If:book Australia is a think-and-do tank dedicated to promoting ‘new forms of digital literature’ and exploring ‘ways to boost connections between writers and audiences’, which is more exciting than I can fully express.

They are associated with the Institute for the Future of the Book in New York, and if:book London, and are based at Queensland Writers’ Centre. Kate Eltham and Simon Groth there are my newest heroes, not least because Simon found an excellent photo of a statue of Farnsy to accompany the essay I wrote for them.

I’m pretty excited about this essay because: 1) it is a call to action on governing our own literary culture and is my first steps into the territory of full-blown internet apostate; 2) it was commissioned with a Direct Message on Twitter by Simon after he read SIB; 3) they paid me really good money to do it.

I’m becoming a little tired of writing and promoting SIB in the ad hoc fashion I do, so I’m starting to think of this commission as the catalyst for the beginning of a departure, maybe.

Sometimes I’m tired of being a wannabe leftist revolutionary and pseudo-intellectual. Thinking about ideology, politics, economics and the publishing industry all the time is kind of bringing me down: the ideologues, the politicians, the failing markets, the legalese … ugh.

Doing this sort of work with good (liberal) intentions is kind of like trying to ride your bike safely: there will always be dickheads on the road, making your journey unsafe no matter how cautious you are; there will always be ideologues pushing their agendas in the way, making your journey of intellectual discovery that much more difficult by being dickheads.

I want to focus on creating literature again for a while. I had a short story broadcast on Radio Adelaide recently, and sitting there listening to it with Felice in Lucy’s lounge room caused a heartswell that I want to chase up.

Also I don’t want to burn out and become jaded ten months out of the next Academy, so after a couple of posts I’ve got lined up I think I’m going to give SIB a break and just post whenever I feel like it and, ya know, try to stop worrying about the internet.

Meanwhile, here is the introduction of the if:book essay, which is called ‘You’re the Voice’ (the rest can be found here):

There was a time, kids, back in nineteen tickety two, when people sincerely believed in the internet as the great democratising power of the twenty-first century. I, for one, thought it was the Second Coming of the Gutenberg Revolution. But then I’m one of the most naive and optimistic people I know. Gullible maybe, whatever.

Now, in only nineteen tickety three, this promise has gone the way of … well, democracy itself. Just as a concentration of third-estate power has occurred in Thomas Carlyle’s esteemed fourth estate, control of the online knowledge market is coagulating in the cloyingly, sickeningly sweet hands of our dear friend Google.

Sure, there are others (alternatives), but only in the same sense there are alternatives to News Ltd and Fairfax in Australia’s traditional media industry: they’re nominal alternatives, with no real power. Running a successful, independent newspaper in Australia would be much like going into farming against Monsanto in the United States.

The book-industry implications for this trend first dawned on me when I found another puff piece about cultural criticism, this time in the Guardian: “Is the age of the critic over?” Puff piece or not, the precis really got to me: “Critics reflect on how social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and myDigg, fit into the perennial debate on cultural elitism.”

I have about 9 mailboxes at work, one of which regularly receives email from this guy ben@sprint-mail.com. I think it’s spam, but it could be some r-tarded subscription whose use has long since worn out. Anyway, when I had nothing to do last week I had a flick through the shit he’s sent was really taken by one of his ideas. Taken to Scorn Town, that is.

The email was about ‘The Power of Free’  that he was ‘compelled to tell me about’. Basically, he prattled on about how successful marketeers should be giving free ‘bits’ of their product to consumers in order to make people buy the more expensive ‘premium’ product. He cited Spotify as a successful example of this business model, and went on to note how ‘The new form of Free is not a gimmick… Instead, it’s driven by an extraordinary ability to lower the costs of goods and services close to zero’.

Marketing Manager. Now comes with free banana and pirate hat.

This is apparently something we’ve grow into in the 21st century. We have a tendency (one that’s not easy to break) to believe that things online should be free (like this blog). We also have a tendency to believe that God exists and that Blackberrys are cool. Not all these things are true, but these assumptions shape their respective industries.

It really distresses me when I see people giving away free PDFs of their magazines for download, or handing out free copies of a book that took them a year to produce – not to mention the crises of ability, mental breakdowns, tears, deadlines, weekends and sunny afternoons pinned to a computer screen. Ultimately won’t this generosity lower the price customers expect to pay for goods and services, leading to the centralisation of producers as smaller companies are hustled out of the marketplace by people who can afford to subsidise their products by giving away free ‘bits’? And shouldn’t even large companies be wary of this ubiquitous lowering of prices and giving shit away as they are basically saying ‘we have been charging you too much, and we need you more than you want us’? This sort of attitude leads to desperate bids for an audience by flinging products at them for less and less and devaluing the entire industry in the process.

The free idea might work out ok if everything in the world were free, but as it is I can’t trade good will for my rent or my groceries. I’m going to want to get paid for the labour I put into my work in the end. And in order for this to happen, someone else somewhere is going to have to pay for the things I produce.

If you have a product that you believe in strongly you should sell it. Sell it and name your own price and let people know the value you place on yourself. A business who has demonstrated this is wildly successful is Apple – their prices are significantly higher than the competition and they do not participate in giving ‘freebies’ and yet they have changed the face of the technology market through the force of their marketing and the quality of their product. If you want to be taken seriously, you have to put shit on the line. Shit like money.

I have some questions for all you publishy/economicsy types. When dealing with eBook distributors, can publishers reasonably expect to set the terms of trade? With enough collective bargaining power, could we garner sufficient market pressure that the eDistros would be forced to capitulate?

It seems there are two choices when deciding how many eDistros to sign with: just the big guns (which I’m gonna go ahead and dub The Bazooka Approach – choose a core group of big distros, and sell to them hard), or all of the little ones as well (The Scatter Gun Approach – spray your books at as many distros as possible and hope your files don’t wind up on torrentz.eu).

The total administrative resources required to sign with all these eDistros, whose terms seem varied to the nth degree, is gargantuan, and what if the big guys squeeze out the little guys when the market settles? All those resources will have been wasted. But The Bazooka Approach means accepting unfavourable terms – some of which are actually illegal in Australia.

If you don’t have the answers/ideas, but know someone who does, please forward a link to this post. I’d love to see a stream of discussion on this here humble blog about ignorance.

An argument for The Scatter Gun approach is that you wouldn’t limit yourself to certain retailers in the pBook trade, though there’s an argument that you would do this: say, if the retailer was actually a lemonade stand. An argument against The Scatter Gun approach is: who knows what sort of DRM software these cowboy operators are using; how do you monitor that? Google Alerts? By then it’s too late – there’s no turning back from torrentz.eu.

An argument for The Bazooka Approach is that your administrative resources are more targeted, and marketing through these outlets much more manageable. And the security’s probably better. (Key word: ‘probably’.) An argument against The Bazooka Approach is you might miss whole territories, such as those where the big guns won’t aim, such as China, if China pinches America’s breakfast one morning.

More of the reason I ask is that I wonder if shooting for something like this would make the whole business of dealing with eDistros far more efficient, at least for publishers. Disclaimer: I’ve never been a bookseller, so I don’t know how it feels to negotiate terms from that side. Maybe the terms we’d like could never be reasonable to enough eDistros that the market would survive.

The Big Five did a bit of muscling against Amazon to get the agency model established, yeah? And The Little Thousands are benefiting from that. Maybe we could ask our bigger brothers to sort these fuckers out for us – get some heads knocked.

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Who knows? Not me. That’s why I’m asking you. Bring it!
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A good book editor has to be capable of mentoring a person: after hacking at the fundamental structure of an author’s manuscript, an editor needs to be there to field questions, lend support and generally reassure the author their early work has not been one big, protracted period of self delusion and folly.

A good editor is often the only person who will ever consider the text as closely as the author, and therefore is in a good position to play the above mentor role, advising on intimate details of the manuscript’s development while the author rebuilds their manuscript around their shattered ego – this requires considerable, tact, diplomacy and compassion, and often it seems an author becomes willing to let their guard down with their editor more than anyone else, for the sake of their beloved manuscript.

This can be beautiful (though it is sometimes embarrasing and painful), and is the sort of relationship I constantly aspire to in my work. The operative word being ‘aspire’: it is not always possible, especially when an author’s insecurities manifest as petulance, arrogance and resistance.

I had to do some quick research into ‘second and subsequent serial rights’ recently, and realised it might be worthwhile demystifying some of what I learnt – it’s such a minefield of ambiguity out there, it must be terrifying if you’ve finally got a book deal and then have to learn legalese when you get the actual contract.

First, second and subsequent serial rights are part of the subsidiary rights clauses in your contract: primary rights being things like the right to edit, produce, publicise and distribute your book (der stuff, basically); subsidiary rights being things like the right to license the work to film producers, or have it turned into an audio book or eBook.

Selling your first serial rights means the publisher can license portions of your content to magazines or newspapers, for promotional purposes.

Selling your second and subsequent serial rights simply means they can publish extracts in more than one newspaper or magazine. This is good for you – they’re bound to have more contacts with these outlets than you have.

Bet you’re glad you skipped dinner for that!

Here are the articles I found about these curious subsidiary rights. Disregard the mid-90s styling of these pages – no surprise that information about print-book rights is not the domain of the internetologically savvy.

Ker-ching!

I don’t know about this one: ‘The Future for Book Editors: Royalties?’ In this article, Ann Patty (former Harcourt publisher from NYC) argues that editors should receive a royalty on profits because they do so much work on books and then get squat in the way of remuneration or recognition.

I’ve rewritten books only for a mention in the the Acknowledgements, but that’s not why I work as an editor: I work as an editor because I genuinely believe in the value of facilitating the expression of others. Ten people have way more ideas than me, and they’re far more likely to clash with each other than my own are with themselves, and it is from this collision that genuine insight arises.

Anyway, of all the people being insufficiently remunerated in the publishing industry, editors are doing alright – at least they have a salary. Taking royalties away from the author who turns into a runaway success just doesn’t seem fair, given how many years of unpaid service they’ve poured into the product before so much as emailing it to the editor.

And let’s face it, unless you’re Ann Patty (or any other high-flying NYC publisher), the majority of the books you’re going to work on are not going to be runaway bestsellers, so trading in your salary for a royalty system doesn’t seem like a viable alternative. Unless she’s suggesting we get a royalty on top of our salary, so that our salary is more like a retainer and royalties more like a commission.

This seems more plausible in the context of the article, yet far more implausible in the real-world industry.

Glancing thoughts: editor royalties would work only for those with a hand in the bestseller pie (so, no one in the small–medium press).

What do you reckon?

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.

I shook hands with Julia Gillard yesterday morning, and then wound up on the telly about it. She made a rousing speech, praising the values of hard work and education, and I came away feeling really inspired by it all.

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,

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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.

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Love,
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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.
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An exciting opportunity has come up for young writers at one of Australia’s most prestigious platforms for the discussion of literature, ABC Radio National’s The Book Show. They are looking for five young bloggers to write about book culture on their new blog. I will certainly be applying, and I encourage other young book lovers to do so as well.

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.

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.