So a literary agent is going in to bat for his authors. Makes sense, right? But in doing so isn’t he’s also making himself some pretty powerful enemies in publishing and doing his authors a disservice for future print publications?

Sam Cooney wrote an excellent article on the effects of digital selling on booksellers, and part of this explored whether it was advisable for publishers to sell direct to consumers rather than go through the old channels. I can’t help but feel Wylie’s move falls into this same debate. Should you move away from traditional forms of publishing if you think you can get a better deal elsewhere, or should we be supporting each other and trying to come to a compromise? It’s sort of like if you were the manager of a football team and you decided your players weren’t getting paid enough so you told the AFL you were going to start your own league. People will probably still come and see your team play, but now the AFL is split. Well done. Because publishing isn’t disparate and parochial enough, bozo.

“I am only trying to make a point in order to underscore the importance of getting the right terms with a view to uniting the two [print and digital] revenue streams,” Wylie said (via The Bookseller website)

Fair shout, and I can sort of see the weird logic. Future unification on his terms through deliberate deprivation. But this point he’s trying to make has effects that last at least two years. So even if you do sort out the royalties thing in the mean time, which I guess everyone hopes will happen, these first 20 books won’t be available from anywhere except Kindle book store until 2012. Do it for the other 2,000 and that’s giving exclusive sales rights for a huge number of potential high sellers to an already massive company, taking away opportunities from smaller booksellers. CEO of ABA Oren Teicher made an excellent point when he said:

Diminishing the availability of titles and narrowing the options for readers can only harm our society in the long run. That the Wylie agency has sought to distribute these works through a single retailer is bad for the book industry and bad for consumers. Books — in whatever format — are crucibles of ideas and unique expression, and we should be doing all that we can to expand, not constrict, readers’ access to them.

Should Wylie be more worried about authors in this debate, or about the industry in general? Book buyers won’t give a fuck about royalty rates, they’ll just not be able to find the ebooks through other outlets and might not bother looking for them on the Kindle book store. Is it wrong for an agent to go this far to protect the interests of his authors?

Besides which, I have this sneaking suspicion that Amazon are slightly evil… It’s completely unfounded at the moment, just a sort gut feeling that they are getting too big for their boots and, eventually they’ll make all publishers bend to their will or be destroyed.

Or maybe I’ve just been smoking too much pot.

An excellent article on this (the Wylie vs publishers, not me smoking pot) can be found here: Welcome to Wylie World

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,

.

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.

.
Love,
.
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.
.

Let’s take a look at why Disney might think they well equipped to handle formal education:

• pretty much every Disney story revolves around someone who is either fantastically rich, or becomes fantastically rich (with maybe the exception of Notre Dame)
• they usually feature tyrannical paternal figures to encourage the notion that responsibility to parents is more important than personal desires
• deformity and difference constitute comedy or evil
• blatantly chauvinistic
• they encourage the notion of a happy ending
• they reduce the world to the simplicity of black and white (quite literally, as everyone knows Disney protagonists are westernised. Can anyone spell ‘white supremacist’?)

I was going to put a picture of The Hulk here to represent my anger, but then I found out Marvel was bought by Disney in August, 2009 so this picture will have to do.

So, without having any previous ideological foothold to guide my negotiation of consumerism in this fast-paced and crazy capitalist world, and yet wanting to feel as though I am making a difference one purchase at a time, I decided to boycott Disney. Yes, that’s right. I am becoming a Disnedent.

This way of life applies ethical consumerism to Disney products. Which means basically I will not consume any more Disney culture. Most ideologies have weird grey areas. Like, is it right to eat meat if you find it on the ground? What if you kill the animal yourself? What if it’s free range? And can they even feel pain, properly, anyway? I can see no such grey area here. Disney’s idea of dabbling in education is for financial gain, a marketing plan that encourages ignorance and is beneficial only to Disney stockholders.

Consider this from the head of Disney Publishing Worldwide:

Disney estimates that it can earn over $100 million in the next five years from the education sector though it’s a challenging market because it’s a country where counterfeit Disney products, including DVDs and merchandise sell more than original ones. China, Hampton said, is a “promising market and as a company it has a high priority for us”.

These sucker companies join Disney in the boycott through affiliation:

• Buena Vista Records
• Holywood Records (sorry Queen, you’re blacklisted)
• Lyric Street Records
• Mammoth Records
• ESPN
• Marvel Entertainment
• Starwave
• Miramax Films
• Fox Family Worldwide
• Saban Entertainment
• The Muppets (not all Jim Henson, Labyrinth is safe)
• Pixar Animation
• New Horizon Entertainment

If you know of any companies that are affiliated with Disney that I should be including in the boycott, please let me know. Just like people sneak meat into shit (fish products in wine for example) it’s difficult to know whether a company is in cahoots with Disney just by looking at them.

Maybe Disney aren’t the only corporation to exploit areas of life that they have no right to touch. But this demonstrates that Disney see no difference between human rights, like the right to an education, and capital gain. They obviously can’t distinguish between someone’s money and someone’s mind. So if you at all give a damn about stopping the rapid decline of intelligence in the world, I would encourage you to join me in this boycott. And even if it doesn’t make a shit of difference to anything, at least you can feel morally righteous in the knowledge that you’re not an accomplice.

]]> http://ryan-paine.com/2010/07/12/boycott-disney/feed/ 0 http://ryan-paine.com/2010/07/08/market-splendour/ http://ryan-paine.com/2010/07/08/market-splendour/#comments Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:09:16 +0000 Felice http://ryan-paine.com/?p=889 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.

Voiceworks is a place where young writers and artists educate themselves. You don’t need to poke around Virgule, the magazine’s blog, for long to glimpse the bounty they’re sharing.

The issue they launched is ‘Birthmarks’, number 81. I recommend you buy it here. If you’re not sure why you should, check out these reviews. It only costs eight bucks, but if you read it four times, that’s like two bucks a read.

It looks like this:

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.

I’ll get to why the call for transparency is questionable at the end, but first I’ll try to understand what some of the fuss is about, with qualifications that are worth considering before we go mouthing off about ABR’s commitment to youth literature.

One, it’s disappointing because it’s one less young writer published in an established journal. But this happens all the time and we don’t blog angrily about it. Perhaps that’s because, two, this collective rejection casts a shadow over the whole community of young writers. But the implication that zero out of 100 young writers are not good enough to be published in ABR is not so hard to swallow – that’s not a big slush pile, and I know a bunch of young writers, outside of that slush pile, who have written for ABR, myself included.

So, I dunno, it just seems like a lot of anti-ageism noise. Worse, ill-thought-out allegations that this decision means ABR don’t really support youth literature only shitcans their attempt to do so. Worst: Ben’s claims that ABR refused to award the prize because ‘its reputation or the respect of its readers might be damaged by the publication of a young person’s ideas’.

Phooey! Such a blatantly antagonistic, deliberate misinterpretation of their decision is simply uncool, and posting this as a comment on Virgule seems determined to pit the gilted applicants against ABR. Yep, that’s anti-ageist noise alright, especially when you consider the form letter doesn’t say this at all. It says:

In [discharging our right not to award a prize] we are mindful of our responsibilities to readers, to the magazine’s reputation for excellence, to our sponsor and – most importantly – to the entrants themselves.

Who’s to say the ABR editors aren’t on the phone/keyboard right now to the shortlist, commending them for their work and commissioning an In Brief, to get the shortlistees working on something more manageable than a full-length essay? So far we’ve only had a snapshot – from people who are upset they didn’t win, as much as they’re upset that no one won.

Even if the editors aren’t on the phone, it just doesn’t seem like something worth making a big deal about. Rejection slips are nothing new. Applicants are free to send their essays elsewhere. They’re running the prize again (another commendable initiative forgotten by most of the commenters), by which time the dedicated among the applicants might have developed enough to enter a winner.

Meanwhile, pulling the prize this year might actually be considered commendable: they are presumably (and understandably) worried about publishing poorly expressed ideas, which, let’s face it, are going to be among the majority in a slush pile of 100 from young writers – even at Voiceworks, where we would receive between 200 and 300 submissions per quarter, we were often scraping the barrel, because it’s true: young writers are usually not as accomplished as older, established writers – the ‘established’ is important: it’s not age that qualifies you as a good writer, but the amount of time, energy and dedication you’ve poured into developing your work, plus the extent of your natural affinity for ideas, and the ability to express them.

During Voiceworks Editorial Committee meetings we would often debate the merits of publishing a lesser-quality piece by a younger writer. There were usually two fronts: doing so might encourage the writer to continue developing their work – to keep writing at all, even – and we might get to publish their higher-quality work later; doing so might undermine the magazine’s reputation for exceptional quality, meaning that readers might not hang around until the time the younger writer had grown up.

Deciding to pull the prize this year does not, necessarily, undermine ABR’s commitment to youth literature. In fact, two alternatives to pulling the plug on the prize could be worse.

One, run something mediocre, which ABR’s older readership might read with disdain, which they then carry over to the broader community of young writers. And every applicant other than the winner remains equally gilted, as they read the winner that’s not as good as they think their essay is.

Two (as suggested in the comments), edit the fuck out of the piece, which undermines the integrity of an award anyway – it’s not an award for an essay-with-great-potential – and establishes a misrepresentation among older readers, as well as a sense of false hope among the winner – few other outlets (Voiceworks aside, of course) will give the author the same extent of editorial attention in the future, when they start shooting equally mediocre essays from the hip at every major paper that still runs them.

In anticipation of the retort that who are Peter Rose and Mark Gomes to determine the nature of mediocrity, I come back to the questionable call for transparency.

Reading the article that Sam Cooney linked to from the comments at Virgule, I was reminded prizes are not much more than simple publishing decisions with a fancy label.

The decision might look different – it is preceded by a public call for submissions, presided over by a public (albeit usually secretive) panel of judges, and succeeded by publication with a gold sticker.

Compare this to other publishing decisions, which are preceded by a private solicitation of submissions, presided over by a private (albeit disparate, but no less inaccessible) panel of arbiters – agents, editors and (if you play with the big kids) marketing departments – and succeeded by publication without a gold sticker.

The only real difference is the sticker, which might momentarily and marginally influence sales, but does little to influence the aesthetic judgement of readers, which is what really drives sales, and therefore the extent of an author’s readership.

The decision to award a prize to a piece of literature is no less subjective than to publish one in the general sense, so ABR deciding not to award a prize merely means that nothing they received was worthy of a prize. It takes balls to do that – especially with so many egotistical writers (read: writers) running around – and at this stage I remain convinced that they not only have a right to do this, but a duty, to prevent mediocre literature being published as award-winning literature, an idea that is inherently contradictory.

ABR is a journal of particularly high … uh, calibre, so the upset over its rejection of these young writers’ advances is understandable, on a superficial level. But the panel was just a couple of editors looking for outstanding submissions from young writers. Attacking an establishment outlet for failing to award a youth-literature prize doesn’t help the very cause this outlet is trying to promote.

This is an important new prize run by an important journal with a long-running history of publishing high-quality ideas about literature. If we shitcan this prize it in its inaugural year, I bet the loud mouths won’t blame themselves for it folding – it’ll be the fault of yet another esteemed, establishment journal looking down on youth literature.

It’s not cool of the youth literati to go shooting their mouths off like this, so if you have a legitimate and informed criticism of the decision, I would love to hear it, and will happily respond in comments below, while eating the form letter. That means I will try to eat my twenty-inch iMac, so I’m pretty serious about this – please comment: tear me to shreds!

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.

I now realise that’s a bit harsh: Australia has a proud history of publishing amazing literature, and my comment was, perhaps, inadvertently disparaging of Australia’s avid-reader population. It was a holier-than-thou thing to say, the implication being that general readers are less discerning than me, which may or may not be true, but a book editor crapping on about his discerning palate is kind of like a mechanic being righteous about the fact he knows how to tune a car better than his customers – this fact is self-evident, otherwise people would tune their own damn cars.

Anyway.

All I was trying to say is that I am excited about having the ability to get amazing manuscripts to publishers on behalf of authors. This is what I want to be doing for my day job. To prolapse the metaphor further: I want to paddle around in a leaky boat, scooping up princess ducks and bringing them to shore, handing them over to publishers and saying, ‘Feed them well, they will nourish many.’

This felt like a pipe dream until I read Nic’s manuscript. It felt like a pipe dream because I knew that I was missing an important element of the equation that equals successful agenting: quality manuscripts.

Quality manuscripts + diligent, active authors + publishing contacts + editorial savvy + youthful naivety + insanity + the empirically unfounded conviction that communication through literature will make the world a better place = Paine Management, my latent literary agency.

I have all of these now, so it’s only a matter of time, patience and dedication – the three core things that got me as far as working as a book editor by 22, something that I had never imagined possible when I was smoking bongs in the back shed and dropping out of uni and scribbling all over those beautiful Peter Carey paperback reprints that UQP released.

So, yeah, the name of my imaginary literary agency is Paine Management. Get it? I will take the pain out of getting your manuscript published, and the pain out of finding a manuscript to publish. I’m allowed to make bad jokes about my name. You are too. (In fact, Sam Twyford-Moore already did it, in a letter to Voiceworks while I was there.)

I want to bundle together a portfolio of the best unpublished manuscripts of young, emerging Australian writers, fold it under my arm and take it, in my leaky boat, to New York City.

I’m thinking of further honing the subject and theme of this blog to cover this journey as an emerging agent – to cover things like trying to develop an author-agent contract when I know almost nothing about contracts. (I’ve taken on contracts administration at work, but I still feel as though I’m learning a second language.)

So if you’re into that sort of thing, come along. Meanwhile, I have a question for you. It’s pretty broad, but here goes: what are your experiences of trying to find a literary agent in Australia?

If you don’t have any experience with this, but know someone who does, please forward a link to this post. I’d like to start a dialogue about it, so I can start thinking about how to achieve this ridiculously ambitious dream of facilitating the best emerging Australian writing onto the world stage.

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.