youth literature. noun 1. literature created by youth, for whoever.

I shook hands with Julia Gillard yesterday morning, and then wound up on the telly about it. She made a rousing speech, praising the values of hard work and education, and I came away feeling really inspired by it all.

Like me, Julia was raised in a working class family in Adelaide, where she became inspired to do something good in the world, and then, unlike me, she went and became Prime Minister. All because she shares the belief that each of us has a duty to each other to be our best, and to contribute some improvement to the world before we die.

At least, that’s the reverie I fell into as I swooned and gave her my card, nervously avoiding the bodyguard who had just inspected it with what I later became certain were ASIO-issue x-ray or maybe just photo-recording spectacles, and then I went back to work and came home and saw my mug on the telly and figured I better ride this wave of thought, and pulled out this little doozy that I’ve been nursing for a week or two. It is now a love letter to Julia.

Dear Julia,

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Independence. Independent publishing house. Indie. Indie rock. Independent record label.

All of these except for the first are relatively easy to identify with, in a cultural sense. It is easier to identify something that has been labelled ‘independent’ than it is to define what independence really means, especially when you say or write independent too many times – like the word ‘spaghetti’, or ‘bowl’, if you look at it for too long you go cross-eyed, and you begin to wonder how these combinations of symbols came to mean something as specific as ‘a kind of pasta of Italian origin, made from wheat flour, in long, thin, solid strips or tubes, and cooked by boiling’ and ‘a rather deep, round dish or basin, used chiefly for holding liquids, food, etc’.

Bowls are great for cereal!

Being independent is so hot. Being into independent art, literature and music seems to imply that you know of an alternative source, like a really good drug dealer, who supplies you with gear that common people can’t score. It’s true that a bag of weed still costs twenty-five bucks after all these years, but ‘independent’ art carries the misguided connotation that it also somehow exists outside of market pressures that warp commercial art, literature and music into the generic pop that makes us vomit a bit in our mouths when we like anything that more than five of our friends like.

When I started at Wakefield all those moons ago, their curiously mixed-economy style of publishing was confusing. They get a few government grants, they do a bit of partner publishing, a bit of corporate publishing, they ran a distro for a while, and they trade international rights with publishers of all persuasions and structures. They also publish a variety of mass-market DIY gastronomy slash ‘gastro memoir’ that is remarkably successful in the trade. They do this to support their investment in novels, poetry collections and obscure South Australiana.

At the time I latched onto the idea that independent literature was defined primarily by the absence of financial backing from large conglomerates. Yet, a quick look around at what is generally considered to be ‘indie’ lit reveals that most of these operations are supported by something, other than the market: the good will of a benefactor, government funding, or a university. So as I think it out now I realise true independence is the reliance on consumers making the choice to buy your product.

My misconception has to do with ‘indie’ bastardising the meaning of ‘independence’. ‘Indie’ is a trend – something that people toss around willy nilly, slapping on anything that seems vaguely removed from the mainstream, without due consideration of how it’s actually financed. ‘Independence’ is a timeless value. Lit journals funded at ‘arms length’ by Australia Council are not independent – they are dependent on the government, a dependence we felt was threatened when, under Howard, severe funding cuts swept the sector, leaving Mark Davis to suggest it was a silent campaign to cripple dissenting opinion. Try to not let that happen again, if that’s cool.

A silver lining of that period might be that it seemed to spurn on a bunch of truly independent ventures – Wet Ink, The Lifted Brow, Torpedo, aduki and Vignette Press are examples that come to mind – fiercely anti-welfare and determined to reach audiences through sheer leg work, they inspire me because they’ve chosen to think of innovative ways to get their product out there.

Marketing to general readers, or directly to small, self-sustaining niches, is integral to the business models of these operations, and advances in communication technology are providing the means to answer the question: ‘Where is the market, and how do we get the value of our product in its way?’

But our cultural definition of ‘independence’ continues to inhibit innovation in these important areas of the sector. SPUNC are trying to rejuvenate innovation, and Australia Council are behind them, but the sector needs more. We need to change our definition of ‘independence’. Imagine, say, a parallel universe where the small-press operators put the stipend of a part-time marketing person on their credit card along with their printer bill, which is not uncommon, such is the belief in the value of this work that people go in for personal debt to fund it.

There are other ways to affect this shift in the mindset of the industry, such as a massive injection of capital tied to marketing, publicity and sales campaigns for small presses, and serious audience-development research and training. This would show small-press operators that it’s worth investing in commercial innovation. Split Literature Board funding 50/50 instead of funding the production of more manuscripts than we really don’t know how to sell.

The shift could also be nudged along by facilitating pro bono partnerships between the corporate sector and the independent-publishing sector, such as Australian Business Arts Foundation are doing in the high operatic arts sector.

With enough money, companies like Coca-Cola Amatil can convince people that drinking lots of acidic, sugary water will make them float around in really fun bubbles. Think of the social benefits of merely doubling the scant budget of a small press, so that they might propel their product into a self-sustaining market orbit. Facilitating communication through literature offers people a private communion with ideas that is unsurpassed by any other medium: it affords us the time and space to consider ideas on our own terms, to learn in the comfort of our own headspace.

This is why I’m so passionate about facilitating the written expression of others. Your speech reminded me of that, when you mentioned that hard work and education are the key to a truly progressive and productive society. An ongoing engagement with literature from an early age constitutes the finest education a person could ever hope for or need. Being literate in literature gives us access to a lifelong education, as we seek out the experiences of others to develop love and compassion through understanding our myriad differences.

Facilitating this provides me with hope that shit won’t get worse, at least.

It was a genuine pleasure to meet you briefly. Seriously, hit me up if you need to know anything about semi colons or en rules or ellipses or whatever.

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Love,
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Ryan
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PS You might already be familiar with this clip. I was reminded of it today when my friend said she wants to have your babies. Thing is, you’re both woman, which is why I was reminded of this clip. It doesn’t transpose exactly, but I’m sure you’ll catch my gist.
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My whole world at the moment is about marketing. Against my will, it’s become increasingly important to my job and my life. Sales figures, profit margins, the whole lot. I know I might have been pretty critical of the way independent publishers don’t use marketing to their advantage, but the more I learn about it the more I want it to disappear. Or at least keep its ego in check.

Recently I was having a discussion with a guy I know, who wrongly thinks he knows everything about everything, regarding whether a marketing plan that utilises the public’s opinion to influence creative process was ‘genius’ or not. I fell on the side of not. Something seems horribly wrong with the idea that developers, in this case of a game, had to compromise their creative vision because the marketing team came up with the suggestion that people might feel more involved if they had direct input into the production of the thing. From a creative point of view, my argument favoured the position that characters that come to life in games, books, films whatever are not necessarily the ones that most resemble the players/readers/viewers or the ones we would chose to create ourselves. That’s why writers exist – to tap into and display creativity not everyone has.

And why does marketing exist? Apparently to tell writers how the masses think they’re doing their job wrong.

This is basically the crux of my argument. I had always thought marketing was a process where you take something, anything, and display it in such a way that it is appealing to the largest possible audience. Commissioners and writers make the thing, and the marketing team go fuck yeah you know what would make this a success? An intensive fliering campaign! Or a week of skywriting over London. Or a competition in the newspaper. Whatever, I don’t know. Now, though, focus groups and user data have the ability to influence the direction of publishers. If a marketing campaign is to become the beating heart of a creative process, then won’t creative industries such as publishing, film, music, gaming and all that just produce stuff based on what’s already out there rather than pushing boundaries and challenging consumers? I’m thinking specifically of the absolute fucking deluge of vampire/supernatural novels that followed the release of they Meyer books, but this is just one example in a swamp of many.

Effective marketing can make the difference between a successful product and a not so successful one. Lots of great ideas go by the wayside because they’re not marketed well. But as an editor or a developer or whatever it is that I do now and will do in the future, I value my aesthetic judgment more than my market knowledge. I’m starting to feel pretty fuckin’ lonely out here.

Then, my mate made this point:

If you stick only those you know to be creative, you will get specific creations.  Give everyone and their dog an open invitation, and you will get a whole mass of shit, but the odd unexpected result… It is the logic that within a mess of fuckwits, there will be great things.  Rather than just picking great things you know and having a tiny number of created entities

Will sterility of creativity result from a belief that market knowledge will hold the key to future production, or will it result from writers who have limited vision in the first place? Both? In which case, is this guy right in thinking that the only way we can really grow creatively is by throwing in the towel as producers and leaving it for other people to decide the exact products they want? But then isn’t that sort of like… making ourselves redundant, and analogous to throwing away a million dollars to pan for gold in a river?

The fact is, people will not always do themselves favours.

This never was, is, or will be acceptable to wear. Anywhere. Just no.

I don’t know whether I trust the beast that is public opinion to be the single driving force behind all creative creation, but isn’t this the underlying principle behind market-driven production?

There’s heaps of shit that hasn’t been thought of yet because people are putting their energy toward creating similar products to what they made last year (with small differences, of course) that are a safe bet economically as they pander to an established audience base.

This does not mean that different things don’t have a market.

It does means marketing will need to be more creative in winning over an consumer.

Then I read this and realised I haven’t even scratched the surface of the consumer-driven vs creative-driven issue.

I’m in the kitchen at the café, scraping the detritus of some asshole customer’s food into the bin and the radio starts playing that song I can’t stand. I suddenly can’t tell what I hate more: the fact that I just stuck my finger into a pile of half-eaten and probably now disease-carrying scrambled eggs, or that skin-melting noise pollution accompanied by vapid words. Later, I am in a dark club with my mates and the floor is sticky and lit only by pools of flashing light and my pint cost me less than £2 and the DJ starts playing something I recognise. I’m halfway through choking out the lyrics to the second verse, thinking if I know it then it must be good, before I realise it’s the same song I heard in the kitchen. It’s not always the booze that does this. It’s the drugged state of familiarity that overtakes my genuine disgust.

I have just started riding the London tube, which has the greatest saturation of book advertisement that I have ever seen. Most stops have posters for two different titles, sometimes three or four, with huge book covers and then a couple of endorsements thrown over the top like ‘international Twitter sensation’ and ‘most shocking thing since I threw your mother under a train’. I see these posters every day and have no strong reaction to them as I slide past on my way to work, but when I actually consider each title, I do a mental sneer and decide that I won’t buy that book. And when I wondered about why this might be, I started to worry about the implications of holding such an attitude.

Would you buy a book you saw on a billboard? The medium screams of mass-production, which in turn seems to cheapen something’s cultural value. I know not many people will admit to the fact that liking books that other people haven’t heard of is like being in a club where you get a membership card – it drips of desirable exclusivity – because as readers and producers of literature we should all be wanting to get good literature to those who don’t currently classify themselves as ‘book people’.

But isn’t this the underlying principle I’m adhering to if I scoff at a book that’s got a massive poster with tag lines written by famous people all over it? And by extension, don’t I want books to remain something only experienced by a select and worthy few, who have discerning taste built into them like the perforations in toilet paper?

Pretend for a moment you are a small publishing house, or the publisher of a small independent journal that is mostly reliant on grant money, and you suddenly come into a whole lot of cash with no spending guidelines. Would you spend it on making twenty billboards and an intense marketing campaign for your latest release that could potentially boost your readership numbers in the long term, or would you put it towards a hardback print run or a full-colour photography essay?

Are a lot of independents shooting themselves in the foot because of an underlying assumption that production will always be more important than marketing? One should not come at the expense of the other. Both from my own attitude and the attitude of a significant number of people I have met in the publishing industry, expansion doesn’t seem to be desirable thing for independents.

So my question is this: is it lack of funding that serves to hold back independent publishers from having a larger market presence, or is it an attitude of elitism?

Because, let’s face it, these posters probably will boost sales of the book. Maybe I’ll scorn the poster on the tube, and later see the same title in a bookshop and remember the cover, but not remember where from. Maybe I’ll think it was from a book review website. Maybe I’ll think the endorsements on the cover are all true. Maybe I’ll have a false memory about hearing that it is the next ‘Catcher In The Rye’. Just like the song that I hate but then find myself singing along to at a club, the familiarity is often enough to make something endearing. And that’s probably not something any book producer should sneer at if they seriously want to increase their readership.

We were lying in the fields on an overcast Saturday, 28 degrees, the sugar of iced lollies dribbling down our hands and hoping the sun would bless us for long enough to darken our transparent skin. Beautiful people surrounded us on all sides: impossibly thin; impossibly well dressed in that garage-sale chic kind of way; impossibly camp in their mannerisms. I had decided not to wear a hat and was regretting this when I saw the ocean of varied head adornments riding atop these sculpted hairdos. Then I remembered that I had lost my favourite hat in Edinburgh, and started feeling lonely instead.

I was reading ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, which made me miss ‘Catch-22’, maybe only because it was about the war. Sentences toppled over me like lego and I was without a building guide. What is this book about? Where are these characters taking me? Is the author talking about a dog, a person, a place, or an idea? I had felt this way before when reading Pynchon. And a glance around told me that this was the general sensibility of our time: a chronological period where the more nonsensical the t-shirt slogan, the greater the cred.

Security through obscurity is a principle used by computing systems. Applied to literature, I am basically talking about the text becoming an insular entity that the author alone can draw meaning from. I know this is an old idea tackled by many literary theorists, but I am seeing a tangible manifestation of it more starkly than before.

Can any text that inspires confusion, deliberately mind, be valuable beyond being comment on the disparate nature of individual existence? If the style moves the readers to pocketed pastiche rather than collective communication, then isn’t this book and others like it just furthering parochial division? Shouldn’t literature be a gateway to further the communication of ideas, more in line with Kerckhoffs’ principle, where ‘it is necessary… that the system be easy to use, requiring neither mental strain nor the knowledge of a long series of rules to observe’? Or would this lead to a stylistic plateau?

There are many pages still ahead of me, and maybe they will hold instructions for how I am meant to build a doorway into this text. Or maybe next time I go to the fields to read a book, I should take a boating hat and surrender myself to these seas.

Something else I’ve been doing lately, while not being a high-flying literary judge, is reading Nic Low’s novel manuscript, ‘Tailings’. Because I’m a youth-literature crusader and everything. Nic is not exactly ‘a youth’, but whatever.

I’m familiar with some of Nic’s other arts work, so I was delighted when he asked me to read and edit his manuscript. I’ve been helping him to prepare it for submission to the Vogel, despite my reservations about awards, which I mentioned, and which I discussed here. It’s a deadline, at least – one that’s been extended!

The Manuscript

Nic’s manuscript is one of the most accomplished, challenging and thought-provoking manuscripts I have read in a very long time. It’s about: Tailings, a half-caste Chinese girl in colonial Victoria during the Gold Rush, who is looking for her mother’s bones while her Irish father digs and drinks himself into suppressing the loss of his wife; and Volker, a 1930s anatomist and eugenicist enamoured of The Third Reich’s racial purity program, who is implicated in the surgically executed live dissection of a young Chinese man. (There is lots of death in this manuscript – I would go as far as to call it a ‘literary thriller’.)

Chinese, colonial and German themes all wrap around each other in the most intricate way, entwined with a minimalism so accomplished that I remain gobsmacked that it is the first novel manuscript of a 30-year-old writer.

Books it reminds me of: Illywhacker and True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, Original Face by Nicholas Jose and Many Years a Thief by David Hutchison.

NB: Nic Low is neither Peter Carey nor Nicholas Jose, nor David Hutchison; Nic Low is Nic Low, a 30-year-old writer / festival director / public installation artist. (He is also a self-taught web designer and developer – in fact, in exchange for my work on his manuscript, he’s gonna trick this blog out with bouncing hydraulic shockers.)

He’s at the beginning of his career as a novelist and he has produced a first manuscript that punches in the same division as those novels above.

I’m not bullshitting.

No Bullshit

If you are familiar with any of my published criticism, or have talked with me for longer than two minutes about books, you will understand that this sort of praise does not come easy to me. Working as a book editor and critic has rendered me more discerning than I would care to be: I don’t enjoy books as much as I used to, because most of the books I read could have been better than they are.

This could be considered a bad thing: you could wax lyrical about how the dissection and criticism of literature renders it lifeless and uninspiring.

Or it could be considered a good thing: instead of meandering through the sea of mediocrity that results from the seemingly indiscriminate publication of some 12 000+ books per year in Australia (vaguely enjoying most things but never really being inspired to write, think, learn, explore), every now and then I stumble across a manuscript like this that blows my fucking brain, bobbing up and down on that sea like a diamond wearing a life vest … or something less garish. A beautiful duck, wearing a tiara … perhaps.

‘Tailings’ is one to look out for, I reckon.