Bloggasm

Simon Owens: I’ve seen many writers say that you should wait until you have a few novels under your belt and have a strong following before publishing your first collection. As someone who published his first collection before his first novel, do you have any regrets? Was there anything you would have done differently?

Tim Pratt: Hmm, I didn’t see any reason to wait until I’d published novels to sell a story collection. My book Little Gods probably helped me sell my first novel — it got me some good reviews in visible places (Locus, Publishers Weekly), raised my profile in the field, probably led directly to my nomination for the Campbell Award, and helped make me more attractive to agents, all of which improved my chances of selling Rangergirl. Insofar as I’m known in the field at all, I’m known as a story writer, not a novelist, and the collection just made me better known.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, I probably should have waited a couple of years before publishing a collection. There are some stories in Little Gods that are pretty visibly journeyman work, and it’s a hodgepodge book with no thematic center. But I’m proud enough of the book that I’m happy to have Prime reprint it (sans the poems) in a smaller paperback size for their new distribution deal with Diamond, so it will be appearing widely in bookstores sometime next year. My next collection, Hart & Boot & Other Stories, does have more of a thematic heart, and will be a better book overall. It’s coming from Night Shade next year.

SO: You’re one of the few genre writers to sell a reprint to the Best American Short Stories series. Do you think that you’re going to try and cross over to the non-genre side at all now that you’ve had some success in that realm?

TP: No, I won’t try, but if mainstream success comes knocking, I certainly won’t pretend I’m not home. I’ll just keep writing the books I want to write, and sell them wherever I can. Almost everything I write has a fantastic element, so it’s likely I’ll keep selling books to fantasy publishers. That said, my first novel doesn’t say “fantasy” on the spine — it says “fiction” — and the cover doesn’t feature dragons or elves or a guy with a sword, and it’s in trade paperback format, so there might be some attempt on the part of my publisher to position me toward fans of literary fiction (or at least literary fantasy). Which is fine. They could just as easily have put a giant scorpion or a golem on the cover of my book, something that would scream “fantasy,” but they made a different choice. I try not to worry too much about the marketing side. I just write books that make me happy. If I tried to write to market — any market — it would probably be too self-conscious, and fail artistically and commercially!

SO: What methods are you using to promote your new novel?

TP: Doing interviews like this one.

Oh, the usual things you do in these crazy days of the interweb frontier. I made a website, and put up a free spin-off story. I have an online journal that I update a lot. Many people in my little corner of the blogosphere started talking about the book spontaneously, which I appreciated. Here in the world of the physical, I’m doing a couple of signings, and lots of interviews for websites and a couple for newspapers, and radio interviews. I’ll make myself visible at conventions. Doing a bigger publicity push would probably help a little, but word of mouth and the esteem of booksellers is what drives book sales, and that’s largely out of my hands. Me wandering around Santa Cruz in a cowboy suit handing out free bookmarks probably wouldn’t make an appreciable bump in sales anyway.

SO: What are the five blogs that everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

TP: I’m not a screenwriter (not yet, anyway), but I enjoy Query Letters I
Love

The Adventures of Art Lad is wonderful

I like Mistress Matisse’s journal, for its witty and intelligent look at an interesting subculture, and for her posts about idiots making stupid phone calls.

Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything is a frequently fascinating
blog/radio show.

Preshrunk, the t-shirt blog, because t-shirts make me happy.

(I read all those usual SF type blogs too, of course, but thought I’d branch out a little to try and hit some your readers might not already read)

You can find Tim’s blog over here