Tag Archives: self-publishing

Refocusing on submissions and short fiction

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Things can change pretty dramatically sometimes. Focus can change and shift all of a sudden (as can a dictator’s hold on power) and yesterday was one of those days. Can you notice something?

After the flurry of discussion yesterday, I’ve pulled down Sanity Juxtaposed. It was refreshing and exciting to have some decent discussion on this here little blog because I hadn’t seen it in a while. I realised that whilst my little experiment isn’t something to regret and I learnt something, it was time to end it and focus on something else.

As one Facebook friend quoted from someone else, “never send out your half-baked cakes” and so I have come to see that putting out those old short stories shouldn’t be my focus, that they reflect badly on me and don’t show my best writing. I need to turn my energy toward writing new work and refining it to be the best it can be.

I kind of got preoccupied with the eBook thing, which wasn’t all bad. I’m still going to blog on eBooks and eReaders but less on trying the whole process out for myself.

Another great thing to come out of the discussion, was further discussion. Alan Baxter offered some thoughts yesterday on posting free fiction on your blog and I agree with a lot of what he said. I don’t mean to denigrate what a lot of people are doing, like my friends in #FridayFlash but I am considering shifting my focus away from it because I’ve written some good stuff last year that became ineligible for publication because it was already up here. Instead, I was left wishing it’d refined it a bit in secret and gave it a chance at more exposure.

I might still post flash fiction and some of my poetry every once and a while, though. I have quite decided about poetry in particular because often my poetry is written to be spoken so is often not suitable for submission to print journals and the whole open mic poetry scene is a different ball game to submitting to journals.

But, I’m thinking short fiction is going to be my focus again. I’m getting all excited about the idea of reorganising my writing folder, putting to bed some old pieces that have been rejected too many times and doing some serious writing, rewriting and editing and targeting some markets. I think I’ve just about missed the boat on Voiceworks but I’ve got a few other places that would make me seriously happy to be apart of.

P.S. There’s a change to this blog coming up too. Can you guess what it is?

Project Update: Sanity Juxtaposed

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I don’t usually update my blog that much anymore with news and thoughts regarding how my writing is going or how certain projects are coming along. There’s the writing goals posts and I did do some ‘writing project updates’ type posts a while ago but the general day to day commenting of what I’m working on and how I’m going has largely been taken on by my Twitter account. If you’re into that sort of stuff, you can follow me there.

But I used to do a lot more of it. Whilst compiling pieces and such for my collection Sanity Juxtaposed, I noticed a lot of my writing posts were in the form of updates, how many words I’ve written, how I feel about the story etc. which was useful for me but I’m not sure they were particularly interesting.

Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of work on Sanity Juxtaposed, getting together all the shorts, poetry and flash fiction up until 2009 and also including a selection of blog posts that either have some life in them or give an indication of what this blog is about.

These pieces, the introduction and the short intros to the sections are all done and compiled into one master document that is currently being proof read and tweaked. As I said in my goals post this month, I hope to have the eBook out by the end of the month and we’re looking mighty close.

I just want to make sure there are no errors, typos or major blunders in it (unlike last time in 2005) and that it’s a decent quality despite the fact I’ve included some of my first short stories!

It was originally intended to be for amongst friends and family and for my own records but it’s developed into a bit of a demo book or sample of my work that hopefully people will want to buy to get a taste of my writing as well as to support me with a little bit of cash and a little bit of encouragement in the form of actually caring about my work enough to want to read some of it, in print.

Hopefully we will have the final copy of the cover by the end of the week so I can unveil it here and get you all excited because the art is spectacular.

Sanity Juxtaposed: What to include and what to leave out

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I’m starting to doubt myself and the pieces I was planning on including in Sanity Juxtaposed so this post is basically a call out for advice and thoughts on what to include and what effects including certain works might have.

You see, I started copyediting some older pieces, like some of the first short stories I wrote, and of course they’re no where near the kind of writing I produce now. That’s a good feeling. It’s shown I’ve improved.

And whilst these aren’t my best work, I still want to include them, have people read them and when compared to the other pieces, it does show how my writing has changed. But I’m not sure if this is selling myself short or shooting myself in the foot.

Sanity Juxtaposed is meant to be a collection of all my unpublished work. I see it as a kind of demo tape or EP. If you go see unknown bands play in your city, you know some of them sell a single or an EP to give people a taste that’s not quite their first album. It’s kind of like that.

But I don’t want people to read those first few shorts and take that as what I write like. I don’t want this collection to then turn people off anything else I write in the future.

I think part of this can be resolved by way of an introduction in the book but I’m still concerned about whether or not to include mainly the pieces I wrote between 2004 and 2005 before I started the blog.

Digital Publishing: Short Fiction's Renaissance?

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With all of the talk at the moment surrounding digital publishing and the transformation of publishing as a whole, a contradiction in the norms of publishing has emerged for me when discussing short fiction and in particular, short story collections.

See, the norm in publishing is that short fiction collections do not sell as well as novels. Big publishers won’t touch them, with only some small presses interested in collections by unknown writers. All of this while we’re told that our attention spans are growing shorter and shorter, we’re becoming wired to the Internet and that the eBook is going to take over from the printed one.

The conclusions may be a little dubious in light of the popularity of books such as Twilight and Harry Potter, forests worth of pages, but I digress.

If we’re all reading blogs, Twittering and waiting for the takeover of the eBook, then surely there is the basis for a revival of short fiction – and indeed the younger brother, flash fiction.

One of the barriers for a lot of people to using the eBook is it being harder to read for long lengths on a screen. It hurts the eyes with the glare. So a novel seems like a daunting thing to read on a screen, but a short story could be the length of a news article that most people read multiples of each day.

Digital books or works of literature are less confined to the laws of economics where the cost of printing a couple of pages of short story wouldn’t be worth it. Amazon Shorts comes to mind. I can imagine selling shorts online for a fraction of the cost of a novel, or even readers subscribing to short story writers. It’s like with iTunes; you can sometimes just buy the single instead of the whole album.

And the shorter length would satisfy our shrinking attention spans. It seems so obvious to me that I’m wondering if I’m missing some vital pieces of the puzzle. Or is just another example of how the desires for profit stifle innovation because publishers aren’t willing to take a risk?

New Project: Capital Comes Dripping

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“If money, According to Augier, “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” – Capital Vol. 1, Karl Marx.

That quote from Karl Marx sums up the violence and brutality that feeds and sustains the system of capitalism. When I first heard that quote, I bristled at how accurate, to the point and evocative it was.

In my own writing, it’s something I aim to do. I want to highlight the brutality, violence and injustice of capitalism through horror and dark writing.

So, after mentioning this ‘project’ that I’ve been working on that includes ‘All Fascists are Zombies!’ I want to announce that Capital Comes Dripping is the working title for a collection of short fiction, flash fiction, poetry and other writing that I’ve been working on and want to focus on for some time to come.

This collection will most probably include the novella, ‘All Zombies are Fascists!’, ‘My Boss Sucks’ and other things I’ve been in the middle of working on already, plus some new stuff as well. I hope that the collection will also manage to cover the various horrors of capitalism that inspire my writing.

Part of my reasoning for putting these stories in a collection and not just sending them to horror and political magazines is that I hope to reach a wider audience. Being published in a horror mag will only result in being read by horror fans, and being published in the progressive literature mags will only be read by the kinds of people that usually read those magazines.

I still hope to have some of my work published in these publications, and plan to include these in the collection as well. It will help promote my writing, increase my chance of the collection being published and overall, be a real confidence boost to myself and the work on the collection.

But publishing the pieces as a collection would also give the themes a much stronger impact as some will interlink in some ways and some themes will be covered in multiple pieces.

I also feel like the short story collection is underrated (something I want to blog on) and have found that some small press publishers in Melbourne are willing to publish collection from emerging writers. There is also the option of self-publishing which I am seriously considering.

I’ll keep everyone updated on the progress of the various pieces and the collection as a whole. And in the off chance that any publishers have read this post and the idea sparks their attention, you can always contact me before I eventually contact you ;)

P.S. Don’t forget to check out my rant against right-wingers against healthcare reform in the US that I posted this morning.

Back In Melbourne

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I flew back into Melbourne from Sydney tonight and am looking forward to doing nothing much at all except a few things online and maybe some reading. Despite having a pretty relaxing and social 5 or 6 days in Sydney, I’m wrecked and need some rest. The thought of work probably isn’t helping.

The time talking with people about what I’ve been up to has made me think about work, writing and all of that and what I want to do. At the moment, I’d love to be working 3 days a week and write for the other 2.

Thoughts about self-publishing or publishing through a small press perhaps have become clearer. I’d love to release a collection of short stories and a novella all surrounding Marxist Horror, perhaps each one taking on a certain issue like racism, sexism, homophobia, economic exploitation, war etc.

But the main thing is to keep writing those stories, refining them and then I’ll have a product to work out how I’m going to publish it.

Another thing to mention is that one of my sisters, Jessica has begun her own blog, where some of it is about writing, and she looks pretty determined to make it a regular habit. Have a look at born for this and perhaps leave an encouraging comment.

Is Self-Publishing Cheating?

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Self-publishing is an area that’s occupied my thoughts a lot over the past couple of weeks. It seems only a tiny percentage get picked up by the big publishers, and that self-publishing, small press publishing and Indie publishing are all becoming more popular and the stigma that I have mentioned before is dying.

One of the things that’s held me back from fully accepting self-publishing as a method is that it feels like cheating. I haven’t been accepted as published, anyone can put anything together and can claim ‘they’re published’ but it doesn’t mean the same as some publisher accepting your book is decent and are willing to sell it.

It doesn’t feel validating. I can’t go to my friends and say I’m published. So what? Anyone can upload a book to the net and sell it on lulu.com. It’s not the real deal.

Do people understand where I’m coming from?

I posted some of these thoughts on Twitter and got some great responses.

PublishingGuru said: “Self-pub is not cheating, it is the democratization of publishing. Power to the author!”

And on being validated, thecreativepenn said, “Re self-pub, your writing ability is validated by your sales and readers feedback – but editors also used :) “

I liked the second reply the most. The part about editing I’d learnt from Alan Baxter and was a bit of an ‘aha’ moment for me, but Joanna’s response (a.k.a. thecreativepenn) really struck me as true. It set off a nice fantasy of me self-publishing a book and selling lots of copies. Surely this would be just as validating, if not more, than being publishing in the traditional sense.

Of course though, only a minority of self-published authors hit the fantasy of making it big and showing up those publishing fat cats by selling heaps of books on their own.

I agree when Tom Cho said that success shouldn’t be measured so narrowly. But I guess my goal is to be read, to have a decent amount of people read my work and for people to take me and my writing seriously. This isn’t just a hobby. I’d like to be paid for it too.

How to go about all of that is still a question even though I’ve gotten some answers.

Indie Publishing v Indie Music: Part II

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This post is extending on some thoughts offered in a previous post sparked by the question, “Is there something like the equivalent of an Indie Music label for publishing?”

I’ve gone over how I think it’s harder for emerging writers to emerge, compared to emerging bands and musicians.

But to answer the original question, technically there is an Indie Publishing equivalent. Indie Publishing, self-publishing, vanity publishing or POD printing is all available. But as the unkind term ‘vanity publishing’ might suggest, it’s not seen in the same light in the world of writers.

Independently publishing a book and not going through a big publisher or at least small press is seen as impatient or simply non-viable, which may indeed be true in a lot of cases. Constantly writers tell those wanting to go it alone that the self-published market is full of crap books, and the only reason they’re going alone is because publishers won’t take them.

So it’s probably true that a lot of self-published stuff is unedited, pure crap that can’t compete with the stuff HarperCollins publishes. But it’s also a generalisation to say that this is the only reason to self-publish.

It also begs to question, how can bands get away with it? Surely the same rule applies. Plenty of Indie Music is probably shit, but that’s hardly emphasised to the up and coming band who decides this route. Or is there something I’m missing?

I guess I’m constantly left with more questions than answers in this game hopefully voicing my thoughts here, making the points, finding the contradictions might encourage some of you to offer comments and ask questions of your own.

writing, books, publishing, Indie Publishing, Indie Music, POD