The Age Of The Self Publisher

Honestly, it is. My news feeds tell me so. Here's a round up.

We start with the underwhelming news that Rich Burlew author of hilarious RPG based cartoon Order Of The Stick managed to raise a meelion dollarss via Kickstarter to re-publish some graphic novels. Not that this isn't good news and not that OOTS isn't great fun but if he was surprised by the support he got I think he's one of a very small number.

So, what about people who are not internet celebrities (or celebrities of any sort)? Well Kerry Wilkinson used to to count as an almost complete non-entity in most people's lives but he is scaling the dizzy heights with a series of crime novels. He was a journalist so one could argue that he had contacts, I suppose. He's just gone over to the dark side like so many self-published successes and signed a massive six book deal with sith lord Darth Liverous Macmillan Books.

Apparently having a square-jawed name helps if you're selling pulp fiction as John Locke has sold over a million self-published books and is very happy with life as a self-publisher. This is what we like to see. Also self-publisher Rachel Abbott has said a book deal with a major publishing house didn't "feel right".

To develop the theme of the last link (tldr: self-publishing is a phenomenon all of a sudden but our eyes bleed for a decent editor) some people are dismayed by the amount of textual slurry now available to peruse. While it's true that about 9% more self-published material is crap than Sturgeon's Law would dictate this is pretty much true of the internet. It's also true that one man's meat is another man's poison. I have, in the past, been known to fete the work of unedited pulp hacks milling out books via Lulu and prefer something with plenty of heart, originality, spark and gusto to most of the bland rubbish available in high street bookshops.

So, you'd think I was a happy bunny right now.

Mostly.

The one fly in the ointment is that we're swelling the coffers of notorious market place bullies Amazon in our rush to get an eye on the rough stuff. This triumphalist blog post from the Guardian simultaneously rallies the troops and sends them on a foolhardy charge Kindlewards in a manner that most deserves the inaugural "Patrick Stewart Facepalm Award" for well-meaning encouragement towards complete and utter disaster.

Customers may well love Amazon, I do, and as long as they're encouraging greedy multi-national distributors to cut their margins as thin as possible that's great. But when they start practicing Long-Tail-Fu on the little guy that's the time to say: "Hey, Amazon, I ain't gonna be your bitch" (with many thanks to Bill Bailey).

That's all for now. Thanks for reading.

Where's The Monkey Gone?

Sad to note that last year I clocked up a grand total of three, count 'em, posts on the main journal. If I'd have made a commitment to one post every month and stuck to it I've have put in more.

I can only apologise.

The old arguments about all the time spent blogging are times not spent writing more worthy stuff still apply but so much has happened and none of it has been recorded. Well, some of it has, as the monkey has been shrinking in public.

PULP RP came out in October (I think it was October). The usual folks played a few games. It was a good thing. I began recording Starfall as an audiobook, I am just over halfway in sittings. There will be editing to follow.

I changed my day job.

I competed in Nano and won my 6th victory (4th consecutive).

The world turned.

I always intended to come back to my journal and pay it a bit more attention, I guess now it is as good a time to start as any.

One of the things that's kept me away is that I am pretty confident that no one actually reads this thing so I am really only writing it for my own sake anyway. Once, back in the mists of the before, I think I had some traffic because I used to review POD books. A practice I fully intend to resume. Being out of commission for a period of time, however, is tantamount to dying, having an empire grow up around your meagre grave, which is then paved over to build a shopping mall and then being utterly forgotten in the mists of time.

So I know that when I come back here to start in earnest I am starting again.

What makes me wonder whether this is the time is the discovery of high configurability in Google News/Reader which has in turn lead me to this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/30/self-e-publishing-bubble-ewan-morrison

From my Self-Publishing news feed. If there's about to be a bubble I guess I should try and get some shekels out of it... I actually doubt that the world of novelising is suitable for a bubble. It is a long held presumption that writing a crappy novel is just as hard as writing a good one and that people generally only wrote if they had some sort of aptitude for it or they wouldn't keep going.

I bet most literary agents can have a good chuckle at these assumptions.

What's staggering though is the fact that even the 999 cruddy novels that an agent turns down every year in favour of the one they actually choose to represent (which may not sell even then) is just the tip of a crudberg that would dwarf the contents of every library on earth.

People are writing utter tripe, we don't need monkeys at the typewriters, we have actual people who will issue forth tens of thousands of words of complete and utter drivel for no real reason whatsoever.

I mean, people can't honestly believe they stand a chance of making it big any more, can they? I mean, really? Twenty minutes acquainting oneself with the facts should be quite enough to show that believing you can write a best seller is a costly and foolish waste of time. Save your tears and buy a lottery ticket. Nobody's getting rich writing, those people who are rich and happen to be writers are rich for reasons beyond their competency as authors, trust me.

Not to say that professional writers aren't talented people who can turn a phrase and produce some solid work on occasion; of course they can. What I'm saying is that there are thousands of people who cannot make a living at writing turning out equally good (sometimes better) material that goes ignored. Some of it is actually published, some of it is self-published, some of it never sees the light of day. All of it is in the minority compared to the oceans of black and white effluvium produced by the sadly deluded and the lexically incompetent. The signal to noise ratio in the world of fiction is just ridiculous, and people don't really care that they're ...

Actually in a straw poll of one the guy who is sitting next to me says that he does care about trying not to read rubbish and he scours the internet to find reviews of titles he is thinking of putting on his reading list before committing to trying to acquire them.

And where does this search start? Amazon.

So if you aren't in a "readers who liked this also liked..." on Amazon, and you've only been reviewed by two people you probably aren't going to enjoy that broad based success necessary to generate  a living income out of just publishing novels.

So, why am I bothering?

I'm not, really. I write because I like to write and if people like to read what I write, well, tough because I find publishing to be a hassle and once the story is done I can't usually be bothered to go any further.

So I hope you enjoy reading about my writing even if you are highly unlikely to ever actually experience any of the stories that I write. I'll get back to reviewing when I can. But it rather depends on finding something to read and then reading it, which requires spare time, and I don't have any.

That's the other barrier.

Oh well, there are always jobs that don't involve writing...

Chance Would Be A Fine Thing

Visited London at the weekend to stay with gamer Mike. I got the double pleasure of playing his Tron lightcycle tabletop game, which is a real toy experience, and running a PULP game for Mike, Nick, Rob and Vicky.

They opted for Western style and we produced a slice of fairly moody frontier drama. The characters created weren't high toned enough for spaghetti Western, or silly enough for heroic Western, although Nick's Riverboat gambler did seem to fit into any of the above.

We elected, due to time restraints, to generate characters on the fly and that worked out very well indeed. I'm really happy with the fact that PULP is becoming the most invisible of all of our systems in terms of the dichotomy between support and absence.

On the way home with Justin had a big discussion about the way that No Dice is going and what we might like to do to plan for the future. I'm surprised to find that I am having difficulty viewing any level of corporate involvement as any kind of help at this stage. One day I would love to use what I've learned to design a game with a "proper" games company but I'm not sure that any of our current projects would benefit from the involvement of the wise and wonderful in the world of RP. After all we still have acres of niche to exploit getting PULP RP and the Core System into the homes of gamers everywhere mostly down to the failure of everyone else in the world to really fill the narrative void. This is down in no small part to a corporate model which believes such things to be, at best, too risky to be viable.

I'm also enjoying the Robin Hood act, being generous, being crazy, trying to claim the market with kindness. I'd say it hasn't paid off, except it's starting to. That's what's enormously encouraging. People are coming forth and saying that No Dice is "a good thing". I wouldn't want anything to interfere with that currently.

On Walkabout...

I think I need to work out what to put in this blog a bit more carefully. I find that the topics I have covered recently tend to just reflect information I have given elsewhere more succinctly (or more thoroughly, whichever is appropriate).

The good thing about a blog should be the "random noodley" aspect and I think I've been altogether too organised about this. Also I have written enthusiastically and communicating ireful passion on things that, in reality were no more than minor irritations. (See D&D, Cards vs. Dice etc.)

I think when I can decide what needs to go here it will be a lot gentler than it has been.

I am also not committing to being "back" from walkabout in any significant way. Let's just see how many posts are forthcoming before we commit to that.

To be honest, I feel in the world of blogs I am a constant participant who is mostly ignored anyway. So I feel it makes very little difference whether I blog or not.

I only blog when it makes a difference to me. I would like my blog to be interactive and a forum for lively debate. Maybe I have been too definite in my opinions for that. Wishy washiness is something that blogs seem to be built for so commenters can be seen to be swaying the blogger one way or another.

Anyway, that's all there is for now.

The Year of the Gamer Beard

What's struck me, particularly, this Christmas is how far the ideas of No Dice have come in 2010. It hasn't been the most glamorous of years for the endeavour although we have got out into the world and played the hell out of some games. We've just kept plugging away at it. Something curious is starting to emerge.

Back at the start of this whole No Dice mullarkey what we were essentially doing was formalising aspects of what Role Players the world over know as "free form  role play" i.e. role play with few rules and not very much dice rolling. The problem I think most gamers had with that, if indeed they did have a problem with it, was that there wasn't very much to formalise.

This was true.

I think the further problem some of them may have had was that they believed that once it was done that would be it. There would be no more work to do. It would all peter out. I didn't believe that when I started and I'm amazed anyone should think that would be the case as of now.

The amount of narrative techniques we've mined out through just trying to make role playing more of an entertainment and less of a game has been staggering. I've spent my spare moments of the last few days grinding through archetypes and what not in an attempt to bring out the PULPiness of PULP. And that's just the beginning.

For this reason I have declared 2011 the year of the gamer beard because I imagine many theories will be unpacked in the next twelve months. I suppose I'd better go and get ready for that then.

D&D Cheats It's Way To The Top (Well, Nearly To The Top)*

Today the halls of geekdom have rung with gleeful joy at the news that D&D hit the number 3 spot in Channel 4's 100 Greatest Toys list show. The ranking has been seen as an official endorsement of the popularity and quality of the entire field of Role Playing, a gold star in the annals of pen and paper role playing history.

Well, sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings but this news, to me, seems to be an indication of only one thing: D&D players can rig an online vote.

I mean for the sake of fuck D&D beat the Wii! If that doesn't tell you everything then it bloody well should. The Wii is a stupidly named piece of technology that just about every adult and child in Japan, North America and Europe is at least aware of. In my work office I think every one of my colleagues has held a Wii controller in their hand. The number of people in my office who have ever even seen a d20? Oh, that would be me then.

Here's my prediction for the future glory of this ranking. It will serve only as a pyrrhic victory. What's even more damning than the fact that several people have expressed surprise at the ranking is that 100s more simply don't give a toss. The fact is, most people see RPGs as a creatively bankrupt haven for socially maladjusted geeks and this blatant vote rigging does nothing to change anyone's mind.

Here's my summary of the societal conversation going on here:

D&D Players: I think that we have empirically proven that D&D is the 3rd greatest toy in the world.
Everyone else: No, you haven't. (Goes back to playing with their Wii and talking about how Lego deserved the top spot.)

This isn't any kind of moral victory. It's a gigantic surge of all that is worst about meta/power gaming that demonstrates precisely the reason why most sensible human beings regard the hobby of role playing as something they would never get involved with.

D&D Players have just done the wider world of role playing a huge disservice and for once I am slightly ashamed to be a role player.

The problem is that D&D is where it all began and the entire hobby has got stuck in this D&D based cul-de-sac. D&D shouldn't be the core of an activity called Role Playing... I'm not sure the activity should have a core. In fact I'd go so far as to say that while D&D maintains it's stranglehold on the hobby it will never grow significantly. D&D should be an option of many equal options. Not the only game in town.

As usual I'm not saying there's anything wrong with D&D in and of itself. I personally find the whole thing stupefying and wouldn't play in a game unless you payed me a hefty sum of money. If you love it, though, you love it and that's mostly cool.

All I've noticed is that all the people who have written off my hobby as a refuge for weirdoes are now doing so just a little bit harder. The almost complete lack of acknowledgement of the weirdness of this result just tells me that people's brains are refusing to accept that role playing is a valid hobby at all.

D&D players have just made No Dice's mission a tiny bit harder. Thanks for nothing all those who voted.

* In my opinion. If your opinion differs you are both naive and wrong.**
** In my opinion.

The Happy Writer

Way back in the mists of time (2006 actually) I wrote a pithy series of writing tutorials aimed at getting a chunk of writing just... you know... done. Hang the quality, hang the need for editing, hang everything, just get it done.

The series was, of course, occasioned by the advent of that year's Nanowrimo. People seemed, continue to seem, to view the production of 50k words of novel something of a burden and a trial. For myself it's only a burden and a trial if my other life commitments physically prevent me from partaking. The actual production of 50k words is a matter of sitting down and opening the floodgates until they're all finished. This year I had a bit of a sudden sprint to the finish slapping down 15k last Sunday to fall panting and exhausted at the finish line with something like a reasonable rough draft. I had another book to proof and put the final touches on, events to host and a regular life to live around this. Probably why I found it quite such a trial.

The point is that I at no point found the actual writing difficult. As I get older getting through the writing is the least difficult part in the production of work. I see questions from aspiring writers on Q&A sites like this asking which bell and whistle laden "writer's word processor" to use to keep track of what's going on. I use notepad. Just me and the words, baby, locked in a continual stream.

The use of notepad to draft a novel is, in some ways, the most hardcore possible way to write with a keyboard, or indeed in any way. You see a sheet of paper can only be so large, a dedicated word processor document quickly becomes unwieldy, with a text editor you just keep on writing, until you're done. No muss, no fuss. If you never find yourself in a position where you're not "in the groove" then any faffing around with notes and formatting and saving chapter files and so on and so forth is just time wasted.

Yet, curiously, in all the world I seem to be alone in this. I do not know of one other writer in the world who can just turn it on and write. Possibly my father, he always kept impeccable office hours and wrote everything in LocoScript which is quite a lot like a text editor. He never discussed how he wrote with us, he just did.

Now, unless I'm some kind of superhuman mutant I can't see why it would be that I can discipline myself to write "on tap" and no one else could. If  I were going to look for obvious differences between me and almost every other living person who considers themselves to be some kind of writer I can see a few that may contribute:

• Absence of illusions. I'm not doing what I'm doing to woo big publishers or to make the Times Bestseller List. I'm doing it because it's what I do.
• Sense of fun. Because I have no illusions the business of writing stories and story games has become a fun hobby, I know of no other hobbyist writers, all writers I have ever encountered are limbering up for an encounter with the big leagues that likely will never come.
• Lack of social pressure or cultural targets. Because I am purely in this to have a bit of fun I am not constrained to squash novels into a commercially viable length, or to worry about whether the thing I'm writing fits under a generic banner in a massive bookstore. I don't need to think about whether there's too much emotional content in an action story, or too much action in a love story. I tell the story the way I think it should be told and hang everyone else's opinion.

To summarise, I just don't actually care about the concerns others may have about whether my stuff "works". Hell if I could, should I put my mind to it, breeze through over half a million words in a year and still live a completely other life that has nothing to do with writing then it's not really much of a loss if something doesn't come off the way I planned. This year alone I've written two role playing systems and a novel.

One of the role playing systems is typeset and ready to roll Monday of next week in time for Christmas. The potential number of productions I could roll out next year is mind-boggling. I am creatively fecund, prolific and master of my own destiny thanks to POD services.

From a typesetting point of view, production of the role playing systems has proven so challenging that the idea of publishing a novel now seems like something I would undertake in a weekend. For me personally, the act of writing and producing works of fiction this way has been so immensely rewarding and personally satisfying I can't imagine having done things any other way.

If I have one complaint it is the common one that the world has not, thus far, seen fit to shower me with sufficient personal largesse for my efforts to dedicate my life to these projects full time. On the other hand, how many people discover the same things through the bitterly frustrating and unfair process of the traditional publishing markets? How many people are left twisted and broken in the ruins of their dreams and ambitions because they can't just let it go? Hey I haven't gained a bank balance that could buy me my own personal island, but I don't hate the thought of warming up the word processor (or notepad) and bashing out a couple of thousand words either.

If you are a writer, look at what you do and ask. Am I having fun? Is this really what I wanted? Am I pleasing myself or some impossible commercial dream state? What do I really want to get out of writing? How many people need to engage with my work before I am happy?

You may find that the answers to those questions lead you down a different path to the one you imagined. One with far fewer riches and launch parties but one with a great deal of personal achievement and a pleasant feeling of stability unattainable by many other methods.