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

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.

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.

This may come as a surprise to many of my friends and colleagues in Melbourne, but it’s been on my mind and in the works for a couple of months. I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and working with the wonderful people at Wakefield. I’m looking forward to having an occupation again.

For seven months after Voiceworks I drove aimlessly around Queensland in my campervan, Delilah. For the last five months in Melbourne I have found it difficult to shake my holiday habits – in particular my tendency to start the day by sitting down with a computer and/or a book and chasing miscellaneous ideas down rabbit holes, which is fun, but not conducive to gainful employment or paying the bills or saving the world.

A lot of these ideas have related to agency and social entrepreneurship, as I have dallied with the idea of starting up a literary agency. The loftiness of this ambition has dawned on me only recently – along with the fact I am wildly under qualified. So I’ve deferred these aspirations for the short term. I will spend the next couple of years gaining experience of other areas in the industry – rights and contract management, hopefully. I will knuckle down and get to New York, where I hope to gain a placement with an agency – as a reading assistant or general work-experience lacky.

Wakefield, blessedly, are aware of my long-term ambitions. They always have been, even as I fumble about figuring out exactly what they are. When they originally employed me as a typesetter, they knew about and supported my aspirations to work as an editor. I took manuscripts home to work on in my spare time, and gradually worked up to the point where I was typesetting half the time, and editing the rest of the time, or thereabouts. I will do the same again.

Because this work aligns so perfectly with my own work, I don’t baulk at working overtime to advance my skills and experience. So I’ll continue to work with the writers I have been building relationships with, to the extent that I can in my spare time or within my new in-house capacity. I hope to bring my new networks and experience into this equation.

This decision also has ramifications for this blog: the new focus in my life will inevitably be reflected here. It’s early yet, but I have plans to move this away from a blog where I ‘empty my thoughts … on literary culture, philosophy and interesting things that happen’, and develop a focus on my exploits going into bat for young writers, as a book editor, aspiring agent and location-independent social entrepreneur.

Wakefield Press are incredibly supportive employers – such that Michael and Stephanie, as well as various members of the long-term staff have continued to be inspirational mentors and friends during my years at Voiceworks. I look forward to upholding their motto: ‘We love good stories and make beautiful books.’

I’ll be having short-notice farewell drinks at Prudence this Friday, from 5pm if you want to come.

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

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?

Recently Andre, who I posted about a while back, emailed me for advice on a book proposal he’s putting together in the capacity of Right Now editor. I sent some feedback along with a book-information-summary sheet I’m developing for Paine Management – this should give him an idea of the sort of info publishers are chasing in book proposals. I hope he’ll keep me in the loop, because this is exactly the sort of thing I’d like to move into.

Last night we launched How to Make Trouble, the book I’m helping Breakdown Press to distribute to Australian bookshops¹. It was a raging success, and much fun was had by all. I feel confident that we’ll move the whole (substantial) print run, and it’s been empowering to apply the distro knowledge I hadn’t even noticed I picked up along the way.

Plus I’m always reading someone’s work and sending back feedback. Mechanics joke and moan about this, and people sometimes ask me if my writer friends are always hitting me up for some free editing. I say yeah, and invariably they say, ‘You know, I write a bit of poetry … ‘

This is agency as I know it – I don’t know much …

… but I know that what I am essentially doing in a relationship like this is acting as a consultant. It’s agency of a temperate variety, but it’s just the beginning. I’d like to take Andre’s book proposal to a publisher and say, ‘Hey, you should publish this and these are three good reasons.’

I conceived the idea to establish a publishing-services business with agency in there as a service to offer, with the long-term plan to allow things like typesetting, editing and indexing to slowly atrophy as legitimate agency opportunities arise.

In the meantime, if I can offer consultancy services on a case-by-case, somewhat ad hoc basis and figure out a way to monetise this, that would be great. If you’re interested in using services like this, let me know – in lieu of actual money, we could arrange a mutually beneficial sort of pro bono arrangement.

To this end, I recently registered with a website called The Sharehood - one of a few online communties I know about that are trading in alternative currencies: samaras. there, I’m offering print-publishing services in exchange for web design and development services. Maybe I should add ‘publishing misc’ in the things I can offer.

1. this one I”m even getting paid for!

These are not just any bratwurst – they’re thick, tasty and juicy, lathered in however many types of mustard you like, maybe a bit of cheese and then a field of sauerkraut balancing on top. These are a two-hand job. Nothing like this – way better:

Bratwurst!

I was dazed and it was Sunday – typically a day of decadence to make up for the previous night’s decadence. I figured I’d grab a bratwurst and then drink my hangover away.

I was ambling along, halfway to the market, content that I had planned my day, when I remembered that I was vegetarian – had been for all of about two weeks. The decision was made not in haste, but without any real preparation for the required lifestyle adjustments. Such as knowing where to get delicious comfort food off the cusp.

I wondered if it would really matter if I contradicted my recently developed consumption principles just this once – how much could my abstinence from meat really contribute positively to the welfare of the world’s animals and our environment?

I knew I could get some sushi to tide me over, but sushi isn’t bratwurst, and the main reason for my decision to give up meat was environmental concern. I couldn’t be sure that consuming rice grown in Australia was any better than eating the meat of flatulent, hoofed animals farmed on our arid land¹ . As with cotton, the water requirements are far greater than our arid lands can support, something something … rising freshwater salinity.

By the time I found two soggy sticks of blandness, I was feeling guilty. For potentially contributing to salinity, and for being ignorant. Because my choice to abstain from meat is informed by a broad interest in ethical consumerism and environmental conservation, rather than specifically animal rights, the requisite decisions are not as simple as trading animal rights for a diet of mung beans and tempeh.

In this series of sporadic articles, called Sans-bratwurst Blues, I will chronicle my research and decisions about ethical consumerism – lest I begin to alienate my friends with my self-righteous indignation. I will try to be equally sceptical of the CSIRO as I am of dubiously anonymous, blingin websites like The Main Meal.

This post is part of Blog Action Day.

Blog Action Day | 2009 | Climate Change

1. I have since figured out that rice might even be as flatulent as all those cows!

In a post about competitions and rights, Agent Sydney dishes out such pithy advice as ‘don’t sign away your subsidiary rights’, and challenges publishing houses’ acquisitions of world-exclusive rights from the runners-up of prizes around the nation. Agent Sydney puts it best about Allen & Unwin’s acquisitions:

The Vogel Award, for example, is not an award for One Really Good Novel and Four Close Calls. It’s an award for one novel alone. Once the winner is announced, the others should either be set free immediately or given a (short) time frame within which the publisher has exclusivity.

This blog is in the business of answering stupid questions about publishing, with (mostly) kind and clever answers. Compare this with my dad, who used to answer silly questions with ‘pumpkin’ and then get a rise out of saying, ‘Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.’

Pumpkin!

Pumpkin!

For what it’s worth, I have become highly skeptical of literary prizes, and will be advising clients at Paine Management to seriously consider their motives for entering. Various factors of competition culture appear to be geared against the long-term interests of writers, and Agent Sydney’s is one good example: being shortlisted for a prize might even compromise your chances of getting picked up – if a house is holding onto your second-place MS, you can’t send it elsewhere. Something to think about.

Even if you win, your book comes out among annually regurgitated hype and is presented to the public as an award-winning book. When I read this books I am invariably disappointed: they are award-winning manuscripts; often, at best, they are marginally publishable novels.

This is why so many manuscript-award-winning novelists are one-hit wonders. Sorry if that sounds harsh – it should be no more abrasive than saying Kris Kross were one-hit wonders.

Jump!