We don’t exactly judge a book by its cover here at the Wheeler Centre … but we do appreciate a good-looking book cover, nonetheless.
The Australian Publishers' Association celebrates the best in Australian cover design once a year, with the APA Design Awards. This year’s winners were announced last week; here’s some of them.
Love Lace: Powerhouse Museum International Lace Award, Powerhouse Publishing, designed by Toko.
The Art of Pasta, Lucio Galletto & David Dale, Penguin, designed by Daniel New, artist Luke Sciberras.
Hannah Robinson for And Red Galoshes, pictured, Glenda Millard & Jonathan Bentley, Hardie Grant; The Elegant Art of Falling Apart, Jessica Jones, Hachette; Wide Open Road, Tony Davis, ABC Books; and Chasing Odysseus, S.D. Gentill, Pantera Press.
August, Bernard Beckett, Text, designed by W.H. Chong and Susan Miller.
Love in the Years of Lunacy, Mandy Sayer, A&U, designed by Emily O'Neill.
Hiroshima Nagasaki, Paul Ham, HarperCollins, designed by Matt Stanton and HarperCollins Design Studio.
Foal’s Bread, Gillian Mears, A&U, designed by Sandy Cull, gogoGinko, and Yolande Gray.
The Flight Attendant’s Shoe, Prudence Black, NewSouth, designed by Di Quick.
Alaska, Sue Saliba, Penguin, designed by Allison Colpoys.
Ben & Duck, Sara Acton, Scholastic, designed by Nicole Stofberg.
Star League 1: Lights, Camera, Action Hero!, H.J. Harper, Random House, designed by Nahum Ziersch and Astred Hicks, Design Cherry.
The full list of winners is available at Bookseller and Publisher online.
In the first of a new event series on the art of book design, multi-award-winning cover designer W.H. Chong will present an illustrated talk on how he turned much-loved Australian classics into art for Text Publishing’s Australian Classics series.
Beautiful Books: How To Design an Australian Classic with W.H. Chong will be held at the Wheeler Centre on Thursday 31 May at 6.15pm. Free, but please book.
Source: Abu Dhabi International Book Fair
Emerging Writers' Festival director Lisa Dempster has, in recent years, become a regular at Arab book fairs. Here, she reflects on her week with the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair 2012.
Travelling and literature have much in common – they educate, entertain and open the mind to the possibilities of the world. For the past week I have been enjoying the benefits of both, as a member of the press delegation at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.
Now in its twenty-second year, the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair brought together over 900 exhibitors from 54 countries, and showcased over half a million titles in 33 languages. Like Sharjah International Book Fair, Abu Dhabi serves a dual purpose as a trade fair and book market, and also offers publisher training and a diverse cultural program.
Spread across 21,500 square metres, the Book Fair offered a vast geography to explore, both physically and intellectually. While every literary festival is a reflection of its own unique culture, Abu Dhabi International Book Fair facilitates conversations that focus on the Arab world while also crossing boundaries to appeal to a global audience.
“Regular fair-goers love book fairs because each fair has its own character,” said Indian editor Vinutha Mallya, visiting the Book Fair as part of the international press delegation. “In Abu Dhabi, I feel like I am peeking through a pin hole camera, but capturing the expanse of the Arab book market. I feel like a tourist in a strange land, but being struck by something familiar.”
Although the processes and structures of the Arab book selling world may be different to India and also to my Western perspective, many of the discussions that arose from the Fair’s cultural and professional programs were globally recognisable. Key themes included identity, and how and why we tell stories in an increasingly globalised world.
Source: Abu Dhabi International Book Fair
Tishani Doshi, a poet and dancer who appeared as part of the Fair’s UK country focus, believes that identity is becoming an increasingly important question in a world where so many people move across the globe, living lives in a state of flux. Although her Welsh-Indian heritage and constant travelling has made her feel like a cultural outsider, she has embraced her otherness as she feels it has helped her as a writer.
At the end of the day, no matter where you are in the world, she says, you share what it is to be human. “The basic human questions are the same, whenever you ask them and whenever you ask them,” said Doshi. “Although our stories are each different, it’s also the same story that’s been going on and on.”
McSweeney’s-approved playwright Wajahat Ali also places importance on the commonalities of the human condition, describing his play The Domestic Crusaders as a universal family drama told through the culturally specific lens of his Muslim-American upbringing. When you strip away the layers, he says, people see universal family tensions and relationships. Embracing digital media in addition to his work as a playwright, Ali’s work speaks to the changing face of human identity in a digitised, post-911 world.
“For all the stories that have been told, there is a new way of telling them. The new generation represents a new world. We have messy languages, messy hyphenated identities,“ Ali explains, adding that global citizens are increasingly unwilling to reduce their cultures by pigeon-holing themselves or others. Instead, writing has the potential to explore and celebrate the mutable lives and identities of people around the world.
The Abu Dhabi International Book Fair is committed to developing its local publishing sector through various means, much of it industry focussed. In addition to publisher training and panels during the festival, the Fair works year-round to promote activity in the region to an international audience. Additionally, they run a subsidy scheme that supports the translation of books into or out of Arabic, meaning publishers who sell rights at the Fair can receive up to $10,000 towards the development of up to ten titles.
Source: Abu Dhabi International Book Fair
Readers and book-buyers are engaged through the Fair’s cultural programming, and of course publishers sell their titles direct to the public at the Fair. The importance of writers is also recognised through the presentation of two major literary awards during the Fair, the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (known as the “Arabic Booker”) and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award. However, less activity is focussed specifically on developing writers, which is vital to any robust publishing industry.
This year, the British Council ran several creative writing workshops with authors such as Marina Lewycka, Phillip Ardagh and Jasper Fforde. The Book Fair also ran a short story competition in partnership with a leading local newspaper. The winner, Katy Shalhoub, won an iPad – but, more significantly, her story was published on a full page in The National newspaper, an amazing outcome for a fledgling writer.
These kinds of opportunities for emerging writers to connect, learn and be recognised during the early stages of their career are vital to developing a healthy literary and publishing culture. It would be great to see these writer-development initiatives grow at the Fair in future years.
A book fair is not just a place to buy books, sell rights, network and undertake training – though those are important. A book fair is also a place and time where a unique group of people come together, learn from each other, and celebrate literature in all its forms. The Abu Dhabi International Book Fair was successful in bringing writers, readers and publishers together, sparking both local connections and global conversations that will continue to resonate in the Arab world and beyond.
We share five of our favourite links to news, reviews or articles that we’ve discovered over the past week.
The whimsical Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year was first awarded in 1978, to Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. The shortlist for this year’s prize has just been announced, with contenders including Cooking with Poo, Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World and The Great Singapore Penis Panic: And the Future of American Mass Hysteria. The full list, and explanations of just what these books are about, is at the website of The Bookseller, the book trade magazine that awards the prize.
The Thai cookbook Cooking with Poo is up for Oddest Title of the Year: ‘Poo’ is Thai for crab and the chef’s nickname.
Recently, we shared a Ron Charles video, ‘Sh*t Book Reviewers Say’, poking fun at typical reviewers' clichés, like ‘Kafkaesque’.
This week, the Guardian ran a blog by Jonny Geller, an agent and managing editor at Curtis Brown, who confessed ‘I think I might have done something really stupid on Twitter’. Using the hashtag #publishingeuphemisms, he translated the real meanings of the phrases publishers use when they’re rejecting authors. Among them: ‘this is too literary for our list’ (it’s boring); ‘the novel never quite reached the huge potential of its promise’ (your pitch letter was better than the book); and ‘sadly we are publishing a book similar to this next spring’ (it too has a beginning, middle and end).
Want more? Last year, a US website published the euphemisms used by some of the business’s most influential, like Bloomsbury’s Peter Ginna (‘acclaimed’ = ‘poorly selling’).
Jonny Geller: Sharing his secrets on Twitter meant ‘I had robbed myself of my tools.’
Next Thursday (8 March) is International Women’s Day. One of the hot topics of last year was the underrepresentation of women in the literary pages – sparked by statistics gathered by US organisation VIDA. One year on, VIDA has posted an update, looking at the past year in books pages and lit mags. Sadly, we’ve still got a long way to go, baby.
Website Flavourwire did its own math and estimated that ‘the vast majority’ of the publications’ statistics hover ‘at around 25% female, 75% male’. For example, in the London Review of Books, 29 of the book reviewers were female and 155 were male. Of the books reviewed, 58 authors were female while 163 were male. And in the New York Times book review section (one of the lesser offenders), 368 book reviewers were female and 448 were male; while of the authors reviewed, 273 were female and 520 were male.
Novelist Kirsten Tranter wrote for us last International Women’s Day on how the issue has played out in Australia. On 8 March this year, we’ll be publishing an update from her on what’s happened in our literary pages and on our prize circuit in 2011 – and what happens next. Stella Prize committee member Christine Gordon will deliver our Lunchbox/Soapbox at 12.45pm on the same day, on the topic Feminism is Personal. And in the evening, war conflict reporter Eliza Griswold will talk about her book The Tenth Parallel in another free Wheeler Centre event, at 7.15pm. Bookings recommended.
Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin said of the 2011 VIDA count, ‘London Review of Books, you break my goddamn heart’.
Lionel Shriver is always happy to wade into controversy. In the lead-up to International Women’s Day, she’s published an article on why, though ‘on a strictly definitive level, I am a “feminist”’, she’s uncomfortable with the label.
‘On the connotative level … the word gives me the willies … Self-confessed feminists are, it is broadly accepted, humourless, earnest, touchy, on the lookout for slights, sexless, and probably ugly. They are party-pooping pills who don’t know how to have a good time or take a joke. They are a big drag. Little wonder that younger women these days run a mile from the word.’
Shriver believes that feminists should be focusing on the big issues, like ‘genital mutilation, forced marriage, honour killings, and marital rape’ rather than being ‘tight-arsed and prim’ about things like raunch culture.
Lionel Shriver: A feminist ‘on a strictly definitive level’, but says ‘little wonder that younger women these days run a mile from the word’.
Tim Parks has a terrific piece on the New York Review of Books blog about the professionalisation of writing as a career, from the advent of studying (rather than simply reading) books in the 20th century, through agents, writers’ festivals and finally the 21st-century expectation that authors will promote themselves on Facebook and Twitter.
Parks traces the explosion of creative writing courses (and would-be authors) from the 1980s onwards back to studying books: readers ‘supposed that if you could analyse it, you could very probably do it yourself’.
Tim Parks asks: ‘Since when did being a writer become a career choice, with appropriate degree courses and pecking orders?’
Chris Flynn writes about the weirdness of becoming an author. Especially when you’ve been making your living as a reviewer – and now it’s your turn to be reviewed.
It’s fairly odd being a debut novelist at the best of times. You have a book coming out! You must be so excited! So, what’s the next one about? Is that a Lamborghini? It’s even stranger when you’ve spent the past few years panning everyone else’s work in the review pages of newspapers and magazines, as I have.
In the Australian literary diaspora (that makes it sound a lot bigger than it is) many writers earn a modest crust penning reviews and much has been written and publicly discussed about the weaknesses in our critical culture.
Chris Flynn: ‘The debut novelist should not be afraid of criticism.’
Are we honest with each other, or is there a lot of hand-holding that goes on, a lot of back-patting and mutual arse-kissing? I guess I’m about to test the theory. Will everyone get stuck into my book and tear it apart, or be extra nice about it just in case I end up reviewing theirs at some point? (Ooh, the tension!)
What happens if they eviscerate it in a review and then bump into me at an event? Will I headbutt them like Norman Mailer did to Gore Vidal? (‘Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.’ What a comeback, albeit from the floor.) No, I won’t. Headbutts hurt both parties. Will I introduce their kneecaps to a drill like Billy does in the book? Hmmm … Look, obviously I have to say no because that’s illegal and everything, but hmmm …
In all seriousness, the debut novelist should not be afraid of criticism. In fact, they should welcome it more than most. No one should be given a ‘free pass’ just because it’s their first book (something I’ve heard reviewers say so many times, it’s depressing).
Writers – and just about everyone else these days – live their lives in public, surrounded by the chaos and noise and opinions that make up our culture. Either you jump in or you stay at home with the internet unplugged, not talking to anyone except the postman. And if you’ve written a novel and it’s your debut, then you’ve jumped in: so start swimming.
You can tell me you hate my novel (‘a filthy sex-and-drug-fuelled romp, an absolute disgrace!’), you can tell me that you love it (‘a filthy sex-and-drug-fuelled romp, thrillingly disgraceful!’) or you can just say ‘meh’ – though if you do, you probably deserve the drill.
Chris Flynn’s first novel, A Tiger in Eden, is released Tuesday 27 February. He is the books editor of the Big Issue and has reviewed for the Australian, the Age and Australian Book Review.
Our weekly Debut Mondays series, featuring authors talking about their new books, kicks off tonight at The Moat at 6.15pm. Authors featured will be Michael Sala, Denise Leith and Eric Knight.
Chris Flynn will be a guest at next week’s Debut Monday (also 6pm at The Moat). He’ll be joined by Robert Power and Maggie Groff.
Working with Words is a new Wheeler Centre web series, where we’ll talk to writers and publishing folk about their work and other bookish things. We kick off with Hilary McPhee, one of Australian writing’s most beloved and respected figures.
Hilary McPhee co-founded McPhee Gribble Publishers (with Di Gribble) in 1974. McPhee Gribble was one of the first publishers committed to nurturing Australian writers and writing; it launched the careers of Helen Garner, Tim Winton and many other successful Australian writers. These days, Hilary is an editor and writer.
What was the first job you had in publishing – and how did you get it?
Ancient history. Penguin Books was still at Ringwood when I was taken on as their first ever editorial anything. I then blew it by living with the MD and the parent company made it clear I had to leave. I started again writing stuff for McKinseys, then Heinemann rescued me for a year before Di Gribble and I started McPhee Gribble in 1974.
What was the best thing about working as a publisher?
Two things for me: working face–to-face with authors for as long as they needed it. And being able to think up books that were needed and persuade authors to write them.
What was the worst thing about working as a publisher?
The treadmill of having to dream up non-existent books for three-year forecasts: when McPhee Gribble was seeking investors during a big recession and later at Penguin and Pan Macmillan for the international companies’ three-year plans.
What’s been the most significant moment in your career so far? And why?
I didn’t ever think of myself as having a career, so can’t really answer this. I thought more of having something marvellous to do during the day.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about the publishing industry?
Worst advice: Don’t publish fiction. Stick to books about ballet and horses.
Best advice: Remember that everyone in publishing in New York and London knows everyone else.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever read or heard about yourself?
That I’m tough and really scary.
If you weren’t working in the world of books and writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
Anthropology and archaeology.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?
Writing can be taught, creative is something else. Short-term gigs are the best, I think. Mavericks are better than career academics. But it depends utterly on the writer – as student and as teacher. The ones that bother me produce a sameness to the work (and to the acknowledgements).
What’s your advice for someone wanting to break into publishing?
Work for as many parts of the industry as you can and work for peanuts.
If you could date a fictional character, who would it be – and why?
Edith Campbell Berry from Frank Moorhouse’s great trilogy. I adore the scale of her ambition to fix the world, her readiness to take huge risks with herself, and the portrait of the times from the 1920s to the 1970s.
If you could have dinner with a fictional character, who would it be – and why?
I’d rather have dinner with Frank, so I could try to get a glimmer of how he did it.
Hilary McPhee will be appearing in a free event at the Wheeler Centre this month to talk about her latest book, Memoirs of a Young Bastard, the edited diaries of celebrated film-maker Tim Burstall. The diaries provide a window into the past – and paint a stark portrait of the language of sex and gender conventions in 1950s Australia, an area of study close to McPhee’s heart.
Hilary McPhee’s Memoirs of a Young Bastard (in conversation with Wendy Tuouy) will be held on Thursday 23 February at 6.15pm at the Wheeler Centre. The event is free, but bookings are recommended.
Ewan Morrison is famous for last year’s bleak Edinburgh Festival address diagnosing the publishing industry as in ‘terminal decline’.
Yesterday he tapped into the zeitgeist again, with a Guardian article warning of the fall-out for writers and publishers when the ‘self-e-publishing bubble’ inevitably bursts.
Digital technology has made self-publishing cheaper and easier than ever before. Not only are there no printing costs, but distribution – once involving trudging around bookshops on foot (and considerable ongoing postage costs) – is now as simple and accessible as a few clicks of the mouse.
And just as any film nerd with a dream can look to Matt-and-Ben’s Good Will Hunting as inspiration, aspiring e-novelists have their own DIY success story to aspire to.
Amanda Hocking needed to raise $300 to travel to a Muppets exhibition in Chicago. With seventeen unpublished paranormal romance novels on her laptop and a shoebox full of publisher rejection letters, she decided to sell them on Amazon to raise the money. She had six months; when her self-imposed deadline came, she’d raised over $20,000 and sold 150,000 copies. In twenty months, she’d made $2.5 million dollars – and sold 1.5 million books.
This month, 27-year-old Hocking’s first ‘traditional publishing’ book, Switched (a fast-paced romance about changeling trolls – and the most successful of her e-books) will be released in Australia. It’s just one of the outcomes of a $2.1 million publishing deal with St Martin’s Press in the US and Pan Macmillan in the UK.
Most self-published authors sell less than 100 books a year. Recent figures suggest 48% of them are sold for under $2.99 per copy and 28% for 99 cents or less.
For the most part, the profits are made by the manufacturers of e-readers (which are expensive) rather than the creators of e-books (which are insanely cheap, sometimes even free). And, of course, by the big e-booksellers like Amazon and Apple’s iBookstore.
Morrison calculated that over twelve months, ‘with five million new self-publishing authors selling 100 books each, Amazon had shifted 500 million units. While each author … made only $99 after a year’s work.’
‘Australia is some years behind the US and the UK when it comes to the availability of e-books, though it has finally started to play catch up over the past year or two,’ says Matthia Dempsey, editor-in-chief of Bookseller and Publisher magazine.
It’s been a period of massive change for the Australian book industry. We’ve seen the declining fortunes of physical bookshops, epitomised by the demise of the Angus & Robertson and Borders chains (representing roughly 30% of the Australian market), a steep rise in consumers buying books online, and a growing awareness and embrace of e-readers. A year ago, Booki.sh, an Australian-based e-book platform, was launched.
And late last year, Dymocks, Australia’s sole surviving major book chain, launched the controversial D Publishing, a company that creates both print and e-books, distributed via the Dymocks website: for a fee and with a restricting rights clause that has been heavily criticised.)
‘I think it’s safe to say the awareness of e-self-publishing as an option will be on a steep upward curve at the moment for most would-be Australian writers,’ says Dempsey.
Angela Meyer is one Australian writer who has happily dabbled in self-e-publishing, publishing her three of her short stories as stand-alone e-books. They’re available on both Smashwords and Amazon; two are priced at 99 cents and the third is free. ‘I did it partly as an experiment to see if anyone would read or buy them,’ she says. ‘I also wanted to extend the life of stories that were previously published in journals but were never available digitally.’
Her free story, ‘You Will Notice that Hallways are Painted’ – which inspired the novel she’s now writing – has had ‘a couple of hundred’ readers; some have gone on to purchase the other stories. ‘It’s worked out pretty well for me.’
Most readers have come through Angela’s blog, Literary Minded (she’s Australia’s best known literary blogger) and her social media accounts.
Visibility is a problem for most self-e-published authors. It’s very cheap and easy to publish an e-book, but most get no readers because they’re lost in the crowd of millions, without the backing of a publishing house for promotion. ‘If you look at Smashwords you can see just how much rubbish is on there,’ says Meyer. ‘My strategy to “rise above’ was to have edited stories with well-designed covers, and to have them available via the social networks I’d already established.’
Morrison worries that the proliferation of ‘so much writing-for-free’ (or ridiculously cheap) will lower the price consumers are accustomed to paying. He fears this will have a similar influence to that of the many websites that don’t pay writers – that it will devalue writing and make it harder to make a living.
‘I’m pretty convinced by the argument that paints the recent past as an unlikely-to-be-repeated golden age for writers in terms of advances and their ability to make a living as a full-time author,’ says Dempsey. ‘As in other major creative industries, the web and digitisation has fragmented the market, making it harder for most to make the kind of profit they once did.’
Lisa Dempster, director of the Emerging Writers Festival, believes it’s ‘a misnomer’ that there have been periods where it’s been easy to be a writer. ‘The struggling-writer-in-a-garrett is a cliché for a reason!’ She says, ‘I don’t think the low price of e-books is the thing that is going to sink the writing industry. Personally, after such a long time of free digital content, I think we’re starting to see a shift towards consumers being willing to pay for work that they know will be good quality online.’
Dempsey is also hopeful. ‘As some readers of cheap self-published works already admit, when you wade through enough bad writing you do become more willing to pay a little more, and that little bit more recognises the role played by the traditional gatekeepers: selection, investment, editing and so on.’
The Australian writing folk we spoke to weren’t as gloomy as Morrison about self-e-publishing, though they all agreed that most writers who think they’ll follow the glittering path of Amanda Hocking – or even make a living from it – will be disappointed.
Dempsey and Dempster believe genre plays a role in what kind of books have a chance of succeeding. ‘It would take a brave person to self-publish a literary novel, however self-published romance novels and travel books are booming,’ says Dempster.
Ultimately, though, success depends on expectations. ‘I think that for writers who see e-self-publishing as a chance to make their writing available for non-financial reasons, and who are not labouring under the notion that they will make a living (let alone a fortune) out of it, the ease with which it is now possible to publish a book would be a welcome development,’ says Dempsey.
‘You could make the case for the new self e-publishing ecosystem functioning as a kind of public slush pile … a way of being a part of it – with the hope of being noticed by traditional publishers or newer e-only imprints and publishing houses.’
Amanda Hocking’s publishers – not surprisingly – agree. ‘It’s always been the same, since the days when people were self-published from the back of their car,’ Matthew Shear of St Martins Press told The Guardian. ‘Cream will rise to the top.’
Earlier this week, we tweeted the news that Penguin’s general publishing department is now accepting unsolicited manuscripts, in a new initiative titled, ‘The Monthly Catch’. Submissions are restricted to the first week (1-7) of every month, starting on 1 February.
It’s been six years or more since Penguin last accepted unsolicited manuscripts; previously, they considered only those represented by agents.
We knew this was pretty interesting news, but were surprised by just how interested our Twitter followers seemed to be. (There’s a reason Melbourne is a City of Literature, it seems. Lots of writers.)
We spoke to Penguin publisher Ben Ball to discover the thinking behind the company’s new embrace of the unknown and unfiltered.
‘Perhaps the main reason is that the digital world is bringing us closer than ever to readers, and therefore aspiring writers,’ said Ball. ‘We want to be an even more active part of that community.’
‘Our relationship with agents is of course vital, but although we haven’t accepted unsolicited submissions for the last few years, we’ve had a long and successful history of discovering new authors directly. So this is part of our past as well as future.’
Is there any kind of project Penguin are on the lookout for? “Nope,’ Ball told us. ‘We want to discover new things we like, and want to be surprised. We look for books of the highest quality, but we’re a broad church when it comes to subject.’
All manuscripts will be carefully read and assessed, though only successful submissions will be responded to.
Submissions should be sent according to strict (but easy to follow) guidelines, which can be found – along with full details – on Penguin’s website. Most importantly, perhaps: don’t send hard copies. They’ll only be recycled.
As we’ve reported before, other large publishers have their own versions of The Monthly Catch: Allen & Unwin has accepted manuscript pitches from aspiring writers every Friday for years. And last year, Pan Macmillan announced their own version of The Friday Pitch – Manuscript Monday (10am–4pm).
In a nice departure from the traditional Australia Day focus on flags and sporting heroes, The Sunday Age has marked the lead-up to the occasion with an editorial decrying our ‘tendency to anti-intellectualism’.
It lamented the fact that Australia’s ‘great writers, artists, soldiers, politicians and scientists … take second place to footballers, cricketers, swimmers and tennis players’.
‘As we approach Australia Day and make our plans for the beach or the backyard, it’s worth reflecting on what we are losing through this neglect of our classics. They are our stories written in our voices, and give us specific clues as to how we became the country we are today.’
In an opinion piece published alongside the editorial, Michael Heyward, publisher of Text Publishing, argued that while Australia has come a long way in recent decades when it comes to valuing and celebrating our homegrown authors, we ‘seem not to care’ about the great authors and books of our past, neglecting to keep them in print and to consistently teach them in our universities.
‘Those of us who choose and influence what people might read – publishers, professors, teachers, journalists, commentators, editors – have done a lamentable job of curating the primary materials of our literary history,’ wrote Heyward.
He said it will take ‘all kinds of effort’ to change both publishing and academic cultures. Increased adaption of Australian novels to film and television was one proposed solution, while he also suggested that the rise of the eBook ‘may liberate some writers from the dungeons of neglect’.
Text will release a new series, Text Australian Classics, in 2012, featuring titles such as David Ireland’s (currently out of print) The Glass Canoe, winner of the 1976 Miles Franklin Award, as well as earlier works by current favourites such as Kate Grenville and Peter Temple.
It’s not the first time Text has dabbled in resurrecting neglected works of Australian writing. In 2009, Madeleine St John’s debut novel The Women in Black (1993) – never before published in Australia, though set in Sydney – was published in a handsome new edition, packaged with accolades from much-loved Australians like Barry Humphries, Helen Garner and Clive James. The novel, a sharp-witted, affectionate portrait of a group of women working in the ladies department of a store much like David Jones, was embraced by both critics and readers; it was followed by new editions of St John’s subsequent novels.
Christina Stead’s work has enjoyed renewed interest thanks to some high profile endorsers. Watch our session The Late Great: Christina Stead here.
The endorsement of a popular writer was also integral to the recent renewal of interest in Christina Stead, after The Man Who Loved Children (1940) was given a rave review by Jonathan Franzen in The New York Times. Melbourne University Press published a new edition, with a stylish cover and introduction by Franzen, shortly afterwards. This was followed by new editions of Letty Fox: Her Luck (with a foreword by Carmen Callil) and For Love Alone (with a foreword by Drusilla Modjeska).
Stylish new editions and canny endorsements or introductions designed to lure new readers seem to be an integral (and, it seems, effective) part of the publisher’s bag of tricks when relaunching forgotten or neglected classics – literally making the old new again.
Another Australian classic, Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1961), enjoyed a resurgence thanks to these tricks (an introduction by Peter Temple and afterword by David Stratton) when the 1971 film was restored and re-released in 2009. The film attracted a wave of media coverage and allowed an accompanying film tie-in edition (again, from Text Publishing, who had also published a 1993 edition).
Barbara Creed, head of culture and communications at the University of Melbourne, told The Age that she agreed with Heyward about the need for more Australian novels on the screen. She said, ‘Whenever a novel is adapted to screen … there is a boost in sales of the book as a result.’
Creed also said that a dedicated Australian literature course was back on the university’s syllabus this year. Last year, a group of students had started their own Australian literature studies, in the absence of such a subject. (‘An unusual situation,‘ Creed said.)
This enthusiasm from students so actively keen to steep themselves in Australian writing is, at least, a good sign.
The Wheeler Centre will run a free series of ten events entitled ‘Australian Literature 101' from next month. Details will be released, along with our February-April programme in full, next Friday 3 February.
As 2011 ends and 2012 begins, we’ve invited our resident organisations to consider the year gone by and to share their plans for the year to come.
2011 was a huge year for SPUNC – it was the year in which we began to carve a path forward for Australian independent publishers entering the eBook environment. Distribution is the perennial obstacle course for small and independent publishers here, but the growth of the eBook market around the world is beginning to open doors for new channels of distribution, which means more readers for more locally produced content.
In 2012 SPUNC will be continuing to develop its digital distribution service, ensuring more books are available more widely. Later in 2012, we will be hosting a publishing symposium for the Australian publishing industry – a two day conference exploring new publishing, distribution and bookselling models. This will be open to the public as well as the industry, and will be occurring at the Wheeler Centre, with publishers, booksellers and book industry obsessives from around Australia plus international guests, all involved.
We have a few other exciting bits and pieces up our sleeves, but we’re saving them for later. If you’re passionate about Australian publishing, or you pride yourself on the diversity of your reading list, stay tuned…
Zoe Dattner
General Manager
While citizens took to the streets to protest around the world, there were other upheavals in 2011: not least in the world of publishing. As digital publishing consolidated its grip on the mainstream, we saw bricks-and-mortar bookstores close and online retailers swallow one another whole.
It wasn’t all gloomy news, though; in fact, the digital book industry flourished as both readers and retailers learned to adapt. While some complained early in the year of a lack of available eBooks in Australia, Melbourne-based outfit booki.sh emerged to facilitate electronic book sales for local bookstores, and digital book industry awards also surfaced.
Project Gutenberg began offering free public domain titles for download to smartphones. Seth Godin recast libraries as home of the information specialist rather than as mere storehouses for books, and predicted that eBooks would be comparable in price to Gilette razors in the future. He wasn’t the only one gazing into the crystal ball; JE Fishman offered his own account of what the future might hold for books.
Early in the year, our residents Australian Poetry launched their iPhone app. And during the Emerging Writers' Festival, Simon Groth took to the Lunchbox/Soapbox to reassure sentimental readers that their fear of electronic publishing was irrational. We continued to host Meanland events, too, including those tackling the evolution of the bookshop and the ways we write for new media.
We looked at the rise of the typo in digital publishing, while Mandy Brett argued for the enduring importance of editors, whether or not books are eventually deprecated.
Of course, it’s not yet over for the paper book – especially if you’re doing it yourself. We looked at DIY publishing more than once over the course of the year, explored DIY marketing for authors, investigated ways in which the paper book is enduring and evolving and watched with interest as mysteries appeared on the street, page by page. And as the year drew to a close, we noted Dymocks' entry into the self-publishing market with D Publishing.
As the book continues to change in our hands, there may be little we can reliably anticipate beyond further change. But as George MacEncroe reminded us, that may be as good as a holiday.
We sincerely hope that you enjoy yours.
A leading Australian book retailer is getting into the publishing business with the launch of an online self-publishing service. Dymocks is the first major Australian book retailer to have entered the online publishing fray with the D Publishing Network. The service offers a fully-functional suite of services for turning a standard Word document into a book and/or ebook. The service can print colour images, offers default covers for those unable to provide their own, and offers medium and high-quality print options.
Prices for a combined print and ebook option start at around $700 plus printing costs (around $3 or $4 per book, depending on several variables include number of pages and colour images). Once produced, the books can also be published with D Publishing, meaning they’ll be issued an ISBN, barcode and imprint and will be registered as officially published works so that they can be bought and sold. They’ll be available for sale on the Dymocks website as print books and/or ebooks at a price set by the author and, if franchise owners can be persuaded to stock them, they could even be sold in a Dymocks store. Here’s more.
A new UK publishing venture is bringing crowdfunding to the book world. Unbound lets authors pitch their novels-in-progress to readers, who then decide whether or not they want to contribute to the financial costs of having the book written and published.
The website already features book projects by Monty Python regular Terry Jones and respected mid-career author Tibor Fischer, but it also plans to make room for first-time authors too, like debutant Jennifer Pickup, whose novel Unbelievable was fully funded by readers. Readers can opt to contribute to a project at several levels, each one of which offers a reward. More than an act of charity or patronage, these rewards give readers value for money. For example, a contribution of £10 to Vitali Vitaliev’s Bad Food Tales: An Anti-Tourist Guide to Italy is rewarded with ebook edition, access to the author’s shed (essentially updates on the writing of the book) and the reader’s name in the back of the book. Readers can contribute at higher levels too, each one of which has its own rewards. The highest contribution level for this title (they vary from title to title) £500, the reward for which is “Everything up to and including launch party level & spend a day with me, learning about my work as an author, journalist, editor and presenter, include a tour of Pegasus Cottage, where I do my writing, and a special Italian lunch cooked by me.”
Unbound is the brainchild of publishers John Mitchinson, Justin Pollard and Dan Kieran, deputy editor of the magazine, The Idler, and is one of several new publishing business models emerging in the digital realm – check them all out in this Wired feature. Read more about Unbound here..
Family and friends are gathering this morning to mourn the loss of Diana Gribble AM, one of the pre-eminent figures in the local and national publishing industry over recent decades.
Detail of a portrait of Di Gribble sourced from ArtsHub
Many tributes and obituaries have been published in the days since Di passed away of cancer last week at the age of 69. The publishing company she set up with Hilary McPhee in 1975 published titles by some of the towering names of the baby-boomer generation of Australian letters, including Helen Garner, Rod Jones, Tim Winton and Barry Hall. More recently, she was a co-owner of Text Media and, later, the company that publishes Crikey. As Michael Heyward wrote in The Australian, “You can’t understand Australian publishing without knowing about Diana Gribble.”
For more, read the obituaries published by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Meanjin, ABC Radio National’s Book Show, and, from Crikey, Literary Minded and Culture Mulcher.
An Australian writer is seeking to become a pioneer of digital publishing with a venture that’s making the most of new publishing technologies. Nathan Farrugia has an ambitious project in mind – in fact, he’s calling it ‘the future of story-telling’. The Chimera Vector is, according to its author, “a conspiracy techno-thriller of unusual depth, snappy dialogue and edge-of-your-seat action”. Farrugia has turned to Kickstarter, a website that allows creative artists to raise money for their projects, to raise $140,000 to develop the project. The money will fund an “awesomely interactive app” that will encompass an ebook, a full-cast, scored audiobook, a graphic novel with optional narration and soundtrack, a soundtrack and “unlockable content, achievements and inventory”. With 15 days to go, the project has raised about $30,000. Contributors have been promised various rewards for funding the project – the most generous, for example, will have characters named after them.
The Chimera Vector is the first novel to have been signed up by Pan Macmillan’s new ebook imprint, Momentum. In a press release promoting the project, Farrugia claims that The Chimera Vector will attempt to harness all the potential that ebooks offer: “There are enhanced ebooks, there are transmedia products, there are a few book apps with bells and whistles. But nothing cohesive, nothing integrated, nothing truly groundbreaking. Is that really the best we can do?” The ebook is expected to be launched in April 2012.
Pioneering publications are giving us a glimpse of what the book of the future might look like – and that future can best be summarised as augmentation.
In the US, the New York Observer reports that publisher Melville House has produced a series of hybrid books. Hybrid books are print books that come with a Quick Response (QR) code that can be scanned with a mobile device to access additional online features, which the publisher is calling “illuminations”. Melville House’s first hybrid books are a series of novellas, all of which are entitled The Duel. The books are all stories written through the ages by Giacomo Casanova, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Heinrich von Kleist and Aleksandr Kuprin that share the same title.
Additional features for Anton Chekhov’s Duel include a Thomas Paine essay, poems by Lord Byron, some Nietzsche, a church sermon on the evils of dueling, and a US senator’s argument in favor of dueling. Casanova’s Duel includes a Mark Twain essay on French dueling and an account of a famous duel fought from hot air balloons.
In addition, the publisher is also making a QR program available to independent bookstores allowing them to sell customers ebooks in-store.
Another exciting publishing venture points towards an altogether different kind of future book. The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore is a children’s book made for the iPad – or perhaps it’s best described as an iPad app in the form of a children’s book. Whatever definition you choose to give it, Morris Lessmore is a sophisticated attempt at blurring the lines between book and interactive game-playing for kids. The lavish production values are due to the fact that it’s a spin-off of a film for children of the same name produced by a Louisiana production company called Moonbot. It costs just $5.49 on iTunes. Here’s a preview.
For several years, publisher Allen & Unwin has accepted manuscript pitches from aspiring writers every Friday with a service it aptly called the Friday Pitch. Now Pan Macmillan has inaugurated its own version of the Friday Pitch – Manuscript Monday. Pan Macmillan will consider pitches for commercial and literary fiction and non-fiction, children’s books and young adult fiction, so long as they are emailed on a Monday between 10am and 4pm. From November, the publisher will no longer accept hard copy submissions at all – thus saving several forests as well as uncovering tomorrow’s bestsellers.
Sophie Marozeau is a French journalist based in Melbourne. She is the founder of Emue Books, an innovative publishing house which promotes French books around the world. Emue books are available in print at Readings or online.
Never has the time been better for writers and independent publishers to take matters into their own hands. Never has it been so easy to publish books. The web is overflowing with tools to create books in digital formats.
If you’re thinking about getting into indie or self-publishing, Smashwords is the place to start. It covers the whole process from file conversion to selling and distribution on the main existing platforms (Apple, Amazon, Kobo, Sony). BookBaby offers a similar service, only the conversion system and compensation program (fixed rate or royalties) vary.
Worth mentioning too is Booki.sh, a cutting-edge and brilliantly designed online library. It’s not yet targeted at self-published authors, but rather at main-stream and indie publishers listed with Readings. However, according to the Melbourne-based founders at Inventive Labs, “an avenue for self-publishing authors is on [their] long-term radar”.
Ebooks are free to create and they travel easily. But with print books it’s a different story. The best solution to get books printed for indie authors/publishers is print-on-demand. This process allows you to print anywhere between a single copy of a book to several thousand. It eliminates stock management problems and returns hassles. With POD, books are never out of print or out of stock. CreateSpace – owned by Amazon – and Lightning Source – an Ingram Content Company subsidiary – are the two world leaders.
In June, Lightning Source opened a Melbourne operation. This means that not only can you take advantage of its distribution channel in the USA and Europe (including Baker & Taylor, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Gardners), but your books will also be listed with Australian retailers and library suppliers. For this you will need to sign an agreement for all three regions. The registration steps may not be as easy as other online POD services targeted at self-published authors – like Lulu – but the quality of Lightning Source’s paperbacks and hardcovers is well worth the effort.
To learn all you need to know about self-publishing or independent publishing and how to market your books, take a look at the excellent Creative Penn blog written by Joanna Penn.
The digital publishing revolution has led to an exponential rise in the amount of words published – and mistakes made. A BBC report published last week claims bad spelling online can hurt revenue because it reduces reader confidence in the website and its brand. The article quotes William Dutton, an academic from the Oxford Internet Institute, as saying that while consumers “might be wary of spam or phishing efforts, a misspelt word could be a killer issue”. Readers are more suspicious of a website when its content is riddled with typos and bad grammar, and misspellings of crucial words can also result in poor results in search engine searches.
Since the report was published, Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times has blogged about typographical errors in digital publishing. She writes that the business of book publishing is changing rapidly. The emphasis now is on leaner editorial processes, reflecting tighter profit margins. Add to that the fact that word processing means several drafts can circulate at the same time, and you have an “explosion” of typos: “Rushing to publish and overlooking glaring typos may have become part of the new economics of traditional publishing.”
This story gives us occasion to correct one of our own mistakes. A story we recently published about an expensive mistake in a cookbook published by Penguin was, in fact, very much out of date – a fact brought to our attention by a reader after its publication. We apologise for the error, and hope you appreciate the irony as keenly as we do.
An opinion piece by Eric Felten published on the weekend in the Wall Street Journal has served as a reminder of the crucial role publishers play as a filter. Entitled ‘Cherish the Book Publishers – You’ll Miss Them When They’re Gone’, Felten reminds us of the miseries of the slush pile, the pile of unsolicited manuscripts received by publishers of books and magazines – at least, those who accept them. Many do not, simply because reading and assessing every unsolicited manuscript is an uneconomic proposition.
“No doubt,” writes Felten, “there are geniuses languishing in obscurity. Who knows how many great books are just waiting to be discovered? But are we really more likely to find them once the publishing pros have been handed their hats and shown the door? I rather doubt it”.
In an article on the same topic published on Salon.com a year or so ago, Laura Miller also praised the filtering service publishers provide. “Aspiring authors have never had more or better options for self-publishing the manuscripts currently gathering dust in their desk drawers or sleeping in seldom-visited corners of their hard drives,” she writes. “What happens once the self-publishing revolution really gets going, when all of those previously rejected manuscripts hit the marketplace, en masse, in print and e-book form, swelling the ranks of 99-cent Kindle and iBook offerings by the millions? Is the public prepared to meet the slush pile?”
And Jean Hannah Edelstein doesn’t remember her days as a manuscript assessor with great fondness: “It was my first job out of university: I was bright-eyed and idealistic and imagined that I might become some kind of beneficent tweedy sprite, conveying the writing of unknown literary artistes to the masses. By the time I left my job in publishing a few weeks ago, my idealism was in tatters, destroyed by the piles of typescripts I received from people who told me that their fondest desire was to write full time while sitting in a villa overlooking the Mediteranian, despite the fact that they didn’t know how to spell it.”
Laughing at the so-called failures of others is as sobering as it is amusing, but for punishment gluttons, here are more peaks into slushpile hell.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the book’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
With all the news about of bookstores closing and Amazon swallowing every competitor in sight, we thought we’d publish a paean to the book.
Thinking about self-publishing? Try doing it the old-fashioned way.
Here’s a new kind of book that, rather optimistically, was briefly touted as a Kindle killer earlier this year.
If you can’t get used to the idea of reading a Kindle, or any other kind of ereader, here’s a way around the problem.
Once you’ve solved that problem, you can settle down to read in one of these.
Sometimes a book can look great.
Little wonder, given how much love goes into designing a book cover.
Sometimes the same book can look great in all different kinds of ways.
Sometimes a book looks so great, all you want to do is frame it and hang it on a wall.
But they can make good sculptures too.
Magazines can look great too.
Unless you are a book slob, you will appreciate these tips for extending the life of your books…
… because books have feelings too, you know.
We were saddened to learn that Reader’s Feast, on Swanston Street in Melbourne’s CBD, is closing. The 22 staff losing their jobs will bring the total amount of jobs lost by REDgroup’s insolvency to 1,904. We wish all 1,904 of them well. And we thank them for answering all those tediously obscure book queries we pestered them with, especially when we couldn’t remember the author or the actual title and had only the vaguest idea of what the book was about, and for not even blinking when we admitted we hadn’t even bothered to look on the shelves before asking them, and for pretending not to notice our impatience as they looked it up online for us when we could well have done it ourselves, and for cheerfully asking us if we wanted to order it in if it wasn’t in stock, and for ignoring our annoyance when we were told it would take three weeks to come in, and if the book was in stock for spending the time to walk us to the shelf in person even though it was obvious where it was, and for hunting the book down when it wasn’t there, and putting up with us as we prevaricated about whether or not we liked that particular edition, and for remaining heroically impassive and/or betraying only the slightest trace of annoyance when we decided that we didn’t actually want to buy that title after all because we could probably get it cheaper on Book Depository. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.
Perhaps this bittersweet ‘Open Letter to Customers Shopping the Liquidation Sale at the Bookstore Where I Work’ will echo some of the feelings of staff at Reader’s Feast over the next few days.
Amazon has announced that it will be buying out online UK bookseller Book Depository. The move will give Amazon a virtual monopoly of online sales of print books in many countries. Founded in 2004, Book Depository has established a dedicated customer base in Australia and many other countries because of its ‘free shipping’, a feature it offers to some 90 countries worldwide, making it in many instances a cheaper source of books than its main competitor, Amazon. In actual fact, Book Depository freight charges are built into the price of the book, so that prices of the same book will differ from one country to the next.
Nevertheless, the business model has been such a success that for a while it looked like Book Depository might emerge as a credible competitor to the American behemoth. A quick look at Book Depository’s numbers tells the story: the company’s turnover this year was expected to soar to about $180 million, up 80% on the previous year. Amazon has reassured consumers that it will not throttle the business and Book Depository for its part has promised to continue to operate independently.
“Potentially it could be a very big deal,” says Tim Coronel, publisher at Bookseller & Publisher magazine about the implications of the buyout. “They will effectively be the biggest market player in Australia without having a physical presence here.” Coronel estimates that up to 15% of all individual books – both print and ebooks – are purchased from overseas online book retailers. He connects the deal with the recently-announced purchase by Pearson Australia of REDgroup, the local owner of the defunct Borders and Angus & Robertson chains, which is committed to continuing Borders' online business. He says this deal means that one of the world’s largest publishers – Pearson owns Penguin – is now the owner of one of Australia’s best-serviced online book retailers.
Leading local online book retailers include Booktopia, Readings, Boomerang Books, Seek Books, Dymocks, The Nile, Fishpond and REDgroup. All, says Coronel, emphasise their localness, and although access to overseas titles can still be tricky, the industry is quickly catching up to Europe and North America.
In other news, Reader’s Feast is closing down after 20 years in central Melbourne. Its owner, REDgroup, was unable to find a buyer for the business. The Age’s report summed up the feeling of loss.
Our symphonies to Penguin Australia, who have had to pulp a cookbook because of a proofing oversight let a racially offensive term make it into print. The pulping of 7000 unsold copies of The Pasta Bible will cost the company about $20,000, according to the company’s head of publishing, Robert Sessions, who was quoted as being mystified that anyone could take offense to what was obviously an error. The mistake, which substitutes the word ‘people’ for ‘pepper’, occurred in a receipt for tagliatelle.
Recently, the first print-run of the British edition of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom was pulped when its publisher printed the novel’s penultimate draft. And in the late 90s, travel guide publisher Lonely Planet was dismayed to notice that the spine of its massive guidebook to Western Europe bore the title, Westen Europe. Rather than pulping the many thousands of books already printed, the company chose instead to print a bookmark that it inserted into the books, alerting readers to the error. Westen Europe has since become a collectible.
There’s a new Australian publisher in town. Congratulations to Spineless Wonders, who have just published their first book, Julie Chevalier’s Permission to Lie. Why ‘spineless’? According to the website, “because [our stories will] be delivered to readers via smart phones and laptops. Spineless Wonders stories are for any person, anywhere, who has a digital device and a little time on their hands… And for those who love to hold the book they are reading, there are hard copy publications too.(Yes, ones with spines).”
Mehan is casting a wide net, welcoming submissions in a variety of genres that includes “contemporary realist, black comedy, steam punk, historical, literary, romance, psychological, mystery, crime, futurist, speculative and genres yet to be labelled”. And throughout July, Spineless Wonders is accepting submissions for a short story contest, for stories of a maximum 3000 words, to be judged by writer and publisher Sophie Cunningham and published in the publisher’s annual anthology. Here’s an interview with publisher Bronwyn Mehan at LiteraryMinded.
Permission to Lie is available to buy as a book on the Spineless Wonders site and as an ebook from Readings.
While we’ve covered the epublishing revolution many times, it feels ironic that Australia’s tyranny of distance nowadays seems to apply mainly to technologies that are designed to make the world smaller. Although our friends at Book.ish are helping the Australian epublishing scene up to catch up with Europe and North America, these regions – especially the latter – remain for the most part at the forefront of innovation.
One thing is clear – while scalps are being claimed, others are benefiting from the changes. Robin Sullivan, for instance, blogs about the new midlist of self-published ebook authors who may not match the stunning successes of Amanda Hocking, but who are doing quite well, thank-you very much. Sullivan writes: “Authors are going to e-books first based on earning potential and a quick time to market. If they do well, then they leverage their sales for larger advances and favorable contract terms. Of course self publishing is not for everyone, but at least for those that decide to go this route, they won’t have to be that one in a million outlier—if they can achieve the e-book midlist status, they stand a good chance of telling their boss, ‘I quit, I’m going to stay home and write for a living’.”
And it isn’t just authors that stand to benefit – publishers are also, according to one commentator, sitting on a pot of gold.
Here’s a list of seven publishing platforms that are currently being touted as market leaders in digital publishing. It includes Red Lemonade, a social networking site for writers and readers. Here’s another list of 40 tools authors need to self-publish online.
A couple of months ago, we reported that print-on-demand printer Lightning Source were setting up a suburban Melbourne facility. It’s now up and running. Here’s a blog on self-publishing through Lulu (an online print-on-demand facility) and CreateSpace (Amazon’s version of the same), by the author of the first ebook for iPhone ever.
Finally, here’s a great iPhone app for readers who love the classics: Penguin Classics 65.
By the way, remember the web? You know, that old dinosaur? It’s shrinking. Yep, shrinking.
Online book retailers Amazon and Waterstone’s have both announced that ebooks are outselling print books. Amazon ebooks for its Kindle device are selling more than all hardbacks and paperbacks combined, not including free downloads. The caveat to this news is that the figures reflect volume, not value. Many Amazon ebook bestsellers sell for US$0.99.
In other news, Waterstone’s has been sold by its embattled parent company HMV for £53 million to Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut. It’s the latest prized British cultural asset to be sold to a Russian oligarch, following the acquisition by Alexander Lebedev of the Evening Standard and the Independent groups, each of which he acquired holus bolus for £1. Waterstone’s, which has seen overall sales decline 8% in the past three months, has 300 stores across the UK. The new company will be run by James Daunt, founder of Daunt Books, who advocates a customer service-oriented approach to surviving the book retailing downturn, best described as ‘no teenagers in t-shirts’.
The term ‘Russian oligarch’ refers to a group of business tycoons who emerged from the rubble of the Soviet Union. Educated, well-connected apparatchiks in the Soviet bureaucracy (often the KGB), they were well primed to take advantage of the fire sale of state assets – particularly in the oil and banking sectors – that occurred under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, who was often accused of being their puppet. As president and prime minister, Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB agent, has battled to rein in the influence of the oligarchs, forcing many of them to expand their horizons abroad. Many have settled in London, which British journalist Nick Watt has called Moscow-on-Thames. Other prominent UK-based oligarchs include Boris Berezovsky and Chelsea supremo Roman Abramovich.
Irrepressible US author, entrepreneur and commentator on the arts of spin, Seth Godin, has built a career on overturning the conventional wisdom on a host of subjects related to business, marketing and information (read this interview by way of example). In his 2000 book Unleashing the Ideavirus – said to be the most downloaded ebook of all time – Godin developed the idea of the book as a souvenir or memento of a reader’s encounter with an idea. In 2008, Godin started his own MBA program and, in late 2010, he announced the Domino Project, which is publishing half a dozen business titles for Amazon Kindles using Amazon’s Powered By Amazon publishing program.
Now Godin has turned his attention to the future of libraries. With the epublishing revolution in full swing, the subject has proven a bottomless well of debate for information professionals. In a recent blog Godin writes, “Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.” In five years, he predicts, “[e]readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.” The future of the library, he concludes, isn’t in the concept of the library as a storehouse for books, but in the concept of the librarian as an information specialist – the librarian “as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.”
Opponents of a decision by Fairfax Media to outsource its subediting from 2012, and thus make redundant its subeditors, will take to the streets at lunchtime today. The publisher of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald plans to save $25 million by shedding up to 100 subeditorial and other production-related positions, and outsourcing the subediting work to Pagemasters. Opposition to the move has been widespread and has coalesced around the website Fair Go, Fairfax. Rallies were held on Thursday in Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle, Canberra and Wollongong. The Melbourne rally took place on the grassy knoll outside the Age building.
Coincidentally, Text Publishing senior editor Mandy Brett spoke at the Wheeler Centre at lunchtime Thursday on why the world will continue to need editors even in a world without books. Mandy published an essay on editors and the art of editing a book in the January issue of Meanjin. In it, she deems editing “an essentially bipolar occupation” because “[e]verything about it can go hard one way or just as hard the other and the difficult thing is not that you have to choose, but that you have to balance.” She says the contribution editors make to books are publishing’s dirty little secret: “Good editing is not just important for an individual book, it is crucial to the health of our industry and the survival of reading as a recreation.” Mandy’s essay referenced this blog by novelist and anthologist James Bradley.
In the Paris Review, Toni Morrison’s editor Robert Gottlieb called editing “simply the application of the common sense of any good reader”. Text Publishing’s Michael Heyward compares the relationship to that between a confessor and a priest. There’s been widespread coverage on the demise of the editor in the literary presses for some years now. Just possibly, the days of an author-editor relationship as formative as the one between Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish are behind us. Are we the worse off for it?
In this Guardian report, Alex Clark grumbles, “It is not uncommon, if you are of a certain cast of mind, to fling a book across the room and wonder if there is anyone still alive who cares about hanging participles”. And this blog by Rufus Griscom has a more urgent ring to it, signalling that the editor has morphed into something altogether different: the content producer. Rufus' message to editors? Evolve or perish.
Oslo Davis' take on the author/editor relationship
Image via WikiCommons
Unlike magazines, books have somehow always avoided the encroachment of advertising. They’ve even managed to successfully resist product placement – at least for the most part. The website Publishing Perspectives yesterday visited a subject that will shock bibliophiles everywhere. Under the banner, ‘Is it Time for publishers to Offer Advertising in Books?’, the article considers the implications of cloud reading. Cloud reading, as we’ve covered before, is an alternative to the conventional model of buying and reading ebooks. Instead of downloading a digital file, cloud reading – such as that offered by the Readings online ebook store – gives readers access to a file stored remotely via a web connection.
The success of a Swedish music website called Spotify prompted the Publishing Perspectives article. Spotify gives music lovers remote access to a database of 13 million songs. Its business model offers listeners free access to music if they’re willing to put up with some advertising – much like conventional commercial radio broadcasting. Otherwise, for a fee, they can enjoy commercial-free listening.
In a related article, Javier Celaya, vice president of the Spanish Digital Magazines Association, points out that the returns to writers of such a business model will be meager, if Spotify is any indication. And he frets over the social implications of this kind of business model. He writes: “… we are allowing the creation of a very unequal digital society where readers with higher spending power will be able to enjoy screen reading without advertising interruptions whereas those with a lower budget will enjoy a very different experience.”
Ex-libris by József Faragó [1866-1906] via WikiCommons
To most book-lovers, the ex-libris, or bookplate, is a cherished relic of the past. Bookplates were small labels that were pasted inside a book’s front cover to designate ownership. They flourished at a time when books were the foremost technology for transmitting information, when they were made to last a lifetime, and when they were considered so desirable a commodity that they were prone to being stolen. The first bookplates were made soon after the advent of printing, in Germany in the 15th century. Their popularity peaked in the late 19th century, and waned with the advent of mass publishing.
At the height of their popularity, bookplates inspired a whole genre of visual art, and today there’s a thriving collector’s market for it. The British Museum has just published a lavish book featuring the best of its ex-libris collection. Ex-Libris: The Art of the Bookplate, by Martin Hopkinson, covers the evolution of the bookplate from as far back as Albrecht Dürer. The museum boasts an enormous collection of bookplates bequeathed by 19th-century bachelor benefactor, antiquarian Augustus Wollaston Franks. The Guardian has feted the occasion with a picture gallery of some of the collection’s best bookplates.
Previously, especially in North America, ownership was often designated with book rhymes – here’s a popular example: Everytown is my dwelling-place, / America is my nation; / John Smith is my name / And Christ is my salvation.
The bookplate has a proud Australian heritage too. Australian bookplate designers of note include Norman and Lionel Lindsay, both celebrated exponents of the form, as were Adrian Feint and GD Perrottet. Irena Sibley continues to create bookplates for collectors today. In the first half of last century, Percy Neville Barnett dedicated most of his adult energies to Australian bookplates, and wrote more than 20 books on the subject. Here’s a gallery of Australian bookplates, courtesy of the Australian Bookplate Society website.
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