Here’s an optimistic redefinition of what it means to be an ‘unpublished writer’: ‘Are you unpublished? No, I’m PREpublished’ on Samantha Hughes’ blog.

In my last post about Nic Low’s manuscript I described ‘Tailings’ as ‘a beautiful duck, wearing a tiara … bobbing up and down on [the sea of mediocrity] … that results from the seemingly indiscriminate publication of some 12 000+ books per year in Australia’.

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.

Something else I’ve been doing lately, while not being a high-flying literary judge, is reading Nic Low’s novel manuscript, ‘Tailings’. Because I’m a youth-literature crusader and everything. Nic is not exactly ‘a youth’, but whatever.

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.

In the same week that I gored myself, I accepted a job offer from Wakefield Press. I’m visiting Brisbane for Christmas, then I’ll be heading to Adelaide to resume a seat at my old desk, to make books full time again. I won’t be needing any presents this year.

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 emailed a couple of Melbourne agencies this week, chasing work experience. I got two hits back, one from Curtis Brown telling me they don’t take work-experience kids. I’ve canvassed this way before, when I was getting into production in Adelaide, and the pattern was much the same.

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

I just found these two grouse websites, Brazen Careerist and Location Independent Professionals. I’ve been thinking of mobilising Paine Management for some time, and it’s been great to bump into a bunch of like-minded souls: people who want to be financially (and locationally?) independent. Each of them have great blogs – in fact, Brazen Careerist has many, somehow linked to members’ sites.

I even found a post called ‘Putting Together A Portable Office That You Can Take With You Anywhere You Go In The World’.

The first time I thought of myself as the sort of guy who might use a portable office was when I was interviewed by David Prater for Cordite. He described the man bag I carried at the time as a ‘portmanteau’. I’m pretty sure Orwell’s listless Gordon uses a ‘portmanteau’ in Keep the Aspidistra Flying as well.

What I’m talking about is not a ‘portmanteau’. It’s just a portable office. I always thought ‘portmanteau’ meant, specifically, ‘portable office’. It doesn’t.

But the thing with Gordon would be the second time I bumped into the notion.

It’s difficult to articulate how excited it makes me when I discover  whole groups of disparate people doing similar things with their life that I’d like to do. When it gets as specific as building a portable office, it gets kind of boggling.

Combine all this with my principle of Three Degrees of Uncoordination and a decision pops out: I’m going to create a portable office. If I do, I might need to do what this guy (presumably) did, and ditch all my stuff. Getting rid of my books is proving to require a few more than three collisions of colluding ideas, however.

I had started creating something other than a portmanteau before I found these websites, and I had begun to break it down into items I would be able to transport with me, and items I would need to buy at each location. Ideally I could have a bike wherever I go, but transporting one each time I move is simply impracticle, so that’s an item I’d need to have in my ‘Purchase Onsite’ category. Bike pants, on the other hand, would go in the ‘Transport’ category, of course.

I bought a mini stapler today, to replace my clunker, which had run out of staples anyway.

Now I will never be late again!

I’m excited about Brazen Careerist because, as a testimonial run from FastCompany said, they ‘decided to turn existing traditional online career management tools on their ear’ by merging the best of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, in a way that might practically advance your career. Basically it seems like a fun version of LinkedIn, which is a weird schmoozy site of the most boring variety, until you have hundreds in your network, which is not where you’re going to be if you’re interested in things like Brazen Careerist. A good stopgap, then, between Facebook and Linked in, via Twitter.

As you read and write around the site, your updates and comments are published in your personal feed, which is called Ideas. In the tab next to that you have your resume, so that if people like what you’re thinking, they might check out your resume to see if you’re good for a job they know about, or an opportunity coming up. That’s how I imagine the site to work, anyway – I’m still new to it.

I never cease to be amazed by what I find on the internet created by like-minded young people.

I’ve set up my profile on Brazen Careerist¹ and joined the Ning group for Location Independent Professionals, the Clubhouse. If you’re in Melbourne and this sounds like your sort of thing, it’d be great to see you there because I feel like the real value of these new mediums is found when they intersect somewhat with your physical world.

1. which, although it’s irrelevant, my fingers insist on typing as Brazeen Carerist – watch out for that one!

I am currently trying to get my shit together, and the likelihood of it ever happening is feeling increasingly elusive as I try to plan and work at the same time. Meanwhile I’m reading The Land of Plenty by Mark Davis¹, which isn’t helping.

He’s going on about the ‘prosperity scandal’ and the mythologies that have propped up the misconception that neoconservative, free-market orthodoxies have increased the nation’s wealth in the last thirty years. Instead of managing the nation’s economy, these policies have thrown caution to the wind at a time when Australia has been fortunate enough to be buffeted upwards by globalisation².

On some level Australia’s mind boggling economic ineptitude and short-sightedness makes me feel better about my own financial mismanagement. Especially when I remember how I like to make concessions for my life, based on reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being a few years ago.

By mashing Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return and Parmenides’ Theory of Opposites³ , Kundera’s concept of lightness might mitigate our bungling through life: if we are not burdened by the responsibility of having lived and learned from this life before, we are light – but our lives are meaningless, without weight; if we are burdened with this responsibility, our lives are weighty – but the repetition somehow gives them meaning, something to do with cycles⁴.

I’d say that we’re making it up as we go along, so as long as we endeavour to learn from our mistakes, our lives might be meaningless, but at least they’ll be pleasant. And by really bastardising it I came up with something like consolation: just as I have no experience of this life prior to my birth, I also have no experience of living in an economic environment that might have encouraged me to think long-term about my finances.

I had my parents of course, and they’re great with money, but I disregarded a lot of what they said. My bad. And anyway, I’m talking about how I might have turned out if I had grown up immersed in a successful, carefully regulated mixed-market economy – such as …⁵ Maybe I’d be able to make rent without living off beans and noodles for the following two weeks.

Seriously, I wonder about how a nation’s psyche might manifest as characteristics in whole portions of generations of citizens. People my age – teenagers growing up from 1996 to 2007 – were raised to believe that the prosperity we enjoyed would continue forever.

It didn’t, and the prospect of getting my shit together in this climate is all the more troublesome because of the pervasive feeling that I am pushing shit up hill.

Because we have both⁶ relied extensively on unexpected economic windfalls to give the impression of progress. We’ve worked hard, sure, but I’ve also been a lucky boy in a lucky country. Just as Australia has ridden the sheep’s back, then the miner’s back and now ‘the debtor-citizen’s back’⁷, I have coasted on the back of my parents’ success, on the back of a generation of false economic pretenses perpetrated by the Whitlam government through to the K Rudd, a bunch of noobs acting out on ideology rather than reason or good common sense.

And just like Australia, I have hit a brick wall after this unbridled, rapid and sometimes inexplicable propulsion through a false personal economy. About all that I’ve gleaned from living in this economy is an understanding of the ‘bubble’ concept: when the luck ran out and I needed to scrape myself up, I got my head around the bubble.

I feel like I’m back at the starting grid, but the race hasn’t stopped. Mark Davis’s Australia is at a similar point, from where it must learn from the failure of two eras of political consensus and move forward with a new vision. Get its shit together, basically.

-----

1. whose blog is unfortunately not working
2. Mark Davis, Land of Plenty, p. 255
3. which, the deeper I dig, seems to not exist – being, instead, a theory that Heraclitus presented and Parmenides rebuked
4. my intuition makes it more difficult to grasp weight than to grasp lightness – the fleeting, meaninglessness of a quick fling with life, a chromosome glitch and nothing more, that makes more sense to me
5. do these exist?
6. Australia and I
7. Mark Davis, Land of Plenty, p. 262

There’s a really good agent blog coming out of Sydney, called Call My Agent! The anonymous blogger, Agent Sydney, posts and answers fictional queries based on what are, presumably, emails that an agent might receive, in a pithy and sometimes scathing manner.

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!

I have a question to ask that seems simple, but which grows increasingly complex when you think about it. How do you consider author intention when reviewing a novel?

I’ve come up ambivalent about a book I’m reviewing. When this happens I like to make note of the positives and negatives and try to round up with a suggestion that readers should check it out for themselves.

I have no problems suggesting that readers don’t bother if a book is below sub-par, but if something comes up halfway decent, I assume that one person’s free review copy is another person’s first edition.

My problem is that in the process of scraping the barrel, I find myself ploughing deeply into speculation and interpretation of the author’s intentions. I tend to say things like, ‘The author didn’t quite carry this theme, but that’s because they were focussing on this other theme, which is explored well.’

Is this a problem? I’m worried that I’m making concessions for books when they should be flagged as undeveloped. That I might save people the trouble if I were more honest about the book.

If I think the book warrants being supported – if it’s a debut novel and the author has demonstrated considerable promise for certain styles and techniques – is that enough to warrant concocting a positive interpretation? It’s not just this novel in particular – I come up against this with many young-adult and debut novels.

This has been just like trying to fix a car engine: as soon as you start pulling it apart, you find more things to fix, or questions to answer.

There are comments to this post here. I couldn’t carry them over to this new site.

I’m really glad to be working on a book that’s not government funded. A stack of money has been poured into this and we need to earn the money back to pay off the debt.

This just came to mind when I was talking to a guy who put out a bunch of comics with a group called Silent Army. He said they never had a real distribution model – they used half the grant to make an approximation of the funded book, then the rest to make the book that didn’t fit within the funder’s criteria.

Fine, but this guy was disappointed they could never really get the books out to a broader audience. Government funding has a tendency to hinder considerations of sustainable business models in the arts – especially with literature, which is so labour intensive, in a culture where production skills outweigh business acumen considerably.

Today we figured out we need to sell half our print run to break even, then we have the potential to make enough to for Breakdown to do another book.

This is the sort of thinking that I’m really happy to be a part of.