There is no best path in this business of writing fiction and every author’s career is different. I started in the usual way, with traditional publishing, and had six science fiction novels published by New York houses between ’95 and 2003. My work garnered good reviews and there were a couple of awards, but despite my best efforts no meaningful amount of money was going into the family coffers. Economically, I was wasting my time. Emotionally I was inhabited by a deep, dark sense of failure, with no viable means to turn things around. So circa 2000 I more or less walked away from the field for almost ten years. I did not stop writing entirely, but it was close.

In 2009 I woke up to the ebook revolution.

My background and situation let me jump right into self-publishing. I’d worked in web development for nine years, so I knew how to handle the HTML behind ebooks, I was familiar with Photoshop, I’d learned the basics of InDesign, I had the rights back to all my novels, and I had time to devote, since the recession had ended my programming job. So I became my own publisher and reissued the novels, first as ebooks and then in print-on-demand editions.

I found that I loved this new business, because I was in control.

In traditional publishing, after a book is sold, the important decisions are made by the publisher—format, cover art, cover copy, sales date, pricing, promotional budget (if any)—and once those decisions are made they can rarely be changed. So my near-future bio-thriller Limit of Vision was released with a pulp cover featuring giant bugs, while my far-future novel, Memory, was released with a back cover description that got the basic facts of the story world wrong.

As my own publisher, I make mistakes too, but because my business model—low upfront costs and no warehoused inventory—is radically different from that of traditional publishing, I’m in a position to correct those mistakes. I can—and I have—changed cover art, cover copy, and pricing after publishing a book.

Of course these days, self-publishing out-of-print backlist isn’t controversial. The question writers debate is what to do with original fiction. I looked at it from a business perspective, asking What’s best for me? And I couldn’t justify trying New York again.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is an amazing time-lapse video of the Mauna Kea observatories, the Milky Way, and lasers!

The video was created by University of Hawaii grad student Sean Goebel.
Read about the process used to create the video, and also about the lasers here at Peta Pixel:

Not exactly stealthy, but terrifying when you pause to imagine where this is going: meet Wildcat, a four-legged untethered robot by Boston Dynamics, being developed under DARPA’s M3 program.

Here is the nearly final cover art for the upcoming War Stories anthology, edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak. Cover art is by Hugo Award winning artist Galen Dara.

Click the image to see a larger version.

And click here to read the story behind the cover art.

War Stories will be funded through a Kickstarter campaign due to begin very soon. The anthology will include my story “Light and Shadow.”

Yesterday in the gym I saw someone who I’d not seen for several years and who I’d hoped never to see again—or anyway, I thought I saw this person. The resemblance was uncanny: the same, unusual body shape; the same facial structure; the same hair; the same mannerisms. The only two points of doubt from my observation post on the treadmill were that this person might have been a bit too tall and a bit too young. But I wasn’t sure. Only much later during my workout, when I happened to hear the subject speak, did I know for sure this was a different person.

For me, a voice can be a much more certain identifier.

Like a lot of people, I’m terrible at facial recognition. I admit that part of this is laziness. If I’m casually introduced to someone I don’t expect to meet again, the name and face will breeze right out of my memory as I walk away. But part of it is just an inherent problem with facial recognition. Take a person out of the context in which I casually know them, change their hair style or color, change their weight, dress them in different clothes—and odds are excellent I won’t recognize them. This is one reason Cloud Atlas was a total fail for me. Most of the time, the continuity of actors completely escaped me.

Some people have an astonishing ability to recognize and remember others. My husband is one. More than once I’ve been in the situation of demanding to know how in the world he recognized that-person-who-looked-totally-different-from-before and “how can you possibly remember that person you worked with for a few days fifteen years ago?”

Ah well, we all know that talent is not evenly distributed.

But this is one reason I find conventions very intimidating. I could be introduced to someone and an hour later be uncertain if that is a face I should know. Yes, everyone wears name tags, but things can still be difficult.

So bring on augmented reality! Google Glasses or better yet, contacts, with a facial recognition program running off of a personal database of who-is-who in my world, while also tapping into shared Internet resources with all the skill of the NSA and Facebook combined, to identify the people I encounter. Oh, and could we include a brief bio while we’re at it? And deliver the information via voice, since I don’t want my eyes looking shifty as I try to read names and bios.

Uh…privacy concerns? What do you mean privacy concerns? I just want to know if I know you!

Reviewer Stefan Raets offers his opinion of The Red: First Light in a review published yesterday at Tor.com.

“…an amazing novel… The Red: First Light is a dark, intelligent, cynical take on military SF. It’s an excellent novel that deserves a much larger audience.”

Read the full review here.

Ads from the ongoing
Clarkesworld campaign.
(size reduced)

I’ve run three online ad campaigns to try to get the word out on my newest novel, The Red: First Light, published last March. For those new to me or my website, the novel is a very near-future, high-tech, military science fiction thriller — and it’s indie-published, so I’m on my own for publicity.

I had a couple of good publicity opportunities when TRFL was released. This helped sales in the first six weeks, although the novel never got anywhere near qualifying as an “indie success story.” So, having no luck getting the book reviewed***, I decided to experiment with online ads.

(***Update: The Red: First Light has since been reviewed at both Tor.com and Locus Online.)

I’m going to guess that most of you reading this never click on online ads. I’ve clicked on a few, but it’s rare. So why would I even consider spending meaningful amounts of money on web ads? I had a few reasons:

1. I HAD TO DO SOMETHING –this was a big reason. “Something is better than nothing” & “Try stuff” — Right? Yes, it costs money. On the other hand I’ve already made a huge investment just in the time devoted to writing the book. What’s a few hundred dollars more?

2. I’m not entirely unknown in the field. In the mid-nineties through the early 2000s I had six hard science fiction novels published by Bantam and Tor. I have a couple of awards. I’ve had short fiction published recently in Asimov’s, Analog, Lightspeed, and Nightmare. My thought was that I might be able to capture the gaze of readers who’d enjoyed my books during my “first career” and were interested in what I was doing now, along with those who’d read some of my recent short fiction, and might be curious about what else I’m up to. This was the factor that really convinced me to try it.

3. I had some awesome blurbs from name writers that might help sell the book — but the value of those blurbs was limited if the only people who saw them were those who visited my website. So the possibility of putting those blurbs in front of a new audience was the third main factor in my decision to try advertising. Read the rest of this entry »

The September issue of Nightmare Magazine is just out, and it includes my newest story, “Halfway Home,” a dark fantasy with a here-and-now setting…or maybe it’s magic realism?

At any rate, it’s a story that wouldn’t have been written without the encouragement of one of my readers. Here’s a blog post on how it came to be.

You can purchase the September issue of Nightmare Magazine in ebook form for only $2.99 — I encourage you to do so, in support of short fiction!

But you can also read the story online at Nightmare Magazine‘s website. Find it here.

A few times a year I send out an email newsletter, usually to announce new publications, but occasionally with other news. If you haven’t already signed up to receive my newsletter, I encourage you to do so. It’s a great way to stay in touch, and it’s simple to do. I just need your email address and a name. You’ll have to click a link on a confirmation email, and then you’re in.

The next newsletter will go out in a couple of days, so please consider it.

Sign up using the “New Book Alert” form in the righthand column of this blog, or click here for a sign-up form, along with samples of past newsletters.

THANKS!

Maybe because writers are enamored of words, we’re always seeking definitions. Yesterday on twitter I didn’t quite avoid reading a diatribe about what those of us who publish our own work should call ourselves. My choice is on display at the top of this blog. Ask me, and I’ll tell you that my last three novels have all been indie published. This is the same thing as self published, but the synonym I prefer is “indie.” It sounds better to my ears, and is entirely accurate in that I have — independently — pursued, overseen, contracted for, or done myself, every aspect of the publishing process. But the comments on twitter passionately rejected my terminology, to the point of name calling.

To which I can only say, suit yourself and I’ll do the same. In the end, it’s not about the publisher or the publication process, it’s about the book.

Another twitter post referred to an article with a title something like “Ten Indie Writers You Should Be Reading” … as if the fact of being an indie writer was recommendation enough. But wouldn’t an article on “Ten Novels Worth Your Time And Money” be more useful? I know, I know—not as catchy, but again, it’s the book that matters, right?

In recent years I’ve changed the process that I use to get published, but my goal with each novel is the same as it’s always been: I want to write the sort of story I would love to read, and I want to make a living doing it. I don’t see any need to define my novels as either traditional or indie. They’re all books that I wrote because I wanted to write them — and that’s a huge privilege, and I’m grateful for it.