Come closer, so I can whisper you a tale of what used to happen to stories in the Dark Ages of Publishing.  They used to die.  Yes, that's right.  They simply disappeared from the shelves without a trace.  One day the books were there on display, beckoning you with bright colours and brighter promises.  And then... well, they were gone.  In their place were other books, perhaps with equally bright colours and with promises just as dazzling; but those original ones, the unique stories that had been there, were gone forever.

Bookstores were graveyards.

The life span of stories has now changed.  Twenty years ago, when my novel, Zenith, was first published in the traditional manner, it had, like the vast majority of its brethren, a life of 3-6 months on the bookstore shelves. Three to six months. That was pretty much the only light it had, the only oxygen it was given – unless it became an instant high seller (akin to winning the lottery twice in a row for a first time novelist).  After that time, booksellers started taking it off the shelves to make room for the next hopeful novelist.  That was the system.  Out you go – let's try something else for 3-6 months.  And then let's try something else.  And then... you get the picture.

Three to six months.  There are single-celled amoebas with longer life spans!

How the world of Publishing has changed since then!  Zenith (with its two sequels, Equinox and Eclipse) were released as eBooks in November last year by the same publisher that published Zenith twenty years ago – and what a difference.

It's now been over 3 months and The Books of Ascension are steadily gaining momentum.  They're only starting to grow into their potential, and the great news is: rather than being killed before they mature, they'll be alive forever.  Books in the New Age of Publishing are immortal.  Time is now on the side of the story, rather than its enemy.  No one will whisk books off their virtual shelves to make room for other novels because the virtual bookshelf is infinite.

We don't need to whisper stories of dying books anymore.  The Dark Ages of Publishing are gone.   Long live the forever stories!

A book trailer, despite the name, is something essentially different to a movie trailer. Most producers of book trailers don't seem to be aware of this, and it's the reason why book trailers usually don't do what they are supposed to do: entice people to read a book which they wouldn't have otherwise read.

Here are three key differences:

1. Movie trailers are effective because they are shown before another movie which has been deemed to appeal to the same demographic. Book trailers aren't shown in books deemed to appeal to the same demographic.  They are usually on YouTube, an author's website, a book page, a publisher's page etc. They, therefore, have limited effect if you don't already know and like the author. You need to be directed to them in some way. They aren't put in front of you just as you're about to read another novel, the way movie trailers are put in front of you just as you're about to see another movie.

2. Movie trailers can take all the images they need from the movie itself. Making one involves selecting, assembling and contextualising existing images. Book trailers, however, need to create these images from scratch, and the danger is that this process can lead to the opposite effect you are trying to achieve. Reading (unlike watching movies) is about getting people to create their own images in their heads. Providing them with images can destroy the magic.

3. Movie trailers are the end result of the work of vast teams of movie-making professionals and feature experienced actors of the highest calibre.  Book trailers don't have these advantages. Although some obviously have quality actors and high production values, they simply don't have the resources behind them that movie trailer producers have.

To try to bring the differences into sharper focus, let's compare the movie trailer for the recently released 20th Century Fox film, The Book Thief, starring Geoffrey Rush, with two book trailers for the Markus Zuzak novel on which the movie is based.

Movie trailer for The Book Thief

The movie trailer for The Book Thief benefits from having an Emmy Award-winning director, an Academy-award winning actor, and the studio behind The Life of Pi. There are a number evocative images and it gives you a real feel for the movie. It does what good movie trailers do through skillful scene and dialogue selection, vividly drawing you into the story. It currently has nearly nearly 2 million views on YouTube.

Book trailer for the YA edition of The Book Thief

This award-winning book trailer for The Book Thief with nearly 110,000 views on YouTube, justifies a close look. It's focused at the Young Adult market, where book trailers seem to work best. The productions values are strong, although nowhere near in the same class as the movie trailer. Interestingly it doesn't actually enact the story, so it is doing something quite different to the movie trailer. It concentrates on the words themselves, the story-telling. The girl is reading from a book, giving the listener tantalising hints, and finishing with the words "If you let me, I shall begin." Successful book trailers are often the ones that provide the flavour of a novel, using its words, but without enactment, leading you to a point where the story is about to begin.

Book trailer for the adult edition of The Book Thief

This trailer for The Book Thief, which has just over 6000 views, has clearly been produced the way many book trailers have been produced: with copyright free archival footage, images and music, and non-professional narration. It seems to me to be reasonably effective until the narration starts and then it falls apart. Up until that point it functions in a similar way to the previous book trailer (without the higher production values). It's much too long. Well before it was over, I was waiting for it to end. Clearly, the summarising of the story plot in a book trailer doesn't work, whether it's through action or words.

So, how do you judge the success of a book trailer? The obvious answer of the number of views isn't the whole story. I'll have a closer look at this in part 2.

Wouldn't it be great if we could time travel?  To witness the great moments in history, to see what the future holds, to have another chance to do some things better in our own lives.  There may be some people in the world who have zero interest in time travel, but surely they just haven't thought about the possibilities enough.

Time travel is exciting, enticing, enthralling.  We would like it to be possible.  Which, of course, is precisely the danger when presented with "evidence" for time travel like this 1938 film clip of people coming out of a factory in Massachusetts.  You want to believe it.  You're inclined to ignore logic and other evidence presented to you because the idea is so appealing.

I've got to be honest, I would love time travel to be achievable, and for this film clip and others that appear across the internet to be evidence for it.

But let's look at some of the questions we should be asking here:

Could this be some sort of hoax use of visual effects software like Adobe
After Effects?  I wouldn't dismiss this possibility too quickly.  It's obviously technically possible to achieve this, and without analysing the original celluloid film, you couldn't prove that it was authentic and untampered.

However, there may be evidence of some trickery in the video clip itself.  If you go to full screen and look closely around the 47 second mark, the left arm of the woman in the dark skirt seems to pass through the dress of the woman with the phone, while the right shoulder of the woman on the phone sort of disappears into the shoulder of the woman in the dark skirt.

Inconclusive?  Yep.  They could have just bumped into each other and it just looks like they're merging.  If that's the case, though, wouldn't there have been some reaction by one or both of them if the two women had actually bumped?  Instead, there's no flinching, nothing at all to indicate that they had come in contact.

Still not convinced?  Here are some other questions to think about:

How does a mobile phone work in 1938 without any transmission systems?  Ah, okay so there could be some future flux capacitor at work that enables transmission through the caller's original time. Okay, I suppose it's plausible that if you can come up with the technology for time travel, you could come up with the technology to communicate wirelessly while you are travelling through time.

Why aren't the people around the woman on the phone looking at her as if she was a nutter?  Or why aren't they at least showing curiosity?  She's talking to herself while holding a box to her ear!  That's worth at least a couple of strange looks, but no one even bats an eyelid.  Now, you've got to admit that's weird.

Even if the the clip is authentic, could she be holding a small radio to her ear?  Or a hearing aid if some kind?

Or is it, in fact, a piece of mobile communications technology developed in the 1930s?  Motorola pioneered wireless mobile communications in the 1930s through two-way radio.  Maybe it was a prototype?

Anyway, as you can see, we can't get an iron-clad explanation for the clip and whether it provides evidence for time travel.  After looking at many of the possible explanations and counter arguments, I've come up with what I like to refer to as my scientifically-based mathematically rigorous "Strasser Likelihood Table for SF-type Phenomena in the Real World" (or "Strasser Table" for short) which provides my estimated percentage likelihoods for each of the possible explanations I've outlined.  If you don't like my percentages, or have other possible explanations to add, you can always post your own version of the Strasser Table.

Here are some rules for Strasser Likelihood Tables for SF-type Phenomena in the Real World:

The Possible Explanations need to be mutually exclusive, that is, you can't have two or more explanations being correct simultaneously.

The percentages need to add to 100%, that is, one of them must be correct – even if to achieve this, one of the options has to be "Other currently unknown explanation".

You can't have 0% or 100% for any explanation because this suggests absolute certainties and the table is for phenomena which we are not certain about.

The Possible Explanations need to be listed in order from the most likely to the least likely.

Good luck with your own time travel likelihood!

Tangent, the premiere magazine for fantasy and science fiction short story reviews, has listed ten Aurealis stories in its 2013 Recommended Reading List, including two with 2 stars and one with 3 stars.  With very few exceptions, the other stories on the list are from professionally paying markets as defined by SFWA. There's a 50-50 split between fantasy and science fiction in the 10 Aurealis stories, and issues #57, #63 and #65 each have two stories on the list.  Here are the ten Aurealis stories:

“Monday-Child” by C.S. McMullen (Aurealis #57, 2/13)) F

“Where Colossi Sleep” by Daniel Baker (Aurealis #57, 2/13) SF*

“Catspaw” by James Bradley (Aurealis #60 5/13) F**

“Kernel” by Sean Monaghan (Aurealis #61, 6/13) SF

“Remnants” by Dan Rabarts (Aurealis #62, 7/13) F*

“The Pillar of the Small God” by Gerry Huntman (Aurealis #63, 8/13) SF*

“Prophet” by Liam Pieper (Aurealis #63, 8/13) SF*

“Intelligent Design” by Marta Salek (Aurealis #64, 9/13) SF***

“Poppies” by S G Larner (Aurealis #65, 10/13) F*

“Butcher’s Hook” by Jason Franks (Aurealis #65, 10/13) F**

Here’s the list of the stories that will appear in the upcoming Tor anthology, Carbide Tipped Pens, edited by Ben Bova and Eric Choi. Ben Bova is a six-time winner of the Hugo Award, a former editor of Analog, and a former editorial director of Omni; and Eric Choi is an aerospace engineer, writer and editor from Toronto, Ontario, who was the first recipient of the Isaac Asimov Award for his novelette “Dedication”.

Carbide Tipped Pens is an anthology of new hard SF stories that follow the classic definition of the genre, in which some element of science or technology is so central to the plot that there would be no story if that element were removed.  The aim of the editors was to collect stories which emphasise plot, character, science, originality and believability in equal measure, not only to entertain readers but also to educate and to return the sense of wonder of the Golden Age to a new generation of 21st Century readers.

The list below is in alphabetical by author surname (which usually means I'm near the end) and doesn’t reflect final order of the stories.

“Thunderwell” by Doug Beason
“Lady With Fox” by Gregory Benford 
“Old Timer’s Game” by Ben Bova
“She Just Looks That Way” by Eric Choi
“A Slow Unfurling of Truth” by Aliette de Bodard 
"SIREN of Titan” by David DeGraff
“Ambiguous Nature” by Carl Frederick
“Recollection” by Nancy Fulda
“Habilis” by Howard Hendrix
“The Circle” by Liu Cixin (translated by Ken Liu)
“The Play’s the Thing” by Jack McDevitt
“Skin Deep” by Leah Sloane Petersen & Gabrielle Harbowy
“Every Hill Ends With Sky” by Robert Reed
“The Yoke of Inauspicious Stars” by Kate Story
“The Mandelbrot Bet” by Dirk Strasser
“The Snows of Yesteryear” by Jean-Louis Trudel
“The Blue Afternoon that Lasted Forever” by Daniel H. Wilson

According to the American novelist and screenwriter, Elmore Leonard, who died earlier this year, the most important rule of writing is: "If it sounds like writing... rewrite it."

There are two schools of thought when it comes to what makes good writing.  The Elmore Leonard view is based on the assumption that the writer should be invisible, that the ultimate aim of an author should be to disappear so that the reader isn't aware of the writing.  The alternative view is that the writing should be something that draws attention to itself, that the words themselves should be works of art that elicit an emotional response from the reader.

The SF writer Isaac Asimov used the metaphors of stained glass and plate glass to make the distinction between the two views.  He says in I, Asimov: A Memoir:

"There is writing which resembles the mosaic of glass you see in stained-glass windows.  Such windows are beautiful in themselves and let in the light in colored fragments, but you can't expect to see through them.  In the same way, there is poetic writing that is beautiful in itself and can easily affect the emotions, but such writing can be dense and can make for hard reading if you are trying to figure out what's happening.

"Plate glass, on the other hand, has no beauty of its own.  Ideally, you ought not to be able to see it at all, but through it you can see all that is happening outside.  That is the equivalent of writing that is plain and unadorned.  Ideally, in reading such writing, you are not even aware that you are reading. Ideas and events seem merely to flow from the mind of the writer into that of the reader without any barrier between."

Plate glass authors are clearly invisible writers.

Asimov goes further than simply stating the two extremes of writing styles.  He is clearly a plate glass author himself, and he argues that plate glass is actually a more recent invention than stained-glass and is much harder to make, implying that plate glass writing is the more modern and superior style.

So should we all aim to be invisible writers?  Both Elmore Leonard and Isaac Asimov are convinced.  But there are a lot of writers (and readers) that would argue the reverse.

Clearly there's room for both – as well as all the gradations across the scale.  I would argue, however, that the balance between the two styles varies significantly depending on the genre, with fantasy having one of the highest emphases on stained glass writing and fewer invisible writers.

We all need to decide how much invisibility we want.

A Fantasy novel always has a Prologue.   Well, nearly always.  It's a genre rule which you break at your peril.  A Prologue comes straight after the Map and just before Chapter 1.  Just use the mnemonic MPC1: Map, Prologue, Chapter 1.  Simple.  You can't go wrong.

Or can you?

Based on some of the advice and discussions on various forums about Prologues, you can go horribly horribly wrong.  Apparently many people don't read Prologues.  I don't know if that's true (personally I'm of the start-reading-at-the-beginning school of thought), but skipping these introductory sections seems to be accepted wisdom among the writing community.   Literary Agents definitely ignore Prologues, I'm told, so if you want to be a successful writer, you need to shun them like lepers (err Prologues, that is, not Literary Agents).

Prologues are only red herring hooks designed to reel the reader in, but without adding anything to the story.  They are camouflage for a weak first chapter.  They will be forgotten and irrelevant once the reader is deep into the story.  They are there to dump huge piles of info or back story on the reader which would otherwise slow down the main narrative.

Allegedly.

Sorry, but I love Prologues.  Especially in Fantasy novels.  I usually trust the writer that, even if they appear unconnected to the main narrative, they will eventually make sense.  I have no problem if they are long, if they are set in different time period to Chapter 1 or if they contain back story.  I particularly don't care if they are designed to hook me.  Come and get me, I say.  Do your best!

All three of my Books of Ascension have chapter-length Prologues which feature a central event in the life of one of the main characters when they were nine years old.  The main action in each book then starts off in Chapter 1 nine years later.  I actually love Prologues so much I even have a Prologue to each of these Prologues – small hook-type sections that I've called "The First Book", "The Second Book" and "The Lost Book".

So, I've broken almost every rule about Prologues (they don't even follow a map because I don't have a map – but I'll save that for another blog).  So, just a warning to all those alleged readers out there who ignore Prologues (you know who you are, even if I don't), if you skip over the Prologues in Zenith, Equinox and Eclipse, you're going to miss crucial parts of the story.  Don't come crying to me that something jumped up at you out of the blue late in the third book.  I'll just shake make head, and say I did warn you.  Why not start at the beginning?  In fact, why not start right now?

How much do you charge for a digital book in this new publishing world we live in?  In the days when print was the only show in town, it was a lot simpler.  You had paper. printing, binding, warehousing and transport costs, and you had to make sure these were covered by the price you charged.  Nowadays, these substantial costs have effectively been reduced to zero, so it's a lot easier to publish at very low prices without losing money.

But how low do you go?

Is 99 cents too cheap for an eBook?  What about the year's work that may have gone into it.  You can't get a cup of copy for that price.  Surely a book is worth more than a  cup of coffee that takes 5 minutes to drink?

On the other hand, how does an individual writer get read with all the world's books only a couple of a clicks away for any reader?  With so much choice, why would anyone spend lots of money on a writer they're not familiar with?

A new  theory on how business on the internet works called The Curve addresses this dilemma   The writer basically argues that it makes no sense to have uniform prices anymore and that there should be many different variations of the product priced along a curve starting from the very cheap or even free.  It's a bit like the old hardback/paperback model in some ways but with infinitely more flexibility and points of difference.

Macmillan Momentum have applied this model to my recently published Books of Ascension trilogy.  Although each of the three books are more or less the same length, Zenith is $1.00, Equinox is $2.99, and  Eclipse $4.99.   You can see the curve at work here, and I think it makes sense for both the reader and the author.  Readers can try the first book without having to worry about outlaying too much, and they will only pay the higher price for the subsequent books if they are enjoying the series (which means it's good value for money for them).  Of course, the author (err... me, in this case) is hoping that without a price barrier, many readers will cross the threshold into a world that they wouldn't have otherwise entered, and a large percentage of them will enjoy the experience enough to trek further.

The curve is waiting.  Are you ready to ascend?

Many people have said to me that my name sounds like a fantasy writer’s name, asking me if it’s my actual name.  Garth Nix also often gets asked the same question.  In both mine and Garth's case, they are our real names, but it makes me wonder what it is that makes a name sound like it belongs to a fantasy writer?

Names are funny things.  I recently discovered that Eddie Perfect is the Australian performer/writer's real name.  I was absolutely convinced it was a stage name.  As he says, though: "If I was willing to change it, I'd have gone all the way to F..king–Brilliant.  Hyphenated."

So, what is it that makes a name sound like a fantasy writer's?  My guess is that the letters “J” and “R” have something to do with it: J R R Tolkien, J K Rowling, George  R R Martin. There aren't any initials in "Dirk Strasser", but there are three Rs.

I once had the venerable science fiction author and editor, Algis Budrys, comment in a rejection letter to me "Mmm, with a name like 'Dirk Strasser', I would have thought you'd be South African."  And I would have thought maybe someone with the name "Algis Budrys" shouldn't really be commenting on other writer's names.

Do people with fantasy writer-type names naturally  drift towards fantasy writing?  That would be a bit spooky.  Maybe there's a prophecy thing happening.

What if a John Smith wants to turn his hand at fantasy?  One solution is to add some initials: John R R Smith works.  But I think there's a better solution for turning an ordinary name into a fantasy writers' name – add an exotic sounding middle name.

John Tiberius Smith does the trick, as does Jane Aphrodite Smith.  It's just a matter of trawling through enough history and mythology to get the right  combination.

Not everyone has been fortunate to have been given fantasy writer names by their parents.  For those of you that haven't, well, you're just a google search away from your destiny.