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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Voiceworks is a place where young writers and artists educate themselves. You don’t need to poke around Virgule, the magazine’s blog, for long to glimpse the bounty they’re sharing.

The issue they launched is ‘Birthmarks’, number 81. I recommend you buy it here. If you’re not sure why you should, check out these reviews. It only costs eight bucks, but if you read it four times, that’s like two bucks a read.

It looks like this:

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.

I hadn’t quite got to wondering about how booksellers might feel threatened by publishers’ online sales, perhaps because I never really buy from physical bookstores, and because I currently work in production, which often leaves me feeling quite removed from the whole extra set of steps that are involved in getting books to readers.

I’m becoming increasingly interested in sales though, and Sam’s article tapped me on the noggin and said, ‘Dear naive and idealistic editor, booksellers are very important to you and your job, and your interest in disseminating ideas with literature.’ So I started riffing on how this shifting relationship might weather the rapid market changes that are being pushed along by this here internet thing.

Perhaps an organised partnership between booksellers and publishers could be established to develop a website that aggregates all of their separate marketing and direct-sales efforts. For these purposes (compared to blogging, say) one big website is surely better than many small ones. Australia Council should fund something like this – just as they’ve recently funded the establishment of Literary Magazines Australia.

Another idea that sprouted was whether booksellers could borrow from the idea of subscription publishing. McSweeney’s do this at their online store. You can sign up to their Book Release Club and receive every book they publish over a twelve month period. Maybe booksellers could offer something similar: I’d like to sign up for a package of ’seller picks’, a bunch of random books from various publishers, delivered to my letter box once a month.¹

The other thing that struck me in Sam’s article was the comment from Don Grover, CEO of Dymocks and aspiring booktrade despot slash self-described benevolent despot: suggesting that ‘a healthy industry occurs when everyone focuses on their own area, their niche in the market’ seems like a typically neo-con thing to say, but my understanding of economic ideology is pretty patchy. Am I right or wrong?

My idea of a healthy industry is one that is not dominated by small groups of large, domineering companies controlling those niches, but one where individuals determine what is produced and how they get it. From this perspective, the suppliers are the ones who need to adapt, rather than trying to restrict trade to a traditional structure of publisher through bookseller to consumer. I guess that’s an irresolvable ideological difference, though.

Or not.

Because then Sam speculated that ‘the coin can also be flipped, the spotlight shifted. Will booksellers be forced to become publishers?’ This must be happening, somewhere.² Curiously (considering my aversion to Grover’s suggestion), this got my hackles up, with its suggestion that booksellers could just whip up the infrastructure required to produce quality books, as if it’s just a matter of pressing the go button on the the Espresso Book Machine.

Thinking about infrastructure, resources and expertise made me realise a more convincing reason publishers should be wary of ‘wading into booksellers’ waters’ (Don Grover’s defensive phrase), and it’s not because they’re not ‘customer-centric’ (also Don’s words). This suggestion denigrates the motives of publishers: does he think we make these books because they look pretty on our shelves? That’s only a secondary reason.

Okay, back to trying to be objective: I’d say a more convincing reason book publishers should be (and, sometimes, are) wary of prolapsing their resources on marketing and direct sales is that they operate in an ailing sector of the economy (especially small-press, literary publishers), within which they have barely enough resources to get their books to print, let alone invest in a serious marketing, sales and publicity strategy.

It’s also possibly true that such print aficionados feel drastically uncomfortable in the online world, and speaking into what seems like an echo chamber a lot of the time. If anything needs to change, I would suggest that booksellers, who will go down the eBookstore path or perish, are in a much better position to drive the development of a collaborative business model that focuses their own, and book publishers’ marketing, sales and publicity efforts. Booksellers and publishers need to share their resources, infrastructure and expertise, so that each is free to work on what they are proficient at, either bookmaking or bookselling.

It’s not as cut and dry as Dan Grover implies, but then, neither is parallel importation, and that didn’t stop him from pushing that wheelbarrow around in the dark.

The rest of the comments in Sam’s article, from all sorts of industry figures, are spectacularly reasonable, and well presented by Sam. A great spectrum of ideas, and all strung together with such clarity and concision. Check it out!

Meanwhile, do you know of examples of this type of bookseller/publisher collaboration? It would be great to keep this dialogue underway about how this changing relationship might morph into something weird, like an Imprints blimp parachuting books to customers in response to sign language made visible by wearing those massive foam-rubber hands.

1. NB: By googling ‘Book a Month Club’, which I thought was the name of McSweeney’s book-subscription service, I found this, The Book of the Month Club, and then I realised that this idea, which I thought was quite novel, is not novel at all, and then I remembered how much I used to bug Mum to join these, but she was savvy to their swindling ways, with which I now sympathise. And anyway, it’s still a better than Don Grover’s idea, which I’m getting to.
2. *googles ‘booksellers turn to publishing’, finds this, is not surprised*

This time it was Harpers, which I had heard was good from friends but never really bothered with. I’m glad I did, because I found something really inspiring in this issue: a story about perhaps the youngest newspaper publishers ever.

‘Final Edition: Twilight of the American newspaper’, by Richard Rodriguez, is a potted history of the San Francisco Chronicle – from its noble and humble origins as the brainchild of two precocious brothers, through its period as the authoritative paper in a two-newspaper town, to its recent slip into an MXesque daily.

As a whole, the article is a bit weak, really. It tries to make the case that the growing absence of obituaries is both indicative of, and the reason for, the demise of traditional/print/investiagative journalism. Maybe it was a typo, and everywhere it says ‘obituaries’ it was meant to read ‘classifieds’.

He also makes the huge claim that the narrative of San Francisco ceased with the death of columnist Herb Caen. Now, I get what he says about how the city makes the newspaper and the newspaper makes the city – each of their narratives are reflected in the other. This was a salient and illuminating argument, which further compounded my interest in newspapers as well as cities. But to say that a city’s narrative could be in the hands of a single journalist is just narrow-minded. What about the people who inevitably thought Caen was a knob? I’m pretty sure their narrative didn’t cease with his death.

I normally skip over the journalism-doomsday essays, because they seem to be nothing more than variations on the same pessimism, which I don’t need in my life right now. But it was familiar territory, in which I figured I would feel comfortable as I acquainted myself with this magazine. There’s heaps of other cool stuff in the article, which have nothing to do with journalism, but nonetheless resonated with me for various reasons.

Hoods

I could easily be mistaken for a hoodlum – tattoos, piercings, foul mouth, substance abuse, irreverence, contempt for belligerent authority … actually, depending on when you catch me, it wouldn’t necessarily be a mistake.

Well, according to this essay, the term ‘hoodlum’ comes from San Francisco, pertaining to young men who prowled the streets frightening Chinese people.  Richard doesn’t explain much more about the term’s original meaning.

Yeah, cool story.

Local Knowledge

Because I’d like to live in the States someday, I figure it wouldn’t hurt to get some local knowledge under my belt. In the essay I noted the following parallels between Australia and San Francisco:

• they both experienced an isolated bout of rapid growth at the hands of a gold rush, and their cultures have remained singularly stunted ever since;
• they both sport Australian blue gums; and
• they are both considered, by some, to be ‘provincial backwaters’ .

This means I can go to San Fran and pretend that I know shit.

Cos I’m Going to San Francisco

I’ve been interested in San Fran for a while, ever since I developed a crush on Dave Eggers in 2002: McSweeney’s is based there. Silicon Valley is also there, and I totally have a crush on the internet, so visiting that place would be almost as good as having a beer with Bukowski. Actually, that would suck.

Anyway, like I said, since 2002 I have developed the aspiration to live and work in New York, and my friend and I have decided to drive from San Francisco to New York when we get to the States, probably in 2011. I’d like for this journey to take as long it takes to read the Beats.

Also, it’s dumb but I’d really like to rock up in San Francisco with some flowers in my hair. I dunno, it’s just something I want to do.

I’ve heard it’s a liberal, progressive place, and I’ve since learnt in this article that San Fran was at the coal front of frontier American journalism. This doesn’t interest me so much in itself – it’s the people at the coal front of the coal front that really interest me. I love it when I inadvertently take inspiration from doomsday articles like this.

The De Young Brothers

Charles and Michael de Young were teenagers when they started what would become the San Francisco Chronicle in 1865. It was the town’s first newspaper, when the population was merely 60 000. By the time the boys were in their early twenties, the gold rush had run the population up to around 150 000 and the Daily Dramatic Chronicle, as it was then called, was one of the two papers in town. And it started with ‘a borrowed twenty-dollar gold piece’.

It gets better. They were psychos. Charles shot a guy called Reverend Isaac Smith Kalloch, who was both running for Mayor and running his mouth off about the brothers’ mum. He basically called their mother a whore.

Four years later and Michael was on the receiving end of the barrel. The way that Rodriguez puts it is classic, in its evocation of the era:

In 1884, Michael was shot by Adolph Spreckels, the brother of a rival newspaper publisher and the son of the sugar magnate Claus Spreckels, after the Chronicle accused the Spreckels Sugar Company of labor practices in Hawaii amounting to slavery. De Young was not mortally wounded and Spreckels was acquitted on a claim of reasonable cause.

How’s that – ‘reasonable cause’! We’d be fucked today if defamation were ‘reasonable cause’ to pull out a hand cannon and go get yourself some justice juice.

Anyway, these guys are an inspiration to me, and might serve as a beacon of hope for readers aspiring to literary greatness at our young age. As Rodriquez says, they lived out the philosophy behind their newspaper: that it should ‘entertain and incite the population’.

Go do that. Good, I’ll see you out there.

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!

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 have known Andre since we employed him as the Voiceworks Production Intern at Express Media. He helped me produce a production manual for future Voiceworks editors – actually, I helped him, as he did most of the leg work.

He is an absolute gun. Since then, Andre has joined the Voiceworks Editorial Committee as Columns Editor, taken over the reins of Right Now, a human rights journal, helps to run Spill Collective and their beyond-epic warehouse parties and squeeze in a wee Arts/Law degree.

He’s the sort of guy who reapplies for internships two years after he was unsuccessful, gets the gig and then proceeds to demonstrate why you should have employed him way back then.

His musings on A Portrait are lyrical and expansive, about everything from a hat that’s not his girlfriend’s to the communal ruse of warehouse parties and some mythbusting on behalf of the yoof.

A very cool and inspiring guy – one of his own Remarkable People – check him out.