Archive for the ‘ Literary Culture ’ Category

The Jackal versus Publishers

There’s been a recent development in the ebook royalties debate, with literary agent Andrew Wylie taking matters into his own hands and negotiating a deal with Amazon to sell ebooks through an imprint of his agency called Odyssey Editions. That’s right. Imprint. Agency. That shit happened for real. I guess this is so he can [ READ MORE ]

Indepenwah? or, An Open Love Letter to Julia Gillard

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 [ READ MORE ]

I Don’t Care How Much it Fucking Cost, That Tracksuit Makes you Look Like a Chav.

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 [ READ MORE ]

Anti-Saturation: Are Independents Their Own Worst Enemy?

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, [ READ MORE ]

Why Pulling Prizes Is Okay Sometimes

Over at Virugle there is a mostly-one-way discussion being had about how terrible Australian Book Review is for deciding not to award the inaugural Young Calibre Non-fiction Prize – an essay prize that matches their esteemed Calibre Prize, but for writers under 21. Unfortunately, apart from a questionable call for transparency, I don’t get a [ READ MORE ]

Hearsay Literary Annual

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been co-judging, along with Stefan Laszczuk, a short-story prize run by the editors of Adelaide University’s student magazine, On Dit. Of course I put my hand up, because now I am a fusty old ex-Voiceworks editor, desperate to get my hands on the raw content of young, emerging Australian [ READ MORE ]

Prizes Ain’t Prizes

Sam Cooney has an article about literary awards in the current issue of Voiceworks, and the critical take on such a holy grail inspired me to continue the conversation. I’ve touched on manuscript awards once before, and am regularly vocal, to people who ask, against wholesale acceptance of prizes as a wonderful and highly sought [ READ MORE ]

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