the long way to a small angry planet sequel

In a contrast to the low-key birth of her first book, Hodder is giving her follow-up the all-bells-and-whistles treatment. It was also picked up by a major publisher and has won her a large body of fans. We shortlisted it for the Kitschies, and you’ll pardon me for smiling smugly if I note that it went on to be listed for the Clarke award, the British Fantasy award, the Tiptree and the Baileys women’s prize for fiction. Chambers had used Kickstarter to raise the (modest) sum she needed to write and self-publish her novel. Chambers’s first novel, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, was one such: a genuinely charming space opera, character-driven science fiction that was readable and inventive and heartening, somewhere between Firefly and Larry Niven, with just a dash of Treasure Island.

And a huge amount of self-published stuff was duly submitted, the majority of it e-published and the majority of that … well, “crap”, I think, would be the mot juste.īut every now and again a diamond would shine from the dustheap. I was one of the judges for the 2015 Kitschies, an award that allows the submission of self-published work alongside conventionally published material.

But who else can pull off such a trick?īecky Chambers, maybe. Andy Weir initially published The Martian on his own website because nobody else was interested, and then watched it become first a global bestseller (quickly snapped up by a conventional publisher) and then an Oscar-nominated movie. Which is why it’s harder too, of course: with so much “content” out there, how is anyone to attract readers? Some manage it. And, boy, are people presenting their works, uncountable rivers of e-books flowing over the cliff-face of the internet.

Easier because anybody can e-publish their book and present it to a global market with a couple of mouse-clicks. Nowadays publishing is simultaneously easier and much, much harder. Of course, very few writers made it to the end of that sequence. Finally, you relaxed on your yacht off Cap d’Antibes. Then the hard work began – getting noticed, getting reviews, sales, awards, bestseller lists, film deals. T he old-style model of publishing was: you wrote your book you got an agent your agent got you a publishing deal you got published.

The long way to a small angry planet sequel