industry view

I was interested to read Beverley Hadgraft’s Can I Have That In Writing in the weekend’s Sunday, which I annoyingly can’t find on Herald Sun’s crappy site.

Anyway, it was a kind of overview of the publishing industry, focussing on the many, many people who write and their pathways (or not) to publication. It was kind of looking at the industry from an outsiders perspective which was fascinating. It opened a little predictably by talking about Jane Austen’s famous rejections, then goes on to mention Louise Thutell’s Friday Pitch before talking about the likelihood of getting a publisher, using an agent and advances. Like I said, quite interesting in itself. However. Agent Fiona Inglis of Curtis Brown makes this rather unusual statement:

“Sometimes we receive manuscripts that should never see the light of day,” Inglis says. “It’s very personal, or it’s poetry - there are only three or four books of poetry published in Australia a year.”

Now, I don’t know a lot about poetry but I do know that John Leonard Press alone is putting out at least that many titles… is Fiona Inglis on crack? Or - more likely, maybe - is she only counting books by ‘real’ publishers? Sigh.

The article ended up with a bit of info about print on demand. It looks at using the services of BookPal, citing:

The cost of printing your own A5, 150-page book wil be around $6000 for 1000 copies. If you want proof-reading, cover design, layout, marketing and distribution you can double that cost.

That just seems really expensive to me, more expensive than simply finding a printer to do the job for you. Anyway, if I were talking to someone who wanted to self-publish, I’d recommend to them spending a bit of money on editing and design yourself, then using Lulu, Blurb or one of the other internet-based POD publishers to create a book, which minimises the risk of having 900 copies of a book sitting in your garage until the end of your days.

L.

literary minded

Angela has started off a series of blog posts called The Best Unpublished Books. Part one talks about Christopher Currie and Amy Vought Barker, and it’s interesting to read her connection with the authors and what she thinks of their work.

L.

fuel4arts

Fuel 4 Arts is a great web resource, well worth taking a look at if you haven’t before. In particular, they provide ‘global arts marketing tools and ideas’. The site has loads of stuff on it - reports, industry data, publications, content feeds, forum, directory, calendar… it can be a bit tricky to navigate through all the content but trust me, there’s some good stuff there.

How can fuel4arts help me?
fuel4arts provides practical information and advice normally unaffordable to arts professionals, including research, arts marketing case studies and articles, trend reports and an up-to-date database of industry contacts.

This professional development tool provides you with access to the broadest range of arts-specific marketing and audience development tools and expertise sourced globally.

Why would I use fuel4arts?

* Develop your professional practice
* Find out how to build new audiences for your art
* Gain inspiration for your marketing efforts
* Save time and energy by letting fuel4arts source and deliver information tailored to your needs straight to your desktop via fuel4arts Direct and What’s New Monthly

Who else uses fuel4arts?
Members are individual artists, arts professionals in organisations, consultants to the arts and arts educators. They share an interest in best practice marketing of the arts and come from all areas of the international arts and cultural industry.

Best of all it’s free, though you do have to join.

L.

bronwen hyde

You might recognise Bronwen Hyde’s name from the beautiful photography she did for the cover of Mini Shots last year, or as the photographer of the creepy Oh, You Beautiful Doll cover. Or maybe you’ve seen her on the interwebs or caught her exhibition at the Brunswick Street Gallery. She is very talented.

And now she sends word that she is offering portrait sessions, for both personal and promotional needs, as part of her new photography business. Ideal for an author photo, I hear you think? My thoughts exactly.

If you would like a quote for a session, feel free to email her at propaganda@bronwenhyde.com letting her know the following:

- Do you require basic headshots or creative portraiture?

- Do you require individual or group portraits? If group portraits, please specify the number of people.

- Do you require the images for personal use only, commercial use only, or for both personal and commercial use?

- Approximately how many final images do you require?

- Do you require the final images as low resolution files only (for web use), high resolution only (for print), high res and low res files (for print and web use), as prints, or all of the above?

- Are you agreeable to images from the portrait session being used on www.bronwenhyde.com and other non-profit websites as promotion for her photography?

- Are you agreeable to images from the portrait session being used in exhibition and / or print publications?

Please also feel free to provide any further information regarding your preferences for the location or style of shoot.

More samples of Bronwen’s portraiture work can be found in the facade section of her website: www.bronwenhyde.com.

L.

not travel writing…

There were a few little travel book stories that caught my eye in the papers today.

In the A2, Thuy On writes of In Turkey I Am Beautiful: ‘Oh no, not another travel memoir was the immediate reaction upon picking up this book.’

Indeed, travel writing can be an annoyingly homogeneous type of book. Unfortunately, most travel books don’t really appeal to me (although I used to read them voraciously): they all seem to be written by men - middle-aged men or young guys out on a lad’s adventure. And don’t even get me started on the female take: moving to a foreign (preferably romantic) city and making a life there. Sure, there are exceptions but sheesh, where’s the variation in the genre? Not to mention, when will publishers start realising that just because someone has taken an exceptional journey, doesn’t mean they will be able to weave a compelling tale out of it.

In the Herald Sun’s Weekend, if you skip past the annoying article on ‘Melbourne’s Best Dressed’, there was this breakout box in the books section: ‘Something to get your teeth into - Got a hankering for adventure writing that doesn’t involve a villa in Tuscany or a year in Provence? Get your teeth into these exciting stories: Into Thin Air (Jon Krakauer), Touching The Void (Joe Simpson), The Perfect Storm (Sebastian Junger) and The Lost Men (Kelly Tyler-Lewis).’

Decent books, all of them, but male-dominated. I don’t blame the paper; fact is adventure travel narratives by women are rare. In fact, travel books by women - let along young women - are rare. It’s one of the reasons why I want to write travel narratives. I don’t think I’m representative of young/women travellers - not at all - but I do think I can write something that will resonate with them more than a lot of the current offerings on the market.

I hope I can anyway, and I’m about to find out. It feels too early to be talking about this, but I’m under contract to write such a book. It’s with an independent publisher, so I’ll be writing about my experiences from the other side of the small press desk from the start of next year.

L.

unpublished manuscripts

Jeff Sparrow from Overland and Louise Swinn from Sleepers were on the Book Show a few days ago talking in general about unpublished manuscripts. You can download the show here. Two points I found particularly interesting were:

Recurrent themes in novels that both publishers often receive:

• the creative writing novel - beautiful line by line but with no over-reaching theme or narrative, due (they think) to the work-shopping process that creative writing students go through.
• the rural novel - there’s a sense that if you want meaning and authenticity it needs to be set in the bush.
• doorstop sci-fi - really thick, long sci-fi manuscripts that are often part of a trilogy
• poetry
• novels for and about young adults

And Jeff said:

[The Overland call for submissions] has made me change the way I think about writing in Australia in quite a fundamental way… Lots of people are writing not for publication but because they enjoy the process.

L.

blogging is bad

I’m sick of people talking about how writers shouldn’t blog.* ‘Blogging is time you could have spent writing,’ is the usual crux of such an argument. Bullshit.

Fact is, people waste time in different ways. Some watch tv, clean their house or organise their book shelves… and some blog. Let’s face it, no one can be 100% productive. Furthermore, all writing is not created equal. Writers don’t have a finite amount of words that are wasted on blogs.

So: email is not ‘writing’, writing a shopping list is not ‘writing’, blogging is not ‘writing’. Sure, we may do it when we have a deadline looming, but wasting time on a blog is no different from baking muffins and playing eight games of Scrabulous, which is what I did three weeks ago when I had a deadline. I blogged too… and I still submitted a rocking piece.

Seriously, can we talk about something else now?

L.

*So sick of it I’m not even going to try and start linking to the offending parties.

emerging writers’ festival

The Emerging Writers’ Festival is on soon, May 10-11 in Melbourne. The programming looks excellent and there is an overall focus on writing - not reading, not book-buying, but writing in all its forms. Poetry, literature, comics, non-fic, performance… it’s all covered, plus some practical panels and workshops about how the industry works.

Locus are running our starting a magazine skill-sharing forum, looking at ‘the opportunities, possibilities and pitfalls of starting your own publication’. It costs $5 on top of a festival pass. We’ll also be at the zine fair on Sunday, in the Atrium at Fed Square from 12-5.

Aduki’s Tristan Clark (author of Stick This In Your Memory Hole) will be sitting on a panel called Let’s Get Arrested, talking about political writing and the culture of it in Australia (Saturday 4-5).

Vignette Press friends and writers Simon Groth and Julian Fleetwood will also be at the festival, both sitting on the Everyone Wants To Hear What I’ve Got To Say panel, speaking about innovative ways writers can get their work out there (Sunday 10-11). Julian will also be running a skill-sharing forum on poetry and performance (Sunday 11.15-12) and Simon sitting on a panel about writers’ competitions (Sunday 1.45-2.45).

The festival is amazing value at only $35 for a weekend pass. Hope to see you there.

L.

small press pros and cons

Over at Booksquare there’s an interesting article on the pros and cons of writing for a small press.

TJ Bennett writes about working with Medallion Press after her book was deemed unviable by many ‘New York publishers’.

Let’s be frank: if my book and its sequel, The Promise (May 2009) sell well, it is likely I might come to the attention of a house willing to pay larger advances and offer more flexible contract terms in the future, or I might even be able to negotiate a more lucrative future deal with the house I’m at. In other words, I’m getting a chance to strut my stuff, and that is worth the price of admission.

L.

food blogging furore

If you’re interested in food and blogging in Melbourne you may have noticed a bit of a spat going on a few weeks ago, when the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival was on. Unfortunately I was really busy during this time and it’s taken until now to catch up on all the arguments. But of course, now I have to stick my oar in.

At a day-long seminar called ‘Out of the Frying Pan’, and in particular a session called ‘Web 2.0 How to Blog and How Not To Blog’ food blogger Stephanie Wood (who was a panellist) ruffled a few feathers by ranting about the low-quality of writing on food blogs. She then reiterated her comments on her blog. Her basic argument is this:

The thing that alarms me about Web 2.0 (as the session for which I was a panellist was titled), is that it is removing a layer of quality control in the media that may never be restored. The proliferation of average or worse blogs (on any subject, not just food) will inevitably contribute to a dumbing-down and diminuition of content and writing quality across the board.