One of the things that happened over the weekend was that I got to see a bunch of people I haven’t seen in some time. Inevitably this lead to questions about how my life was going, and whether US Immigration had come to their senses. There’s not a lot of time at a party to go into detail, so I figured I should do a blog post.

The short version is that nothing has changed. I still can’t travel to the USA, or indeed anywhere in North America, without getting a special visa, and the likelihood of that being granted is not good. My best bets are a lottery win, or making a success of the publishing business.

So how is that latter going? Well, the bookstore still isn’t making a profit, but the monthly losses are not too terrible. I haven’t published any best sellers yet, but then I didn’t expect to. I’ve sent several payments to Juliet and Ben, and that makes me happy. I also have a busy schedule ahead with Colinthology due out in just over a week, four more novels to come from Juliet, and four from Lyda. The latter are crucial, because any argument regarding the business needs to rest on my ability to make money for US citizens.

Thanks to Jon Turney I have been able to do a little bit of SF-related work for someone who pays sensible fees. That means that Wizard’s Tower has a small amount of money in the bank for once, and I need to decide what to do with it.

I’m not planning to pay a fat advance for an undiscovered work of staggering genius. If I found such a book I’d do my best to place it with a bigger publisher.

I would like to get another issue or two of Salon Futura out. I still believe in the principle of paying people professional rates for top quality non-fiction, and maybe something like a quarterly schedule would be sustainable. The magazine was also a good advert for the store. But it can’t simply be a cost center. I need to be able to get some money in from it. And you can’t use something like Kickstarter easily for an ongoing project with no physical deliverables. So I need to think about this.

The other thing I want to do is put out some advertising for the bookstore. If more people knew about it, more people would buy books. The only reasons I haven’t done more already are a) lack of money, and b) I’m completely useless when it comes to graphics. I need ads created. If anyone is really good at that sort of thing, and would like to earn a bit of money, please get in touch.