The future of High Street retailers

Buying books from Waterstones is ideologically similar to buying organic items at Tesco – it’s better than some of the alternatives (ie: Amazon), but I can’t feel as smug as I might if I bought from an independent. Still, there’s so much doom and gloom in the industry news at the moment following the Red Group collapse that I feel any help is good, right?
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The air of the bookshop was thick with manic desperation – not that surprising given the threat  of a possible 200 store closures hanging over their heads. They had no less than 6 staff members manning a shop with four aisles of books in a town of 25,000 people, most of whom would probably have been at work at 2pm on a Thursday. Overkill? Probably. The staff were helpful. Overly helpful. Do I need help, a recommendation, a foot massage, a bagel? [Note: there weren't really any bagels, that's called dramatic effect. Please don't ask Waterstones staff to provide you with bagels.] There were mutters in the corners of limiting the range of stock to boost sales and the fact that you could now buy a hardcover for £7.90, and every second sentence I heard was: ‘We don’t have it, but we can order it in for you! It’ll only be two days!’ In a small town of geriatrics, this might fly. In a city where people know how to use the internet, it will not.
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I bought my three 3for2 books (a Booker prize winner, something from a publisher I love, and one by an author I had thought I had heard of but it turns out I was thinking of someone else), which came to a paltry £17.98 (the same titles on Amazon came to £19.79). The guy at the checkout, busy flinging ‘50% off’ stickers on every book in his immediate radius, tried to apologetically up-sell me the Stephen Fry biography for a bargain of £4.98, and didn’t seem that surprised when I declined. You don’t have to work in the industry to see this is a business in a state of decay.
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Their tight smiles and false cheer left me with the feeling more than ever that, as publishers, we have to support our retailers. I wanted to hug each of them and tell them everything was going to be ok and that I would go to work on Monday and make things right for these people who cared not just because their personal livelihoods were at stake but because they wrote the recommendations for these books, because they read each of the new titles, because they know their job and are pretty damn good at it when they’re not being nailed to the cross by store closures. They are out there selling their faces off for publishers. What a fucking thankless task.
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So how do we help them? Smaller fucking lists! I have said this ever since I started to work in publishing, and it is disgustingly apparent to me now that publishers must cut back the number of physical books they publish each year. Not only will bookshops not have enough room to stock the books, but they probably won’t be able to sell the ones they do have because there are too many to keep track of. If we were more selective and discerning in our publishing, the market wouldn’t be flooded with more novels than it can hold and buyers wouldn’t get confused by the range. Retailers can hone their skills and sell directly to individual consumers through intelligent marketing campaigns based on genre and topicality, rather than slapping a reduced price sticker on everything that rolls into their storeroom. As a book buyer, I think I know which experience I would prefer.

It stands for World Book Night– new champion among publishing events. It stands for about a million free books, and for Jamie Byng’s lovechild.
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It also stands for a major ideological problem for me.
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The basic premise of the night is that individuals register on the World Book Night website to be ‘givers’. On March 5th, 20,000 of these givers are provided with 48 books to give away to whoever they like. They pick these books up from their local bookshop, who are provided with the books by publishing houses who donated the titles. WBN is registered as a charity, and the publishers and bookshops will receive no money for their involvement whatsoever.
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I love books. I love Jamie Byng. I love things that happen at night. But for some reason, the idea of Jamie Byng, in conjunction with a number of large publishers, giving away over one million free books to the public at night by delivering stock to bookshops to be picked up by registered individuals and handed out really pissed me off. It might have been the comments I read where booksellers told how they received the email to ‘opt out’ of being a drop-off/pick-up point for this venture on Christmas Eve, giving them next to no opportunity to say they didn’t want to be a part of World Book Night. It might have been the fact that in this time of serious hardship for booksellers in general, not a month after two different Borders’ chains closed their doors, World Book Night was further devaluing the books by pushing the price of some major titles down to nothing.
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I don’t think those involved in World Book Night would do anything to deliberately destroy publishing. In fact, I know this venture was born purely from an altruistic love of novels in that, without any ulterior motives, the organisers wanted to get more people reading and just drum up some publicity for books in general (not Canongate’s specific list, but those of a number of different publishers). The titles were also chosen to be bestsellers past their peak selling point, all with sales in decline, so it wouldn’t rip money away from booksellers or publishers. Still, you don’t have to look far to find out why booksellers were angry about this. And I was right there with them in thinking it was probably a bad idea, given my thoughts on free stuff and the public’s perception of value in the face of promotional offers.
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So then what the hell is with this? The sales of the books that were given away for free have actually doubled. Granted, they were on the decline before all the publicity of World Book Night, but there are now shedloads of free copies circling the UK. Can someone please explain to me the logic behind giving away thousands of copies of one book, and then having the sales increase in the weeks that follow? What the hell kind of market are we looking at here, anyway? Should I start eating words?

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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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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My whole world at the moment is about marketing. Against my will, it’s become increasingly important to my job and my life. Sales figures, profit margins, the whole lot. I know I might have been pretty critical of the way independent publishers don’t use marketing to their advantage, but the more I learn about it the more I want it to disappear. Or at least keep its ego in check.

Recently I was having a discussion with a guy I know, who wrongly thinks he knows everything about everything, regarding whether a marketing plan that utilises the public’s opinion to influence creative process was ‘genius’ or not. I fell on the side of not. Something seems horribly wrong with the idea that developers, in this case of a game, had to compromise their creative vision because the marketing team came up with the suggestion that people might feel more involved if they had direct input into the production of the thing. From a creative point of view, my argument favoured the position that characters that come to life in games, books, films whatever are not necessarily the ones that most resemble the players/readers/viewers or the ones we would chose to create ourselves. That’s why writers exist – to tap into and display creativity not everyone has.

And why does marketing exist? Apparently to tell writers how the masses think they’re doing their job wrong.

This is basically the crux of my argument. I had always thought marketing was a process where you take something, anything, and display it in such a way that it is appealing to the largest possible audience. Commissioners and writers make the thing, and the marketing team go fuck yeah you know what would make this a success? An intensive fliering campaign! Or a week of skywriting over London. Or a competition in the newspaper. Whatever, I don’t know. Now, though, focus groups and user data have the ability to influence the direction of publishers. If a marketing campaign is to become the beating heart of a creative process, then won’t creative industries such as publishing, film, music, gaming and all that just produce stuff based on what’s already out there rather than pushing boundaries and challenging consumers? I’m thinking specifically of the absolute fucking deluge of vampire/supernatural novels that followed the release of they Meyer books, but this is just one example in a swamp of many.

Effective marketing can make the difference between a successful product and a not so successful one. Lots of great ideas go by the wayside because they’re not marketed well. But as an editor or a developer or whatever it is that I do now and will do in the future, I value my aesthetic judgment more than my market knowledge. I’m starting to feel pretty fuckin’ lonely out here.

Then, my mate made this point:

If you stick only those you know to be creative, you will get specific creations.  Give everyone and their dog an open invitation, and you will get a whole mass of shit, but the odd unexpected result… It is the logic that within a mess of fuckwits, there will be great things.  Rather than just picking great things you know and having a tiny number of created entities

Will sterility of creativity result from a belief that market knowledge will hold the key to future production, or will it result from writers who have limited vision in the first place? Both? In which case, is this guy right in thinking that the only way we can really grow creatively is by throwing in the towel as producers and leaving it for other people to decide the exact products they want? But then isn’t that sort of like… making ourselves redundant, and analogous to throwing away a million dollars to pan for gold in a river?

The fact is, people will not always do themselves favours.

This never was, is, or will be acceptable to wear. Anywhere. Just no.

I don’t know whether I trust the beast that is public opinion to be the single driving force behind all creative creation, but isn’t this the underlying principle behind market-driven production?

There’s heaps of shit that hasn’t been thought of yet because people are putting their energy toward creating similar products to what they made last year (with small differences, of course) that are a safe bet economically as they pander to an established audience base.

This does not mean that different things don’t have a market.

It does means marketing will need to be more creative in winning over an consumer.

Then I read this and realised I haven’t even scratched the surface of the consumer-driven vs creative-driven issue.

Sam Cooney republished an article he wrote for Bookseller+Publisher about, well, the relationship between booksellers and publishers – and how this relationship is changing as publishers embark on direct-sales ventures, which, I guess, have the potential to undermine the traditional business models of booksellers. On the surface it seems like a superfluous debate, when compared to whether eBookstores will overrun this model, but it remains relevant, and the article got me thinking, which I like, obviously.

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*

I’ve been reading about marketing recently, because I joined the committee of Wet Ink magazine as Marketing Dude, and understanding what marketing means does not come as naturally to me as understanding how to edit a manuscript does.

This seems to be a common sentiment in the small-press sector: there is an immense amount of production talent – well-read, judicious editors, tweaked and beautiful designers, typography wonks and typesetting nerds whose idea of a hilarious joke is that keming is bad kerning – but most of the people I know in this field spend as much of their time producing as they do commiserating about their poor sales.

The problem with most of us progressive, literary types is that we’re educated enough to be critically minded about marketing and advertising, so we find it difficult to employ these dirty means to sell our own work, or that of the writers we publish. As though literature were some sort of sacrosanct product – something that could, or should, exist outside of the market in which we trade everything else.

Yes, a lot of the marketing literature out there is riddled with impenetrable corporatese, and the prospect of beginning to use this language makes me feel illogically duplicitous, but buried in that corporatese are perfectly reasonable phrases like ‘identifying your market’, ‘putting your product in the way of your market’ and ‘delivering value to your customers‘.

If you produce literature, why wouldn’t you want to do these things? Marketing is only a dirty word in some literary circles because it has been appropriated by unscrupulous companies to deliver products of dubious value to customers whose faculties of scrutiny are less than sharp. It’s not just anti-ageing cream that gets this treatment – someone, maybe Albert Camus, said that abstract art is ‘a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered’.

It might also be that marketing doesn’t fit well in the literary sector because no one can really explain what the value of literature is: you either get it and you read a lot, or you don’t and you’re not sure what all the fuss is about. Next time you meet someone who says they don’t get reading, try explaining to them that regular engagement with literature develops your compassionate motives by facilitating your understanding of other people’s experience of the human condition.

Yet, Coca Cola manage to convince millions of consumers every day that they should buy their sugary, carbonated tooth corroder. Coke has no value, but look how fun it is to drink – you get to float around in one of those bubbles!

So, what are the values of literature? One way to begin answering the question of how to market literature is to start thinking about why you read literature. Chances are, many others read literature for similar reasons, and you can derive a loosely representative sample from this.

I read literature for private communion with the ideas of others, and I write it to offer the same. This communion improves my understanding of others, which improves my personal relationships. Through literature I learn about perspectives on the world I could never have dreamed up myself, simply because I have not lived the same experiences as the writer. So my world view shifts almost imperceptibly through reading literature, and this empowers me to lead a more ethical, productive and compassionate existence.

Why do you read literature? What value does it contribute to your life?

It’s time to give this blog a kick in the guts, by making it useful.

I’ve been digging in at work and making the most of the cold summer I was welcomed with, and I’m ready to start soliciting book proposals or manuscripts, maybe, depending on the proposal. In particular I’m interested in challenging non-fiction by young, emerging writers, so if you have an idea for a book, please read on.

Soon I will post some more specific ideas about my ideal book proposal, but for now I want to put it out there that a book proposal is more than just a few sample chapters and a synopsis: it is a document that conveys a comprehensive concept of what sort of book the manuscript could become, and how the book might be brought to the attention of its potential readership. And I’d like to get a bit of discussion happening about a trend I’ve noticed.

I don’t know if it’s like this in the big houses, but we usually like it when an author shows the sort of initiative that might help to sell the book. Authors have to sell their books too, and this may as well start early.

While it’s difficult to predict the sales of any given book, and I don’t expect a sales-projection spreadsheet, a little demonstrated awareness of the life of your manuscript in book form will go a long way. That’s because in the independent sector there seems to be a dearth of marketing, sales and publicity personnel – probably because there’s not a lot of cash flowing around to pay for the sort of people whose natural inclination is to sell things – and the result is that authors need to get on board in the sales department.

What do you think of this?

Actually moving units seems to have become a subset of tasks in the process of producing and publishing literature. Marketing is almost a dirty word in some literary circles. And this troubles me immensely because I don’t see the point in slaving over a book (as either an author or an editor) if you can’t be bothered getting it to readers who aren’t already tuned in to the value of reading literature.

I want to find an amazing work of literature, see it through the production process, and then sell the fuck out of it. For shame?

Back to the other point of the post.

Wakefield Press Books

To save you some of the trouble of researching our list: Wakefield publishes primarily non-fiction, and of that, primarily history, memoir, gastronomy (including the unfortunately labelled ‘gastro memoir‘) and DIY books. We also publish literary fiction, something that began to be called life writing (extraordinary stories of ordinary people), and poetry. Oh, and art books – such as those published as part of SALA Festival.

My Interests

To give you an idea of the sort of book I’m looking for, those of my interests that align with Wakefield’s publishing program include: progressive thinking about popular culture, politics, economics, religion, philosophy, tangential history and real-life curiosities; vegetarian cookbooks, especially those that function as part treatise, part guidebook for adopting the lifestyle; youth literature, by which I mean literature by young writers, as defined by this blog; adventurous fiction – so, no landscape fiction or novels about art hoaxes; biographies of outstanding ordinary people; satire and parody.

I worked on most of those linked books above – except for Amore and Amaretti, the DIY books and most of the SALA books – and I enjoyed them all immensely, if that provides another indication of the sort of books I’d like to consider.

Submitting your Proposal

Check out this link, where you’ll find our submission guidelines (which are pretty basic, and mostly common sense) and a postal address. Do not email your proposal. Wakefield is not currently accepting unsolicited manuscripts, but if you’ve read this then, well, yours is not exactly unsolicited. Feel free to contact me at Wakefield with any queries you have. I prefer to answer phones than emails.

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’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.