Local authors find their way

For two local Science Fiction authors, the Internet and independent bookstores provide a springboard to great things

By Erica Ryberg

The South County Spotlight, Dec 30, 2009, Updated Dec 30, 2009

When St. Helens bookstore employee Tina Connolly’s story “Bitrunners” appeared in the anthology “Unplugged: The Web’s Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy,” it represented a crossover of sorts for the 32-year-old writer. Like all the stories in the anthology, Bitrunners had first appeared on the Internet.

Erica Ryberg / The South County Spotlight

When St. Helens bookstore employee Tina Connolly’s story “Bitrunners” appeared in the anthology “Unplugged: The Web’s Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy,” it represented a crossover of sorts for the 32-year-old writer. Like all the stories in the anthology, Bitrunners had first appeared on the Internet.

Connolly, who began writing 10 years ago, had already published widely on the Internet with both written and podcasted fantasy and science fiction and was just beginning to publish in print when Unplugged received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

That review refers to the brunette with the dry sense of humor as a rising star. And if she is, it’s in large part because the medium that first hosted Bitrunners has been nurturing her talent all along.

“The Internet is amazing for being a writer,” she said.

Years ago, she said, you would have had to write away for a catalog to figure out where to send submissions.

The Internet has helped shape her work, as well.

“There’s so much community where you can find out what you’re doing wrong,” she said.

There’s something else, too. Like the intellectual gathering places of earlier centuries, the Internet offers writers a place to exchange ideas. It also lets them market their work to a wide audience.

Connolly, still early in her career, does all of her marketing. And, for the most part, she does it on the Internet with blogs and Twitter updates.

She likes Twitter, she said, because it’s a fast medium and she’s a slow writer.

And Connolly, who just signed with an agent for her first novel, said she specifically wanted a book shop job to see the other side of the industry.

On the job, she lends her Internet marketing chops to the St. Helens Book Shop. The shop maintains a social media presence and has just launched a new blog, which Connolly sometimes ghost writes.

“I can see from our stats that it’s slowly moving up,” she said of the blog’s popularity.

Another highly successful St. Helens science fiction writer, Ken Scholes, said he had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the age of Internet marketing. But once he was assimilated, he said he had a seamless transition into the literary marketing machine.

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