I find it interesting how we use our Twitter bios to communicate our identities to one another. We need labels in order to understand who we are, and the 160-character limit means we tend to cram these labels in, dropping ‘and’ from our lists to leave more space or, if you’re an internet marketer and have no respect for the English language, you abbreviate yourself up the wazoo, remove the spaces after commas and employ too many ampersands.

I just added ‘Melodica Dissident’ to my Twitter bio, and am going to coin the phrase here and leave those who don’t read SIB to wonder, to bring their own interpretation to it.

Felice once described me as a melodica: n. a type of harmonica used in schools which is enclosed in a plastic case having a keyboard mounted on it and a mouthpiece at one end.
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She said the melodica embodies both a respect for tradition and a cheeky irreverence. This is true about me too: I believe the best writers are those who familiarise themselves with literary history before straying from it; I believe in learning the fundamentals of grammar and language before trying to fuck with them; I am critical of Australia Council but respectful of what they have contributed to Australian literary culture in the last forty years or so; I read and bitched about Breath in The Big Issue before it won the Miles Franklin, and only really began to rail against that award when that second-rate novel won it. Before then I respected the award, and quite liked Tim Winton’s writing. I still like the Winton I like, and if his next novel is good I will like that. If it’s not, I won’t: my respect and irreverence is dependent on the value of whatever it is I’m thinking about. Simple.

So I balance a healthy respect for tradition with healthy skepticism for the status quo. Literary progress does not come from nothing.

As of today I’m a Melodica Dissident, and melodica dissidence is a form of dissidence that starts with respect for the traditions it wants to challenge.

It stands for World Book Night– new champion among publishing events. It stands for about a million free books, and for Jamie Byng’s lovechild.
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It also stands for a major ideological problem for me.
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The basic premise of the night is that individuals register on the World Book Night website to be ‘givers’. On March 5th, 20,000 of these givers are provided with 48 books to give away to whoever they like. They pick these books up from their local bookshop, who are provided with the books by publishing houses who donated the titles. WBN is registered as a charity, and the publishers and bookshops will receive no money for their involvement whatsoever.
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I love books. I love Jamie Byng. I love things that happen at night. But for some reason, the idea of Jamie Byng, in conjunction with a number of large publishers, giving away over one million free books to the public at night by delivering stock to bookshops to be picked up by registered individuals and handed out really pissed me off. It might have been the comments I read where booksellers told how they received the email to ‘opt out’ of being a drop-off/pick-up point for this venture on Christmas Eve, giving them next to no opportunity to say they didn’t want to be a part of World Book Night. It might have been the fact that in this time of serious hardship for booksellers in general, not a month after two different Borders’ chains closed their doors, World Book Night was further devaluing the books by pushing the price of some major titles down to nothing.
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I don’t think those involved in World Book Night would do anything to deliberately destroy publishing. In fact, I know this venture was born purely from an altruistic love of novels in that, without any ulterior motives, the organisers wanted to get more people reading and just drum up some publicity for books in general (not Canongate’s specific list, but those of a number of different publishers). The titles were also chosen to be bestsellers past their peak selling point, all with sales in decline, so it wouldn’t rip money away from booksellers or publishers. Still, you don’t have to look far to find out why booksellers were angry about this. And I was right there with them in thinking it was probably a bad idea, given my thoughts on free stuff and the public’s perception of value in the face of promotional offers.
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So then what the hell is with this? The sales of the books that were given away for free have actually doubled. Granted, they were on the decline before all the publicity of World Book Night, but there are now shedloads of free copies circling the UK. Can someone please explain to me the logic behind giving away thousands of copies of one book, and then having the sales increase in the weeks that follow? What the hell kind of market are we looking at here, anyway? Should I start eating words?

I had another meeting with the Format crew last night and got all excited about programming the Academy. I’m still looking for panelists and performers to get involved, so here’s the submission form, and there is a little more information at this Facebook event. (I know I wrote about pulling away from Facebook, but I’ve changed my mind about worse things.) Feel free to invite your friends to the event, and put 22 November in your diary as the deadline.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, these reliable sources have more to say about the Festival and it’s blessed Academy. Also, check out the 2010 Festival program – flick the flash little curtain things to the left until you get to Day Fifteen, or see the Academy program here at Lisa Dempster’s blog, Unwakeable. Lisa programmed the Academy this year – a gig she took on just before getting the Directorship of Emerging Writers’ Festival in Melbourne. Big shoes!

Crowdsourcing!

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In the DIY spirit of Format and the one-day literary festival I’m programming for them, I’m posting prospective blurb titles for the events I’m thinking of running on the day, and I want you to write the blurb you think I should run with it. Hopefully some panel ideas will come out of it, and you’ll be keen to host the discussion. I’m also running this as a meme, and have tagged: Connor Tomas O’Brien (not to be confused with the drastically oceanic Connor Tomas), George Dunford, Estelle Tang, Elena Gomez and Lisa Dempster, who directed the Academy this year and is now running Emerging Writers’ Festival.

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The Blurb Titles

Activism Smells

Copy Left, Right, Left, Right, What?

How to Sell Out Without Losing Your Cred

Miles, Miles, Who the Fuck is Miles?

The Future of Adulthood

Honk if You’re the Publishing Industry

Why Isn’t Writing More Like, Say, Mining?

Where Can We Go From Here?

I Write, Therefore I am a …

Fulture-cunding Vultures

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When I came back to Adelaide from Melbourne thinking I could take some time off and bury my head in some books at work, I didn’t expect that a bunch of Adelaide crew would have set up a goddamn arts festival and plonked their headquarters down in a little side street off Hindley, that mungtarded street of strip clubs, sports bars and sleazy meat markets that also happens to house one of the most beautiful bookstores in the state, if not the country, let alone that they would approach me to coordinate the literary stream of said arts festival, but here I am.

It’s called Format Academy of Words, henceforth referred to as ‘the Academy’, because what other academy would you rather join? I don’t know.

An ‘academy’, as if you didn’t already know, is, according to the Macquarie:

noun. (plural – academies)
1. an association or institution for the promotion of literature, science, or art

Format Festival is:

an award winning artist-run festival that celebrates and explores the creative community, showcasing visual, urban and experimental art; as well as zines, live music, craft, activism, performance and discussion.

Their website used to have ‘creative activism’ in there, and was unashamedly inspired by This is Not Art, an ‘independent, emerging and experimental arts festival’, which takes place in sunny Newcastle every year, because, well, we’ve all been inspired by TINA, she’s beaut.

This is all just background noise, to give you an idea of what you might like to get yourself into at the Academy. The theme will be ‘literary activism’, but don’t let that put you off – feel free to replace ‘activism’ with ‘advocacy’, ‘lobbying’ or ‘agency’.

Just as TINA hosts a subsidiary literary festival called National Young Writers’ Festival, Format hosts the Academy, which I have started to think of as

a forum for the discussion of practical ideas about how to guide recent, rapid changes in the publishing industry toward a more democratic, representative, diverse and accessible market for reading, writing  and the dissemination of ideas.

It all sounds a bit grandiose, really. Well, maybe you like that sort of thing. If so, the Academy will happen in late February 2011, at 15 Peel Street in the Adelaide CBD. This is just a heads up for now:

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Heads up!

I emailed a couple of Melbourne agencies this week, chasing work experience. I got two hits back, one from Curtis Brown telling me they don’t take work-experience kids. I’ve canvassed this way before, when I was getting into production in Adelaide, and the pattern was much the same.

I expected one response to be straight and to the point, perhaps pointing out an error¹, one to be in-depth and thoughtful response², and then silence³.

I heard back at length from Jean Briggs, who threw me a welcome spanner to get me thinking. She advised against literary agency – for young and emerging Australian writers in particular – because it is simply unsustainable, and suggested I consider other ways to promote Australian writing – other forms of agency. Publishers go by an unspoken previous-book-contract requirement, and I’d be collecting approximately 15% of royalties, which are between 7 and 10%, on sales of maybe 2000 on average⁴.

She suggested I would be better off providing other services to develop writers, and then pass them on to agents.

Another reason she suggested it would be prohibitively difficult to set up such a literary agency⁵ is that I’ll need to prove to writers that I have publishing contacts and demonstrated previous contracts signed. George Dunford has pointed this out to me many times before.

I’m less concerned about this, as working on Voiceworks brought me into contact with plenty of writers with manuscripts ready to be shopped around – many of them sympathetic to the difficulties of forging these relationships, so willing to take on an ally of any sort of limited experience.

I do lack publisher relationships though. Jean echoed my concern that this business of moving into agency with my experience is going to be riddled with catch-22 problems that I’ll need to solve: agents won’t take on authors without existing book deals, and publishers won’t consider manuscripts for book deals without trusted agency representation; authors won’t consider agents without contacts and contracts, and agents won’t consider authors without contacts and contracts.

For now all I can do is go with the advice I got from Zoe Dattner at SPUNC: to get a cache of writers together before fronting up to publishers.

Still, when I think of the combination of those figures and the catch-22s, my mind boggles and I wonder if this whole idea isn’t going to wind up a pipe dream.

But I’ve been reading the blog of a young entrepreneur from Boston who made a salient point that buoyed me: ‘When you’re searching for ideas for a startup, remember to look for things you love and problems that relate to them. Solve those problems.’

I will try to solve these chicken/egg problems that I was fortunately reminded of early in this endeavour, and I will stray as far as I need to from my original idea of ‘literary agency’ to achieve my goals to develop, promote and advocate for emerging Australian literature. Jean has offered to speak with me about alternative ways to achieve these goals – for a nominal fee, she tactfully added (a lesson in sustainability through diplomacy that I have gladly taken away also).

The beauty of this for me right now is that this doesn’t need to be the spanner that I could have taken it as. Jean has kindly and reasonably advised me against a particular type of agency I have been considering: selling manuscripts. My definition of agency is broad enough to encompass anything that constitutes me being involved with the development, promotion and advocacy of young, emerging Australian writers.

Another concept of agency came to mind recently, but I need to delve into it further before reporting here. For now I have a question to pose: to what extent does the small-press sector suffer from prohibitively expensive sales data, collected and distributed to member organisations by Nielsen Bookscan?

UPDATE: My response expectations have been exceeded today, with the rest of the agencies getting back to me, politely advising that they don’t take work-experience kids.

1. which happened
2. which happened
3. which also happened
4. the first figure is Jean’s, the last two are my partially informed speculations
5. the young, emerging and Australian qualifications are important

I met this guy called Warri who wants to start up an arts and culture magazine. So I said, ‘Hey, I know a thing or two about magazines, let’s hang out and geek out on production talk.’ We’re yet to meet up, but we will.

Recently Andre, who I posted about a while back, emailed me for advice on a book proposal he’s putting together in the capacity of Right Now editor. I sent some feedback along with a book-information-summary sheet I’m developing for Paine Management – this should give him an idea of the sort of info publishers are chasing in book proposals. I hope he’ll keep me in the loop, because this is exactly the sort of thing I’d like to move into.

Last night we launched How to Make Trouble, the book I’m helping Breakdown Press to distribute to Australian bookshops¹. It was a raging success, and much fun was had by all. I feel confident that we’ll move the whole (substantial) print run, and it’s been empowering to apply the distro knowledge I hadn’t even noticed I picked up along the way.

Plus I’m always reading someone’s work and sending back feedback. Mechanics joke and moan about this, and people sometimes ask me if my writer friends are always hitting me up for some free editing. I say yeah, and invariably they say, ‘You know, I write a bit of poetry … ‘

This is agency as I know it – I don’t know much …

… but I know that what I am essentially doing in a relationship like this is acting as a consultant. It’s agency of a temperate variety, but it’s just the beginning. I’d like to take Andre’s book proposal to a publisher and say, ‘Hey, you should publish this and these are three good reasons.’

I conceived the idea to establish a publishing-services business with agency in there as a service to offer, with the long-term plan to allow things like typesetting, editing and indexing to slowly atrophy as legitimate agency opportunities arise.

In the meantime, if I can offer consultancy services on a case-by-case, somewhat ad hoc basis and figure out a way to monetise this, that would be great. If you’re interested in using services like this, let me know – in lieu of actual money, we could arrange a mutually beneficial sort of pro bono arrangement.

To this end, I recently registered with a website called The Sharehood - one of a few online communties I know about that are trading in alternative currencies: samaras. there, I’m offering print-publishing services in exchange for web design and development services. Maybe I should add ‘publishing misc’ in the things I can offer.

1. this one I”m even getting paid for!

I have a question to ask that seems simple, but which grows increasingly complex when you think about it. How do you consider author intention when reviewing a novel?

I’ve come up ambivalent about a book I’m reviewing. When this happens I like to make note of the positives and negatives and try to round up with a suggestion that readers should check it out for themselves.

I have no problems suggesting that readers don’t bother if a book is below sub-par, but if something comes up halfway decent, I assume that one person’s free review copy is another person’s first edition.

My problem is that in the process of scraping the barrel, I find myself ploughing deeply into speculation and interpretation of the author’s intentions. I tend to say things like, ‘The author didn’t quite carry this theme, but that’s because they were focussing on this other theme, which is explored well.’

Is this a problem? I’m worried that I’m making concessions for books when they should be flagged as undeveloped. That I might save people the trouble if I were more honest about the book.

If I think the book warrants being supported – if it’s a debut novel and the author has demonstrated considerable promise for certain styles and techniques – is that enough to warrant concocting a positive interpretation? It’s not just this novel in particular – I come up against this with many young-adult and debut novels.

This has been just like trying to fix a car engine: as soon as you start pulling it apart, you find more things to fix, or questions to answer.

There are comments to this post here. I couldn’t carry them over to this new site.

I’m really glad to be working on a book that’s not government funded. A stack of money has been poured into this and we need to earn the money back to pay off the debt.

This just came to mind when I was talking to a guy who put out a bunch of comics with a group called Silent Army. He said they never had a real distribution model – they used half the grant to make an approximation of the funded book, then the rest to make the book that didn’t fit within the funder’s criteria.

Fine, but this guy was disappointed they could never really get the books out to a broader audience. Government funding has a tendency to hinder considerations of sustainable business models in the arts – especially with literature, which is so labour intensive, in a culture where production skills outweigh business acumen considerably.

Today we figured out we need to sell half our print run to break even, then we have the potential to make enough to for Breakdown to do another book.

This is the sort of thinking that I’m really happy to be a part of.

These are some photos of the warehouse I might be working in if I get
a temporary gig with Breakdown Press, which I’m really excited about.

The Tin Man #WhereAreTheyNow?

The Vegie Patch

Front Windows

Pot Belly Replete with Couch, Hammock and Actual Flu

I met Tom and Lou from Breakdown Press about me possibly managing the sales and distribution of their forthcoming title, How to Make Trouble and Influence People. I’m interested in making more trouble these days, as well as learning how to sell books. I’m also volunteering for The Lifted Brow in a similar capacity.

This makes me consider that it might be worthwhile adding this sort of thing to the list of services that Paine Management will provide.

Consultancy might be another. When I have a specific project or or book to riff on I realise I know more about this business than is immediately present in my mind most of the time.

But all of this makes me wonder if I’m trying to spread myself too thinly. if I come off as a hack – as a jack of all trades, master of none – writers and publishers might be less inclined to trust or value my judgement and quality of work. But then I know that I need to offset my ignorance of literary agency with my current skills and experience. As I build up networks as a publishing contractor, I might lever in a sneaky manuscript here and there until publishers come to me as the go-to man for new talent.

I know that I can’t expect to survive as an agent yet, and that I don’t want to limit my work to writing and production. I also know that I don’t want to get a real job, so working part time to subsidize the agency is not an option. And I figure that freelancing in the industry is bound to complement my plans for the agency to a degree that outweighs any possible dilution of Paine Management’s business identity.

So Paine Management will probably be a full-blown publishing-services business, and one of those services will be literary agency.

I’ve been mulling over the whole idea of ‘agency’ recently, in terms of the business as well as in general. I like to hook people up if they have similar interests but don’t know each other. I read people’s work, give feedback and have forwarded their work semi-formally to editors I know. I’ve been trying to agitate thought about the Productivity Commission and continued to agonize over a letter I want to send to my MP. I like to party and talk about ideas in a manic fashion on trips between the fridge and the dancefloor.

It’s all a sort of agency, in a way, and I feel that Paine Management is simply the natural progression in my career. I feel like this is how I can pick up where I left off at Voiceworks – after nurturing writers and editors into new chapters in their careers, I’m convinced that there is greater cultural capital to be generated through facillitating the publication and professional development of writers. I get to help contribute more ideas to the public debate and our nation’s cultural life than if I were to merely work away at my own writing – in a ‘hole-and-corner way’, as Orwell described it in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

When I told my friend this, she asked me why I didn’t try to become a publisher. The long haul I’d have to put into that would yield influence on a single publishing house’s list (or my own, if I wanted to go down that path). With an agency I can pick and choose the writing I think is the best and sell it to a wide variety of publishers, yielding a more dispersed but diverse and targeted influence.

And that, ultimately, is what I want to do – influence Australia’s literary culture out of a post-colonial, post-twentieth century rut. I want to help bring in the new guard, and then another and another, perpetually, until I die. Grandiose but true.

And easier said than done. I don’t know quite how to structure Paine Management to achieve this goal, but I’m thinking that I need to just structure it somehow and get a move on. Nothing needs to be set in concrete in a hurry – isn’t that the whole thing about being self-employed? I get to make it up as I go along, which is the way things roll for me.

This is liberating and exciting beyond compare. I have never felt so sure that I had found something to do for real, for serious, for cereal. I’ve always thought a career in writing and publishing would be orright, but never have I felt so confident about going out on my own and pouring a good five years into something that may or may not bear fruit.

So this is the plan, according to right now: finish out the year eking it out on the dole, continue to faff about and mull over the future; start Paine Management on NEIS in 2010, get a work-experience placement with an Australian agency, spend twelve months establishing myself as a freelance writer, editor and production-nerd; go to New York in 2011 and get a paid placement as an assistant to an agent, continue Paine Management from abroad; move back to Melbourne in 2013 and vamp up the agency side of Paine Management; by 2015 I’ll be back on a plane, touring the world like a snake-oil salesman or something less seedy but equally manipulative, selling Australian literature into all of the world’s publishing territories (note to self: research the geographical and economic boundaries of international territories).