The "Uncanny Valley"

A topic of some enduring interest. An appealing anomaly, an delightful irony, a conundrum. The closer animation gets to reality the less realistic it seems. The valley showcases the ability of the human mind to fill in the gaps as long as the gabs are big enough to be worth filling. So for example in Animalia the animals are done with greater realism than the humans.

Summer is the season of the short story

… whether its a collection for Christmas or in the daily paper.

food for thought - will e-books go the same way?

"The digital growth in downloaded songs and albums hit record levels in 2007, but it wasn't enough to make up for the loss in physical CD sales. Sales in the U.S. of all albums, digital and physical, dropped 15% to 500.5 million from the 588.2 million sold in 2006. Last year was the seventh consecutive in which music sales have dipped; the last rise was in 2000, when album sales hit 800 million." Variety

novels v movies

"A novel can include a sort of panorama of characters, a little like the Breughel painting with Icarus going down in the lower right-hand corner of the canvas. That's one of the reasons there are novels. That's one of the reasons we need novels and we need movies. A novel can account for randomness and can include a wide range of people whose fates just barely impinge on one another. I can't think of a way to tell a story like that in a movie that I would want to see."
David Cunningham, for more of the article see

Oscars

I wasn't aware but it's apparently true to-line actors choose their films on the basis of a release in time for a peak of Oscar voting.

Maybe it's just that I haven't noticed it in the past, but the advertising for Oscar votes is quite in your face this year. It seems a distortion.

Oz style - 2 be open to a lot of things?

"In Australia to make a living out of conducting, you need to be open to doing a really wide variety of concerts, whereas in Europe you could probably be a bit more focused on the traditional classical orchestral repertoire."
Benjamin Northey, conductor, who collaborated with the Hilltop Hoods and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra on the album "The Hard Road: Restrung".

Christmas shopping season correlations

Greatest hit compilations from the music industry
Hardback picture books from the childrens publishing industry

What other special things we do - sell and buy (as special gifts) - for Xmas that we don't do so much at other times of the year?

The Shark Book is coming in March

Dr Mark Norman is following on from cute penguins in the best-selling "The Penguin Book: Birds in Suits" to another hot topic for kids in "The Shark Book: Fish with Attitude". This is not your usual big-fish-with-scary-teeth book. Mark is passionate about the diversity in the world around us. There are 370 species of shark in the world and Australia is home to a massive 166 of them. Only three species regularly attack humans; the great white, the tiger and the family of whalers, which includes the nicely named bull shark.

People eat over 70 million sharks, or so I've been told, and in Australia there have been an average of 1.2 shark attack fatalities each year over the last 200 years. A swimmer is at a much greater risk of drowning than of being attacked by a shark and less than half of the attacks lead to a fatality.

Sharks are an extraordinary bunch. Some sharks are so small they can fit on your hand.My favourites are the cookie cutter sharks who attach themselves to passing beasts with lips like suction cups, and then spin around to cut out a cookie-shaped plug of flesh. One submersible came back from the depths with a nice cookie-shaped hole in its thick plastic window.

Watch out for it! It's an amazing book.

Mother's Day is upon us (just before Xmas)

Everything is so stretched out these days for those of us servicing the retail industry.(Fashion shops are now buying 18 months ahead and planning for product buying for Xmas starts in the preceding January.) We've just finished our sales kits for April-May — 4-5 months away, so Mother's Day is upon us. In the good old days (before my time), when the books were printed, they were then released, which I'm sure was much more civilized. Now we lock in months ahead and we have the printer deliver to the warehouse at least a month ahead of the publication date — to ensure smooth (we hope) and simultaneous (we hope) delivery to every bookseller. We set our the print quantities for our Xmas books back in May, which meant plucking a figure from the air and living hopefully there after. The proof of that Xmas pudding guess will be in January.

Dragon Moon short-listed in the Aurealis Awards

Congratulations to Carole Wilkinson. The Aurealis Awards short-list has been announced and Dragon Moon is in the running for the Best Children's Book.

Here's the complete list

the demands of reading

I came across this quote on the web on the weekend: "Many books require no thought from those that read them, and for the very simple reason; they made no such demands on those who wrote them." Charles Caleb Colton (1782-1832)

This echoed for me the pleasure that my friend Brian had in his 11 year old, Gabriel, finishing The Lord of the Flies and saying ,"I didn't enjoy it but I couldn't put it down". Brian felt that Gabriel was discovering that reading was more than just an immediate pleasure.

Flying Dragons from The Companion

One of the Dean's beautiful dragons from Carole Wilkinson's Dragon Companion has taken flight courtesy of studio Mancini:

www.bdb.com.au/dragoncompanion/

and it is beautiful! Do have a look.

The mind's antechamber

"The ideas that lie at any moment within my full consciousness seem to attract of the own accord the most appropriate out of a number of other ideas that are lying close at hand, but imperfectly with the range of my consciousness. There seems to be a presences-chamber in my mind where full consciousness holds court, and where two or three ideas are at the same time in audience and an antechamber full of more or less allied ideas, which is situated just beyond the full ken of consciousness. Out of this antechamber the ideas most nearly allied to those in the presence chamber appear to be summoned in a mechanically logical way and to have their turn of audience."

From the program notes to "A Large Attendance in the Antechamber' by Brian Lipson: an amazingly energetic one-man show performed at the Malthouse this year.

I'm reading Olver Sacks's Musicophilia and his many references to Galton reminded me of how quote Lipson had chosen had reverberated for me and in one of those serendipitous moments I happened across the program as I was cleaning my office.

Galton was a extraordinary and scary mind.

In quick summary: "a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician." And the discover of uniqueness of fingerprints. I'm not sure that I'd want to always be first thought of as the half-cousin of Charles Darwin.

Black Dog is publishing a history of number by David Demant, designed by Regio Abios, which is coming out next year and will be beautiful -  a union of content and design. I'm sure Galton will get guernsey.

Australian content seems to be doing better

Shamelessly lifting from David Dale:

The Top selling DVDs of the past three months: 1 Transformers; 2 Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix; 3 Summer Heights High; 4 Family Guy season 6; 5 Wild Hogs; 6 Spiderman 3; 7 Stargate SG-1 complete season 10; 8 Happy Feet; 9 Supernatural season 2; 10 300; 11 The OC complete season 4; 12 Heroes season 1; 13 Entourage season 3 part B; 14 Scrubs season 5; 15 Little Britain Abroad.

and this caught my attention:

Every one of our most watched, top ten series in 2007 was locally made: a mix of drama, comedy, documentary and talent quests. Three years ago US drama dominated and the only successful local shows were reality and lifestyle shows.

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.