Sleeps With Angels

An Introduction

I just checked, and I discovered that it’s a little over ten years since my last collection, As The Crow Flies, which came as a bit of a surprise. Where does the time go?

There was a time when I wrote nothing but short stories. A friend of mine, faced with my first novel, The Villages, said, “You know, you’re really a short story writer.” I’m still not certain what he meant by that. Anyway, the stories got longer and longer and fewer and fewer. Where I would once have been happy to wind up a story in two thousand words, I started to find there wasn’t enough room unless I had at least ten thousand to play with.

Sleeps With Angels is a collection of the previously uncollected. Some of the stories were published by the late and very much lamented SciFiction, others as part of anthologies and collections with other writers, one was self-published as an ebook, and one, “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi”, has never seen the light of day until now, apart from as a word file being sent to anyone who wanted to read it. It’s interesting that once upon a time all of these stories would have been in print at some point, but at least two of them have only ever existed in electronic form before this.

Publishing is changing, of course. Self-publishing, notably with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing programme, seems to me to have finally democratised the process. It’s now possible for anyone to publish a novel — or even a standalone short story — for free, and make some money out of it. This of course has led to a tidal wave of spam on social media from Indie Authors, many of whom have read Internet Marketing 101 books and not realised that spam is intensely annoying.

One of the interesting things this change in publishing has done is remove, for a large number of authors, the traditional checks and balances which once stood between the writer and the reader. Editors, for example. I have a suspicion — and I’m not going to do the research to back this up because it would only make me angry — that there is an awful lot of very badly-edited self-published stuff out there. Self-edited, which is often not the best of ideas. First-drafty, which is even worse.

On the bright side, nobody needs to read the stuff. It doesn’t take up any room anywhere, doesn’t consume any resources, there’s often a chance to preview it before you buy. It’s possible that as time goes by a kind of natural selection will come into play; the really crap stuff will sink without trace while the good stuff rises. Just like in ‘normal’ publishing, right?

I’m fond of telling people that the internet is still, really, in its infancy, still shaking itself down and finding its feet. Which is largely meaningless, but sounds sort of wise if you don’t think about it too hard. I think this new age in publishing is much the same; still young, still finding its feet. I’m still not convinced that it won’t go the way of Betamax and MiniDisc. I’m told that sales of the Kindle have been falling, although that’s probably because more people are reading books on their tablets now. Probably.

I have a Kindle and I’ve been surprised by how easily I’ve taken to it. I expected the experience to be weird and alienating, but it wasn’t at all. I find that I read more quickly, and retain more, using the Kindle than when reading a conventional book. While I’m not about to give up reading paper books entirely — the few books I did actually manage to read last year were all printed versions — the Kindle is a handy alternative, and we have to remember that an increasing number of books never see existence in print and that e-readers, whether in the form of an app or a discrete physical device, are the only way to access them. Personally, I don’t enjoy using a Kindle any less than I enjoy using a paper book.

I’ll end this ramble with a small observation. While I was writing this, I looked up Ben Bova’s 1989 novel Cyberbooks, which some say predicted ebooks. As far as I can tell, there is no Kindle version of it…

Dave Hutchinson

London

January 2015