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

Sam Cooney has an article about literary awards in the current issue of Voiceworks, and the critical take on such a holy grail inspired me to continue the conversation. I’ve touched on manuscript awards once before, and am regularly vocal, to people who ask, against wholesale acceptance of prizes as a wonderful and highly sought after accolade – it’s something I’m very much interested in.

Sam reckons that literary prizes pick books and raise them up as symbols of our ‘national consciousness’, which gives them inordinate cultural weight. He uses a lovely Lion King metaphor – think:

I agree, and would go on to say that a culture heavily influenced by such a top-down, arbitrary and selective approach cannot be representative of the broader public’s diverse reading tastes. This is why I’m so interested in literary prizes – they are at odds with my interest in promoting the self-determination of our literary culture.

Chris Flynn made the point once, when I got angry about Tim Winton winning the Miles Franklin again, that prizes don’t have to be relevant to everyone, because a culture of alternatives exists. This would be fine if the general reader had as proactive an approach to reading as Chris, who is so passionate about literature that he publishes his alternative source of literature that he likes.

Maybe we should just leave the award crowd patting each other on the back for sharing the same impeccable sense of taste and go make/find our own literature. The large publishers and other cultural institutions that run these prizes make it difficult to do this by using their considerable market share to drive trends around by putting stickers on adult books, like decals on a racecar. Sam quotes Ann McCulloch on this:

McCulloch herself deems panels and the public as ‘a malleable beast that will generally move towards “winners”, even if non-winners are writing some amazing books’

If people do gravitate toward award-winning literature when deciding what to read, then the determination of what qualifies as award-winning does lend inordinate cultural weight to certain books. If the public’s vision of culture (which, to some extent is derived from the literature they read) contributes to the way culture is actually realised in Australia, then if we change the literature they read (by awarding different literature with relevant accolades) we alter the nature of the culture that is realised and we all have to endure. As in, cultural agency needs to be distributed more equally among the reading public. Surely someone with a serious name has written about this.

When we charge judging panels with this responsibility of concentrated cultural agency, it becomes especially concerning to read that ‘ideological soundness’ has so much as been uttered in the same room as a judging panel – Sam quotes Michael Meehan, novelist and judging panelist:

at the outset we all agreed to put forward the books we liked best – to put forward his or her own personal preferences on quite a subjective basis. Otherwise … you can get into some pretty sterile formulas – which novel best embodies national themes and current issues, or worse, which novels are ethically and ideologically the most ’sound’.

If this culture permeates our cultural agencies, and if enough readers base their bookstore decisions on gold stickers, literary prizes become ideological mechanisms of the institutions that run them. A government institution, whose independence is constantly in question, should not wield this sort of control over the marketplace.

Their power undermines individuals’ power to determine the good books and places this power with a handful of individuals. Of course, if individuals were left alone in the market to ‘vote with their wallet’, a lot of worthwhile literature would remain unpublished. A model for subsidising and awarding quality literature needs to be designed and implemented by interested planners – government as well as private funders and lobbyists – with a view to generating greater diversity when determining who receives the funding, who receives the awards, and what constitutes both.

Unfortunately Sam pulls his punches in the conclusion of his column, but if prizes are dodgy, we need to continue to question their virtue, and amend the way they are delivered: have more readers’ choice awards, such as the Inky Awards; reconsider the dividends – get the right mixture of publication contract and prize money and maybe a prize that encourages audience engagement with the text, especially the more obscure awards and the manuscript awards; use the prize money to financing marketing, advertising and publicity campaigns.

If these books are being awarded such accolades as being in possession of ‘the Australian voice’, as many Australians as possible should know about who is speaking on their behalf, and what they’re saying. Meanwhile, the longer literature represents and appeals to an elite, privileged sector of the community, the longer people go wanting for good literature, and the more likely it is that people will move away from literature altogether – if it is neither entertaining nor insightful in a way that is meaningful to you, why would you bother?