OK. I'll admit it. I'm doing a lot of panicked Christmas shopping this weekend. Every year, I promise myself that I'll get it all done early. This year, I actually did buy quite a few presents well in advance. Unfortunately, I gave them out early too because I couldn't resist cheering people up with them.
Well, if that sounds like you too, perhaps I can help. My Newcomer series of scifi anthologies is available in paperback, perfect stocking-fillers for anyone who likes the genre.

In my interview today, I am talking to Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, author of Numbercaste.

What were you like at school?
I think I was a know-it-all. Definitely a know-it-all: I aced every test and discovered friendship (and people in general) late in life.

What draws you to writing science fiction?
I've thought about this quite often, and I think the best answer is something Brandon Sanderson said in his writing class at Brigham Young Uni. To paraphrase a bit - it's a field that has no limits; you can touch on politics, race, cultural commentary, romance, everything - AND you can have starships. That's the best thing ever.

Why did you choose independent publishing?
Trad pub has its advantages, but it also has one very interesting disadvantage: each book has a high unit cost. Paper, printing, storage, warehousing - the cost of replicating a work is quite high, and the entire publishing industry, since the Gutenberg Press, has been build on the fact that some people can afford this and some people can't. Those who can afford it become gatekeepers.
With digital, the cost of replicating a book drops to almost nothing: just a few hundred kilobytes of storage space. The cost and delay of transmitting a work drops to almost nothing. Whereas print, by default, imposes geographical limits, digital just nukes all that. The gatekeepers start vanishing.
I think for me and my fellow authors, this is really important. Our markets and readerships are scattered throughout the world. And now you and I can go live across the world with the click of a button and be read from Colombo to Colombia.
I had realized this on a theoretical level before, but I think this really hit when a student from the University of California mailed me. Their professor had apparently come across TSSRW and they were discussing it informally in class - and this was three days after I hit that publish button. I don't think it could ever have propagated that far and that fast without digital.

What’s your views on social media for marketing?
I think it's absolutely one of best tools ever, provided you engage with the audience. Backstory - I run a blog called icaruswept, which is read by around 200,000 people, mostly Sri Lankan. 70% of that traffic is from Facebook.
The problem is that a lot of authors don't engage. They tick the boxes - they make Twitter and Facebook accounts - and then they just constantly spam their books. That's a massive turnoff. You have to be social on these media for things to work out.
I have to say, I love it when my readers get in touch. Knowing that actual real people are interested in my work is profoundly humbling.

If you could have been the original author of any book, what would it have been and why?
Hard pick... but I'd say Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, because that is simply a mind-blowing masterpiece of imagination. The way it blends science and myth together is... let's just say reading those books make me sit down and hold a few day's of silence in sheer respect for what's been done there on those pages.
That is a great choice. I'd go for pretty much anything by Iain M Banks, but if I had to pick one it'd be Excession.

Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. Good luck with the writing...