Also, someone deleted me from Facebook yesterday – it was pretty funny, stay tuned …

The gig is unpaid – advertised as ‘the best unpaid gig in town’ – and a discussion was brought up by Lisa Dempster about whether this is because blogging is not a legitimate form of publishing. The discussion of blogging legitimacy baffles me, especially attempts to articulate support for the medium, and the cries of outrage when another media outlets ‘exploit writers to leverage their online presence’: if the writers didn’t consider it worth their while, they wouldn’t do it.

The debate also reminds me of the equally superfluous debate about the life expectancy of the novel as a medium. Debating the legitimacy of blogging or the longevity of novel publishing is less important than simply blogging well and publishing good novels.

Reading the post highlighted a division that I think is worth exploring further. For these purposes, legitimacy might be arrived at through payment or publication of writers. I think there is much more at stake here than the meagre incomes of a couple of writers – embracing this opportunity, paid or unpaid, will yield far greater cultural capital than the alternatives proposed by its detractors.

Legitimacy through Payment

If the legitimacy-through-payment debate is to be had, it could be easily applied to many art forms that people practise without remuneration: graffiti, long-stitching, or writing books themselves – Lisa herself has done a lot to reveal the appalling financial conditions under which Australian authors labour.

Brian from Fitzroyalty mentions – with some exasperation – legitimising blogging by paying bloggers is difficult in a medium that barely has a functioning economic model. Instead, another idea of legitimacy needs to be considered when evaluating blogging.

Legitimacy comes from other sources in the blogosphere – sources that traditionally legitimate mediums are lacking, such as the amount of conversation generated by your writing, which is inhibited in most print mediums. And the inclusion of young voices on the ABC is worth more than the validation a young writer might get from being paid by any other institution. The prospects arising out of a gig with the ABC far outweigh the likelihood that they’ll never pay for blogging.

Legitimacy by Publication

Young writers are apprentices pushing their way into an industry with an abundance of suppliers (writers) and a dearth of distributors (editors/publishers). The under-representation of young writers’ voices in our traditional outlets makes this even harder. These positions at the ABC will help young writers to advance their position in this pursuit, by teaching them the ropes and getting their name out there. These are legitimate means for the development and promotion of youth literature.

They could choose not to publish them, which is the model alluded to by Mel Campbell, editor of The Enthusiast. In the comments to Lisa’s post, Mel criticised the ABC and Express Media¹ for not paying young contributors, and stated their alternative policy of restricting the number of contributors and writing a lot of the content themselves instead of ‘exploiting inexperienced workers’.

Not only does Express Media have an honourable tradition of paying its contributors, the organisation also works extensively at legitimising young writers in other ways, such as by providing professional development and experience in the industry. As with the ABC publishing youth literature on this blog, this constitutes a greater contribution to the legitimacy of their careers than paying them ever could.

I would rather see a million young writers working for free than a handful of writers dominating the industry because the market found a way to pay for their time. These young writers are producing content for free anyway, on their own blogs – that the ABC is leveraging some of their resources and infrastructure to endorse this content is legitimising enough.

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1. Disclaimer: I am a former employee of Express Media, and I have been paid to write book reviews for The Book Show, so maybe it’s easy to go into bat for these guys, but in reality I’ve seen the value in providing professional development for young writers, and I’ve experienced the same writing for the ABC; I certainly would have written for the ABC for free if it meant getting my name out there the way it did.

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

Also the Federal government’s new contract with Centrelink put me back to the beginning of another considerable grace period.

So I’ve been kicking back all year and mulling this puppy over. What I’ve come up with is this, a publishing-services business with a long-term plan to expand into agency.

Earlier I mentioned a five-year plan ending in a trip around the world selling Australian literature. To get there I have to learn how to run a business.

I’m halfway through my initial NEIS application. I’ve gone overboard, as I kept finding new things to think about when starting a business: the Kangan Batman TAFE website provides some interesting information for start ups; the government has a stack of information and templates to sink your teeth into. The application has gone from the hand-written requirement to half a business plan.

Though I bet I’ll never feel as though I’ve planned enough. I’ve just got to get out there and do it. Here goes. I’ll try to post here once a week, with news and progress reports – as much for my own sense of achievement as for anyone’s interest.

Meanwhile, I made some business cards.

In particular, I wanted to link my Google Reader feed to my blogroll, because I don’t want to have to be arsed updating my blogroll everytime I find a new blog, but I want my blogroll to be a kind of what-I’m-reading-now list.

I’ve carried over as much of the stuff as I could without dying from a documentation overdose. There are some comments to ‘Ploughing Author Intentions’ that I couldn’t transfer, but they’re still active there.

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).