I logged to Amazon this morning to see how pre-orders were going for A White Cross On A Lonely Road. The nice thing about the dashboard they offer is the way it lines up a whole lot of books you’ve published in a row. If you’ve made a decision to adopt a standardised layout, that means you get a neat little visual when you log in. I’m still working through some of the older releases, bringing them into line with the standardised approach, and I’ll admit that I’ve gone back-and-forth between this and trying for a more genre appropriate cover for certain kinds of work. Today, though, was the first time I looked at them as a whole and felt satisfied with the effect. The approach is very much an approach that is designed to work with my relatively limited graphic design skills and keep the production side of things fast, but theres just enough scope to try new things and tweak the design as I go and while they may not always scream “fantasy story’ or “horror story” or “science fiction,” I’m pretty pleased with the way it makes it clear that you’re looking at something Brain Jar has

I find myself re-reading and chewing over Dan Charnas Work Clean for the second time this week, despite raving about it just seven days ago. I do this semi-regularly with the books I really love – the first read through is all about the experience, but the second is where I start to process. The re-read is where I slow down and take notes, reworking ideas and responses as I figure out how to make best use of what I’ve learned. And I will admit, this post started with a what-can-learn-that-will-be-useful-as-a-writer post, because most things do, in my head. I gathered up my notes, started putting them in shape. “This’ll be easy,” I thought. “Just find the writing angle.” There are lots of writing angles in Work Clean. It’s a book about understanding time, as much as offering a business process, and it tipped the notion of the most productive thing I can be doing right now on its head. Then I noticed that the stuff I really focused on wasn’t just useful in writing. The mindset seeped over into other parts of my life, and made things like putting together a PhD application, cleaning my apartment, and processing my ridiculous

Eleven years ago, Warren Ellis released Shivering Sands: a print on demand collection of essays, columns, and other content he’d produced over the years. No real distribution, no real stock on hand, just a book set up and ready to print if a reader wanted a copy. A few days later, they included a PDF edition. Three months later, they’d sold around 700 copies. 664 of them were print editions. As Ellis mentioned in the three-months-on post where he charted the numbers, “now we enter into the long tail.” I missed the book, first time around. I was an Ellis fan, but I was broke as fuck back in 2009. Two years unemployed, scraping by on sales of short stories and loans from family that kept me from sliding off into a world of credit card debt. Yesterday, I bought my copy. Put the effort in to go and buy it from the archaic print on demand service Ellis and co originally used, because the only copy that showed up on Amazon Australia was over a hundred and fifty bucks. And this is what the long tail means, when folks talk about it in relation to publishing. Ellis didn’t promote

So here’s the thing about writing no-one tells you: the money is going to fuck with you and affect your creative process. O-ho, there, you may be thinking, foolish Peter, there is no money in writing, and I totally understand why you’re thinking that. You’ve been hammered with that message from day one, ever since you began stringing words together to generate meaning. People will gleefully inform you that writers don’t make a living, and even those who skip that step will imply it by asking the kind of questions that make it clear your options are: a) become JK Rowling and have books in every store every time they walk in, or b) die in a gutter. And that’s where the fucking with your process begins, because you do not want to die in the gutter. Which means your process is shaped by the perception that making a living as a writer is either a one-in-a-million chance where your craft matters not at all, or by the perception that the only way to make a living as a writer involves constantly delivering at the top of your game because only the very best of the best get to make