher relationship became so deeply damaged.

But it’s a rare author who has a career longer than a decade and hasn’t picked up some horror stories along the way, and I can tell you that I have quite a few traumas attached to my experiences with pro publishers too (though not, thank goodness, recently).

Indie press doesn’t offer the big money, and it doesn’t offer major distribution, especially not in Australia. But for those works that are never going to appeal to the big business side of major publishing, it can lead to beautiful books, and the promotion of work that helps to build a writer’s reputation. For me, at a time when my pro novels are still confined to Australian and NZ territories, it’s rather glorious to have a little book that can fly to every corner of the world. Also, it’s purple.

I love Harper Voyager for everything they have done to relaunch my career, putting my heart and soul (and falling naked men, and frocks, and shapechanging animals, and magical cities) on bookshelves around the country, but they never gave me purple.

Tansy Rayner Roberts is the author of the Creature Court trilogy (HarperCollins Voyager) and short story collection Love and Romanpunk (Twelfth Planet Press).  In the last year she has won the Washington SF Association Small Press Short Fiction Award, the Ditmar for Best Novel, the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism and Review, and the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel, among other awards.  It’s been that kind of year.  Tansy blogs at http://tansyrr.com and can be found on Twitter at @tansyrr.  You can hear her every fortnight on the Galactic Suburbia podcast.

On indie press: Sean Williams

~ Tehani

I’ve invited a number of people who have published in indie press and gone on to become professionals in the field to write about their experiences. Today Sean Williams, one Australia’s most prolific and best-known writers of speculative fiction, shares his love of small press with us.

“Small Press: An Ongoing Reminiscence”

It seems strange now that there was ever a time when small press was thin on the ground in Australia, but in the early nineties publishers big and small had pretty much abandoned the field. All that remained was a tiny handful of small, independent zines, and it was in these that my stories found their first homes – from the Esoteric Order of Dagon magazine, in which I saw print for the first time exactly twenty years ago, to the future powerhouse of Eidolon, where I found a space to experiment with different types of speculative fiction and different forms of fiction, too (such as the mammoth 25,000-word “The Perfect Gun”, my longest story in print at that time). Under the close editorship of Jeremy G Byrne and Jonathan Strahan, I learned to be a better writer all round, garnering several Ditmar and Aurealis Award nominations, and even the odd gong or two.

Those exciting early years ultimately brought me to the attention of HarperCollins, which published my first solo novel, but there were a couple of serious milestones to cross before then. Bill Congreve of MirrorDanse books published the very first book with my name on the spine – a collection of two unpublished stories and a novella under the title Doorway to Eternity, which sounds a bit New Age-y to me now but aptly captured my aspirations, none of which would have been achievable without this crucial nudge in the right direction. Bill’s confidence in my work and his close stewardship of the book and its contents were critical in keeping me moving onward and outward.

Around the time of Doorway’s publication, the now-legendary Peter McNamara got in touch to propose a joint project with Shane Dix. At this point, Aphelion Publications had become the only small press publisher of science fiction novels in Australia, and our discussions resulted in The Unknown Soldier, my first full-length work in print, beating HarperCollins and Metal Fatigue by a year or so. It garnered my first award nomination for a full-length work and gave me critical experience for what was to come.

So experimentation, exposure and experience – three things every writer needs to accumulate in order to succeed – all came from small press. That was my experience then, and it remains so today for writers new and old.

The important role small press played in my career didn’t end with my transition to traditional publishers. Russell B Farr of Ticonderoga Publications has published no less than three collections of my short work: A View Before Dying, themed reprints to accompany my second solo novel, The Resurrected Man; my first full-length collection, the Ditmar-winning New Adventures in Sci-Fi in 1999; and a retrospective collection, Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams, which won the Aurealis Award in 2008. (Exposure – tick.) He also commissioned the strangest collaboration I’ve ever been part of: the intro to Stephen Dedman’s The Lady of Situations, consisting of a conversation between myself and a dead racehorse channelled by Simon Brown. (Experimentation – huge tick.)

In 2007 Rob Stevenson of Altair Australia Books published Light Bodies Falling, a collection of my rarer works, many of them unpublished or out of print, many connected to novels such as The Crooked Letter. This is Exposure on two counts: good work that might have been forgotten (even by me!) is given a new lease of life and my interest in the short story form remains vital.

I do write less short fiction than I used to, but the odd small-press commission does occasionally spike my interest. Such was the case when Chris Roberson invited me to write a standalone novella for his small press, Monkeybrain Books. Cenotaxis was the result – my first serious experiment in non-linear storytelling and a work that plugged an important gap between the first two Astropolis books. The same goes for Rob Hood’s Daikaiju series of anthologies (published by Agog! Press), which resulted in giant monster-themed haiku and limericks that would never have existed but for the invitation (some might not regard that as something to be thankful for).

I’m far too lazy and nowhere near crazy enough to do any of this small press stuff myself, although I did once self-publish a leather-bound edition of a book co-written with Simon Brown (without his knowledge, just for lolz). Only four copies of The Butler Codex exist, but bringing them into being gave me a much greater appreciation for those who take on tasks like this – from those who publish several books a year, to passionate individuals putting together a single fund-raiser anthology to raise money for victims of natural disasters (I’ve been in several of those, too, such as 100 Stories for Queensland, Tales for Canterbury and Hope). While some of these people go onto become Jonathan Strahan (TM), celebrated world-wide for the awesome forces for good that they are, all of them deserve to be celebrated and thanked for everything they’ve done to shape the field, by providing homes for niche or experimental work and by nurturing new writers. Their dedication, hard work, and serious financial investment do not go unnoticed.

I don’t think it’s outrageous to claim that I wouldn’t be where I am today without the help of these wonderful people. I think it’s the absolute truth. Small press is just about the purest expression of community in this mad and magnificent field of ours. Long may it thrive.

Sean Williams was born in the dry, flat lands of South Australia, where he still lives with his wife and family. He has been called many things in his time, including “the premier Australian speculative fiction writer of the age” (Aurealis), the “Emperor of Sci-Fi” (Adelaide Advertiser), and the “King of Chameleons” (Australian Book Review) for the diversity of his output.  That award-winning output includes thirty-five novels for readers all ages, seventy-five short stories across numerous genres, the odd published poem, and even a sci-fi musical. He is a multiple recipient of the Aurealis and Ditmar Awards in multiple categories and has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, the Seiun Award, and the William Atheling Jr. Award for criticism. He received the “SA Great” Literature Award in 2000 and the Peter McNamara Award for contributions to Australian speculative fiction in 2008.

Tehani says: Sean has written far too many great books to list them here, but check out his new website for more on Sean and his extensive publications list, including his most recent book Troubletwisters (with Garth Nix).


On indie press: Kaaron Warren

~ Tehani

I’ve invited a number of people who have published in indie press and gone on to become professionals in the field to write about their experiences. In today’s post, dark fiction writer Kaaron Warren shares her publishing journey.

My history with independent press is the history of my writing career. I sold my first short story, “White Bed”, to the Women’s Redress Press, after finding a flyer in my letter box. I’d been sending out stories for a couple of years by then, gathering rejections and a wonderful ‘This is a very satisfying story” from the fiction editor of Penthouse. So when I received the phone call from the editor of Shrieks (I‘d moved from Sydney to Canberra in the interim) many months after submitting the story, I was stunned and thrilled beyond words and I still think of that phone call as the moment I became a professional writer. Until you make that first sale, you’re not really sure it will ever happen.

My second short story I sold to Aurealis. Like Trent Jamieson, Aurealis was a major career goal. I’d been reading it since the first issue, and considered it an impossible dream, to be honest. I’d received some ‘good’ rejections, ie ticks at ‘this was almost there’ and ‘send us more of your work’ rather than ‘thanks but no thanks’. A couple of times I’d had ‘revise and resend’ and I  took a week off work each time, to work my butt off as a real writer. It worked for ‘The Blue Stream’. When Stephen Higgins called to tell me they were buying the story, my excitement must have been clear. “You haven’t sold too many stories yet, have you?” he said, very kindly.

From then on, when people asked me if I’d been published, I could proudly say, “Yes.” And it made a difference to the way I was perceived.   I think there is passion in all parts of publishing; most people work in the industry because they love books. With the independent press, this passion can be seen through from the initial dream to the end result, and I love being part of that process. A publisher has an idea for an anthology and has the fun of finding stories, cover artists, layout artists and all. I love some of the anthologies and magazines I’ve been in for their creativity in concept and style. Here’s just a few:

Scenes from the Second Storey from Morrigan Books, came from Mark Deniz’s love of the eponymous album by The God Machine. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in mainlining the album while writing my story.

Baggage from Eneit Press, came from Gillian Polack’s desire to explore the nature of migration to Australia. What we bring with us, what we leave behind.

The Alsiso Project, from Elastic Press, came from a typo!

These are just three. I’ve also been in inspired anthologies from our host, Tehani Wessely’s Fablecroft Press, Alisa Krasonstein’s Twelfth Planet Press, the CSFG anthologies and many more. I love that these publishers have creative ideas and that I get the chance to write for them.

My short story collections, The Grinding House from CSFG Publishing and Dead Sea Fruit from Ticonderoga Books, both came from the passion of the publishers. Donna Hanson, from CSFG, and Russell Farr, from Ticonderoga, approached me to publish my stories. Both overcame my fears and my self-doubt and pushed me to produce books I’m hugely proud of. Both times I had the opportunity to choose the cover artists, which is something else wonderful about the independent presses. Robyn Evans did the cover for The Grinding House and Olga Read did Dead Sea Fruit. I adore both covers.

I continue to support and be published by the independent presses. I can’t wait to see what they’re going to come up with next.

Kaaron Warren has been publishing fiction since 1993. Her three novels, all from Angry Robot Books, are Slights, Mistification and Walking the Tree. Upcoming, she has a novella upcoming in Visions Fading Fast, from Christopher Teague’s Pendragon Press, another in Ishtar from Gilgamesh Press, and a series of four stories inspired by the Australian landscape as part of Alisa Krasnostein’s Twelve Planets series. She has a story in Ellen Datlow’s Blood and Other Cravings anthology.   You can find her at kaaronwarren.wordpress.com and on twitter @KaaronWarren

On indie press: Jim C Hines

~ Tehani ~ 2 Comments

I’ve invited a number of people who have published in indie press and gone on to become professionals in the field to write about their experiences. Today’s post comes to us from Jim C Hines, a US author who has experienced success professionally and is also experimenting with self-publishing. 

When Tehani e-mailed to ask if I’d be interested in doing a guest post about my experiences with indie press, I said I’d be happy to … but, um, what exactly did she mean by “indie”? Were we talking about indie as a deliberate alternative to the mainstream? The small presses who publish titles too different or risky for the big publishers? Or is this indie as it’s come to be used, where everyone from vanity presses to bestselling authors dabbling in e-books try to lay claim to indieness?

I admit I cringe a bit at the term “indie” these days. Often (but not always), the word signals that I’m about to be sold to. I’ve come to associate indie with authors who send multiple invites to be their fan on Facebook, daily messages asking me to retweet their contests, comments begging me to like and +1 their books, and so on. Not all self-identified indie authors are obnoxious self-promoters, but in recent years, it feels like most obnoxious self-promoters identify as indie.

To me, indie is more than a sales pitch. I’ve always appreciated the role of the small press in publishing works that were too risky for the big publishers. My first novel Goldfish Dreams was a mainstream book about an incest survivor. I don’t know that a book like that, written by a fantasy author, would have sold enough copies to justify the time and money most major presses invest in their titles. But this smaller, specialty publisher was able and willing to take that risk.

The same holds true of short fiction collections. How many single-author collections do you see from big vs. small publishers? These are important works, but not works that generally sell well enough to make it as major releases.

Following that logic, self-publishing could indeed be the culmination of indie. When Goldfish Dreams went out of print, I released it as a $2.99 e-book. I’ve also published two electronic collections of my short fiction, with a third on the way. I have the freedom and independence to publish anything I’d like, and no marketing group or sales committee or editor has any say in those choices.

Heck, I could post my grocery list for sale on Kindle and declare myself an indie author. (A bestselling indie author, even, if my book makes it into the top 100 list in the Kindle > Kindle E-books > Nonfiction > Produce > Contemporary Grocery Lists category.) But when people talk about wanting to read indie books, or to listen to indie music, the assumption is that they’re looking for something a) different and b) good.

Which makes me believe that self-publishing =/= indie. Some self-published titles would qualify as indie, but not all, and not by the mere virtue of being self-published. My suspicion is that most of the truly indie titles continue to be found in the small press, where editors can deliberately select those stories that are both different and good. (And if you believe “good” is in the eye of the beholder with no true meaning, then you’ve probably never been on slush reading duty.)

I’m pretty sure I’ve gone off on a tangent from Tehani’s original topic. Coming back to myself and my own career, I very much appreciate the small publishers who took a chance on my earliest books. Those first books provided a tremendous boost to my confidence. And while I don’t know that I’d describe Goblin Quest as indie, I do think Goldfish Dreams feels like an indie title, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have published something I feel was both different and important.

Long live the indies!

Jim C. Hines is the author of The Snow Queen’s Shadow, his seventh fantasy novel. This is in no way an indie title, but does feature Sleeping Beauty as a kick-ass ninja, so that’s pretty cool. He’s self-published two short collections, Goblin Tales and Kitemaster & Other Stories, and spends far too much time online at http://www.jimchines.com

Guest blog: Ian Irvine – writing for children and young adults

~ Tehani ~ 2 Comments

We are delighted to welcome highly acclaimed Aussie author Ian Irvine to the FableCroft blog, for a guest post on writing for children and young adults. Thanks Ian!

Tehani asked me if I could post about writing for children and young adults. Though I’ve written a lot of books (27, in fact) and most of them are read by young adults, I’ve never written a book specifically for that age group, so this post will focus more on what I know about writing for children.

I’m best known for a long epic fantasy sequence set in the Three Worlds, though in recent years I’ve also written three quartets for younger readers – the Sorcerer’s Tower, Runcible Jones and Grim and Grimmer series’. However, writing for children covers a vast range of ages, abilities and interests, and each of my children’s quartets has been aimed at a different audience. I always keep the audience in mind while writing, and each series had to be written differently.

The Sorcerer’s Tower books, published in 2008, were part of Scholastic’s illustrated Fantastica series for mid-primary readers (the other quartets in this series were written by Kim Wilkins, Fiona McIntosh and Richard Harland) and were only 10,000 words each. My books were illustrated by DM Cornish, incidentally, and he did a magical job. For such a young audience I restricted the stories to a handful of characters, linear story lines, only one viewpoint, simple language, and of course concepts suitable for this age group.

You might think that such little books would be easy to write, but I found them a real challenge. In one sense they were easier – being much shorter, I could keep the whole story and all the characters in mind while writing each book. This isn’t possible in an epic fantasy quartet which can total 800,000 words or more, and where every editing task, even getting all the inconsistencies out, is a cosmic labour. On the other hand, big fantasy novels offer the writer more freedom, because readers are more tolerant of diversions and many fans love huge, complex plots. For children, however, the writing has to be tight, focused and clear.

Because I was used to writing the epic Three Worlds novels, it wasn’t easy to adjust my writing style to small, simple books. Simple can be surprisingly difficult to write – you have to create engaging characters, with a degree of complexity, and tell an exciting, fast-paced story, within a very small canvas. However reviewers and librarians have said that the Sorcerer’s Tower books are ideal for reluctant readers in primary school, and I’m delighted that they’ve encouraged some children to read who might otherwise have not done so. In doing these books I also learned a tremendous amount about writing economically, and that’s changed the way I’ve written since.

My first children’s series was Runcible Jones (published 2006-2010). These are much longer works, written for 9-14 year olds but also read by YA and adults. Here I could write more complex stories with strongly developed characters, though I still simplified the language, used a single viewpoint character and avoided ‘adult concepts’ such as sex, graphic violence, crude language, and strong crime and horror. These are okay in YA literature (with some limits) but rarely acceptable in children’s books. I spent a long time developing the story world for this series – an Earth where magic is illegal twinned with the world of Iltior where science is banned but magic routine – though in retrospect I think the canvas was too broad, the story world too large. Also, at 105,000 words each, these books were a bit long for the target audience. 60 – 80,000 words is the ideal length for younger readers, because a lot of children are daunted by the size of big books.

Why did I want to take time off from my very successful epic fantasies to write for children anyway? Good question. The eleven books of the Three Worlds sequence run to 2.3 million words and, though I love doing them, they’re mentally and creatively exhausting. At the end of each series I need a writing escape and after the last, The Song of the Tears, was finished in 2008 I longed to write something completely different. And much shorter.

Another reason – if a writer only ever does one kind of book, he or she tends to become typecast by both publisher and readers. Readers are reluctant to read something quite different by that writer, and publishers understandably reluctant to publish it. For this reason, all my writing life I’ve alternated epic fantasy with other kinds of books, to give me the flexibility to write whatever I feel like (within reason).

After finishing Song of the Tears, I wrote a proposal for a series of relatively short, humorous adventure stories called Grim and Grimmer (published by Scholastic in 2010 and 2011). Each book was to be around 25,000 words, and aimed at readers 8-13. This was going to be a real challenge because I’d never written humour before – well, not intentionally! – and wasn’t sure I could do it. It would be highly embarrassing if my attempts were unfunny.

I’d also noticed that, while there are plenty of humorous books for children, and plenty of adventure fantasy too, there aren’t many books that successfully combine humour with a strong, compelling plot. The really successful series that do both, such as Artemis Fowl, Skulduggery Pleasant and Bartimaeus, are for older readers. A gap in the market, I thought, ha!

I originally planned six of these books though, in the middle of the global financial crisis, my publisher could only commit to four. However when it was time to write them, Scholastic wanted longer books, 40,000 words or more each, and I was happy to make this change because the added length offered more scope for the stories I was developing. Such is the give and take in developing a series.

There’s oodles of fantasy adventure around for this age group and, for the Grim and Grimmers to succeed, I had to find a way to make them stand out. This wasn’t going to be easy, since they’re set in a fairly traditional world of children’s fantasy, with stock characters like goblins, trolls, dwarves and so forth. Don Maass (a top NY agent) wrote, in The Fire in Fiction, that most stories his agency sees fail because they’re too familiar, too bland, and too much the same as all the others. It’s the same with characters – most characters fail not because of too much exaggeration, but too little. And exaggeration and hyperbole is particularly important in writing humour, so I decided to indulge my zany side for once. I also acknowledge the assistance of John Vorhaus’ The Comic Toolbox here. It’s not just the best book on writing humour, it’s better than all the others put together.

To make stereotypical characters fresh, I twisted the stereotypes. My goblins are still greedy and calculating, but in Grim and Grimmer the entire goblin nation is under an enchantment that drives their flaws out of control – they’re so obsessed with gambling that they neglect their homes, children, personal hygiene and even the kingdom itself. The mournful goblin king, Dibblin the Doughty, constantly accepts responsibility for everything that’s gone wrong in his kingdom, then turns back to the gaming table without doing anything. The villainous Aigo bets on whether Useless Ike (the hero of the series) will survive various deadly ordeals he puts him through.

The dwarf Con Glomryt (all the dwarves are named after rock types), who challenges Ike to a contest, isn’t a typical dwarf warrior with an axe and chain mail, but a gold-toothed, smirking conman who resembles the lowest form of TV game show host. The huge, handsome demon Tonsil is as dumb as a doughnut and sweats crude oil by the barrel – he’s a real fire hazard at a party! The apparently kindly old lady, Fluffia Tralalee, who lives in a cave carpeted in pink shag pile, with fluffy bunny wallpaper, turns out to be a bloodthirsty old bat with an armoury big enough to start World War 3. And Tonsil’s sister, the demon Spleen, specialises in psychological pain. She doesn’t just get inside Ike’s head, she actually puts her head inside his head (via another plane), to identify his secret terrors and see how to best torment him. And so on for the entire cast of characters.

But were the books funny, you ask. Well, they had lots of reviews and all the reviewers thought so. Writing these books was the first time I really let go, and it was worth it. Grim and Grimmer is the most fun I’ve ever had writing, and I’m sorry that the series is finished.

However, epic fantasy calls. I’m presently doing the final edits for Vengeance, book one of a brand new series, The Tainted Realm, out in Australia in November and the UK and US in 2012.

Ian Irvine is a marine scientist who has developed some of Australia’s national guidelines for the protection of the marine environment and still works in this field. He has also written 27 novels, including the internationally bestselling Three Worlds fantasy sequence, an eco-thriller trilogy and twelve books for children. Website: http://www.ian-irvine.com/

On his Facebook author site, Ian is giving away three sets of his trilogies and quartets every week for the whole of 2011, plus other great prizes. To celebrate the publication of Vengeance, there’ll be another iPad2 giveaway later in the year.

To enter any of the comps, go to http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author.

Of Swords and Breakfast

~ Tehani ~ 2 Comments

The thoroughly delightful, ridiculously talented Tansy Rayner Roberts shares her thoughts on the difference between male and female fantasy writers.

Tehani is totally trying to trap me into saying something controversial, by requesting a post about the difference between male and female writing in fantasy.

Since I first started reading Proper Grownup Fantasy at the age of thirteen, I noticed women writers and sought them out. Not necessarily because their writing offered something that male writing didn’t, but because – well. Maybe it did. I find myself drawn to female voices, though a book has to offer me far more than just a female byline to capture my attention.

Warrior women photograph Attribution Some rights reserved by Ran Yaniv Hartstein

As a reader, I particularly love deep characterisation and unusual takes on gender roles, and frocks, and humour, and smutty bits, and strange magic, and to be honest I’m far more interested in the stories that happen inside the castle walls than outside of them. None of those things are exclusive to women’s writing, but why shouldn’t I seek it out there? Why shouldn’t I assume that I’m more likely to find what I want in a book by a woman than a book by a man?

After all, it seems pretty clear that there are a huge number of readers who only seek out what they think they want in a novel from books with a male name on the cover. And I think that’s very depressing. Also, as a woman who occasionally reviews books, I do think it’s very important for me to single out and discuss books by women – or rather, as someone who reads a lot of women, I think it’s important that I keep reviewing books, as my small attempt to be part of the solution rather than the problem.

The truth is that we all filter our reading, before we even pick up a book. We use all manner of filters: what we know of that author already, what we’ve heard about their work, what we think of the cover. Gender bias often plays a part in that too. I do tend to assume that with a male fantasy author, I’m more likely to get an abundance of fight scenes, and not enough chatting over breakfast scenes, but that’s a completely unfair assumption. (look at David Eddings, his books were PRACTICALLY ALL BREAKFAST CHATTING, remember Breakfast of Magicians? It was between Queen of Elevenses and Tower of Gossip and Stew).

Some of my favourite books ever involving swords are by women: Jennifer Roberson, Ellen Kushner, Tamora Pierce. Some of my favourite books involving witty dialogue, smutty bits and pretty clothes are written by men: Simon R Green, Kim Newman, Neil Gaiman. Some books (the best books ever) have both of these things! I certainly don’t assume that a woman is going to automatically produce all the things I love best in books.

Around the fire photographAttributionNoncommercialNo Derivative Works Some rights reserved by Jane Starz

But on the other hand: female voices, I am drawn to them. I seek them out, I tend to enjoy books which have them far more than books which don’t, and I choose not to feel guilty about that.

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Tansy Rayner Roberts is the author of Power and Majesty (Creature Court Book One) and The Shattered City (Creature Court Book Two, April 2011) with
Reign of Beasts (Creature Court Book Three, coming in November 2011) hot on its tail. Her short story collection Love and Romanpunk will be published as part of the Twelfth Planet Press “Twelve Planets” series in May.

This post comes to you as part of Tansy’s Mighty Slapdash Blog Tour, and comes with a cookie fragment of new release The Shattered City:

Roast goat. Someone had said something about roast goat. Velody followed her nose to the spit, where two lads were slashing strips off the beast, layering them up on platters for the crowd. She found a dish of the rarest slices, oozing blood, and ate ravenously, licking her fingers. “Love a demme with an appetite,” leered one of the goat lads.

Velody wiped a smear of blood from her chin. “Don’t we all?”

Fresh meat was a rare extravagance, and her body thrummed with it as she turned back to face the crowd. The music slid under her skin, and she could feel Ashiol’s presence nearby. She could not see him in the crowd, but his animor sparked against her own, bringing mixed sensations of security and lust. You don’t want him, she told herself sternly. It’s the meat making you crazy.

NaNoCafe Notes

~ Tehani

On Wednesday November 10, 2010, I was invited to speak to a group of NaNoWriMo participants as part of three Rockingham City Council sponsored NaNo Cafes. It was a great pleasure to be able to chat with local NaNo nuts. I’ve reproduced below some of the topics we talked about.

Know your market

If you have never read a book by a publisher you want to sign with, or an anthology by an editor you’d like to submit to, how can you possibly know what sort of thing they are looking for? What standard of work they are publishing? What quirks they may have as an editor that you could work to? Subscribe to a magazine you aspire to, buy an anthology by an editor you’re interested in, read novels from interesting publishers. While you’re at it, check out reputable awards in the genre you write, both Australian and international, and see the standard of the very best being published.

Read widely

And not just in your preferred genre, although that’s important too. Side note: I know of authors who say they never read in the genre they write in, which I find unfathomable – how can you know as a writer what tropes are being done to death if you never read your contemporaries, and how can you write successfully without knowing the roots of your genre? Back to the point. Read widely in other genres too. Some of the very best stories draw on influences from a wide variety of literature.

Make time to write

Once thing that NaNoWriMo does for authors is make them find time to write. The most frequent excuse I hear from (people who want to be) writers is “But I just don’t have time to write!” Here’s a scoop for you – no-one “has” time to write. People MAKE time to write. I know authors who get up at 4am to write, before they start their “real” day. Others disappear on writing retreats with no internet, no phones, no distractions, taking their holidays to write. If you WANT to write, you have to find the time to, and sometimes that means making choices about what you give up in order to get that time. Give up television, wake up an hour early each day, turn off the internet for an hour a day – find your “disposable time” and use it better.

Research your work

You don’t always have to write what you know but make sure you know what you write! Side note: don’t make the Bryce Courtenay mistake of making fiction sound like non fiction. Fact should underpin the story, not dominate it. And yes, fact applies to spec fic too. Back to the point. If you’re writing about horses but the closest you’ve come to a horse is the carousel at the park, first hand experience can’t be topped. Visit stables, farms, take some riding lessons if you can. If that’s not practical, talk to someone who has worked with horses. If you can’t manage that, at the very least, extensively research your topic! Don’t rely on the work of other fiction writers to inform your information – maybe THEY didn’t know a horse from a sheep either!

Give manuscripts time before revising

It’s amazing how many changes you’ll make if you let a manuscript sit for a few weeks or months before pulling it out and giving it a polish. You’ll find errors you’d missed, ways to tighten the story, places where the dialogue clunks and so much more. Time really gives you an opportunity to distance yourself from your baby before giving it another going over.

And speaking of polishing…

Draft. When you NaNo, the 50,000 words you produce are a draft. They are not, and never should be, a finished product. No-one writes perfectly the first time round and many great writers do three, four, five or more COMPLETE revisions of works before them deem them good enough to send out to a publisher. And then they wait for the revisions and edits suggested by the editor, should the manuscript be accepted.

Read your stories aloud

Okay, this one is a more for short stories; I don’t know many novellists who do it! Reading your work aloud forces you to read what is actually on the page, rather than what you THINK is on the page. There is a difference. You’ll find typos, incorrect punctuation, clunky prose and, most especially, dodgy dialogue. Well worth the time.

Read submission guidelines

They are there for a reason. Submission guidelines tell you what the editor/publisher is looking for. If they call for urban fantasy, don’t send hard scifi. If it’s a romance publisher, don’t send them a paranormal. Check length restrictions/requirements. Double check reading periods and put them in your calendar. Accept the fact that some markets won’t be suitable for your manuscript and look for ones that are. And related to this…

Keep track of your submissions

Check market/agent websites for usual submission times and query after that period – subs do go astray, but editors are busy people and don’t want to be answering your query two days after submissions close when the information about the reading process is easily accessible on their website.

And a final few points

* Good stories are part idea, part talent and mostly sheer hard work. Writing isn’t easy, and it’s not always rewarding, but if you’re a writer, you’ll do it anyway.

* Get used to rejection – very very few stories or manuscripts are accepted first go and many never find a home. Don’t take rejection personally – sometimes it’s not actually anything wrong with the story, but it’s just not a good fit for the market. If you’re a writer, you’ll keep revising and submitting. And writing.

* Accept that sometimes your published work will receive bad reviews. Everyone is different and likes different things. Sometimes that means other people won’t like your baby. If you’re a writer, you’ll keep writing.

* Understand that you are your own best publicist … but you can also be your own greatest downfall. Twelfth Planet Press’s Alisa Krasnostein said it better than I could on a post about the perils and positives of social networking and an online presence here. If you’re a writer, you need to keep in mind you have an audience, and continue writing.

A writer is someone who writes, not necessarily for publication. If you find these notes useful, I’m glad. If you disagree with everything I’ve said, I’m okay with that too! Every single writer is different and has different journeys. Some writers are published on their first attempt, others never are (and might not want to be). Each person’s writing process is unique to them, and what works for some may not for others, so these notes may be useful for some, but won’t be for all. I had a great time at the NaNo Cafe, and want to thank Lee Battersby for organising them and thinking of me as one of his speakers.