TVs in Australian households

Approximately 99% of all Australian households have at least one working television set according to Neilsen. I wonder how many of the other 1% have a not-working television. And how many Australian households don't have a book, other than a phone book.

Canadian publishing foreign dominated!

"A unique aspect of the Canadian book publishing market is that 19 foreign-controlled publishers, which represented less than 6% of all companies surveyed, accounted for 59% of domestic book sales in 2004 (the figure would be similar in 2005). One might say that the Canadian book publishing industry is foreign-dominated."

quote from an industry report

I came across this quote that tickled my fancy

"France has two the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older - intelligence and manners." F Scott Fitzgerald

Harry Potter and Star Wars

I found this lurking in my old emails, and it amused me yet again, so I thought I'd share it. I'm not sure where it came from originally.

independent publishing is a nutty business

Driving to work on this fine and sunny morning one of those uncalled for thoughts popped into my mind as I was gritting my jaw about the frustrations of the coming day: independent publishing in this country, in any country, is an insane and nutty business that pretty much defines any business logic and is only made possible by the immense amount of goodwill that exists all the way along the chain from author and idea to reader and that goodwill conversely makes it a particularly satisfying business to be in.

reviewers whinge

A bad review hurts. Not a critical review but a bad review - the smug smart-arsed review that lets the reader know that reviewer is a very clever person, far cleverer than any published author, or any publisher, editor or anybody else involved in the publishing process.

Reviewers generally do a really excellent job and are an important, valued part of the publishing community and fair criticism that includes that good and the bad is good for us and for our authors. We get better no feedback from authors than by sending them a good review.

There are some reviewing habits that get right up my nose though, and they often appear as a cluster. The worst of these sorts of reviewers will writer reviews with all the following sorts of characteristics. (I'll call this hypothetical reviewer by the usefully androgynous name of "Sam" so I can avoid that "he or she" thing.)

1 Sam retells the plot of the book,
2 Sam applies an adult sensibility to the assessment of a children's book, without considering how the reader of an appropriate age would respond to the text.
3 Sam judges all books by the criteria of literary fiction.
4 Sam presumes to know what happened in the publishing process. Something like: "The publisher just printed the author's first draft and didn't bother with any editing."
5 Sam then blames the publisher for a lack of editing rather than honestly critiquing the book.
6 Sam criticizes the book for failing to meet the criteria of some old saw like "show don't tell". I often think that this is what Sam has been taught in a creative writing class and as a clever student Sam has been too quick to ingest it. (Don't write books according to such advice - do what the work itself needs, is my advice)
7 Sam criticizes the punctuation and grammar. This carping demonstrates Sam's superiority to the author and editor. (I'm thinking that Sam is the disciple of an ancient edition of some school textbook.)
8 After reading the review I'm left with the impression that Sam believes that anything done "over there" is far superior to anything done here - with the exception of Sam's own work.

Like Powerpoint Bingo, it would be worth seeing how many of each of these sins appears in each review you read. All eight is a major achievement by the reviewer.

Wittenoom - 1984

Due to an extreme to medium risk to tourists visiting the area from exposure to airborne asbestos, the WA government is closing Wittenoom. Townsite status and placename status have been removed which permits the Shire to close roads and the name to be removed from maps. Quite 1984.

Ezra Pound:

“To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly exact, nor the merely decorative word.”

I think we have too much of the "merely decorative word" in the scripts that come to us. Some of the editorial work we do is paring out the merely decorative which seems almost to be a modern addiction. The thought seems to be If I put enough icing on this cake it will taste good. Nobody wants to expose the story on which the book has been built.

Wild French Mushrooms

It popped up in my email this morning. It was an exciting subject line for an emai. And the body listed such excellently named mushroom as Wood Hedgehogs, Black Trumpets and Fairy Fings

post-colonial pun

I enjoyed this excruciatingly delicious pun found in Elizabeth Street Melbourne. It's in about the same location as the Southern Cross College, so I wonder if one has become the other.

Doris Lessing wins the Nobel

It wa sfascinating listening to her on the radio this morning. She was so matter-of-fact about the win. I guess that's what you feel like at 88. She said, well you can't give it to a dead person.

I do remember reading The Grass is Singing one hot summer's day in my late teens and finding it bizarre (I led a sheltered life) and intrigueing.

rate of change …

It just keeps on increasing a pace in the book trade. Collins have announced they're taking over the franchises of Book City. Well, there you go.

teen genre missing here?

It was interesting (and a pleasure) talking to the charming David Levithan, publisher of the Push imprint, in New York. There is a whole teen genre in the US which doesn't exist here, which David said started when they pulled the teen books out of the children's section and put it next to the adults section.

Helen Mirren

I'm just back from a trip to the US. The whole family went. A blend of pleasure and business. On the first night in San Francisco I watched the Emmy awards. It was quite a different feeling watching them over there than here. I felt I was in the culture the awards were about. One comment struck me in particular. When Helen Mirren collected one more of the awards won by "Prime Suspect", the British TV show she said, "You Americans are wonderfully generous people." [Pause and then, not wanting to sound too much lips on bum, she added.] You're a lot of other things as well. Some good, some bad." The generosity and the surprisingly warm open enthusiasm was what I experienced on the business side of the trip. It was a shot in the arm. [Footnote: Time saw fit to quote Helen Mirren's comment in their quotes column.]

reading the Blue News

Interesting to come back and discover that so much happened in three short weeks;:

75% of Lonely Planet is sold to the BBC
PEP makes and offer for the Australian Borders stores
Allen & Unwin sells its share ADS to Hachette and heralds a move to UBD

RG Madden on design and Australian culture

I wanted to quote:

"[The Ford motor car is] Pound for pound, the best cars in the world - our culture threw that up. You don't have to put a kangraroo on it. It is what it is." And he cites that there are seven Australian designers working for Alessi.

Commodisation is a word I'm hearing a lot

It seems to be a business buzz word at the moment - something businesses should fear. So here is a definition.

A commodity is a product that is completely undifferentiated. If a product becomes less differentiated, so that buyers care less about who they buy from, this change is called commoditisation.
The key effect of commoditisation is that it reduces the pricing power of the producer: if products become more alike from a buyer's point of view they will tend to buy the cheapest.
Commoditisation is a key reason why many growth markets disappoint investors. Sales volumes grow as expected but, as the market matures, prices come under pressure and margins shrink. This is a key issue to consider when picking growth stocks.
In order to avoid commoditisation companies need to be able to differentiate their products with something unique, that is not easily copied by competitors, and which is valued by customers. This may take the form of a strong brand, a technology lead, good design, good retail locations, or anything else that will convince customers not buy the cheapest product. The alternative to avoiding commoditisation is, of course, to compete on price.

I'm not sure how that applies to the book trade.

My understanding of comoditization in the publishing context is the the quality of book stops mattering and the marketing, including the choice of author/subject/celebrity, becomes everything, and the success of the book is then thought to depend on the size of theadvance and the concomitant size of the marketing spend. It's what's happened to a good chunk of UK publishing. It appeals to publishers because it removes uncontrollable variables, like the quailty of the writing, from the equation.

The gorgeously sounding word "fungible" is an allied definition; A commodity is fungible if it is perfectly interchangeable with any other of the same type and class. So a fungible celebrity biography is one that is perfectly interchangeable with any other celebrity biography.

Heyward article in Saturday's Age

I read with interest Michael Heyward's article "Word wise, book poor" in Saturday's Age. It was a spacious and fascinatng review of the state publishing in this country. I found much I agreed with and quite a bit I disagreed with - a sharp and enjoyable stimulus to thought.

First it pips me off that independent children's publishing get so little recognition both in the broader community (including festivals), within government, and even within our own independent publishing community. Michael doesn't include children's publishing in the para "Independent publishing shows signs of life…" (I'd like to see a Books Alive for children's books - start kids reading, keep them reading in the teen years and you build a community of "cuirious habitual readers".)

I agree its a good time for independent publishing, that it was a tragedy that the stylish McPhee Gribble folded into Penguin (they did blaze an amazing path), and that branch-plant publishing slowed the development of publishing infrastructure (but has enable the independents to access excellent distribution).

The economy is chuffing along and the independent publishers seem to be doing quite nicely in its wake. Times are golden for books. $2.5billion at the till, bigger than film ($867 million at the till of which only $40 million was for Australian films) and recorded music combined. The comparison Michael makes between Nobel-prize winning Patrick White selling 30,000 copies in 1973 and Kate Grenville selling more than 100,000 copies of The Secret River is a sign of how far we have come. And we need more astute, quick-witted publishers like Michael, Henry Rosenbloom and Rod Hare both within and without the corporate walls.

I'm not convinced of the necessarily beneficial effects of government spending though. I think the failure of our film industry is in part a result of its dependence on government funding. The need for government spending sent it on a downward sprial,;the dependence on a beauracratic decision-making process has worked against the quick-witted and the astute and favored the earnest. Govenment money is a two edged sword. I think PLR and ELR have been a huge success because they reflect people's choices.

I like Michael's suggestion of a national non-fiction prize; and what about government support for the CBCA awards?

If you missed the article, it is well working fishing the paper out of the recycling bin and having a read.

e book

We have to read Anna Karenina for my book group, and I started by printing pages from a download from Project Gutenberg - worked but a little clumsy, so now I've downloaded the e-book software for my Palm Pilot, and I'm going to give it a shot, reading my first e-book.

I'll let you know how I go.

NSW's Premiers shortlist

A huge congratulations to black dog authors Lili Wilkinson (Joan of Arc) and Peter Mcinnis (The Kokoda Track) for their shortlisting in the NSW Premier's History Awards.

The Kokoda Track is the clearest and most readable description of the experience of the Militia and the AIF on the Kokoda Track. It's not just for kids. And congratulations to Karen, the editor, and Guy, the map-maker.

And I was particularly pleased to see a non-Australian topic be recognized by the judges with Lili's Joan. It's a terrific book - the fictionalized voices extraordinary - and then when you've finished Joan please start reading Lili's latest - Scatterheart