Flipping the bird at answers

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!

I was doing a bit of internet stalking the other day and came across this article by Rjurik Davidson about creative writing courses and so forth. It’s an interesting read, but there was one line in particular that hit out at me from a guy he interviewed (Errol).

[I]n the 1970s, there was a much smaller pool of authors … fewer publishers [and] no literary agents. We were more inclined to take on things that were perhaps a bit rough around the edges in the hope that we could work with the author and polish them up … We used to do more work in those days. All sorts of things have happened since then. Literary agents have come along …

There it is. That ellipses represented to me not a edited quote (which it was) but a backward gaze into the carefree days before agents or agencies, and my head started to explode from wondering about what the industry would look like without formal representation for authors. In this one paragraph I could see a literary utopia blossoming like vinegar and baking soda in a glass – a place/time where writers and editors worked on manuscripts together in coffee shops, their heads bent to the paper and their noses nearly touching, and the editor would whisper a word of advice and the writer would leap up and shout in delight and the book would be a bestseller and everyone had leather bound notebooks and no-one wrote about vampires.

Obviously this is far from any reality. I know that agents play an integral part in the industry game – making sure that authors get enough money for their art. But facing a time when the author-publisher relationship might be changing, I started to consider what this could mean for agents. Are they likely to be more important now in bartering distribution and rights deals for digital editions? Or will the author just take their Adobe Acrobat and manuscript and go straight to a distributor themselves?

More than this, I began to question the fundamental aspects of being an agent. It seems to me that literary agents are another form of middle-management – external to the house but somehow so entwined in all the major publishing deals that they can’t be bypassed. Even though it’s a job an editor could perform if they had the inclination. Sourcing new talent and reading raw manuscripts – didn’t this once fall under the remit of editor/editorial assistant? It sounds like more fun than dealing with an author who has a premature ego the size of a small galaxy due to the fact an agent has decided to pitch their novel to Penguin. And is this even what agents really do? There are now books out on how to best go about getting an agent, as the agents themselves start putting up filters before they will touch a manuscript.

I believe publishing houses should do more in-house siphoning. Not to put agents out of work, but to keep their hands in the author pool, feeling out the grooves and flows, rather than only dipping their toes in the warm shallows. With socks on.

I do hate a lot of things (Disney, marketing, Andrew Wiley etc) but I want to put it out there that this isn’t all I’m about. I got really excited when Tim Hely Hutchinson (CEO of Hachette UK) decided to go with the agency pricing model, Amazon be damned, and was excited again yesterday when Penguin and HarperCollins joined the party – soon to be followed by the kings at Canongate and Simon and Schuster apparently. One of the coolest things about this is the massive debate that rages on forums around this topic and I spent many a good work hour yesterday reading both sides on The Bookseller and the Kindle Forum.

What strikes me most is the dichotomy between the trade forums and the consumer forums. What sort of relationships do the publishers have with their audience? Will no publisher issue a statement to their public about the reasons they want to take control of prices away from the retailer? So I went on the Kindle Forum and stirred in my two pence, and then a few more things, like sarcasm and blame.

People are championing Amazon as their hero – who “continue to fight against higher prices for e-books” (read: pamper to a customer’s desire to pay as little as possible for as much as possible) – and are ignoring the fact this whole debate was spawned by an effective press release by an international corporation. The blinding holier-than-thou attitude that Amazon has instilled in its customers is nothing short of disgusting and gives me that drunk-on-rage feeling. But then again, you can’t spell ‘Kindle’ without ‘Kind’. (Does this strike anyone else as exceedingly sinister?)

I'll be Kind-le to you - pun definitely intended!

But with publishers staying silent, what are people supposed to think? Innocence doesn’t clam up like a pair of nun’s legs when people start asking questions.

Still, actions are louder than worms etc etc and so I applaud all publishing houses involved for putting a spanner in Amazon’s face. I can’t help but feel this is a major milestone – publishers are now taking the ebook medium seriously and won’t let retailers like Amazon give authors a short straw. It’s already operating in the US, now the UK – Australia’s next, I’d say. Publishers there better make a move before someone else does it for them.

Get involved: head over to the Kindle forum. It’s an amazing conversation that’s worth getting fired into.

For ages I had this article open in my browser at work because I am loosely interested in keeping in touch with developments in experimental fiction: some days I just want to read a good book, of the ‘lyrical realist’ variety mentioned in the article – the kind of novel we inherited from the nineteenth century; other days I feel bored and want to read something I have to work hard to understand.

I tend to leave these sorts of articles open until I’m feeling relaxed enough to read them over lunch or something, because I know if there’s any sort of revelatory information in there I’m going to need to feel receptive to doing anything with that information, such as, in this case, ordering a book by a writer I’ve never heard of, from a publisher I’ve never heard of in a city I’ve heard a lot about, but never visited.

The book – a novel called Fences, written by eighteen-year-old British schoolboy, Ben Brooks – is published by Fugue State Press in New York, and is not to be confused with the 1990 Garth Brookes album, No Fences.

…

…

According to FSP’s minimalist website, their novels

tend to be unusual – singular, eccentric, impractical, emotional, visionary. They are also ‘experimental’ in the sense that any good art is experimental. It comes down to one person looking for truth.

…

This is the sort of grandiosty that makes me shell out coin at a dubious online checkout and then forget about my purchase until it arrives in the mail, at which point I will fall into one of my new armchairs to douse myself in a … ahem … fugue of literary inspiration. Or frustration, depending on how the book weighs on the ol’ effectiveness scale.

Right now I’m just hoping the difference in time it takes to receive the package from the US varies from now only as fractionally as the difference in the strengths of our dollars, for this US$15 novel cost me a whopping AU$15.15 including postage.

Obviously I’ll review it here sometime after it arrives.
…

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:

…

Heads up!