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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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.

But many young people have come of age to start their publishing endeavours during a time when major world events have occurred (or circumstances have developed) that have changed the way many of us consider our engagement with the world. Not least of these are the issues arising from Western countries’ dubious approach to international economics.

This means that when young publishers learn they can get their books printed bulk-cheap in China, they might wonder about the ethics of exporting work to developing, over-populated economies. One reason the books are so cheap is that labour is inexpensive.

For example, I did some freelance work for aduki independent press while I was in Melbourne, and (then-Publisher) Emily was adamant that her readership wouldn’t buy books that were produced in China – that printing an aduki book in China would go against aduki’s core principles. Granted, aduki have documented their publishing philosophy (which Vignette Press and Ilura Press have signed up to), so they’re kind of an extreme example, but others are conscientious to varying degrees.

Similar questions come up in the location-independence movement. (I’ll call it a movement, cos it’s easier and it fits here.) Location-independent professionals , who move about the world to live and work, must and do consider the ramifications of living cheaply in developing economies while working on projects that channel income elsewhere.

I wonder how much this extends to young people’s consumption of literature. I still boycott Dymocks and the chains that backed the Cheaper Books campaign, and I felt guilty when I thought about buying What is the What direct from McSweeney’s instead of waiting for a paperback Penguin in Australia.

George Dunford, the guy behind Hackpacker (among many other things), coughs up for whatever’s being launched, as a demonstration of solidarity. (So put him on your mailing lists.) And Chris Flynn, the Torpedo guy, told me he considered it his duty to help bailout McSweeney’s when their distro went bankrupt. This was equally opportunistic and charitable, but this sort of thinking happens.

What are some of the ethical considerations that inform your production and consumption of literature?

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UPDATE ‘Ethics of Publishing’ was cross-posted at Spike, the Meanjin blog.

This seems to be a common sentiment in the small-press sector: there is an immense amount of production talent – well-read, judicious editors, tweaked and beautiful designers, typography wonks and typesetting nerds whose idea of a hilarious joke is that keming is bad kerning – but most of the people I know in this field spend as much of their time producing as they do commiserating about their poor sales.

The problem with most of us progressive, literary types is that we’re educated enough to be critically minded about marketing and advertising, so we find it difficult to employ these dirty means to sell our own work, or that of the writers we publish. As though literature were some sort of sacrosanct product – something that could, or should, exist outside of the market in which we trade everything else.

Yes, a lot of the marketing literature out there is riddled with impenetrable corporatese, and the prospect of beginning to use this language makes me feel illogically duplicitous, but buried in that corporatese are perfectly reasonable phrases like ‘identifying your market’, ‘putting your product in the way of your market’ and ‘delivering value to your customers‘.

If you produce literature, why wouldn’t you want to do these things? Marketing is only a dirty word in some literary circles because it has been appropriated by unscrupulous companies to deliver products of dubious value to customers whose faculties of scrutiny are less than sharp. It’s not just anti-ageing cream that gets this treatment – someone, maybe Albert Camus, said that abstract art is ‘a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered’.

It might also be that marketing doesn’t fit well in the literary sector because no one can really explain what the value of literature is: you either get it and you read a lot, or you don’t and you’re not sure what all the fuss is about. Next time you meet someone who says they don’t get reading, try explaining to them that regular engagement with literature develops your compassionate motives by facilitating your understanding of other people’s experience of the human condition.

Yet, Coca Cola manage to convince millions of consumers every day that they should buy their sugary, carbonated tooth corroder. Coke has no value, but look how fun it is to drink – you get to float around in one of those bubbles!

So, what are the values of literature? One way to begin answering the question of how to market literature is to start thinking about why you read literature. Chances are, many others read literature for similar reasons, and you can derive a loosely representative sample from this.

I read literature for private communion with the ideas of others, and I write it to offer the same. This communion improves my understanding of others, which improves my personal relationships. Through literature I learn about perspectives on the world I could never have dreamed up myself, simply because I have not lived the same experiences as the writer. So my world view shifts almost imperceptibly through reading literature, and this empowers me to lead a more ethical, productive and compassionate existence.

Why do you read literature? What value does it contribute to your life?

It was kind of annoying to have to do it with the knowledge that many had probably been through the same process before, and were sitting on their own database somewhere, compiled with a similar sense of frustration. SPUNC kindly shared the database they are beginning to compile – Breakdown Press are members. I assume the Australian Booksellers Association has one, but you have to pay for it. I reckon we shouldn’t need to pay for this sort of information – just as people are producing open-source and free versions of micro-blogging sites, word-processing software and project management tools, the open-source philosophy could be applied to small-press industry resources.

Bookshop databases are just the beginning: Alex Hutton, a guy I worked with at Voiceworks, has all sorts of crazy ideas about pooling the administrative infrastructure of the sector, including the slush pile; when we were trying to execute a Voiceworks promotions mailout to Australian schools, you can imagine how far we got, a small, under-resourced organisation up against ten-thousand-odd schools. I’ve since found the Australian Schools Directory, but even this is marginally useful – the information needs to be more easily accessible, and malleable.

So I want to share the database I’ve compiled, but am not sure about the best way to do this. Having compiled it for Breakdown Press, I wondered briefly whether there would be copyright concerns with sharing such a resource, but they’re cool with it – because they’re cool, see? It’s just a spreadsheet right now, but if a group like SPUNC came on board it might be turned into an online database that SPUNC members have access to. Online CRMs like Highrise come to mind.

Does anyone else know of ways to share these sorts of resources?