Tag Archives: publishing

I still get more excited over print than digital…

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For someone who goes on about eBooks a fair bit, I do get quite excited over print books, namely when my stories are in them. Which is fair enough, because I think it’s only happened twice.

Nothing But FlowersI got my copy of ‘Nothing But Flowers’ in the mail today and quickly flicked to see my story ‘Empty Shelves’ sitting there with my name under the title. Nothing like seeing your name in print to get you motivated. I finished my edit after that, for a story in another ‘Literary Mix Tapes’ anthology, ‘Eighty-Nine.’ My story in it is tentatively titled ‘Amir’ after the brave Iraqi teenager that features in it.

I think I still get excited about seeing my name in print because part of me still thinks traditional publishing is more legitimate than digital publishing, or at least even if I see that there is still value in being published online or in an eBook, most of my friends, family and comrades probably think print counts for something more. I’ve been showing it off all day. Does this prove I’m a real writer? Look, someone else has put my words on a real page.

Comparing print and digital book formatting

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As most of you know, I bought two eReaders last year, the Sony Reader and the Kindle (which I’m both yet to properly review or compare) and eBooks and eReading has been a major focus of this blog for some time now; a lot of it has been complaining but I do really love the Kindle and where eBooks are going.

But at the moment, the two books I am reading are in print, not digital. I’m reading them because they’re not out as eBooks (one’s not released yet at all) which I’ve spoken about before, but also, I’m enjoying reading in print again, especially new print books.

You see, one of the things that bothers me about both print books and digital books is the way they’re formatted, especially with long form text. Reading short pieces on the Kindle is a dream, better than scrunched up print outs out of your bag and so loading lots of beta reading is fun, but it becomes split even when it comes to novels.

I hate text that is small, bunched up, dense, not spaced out. I’m big fan of double-spacing, normal paragraph sizes and eloquent fonts. If something isn’t formatted right, I find it harder to read, even a deterrent. This is a bit OCD of me and I realise a lot of people won’t have a problem with this like I do, but hey, the internet gives us the freedom to rant about small things to only some people care about.

Comparing eBooks to old out of copyright titles, the eBook with its standard formatting beats the tatty second hand copy or the old editions. With newer paperbacks though, I think eReaders and eBooks are a bit behind.

Firstly, a lot of books are just badly formatted and full of errors. My copy of Cell from Kobo Books has really wide margins in an eReader, my partner’s copy of The City and The City has all accented letters in capitals. I’ve seen numerous mistakes and from professional publishers, it’s more than disappointing. The quality of formatting seems more lax than in print. Not to mention no response from publishers or retailers about fixing problems.

But secondly, there’s even a problem with the lack of options in the eReaders themselves. You can only change the size of the font on the Sony Reader and the only font is damn ugly. You can choose two or three fonts with the Kindle but even that doesn’t suffice, but it is better. Fonts in print books seem to often complement the content and style of the writing which is then harder to replicate with an eBook when there aren’t that many options. I’ve heard that you can embed fonts but haven’t seen publishers utilise this yet. If you’ve seen them do this, then point me in the right direction.

Some people prefer books formatted in different ways to other people so the benefit of a digital version should be the ability to have a choice, to change it according to your own tastes instead of the one size fits all of print publishing but at the moment, my two print books look much nicer than the stuff I have on my eReaders.

Defenders of print books cite how the books look and feel as to why they won’t switch but I don’t think it has to be this way. With a little effort, eBooks could look much nicer and more personalised.

Writing well versus writing (and tweeting) for the market

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Do we spend too much trying to write well when people might not even read it? Does it even matter what the quality is when success is based on the market and advertising equations? Shouldn’t we tweeting instead of writing? Or do some of us spend too much online talking about being writers and not actually writing?

Some questions and issues were thrown open by Conner O’Brien on Killings yesterday in his post, Step one: Learn how to write. Step two … ? He argues that it doesn’t so much matter how good your writing is, so much as can it be sold to a market, and one way to do that is to build an audience online, ditch the publishers and do it yourself. There’s also a bit of discussion in the comments section worth reading and possibly contributing too, such as the always insightful Emmett Stinson’s point that most writers don’t earn a living from writing, even if you write for the market.

There are a few points though that I’d like to draw out.

Writing quality or for the market?

I think there is truth to the idea that literature and books under capitalism are subject to the market. Publishers make economic decisions about what to publish. Everything is a commodity, which is a reality that we need to face, but it also something worth stating is a problem. I don’t like that anything at all produced under capitalism is done because it makes money, not because it’s useful to society or not, but especially art. It seems absurd that something of high quality could be rejected simply because it won’t appeal to a wide audience. That is why O’Brien and others argue that you need to build your own audience and go it alone catering to a niche rather than writing just to appease the widest possible audience.

Though at the same time, I’d distance myself from the kind of argument that blames how uncultured the mass of people are. Those attacks always stink of elitism. The point to make would be that if art (or anything) wasn’t subject to laws of profitability, and ideas such as producing things to suit as many people as possible weren’t so prevalent, we could conceivably cater for a whole variety of tastes.

Should we spend more time building an audience online?

It shouldn’t surprise you that I’m sympathetic to the argument of building an audience online and building a name for yourself. I started a website, later this blog, and my Twitter account, in order to get my name out there, build a profile, find people interested in my writing and to network with other writers. It’s been a lot of fun, I’ve had some success with it, and I’d certainly encourage emerging writers to blog, tweet and mix with other writers.

But my problem isn’t that people are not doing this, it’s that I think writers can be sucked into doing it too much. And I’m totally guilty as charged.

My one line of defence is that most of the time the excessive amount of time I spend blogging, tweeting and Facebooking is time that I probably can’t write anyway. Fiction writing, for me, requires the kind of solid attention that the time tweeting at work can’t provide. Of course, I do it at home too but not nearly as much.

But there can be some weeks where I’ve blogged about being a writer, moaned about rejections on Twitter and identified as a writer online whilst having written not one word of fiction in that week. Sure, you don’t have to write all the time but I think I (and others) have a tendency to talk more about being a writer than actually producing words.

So the problem for me is that I can be building myself to a level where I have an audience, a profile, where people know my name, want to read my work, but my work isn’t at the quality yet that meets that profile, or any standard. There can be a pressure that you should have things out in the world by now because people might recognise you – but you just blush and admit you’re still piling up rejections or have most of your decent work languishing on your hard drive because, whilst you might have blogged every day that week, you didn’t put aside time to do any editing.

I think it can lead to impatience as Toothsoup points out responding to some of the issues around my self-published eBook. You have a profile so you want to get something out there, when really you need to realise you’re not quite there yet.

And yes, it is ironic that I am spending my afternoon constructing a response that says we spend too much time online talking about writing instead of writing.

Gatekeepers

I guess if my Facebook profile indicated I was in some kind of relationship with the trolls guarding the bridge to publishing goodness, it would read: ‘it’s complicated.’ I think I hate that there is a need for gatekeepers, but am cautious about defying them or ignoring them. As I pointed out above, publishers are often more concerned with publishing something that has an audience than something of quality – and so that and numerous other reasons can judge whether or not you get a ticket through the gate and your work reaches anyone.

The idea of building your own audience is based on a desire to bypass those gatekeepers and digging out your own niche, finding even just a minority of people who want to read your stuff, profit margins be damned. I like the idea and as with my eBook (now offline) I’ve tried to do it before and am thinking of trying it again, but much further down the track after I actually spend some more time writing, editing and honing my craft. I’m sympathetic to the idea of going it alone because ‘Marxist horror’ isn’t really something I feel would appeal to the mass market, much like Marxist ideas at this point in history aren’t the most popular, and even most horror doesn’t reach a mass audience.

But the thing that always gets me is how do you differentiate between being rejected by the holy gatekeepers because it doesn’t fit a mass market or because it’s just crap (I have a distinct feeling as I ask this that I might have asked it before, perhaps several times). How do you know your work meets a certain standard that means you can just go it alone? It makes me feel that, at least for now, I need some kind of tick of approval from a gatekeeper.

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I don’t think that us as writers necessarily do spend too much time learning how to write well. Then again, O’Brien refers to those studying writing at university, which I haven’t done, but the online environment is often a way new writers try to learn about the craft as well, to good and bad ends. I feel like I still have a lot to learn about writing before I can decide whether or not to use an audience I’ve built to go it alone and try other methods other than through the channels provided by gatekeepers. And I could do with spending more time doing that than writing long blog posts addressing these concerns.

* One point of clarification I’d like to make is on publishers and their motives. I realise that a lot of publishers and editors do love books, do judge quality and not every decision is based on the laws of the market. I think this applies more so to small press and independent publishers than the big houses. It is more a general point that publishing like most industry is subject to the need to stay afloat and make some sort of money, even if they do run at a loss for a while. Even self-publishing can’t escape the laws of capitalist economics in the end.

All problems start with DRM

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This piece was originally published on Shane Jiraiya Cummings’ blog where he kindly invited me to participate in ‘The Grand Conversation on eBooks.’ Check out his site for a heap of other great posts from some really respected people in the industry discussing digital publishing.

The way we read in a few years time, I think, is going to be totally different from how we’ve read in the past. Greater than the shift from records to cassettes to CDs to MP3s, books and literature is entering the digital age with much angst, debate, and uncertainty, but finally, I think we’re beginning to actually accept the changes and try to shape the new era in our own way.

Hence publishers and booksellers have been having panels and seminars and discussions on eBooks, writers festivals frequently feature panels and sessions on digital publishing as part of their program and blogs, often an accessible field for discussion amongst the literati, are beginning to discuss it at length. It started in Australia with the Meanland project and now it’s branched out to the speculative fiction fields, which is why we’re all here with Shane.

As a writer, I have some thoughts about how I’d like things to go, but writers are also readers (or they should better be), and so some of my thoughts are shaped as an early adopter of eBooks and eReaders in particular. It helps because if the new ways of reading don’t make it easier for readers, what’s the point?

And the first barrier we come to is DRM (digital rights management) – or various methods of security and encryption on eBooks. There are a lot of different parties vying to keep control of their sections of the market. We’ve got publishers, booksellers, writers, and competing bookstores at that. Each bookstore so far wants to make sure you keep buying books from them, and so most of the time, if you buy a device, it’s linked to a respective store. If the book you want is not available at that store, and at another in a different format, most of the time you can’t read that book on your device. This is how booksellers are making it harder for people to adopt eBooks.

To use an analogy from Cory Doctorow, it is like having a bookshelf that you can only stock books from a particular bookstore with only one format: say a shelf of only mass-market paperbacks. Where as in the world of print, if you have a bookshelf, you can stock it with books from any damn store you want. You can read that book anywhere you want, take it with you anywhere, and lend it to anyone.

DRM, the current models of eBooks, and digital bookstores ignore the fact that people read in different ways. With eBooks, there is no one way that has emerged as dominant. People read eBooks on their desktop computers, their laptops, their iPhones or other smart phones, or their iPads or other tablet computers. There are also dedicated eBook Reading devices, some using a special eInk technology that isn’t backlit and so reads almost like a page. They include Kindles and the Sony Reader, and some devices like the Kindle use special formats whereas others use an open format, EPUB, though most bookstores sell a version of that format restricted with DRM, hence destroying the benefit of the open format anyway.

If you make your book(s) available in only one or a few of those formats, you cut off access to all of the readers that use another method. For readers, this is especially frustrating. It’s hard to decide what device to buy, in particular, when you’re looking at a dedicated device. It would make the process and transition to this new technology a whole lot easier if bookstores and publishers made their titles available in a wide variety of formats in order to cater to everybody, at least, until a particular technology becomes dominant.

Ideally, this would also include DRM-free files so it is easier to move your files between devices, and if need be, convert files to other formats. The problem publishers see with this is piracy, but with the high probability that people will find ways around encryption methods and file sharing sites making a heap of titles available in unencrypted methods, there is little benefit in return for frustrating and restricting honest consumers that want to pay money for your titles.

Smashwords is an ideal model, though at present, it mostly publishes titles from small press publishers and self-published authors. The DRM-free, multi-format model, which I think is ideal, is so far being shunned by the major publishers, which the majority of readers get their books from.

For most writers, the possibility of living off royalties from your work is a pipe dream. The main concern, really, is to have your work read, and so it is in the interest of writers to have their work available in as many places and methods as possible. The problem at the moment is not only the debate around formats and DRM, but whether titles go digital at all. Most books are only available in print. Further hindering people’s willingness to even try digital reading. Writers need to start asserting that, in the least, their titles are made available in some form as an eBook because it just cuts them off from more and more readers turning to digital as their primary form of reading.

Refocusing on submissions and short fiction

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Things can change pretty dramatically sometimes. Focus can change and shift all of a sudden (as can a dictator’s hold on power) and yesterday was one of those days. Can you notice something?

After the flurry of discussion yesterday, I’ve pulled down Sanity Juxtaposed. It was refreshing and exciting to have some decent discussion on this here little blog because I hadn’t seen it in a while. I realised that whilst my little experiment isn’t something to regret and I learnt something, it was time to end it and focus on something else.

As one Facebook friend quoted from someone else, “never send out your half-baked cakes” and so I have come to see that putting out those old short stories shouldn’t be my focus, that they reflect badly on me and don’t show my best writing. I need to turn my energy toward writing new work and refining it to be the best it can be.

I kind of got preoccupied with the eBook thing, which wasn’t all bad. I’m still going to blog on eBooks and eReaders but less on trying the whole process out for myself.

Another great thing to come out of the discussion, was further discussion. Alan Baxter offered some thoughts yesterday on posting free fiction on your blog and I agree with a lot of what he said. I don’t mean to denigrate what a lot of people are doing, like my friends in #FridayFlash but I am considering shifting my focus away from it because I’ve written some good stuff last year that became ineligible for publication because it was already up here. Instead, I was left wishing it’d refined it a bit in secret and gave it a chance at more exposure.

I might still post flash fiction and some of my poetry every once and a while, though. I have quite decided about poetry in particular because often my poetry is written to be spoken so is often not suitable for submission to print journals and the whole open mic poetry scene is a different ball game to submitting to journals.

But, I’m thinking short fiction is going to be my focus again. I’m getting all excited about the idea of reorganising my writing folder, putting to bed some old pieces that have been rejected too many times and doing some serious writing, rewriting and editing and targeting some markets. I think I’ve just about missed the boat on Voiceworks but I’ve got a few other places that would make me seriously happy to be apart of.

P.S. There’s a change to this blog coming up too. Can you guess what it is?

How is my eBook going?

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Sanity Juxtaposed, my eBook that is now available on Smashwords, Amazon, Kobo Books, Borders.com.au and the iBookStore (as well as others) has been out for a little over three months now and so I’m starting to assess how well it’s been going – or not going well, as I’m beginning to fear.

The first step in that assessment started with this piece I wrote for Alan Baxter’s series on Digital Publishing, and me looking at some of the factors for poor sales.

To date, I’ve sold 6 eBooks (4 on Smashwords and 2 through iBooks) and none on Amazon for Kindle. There may be more through iBooks and the Kobo Store since the start of December, because sales haven’t been reported since then and some people mentioned they might buy it but it will easily be less than 10. 10 books isn’t quite what I was hoping for.

I don’t want this to become a whine, but I am left wondering about what’s gone wrong after seeing that 91 people have download the sample on Smashwords and only 4 people have bought it. It could be that what they read was shit (which is I possibility I’ll come back to) or it could be the nature of people buying online. I flip out $5 (the old price) or more for a beer all the time, or $2 (the price I dropped it to) for a drink, a donation to a busker etc. and it doesn’t seem to matter but people seem to freak when it comes to purchasing stuff online as if that money is worth so much more. The Oatmeal’s comic explains this point in hilarious fashion.

I don’t want to make it available for free or for .99c because I think $2 isn’t that much and I did work on that book. It’s not worth nothing. I realise people like free content and I blog like crazy to provide that but I also believe in supporting writers and have bought a number of eBooks from friends not just because I want to read their work but because I want to support them.

A lot of those people downloading the sample though, are quite possibly strangers and so I accept that they may judge it on the sample. The start of the book features my first short stories and poems. This was a bit of a gamble because it’s not my best work, nothing like what I write now. But I put it in to be be true to the original version of the book, released in 2005, but also to show a progression of my writing style. I tried to explain the reasoning for this but either people didn’t get it, didn’t read the introductions, or it didn’t work.

I can’t really tell because as of yet, I haven’t gotten any real feedback on the book, whether the early works worked, or whether any of it was any good. So all of this is just me thinking too much and wondering aloud.

I am now thinking of starting again, as in, doing a new eBook, maybe with only a few shorts, some newer stuff and a few select pieces of flash fiction that people really liked and see how that goes.

What does that mean for Sanity Juxtaposed? I could remove it, make it free, make it cheaper or just leave it there. I’m still tossing it up but it’s useful to have others like Shane Jiraiya Cummings and Aaron Polson embarking on similar (but apparently more successful) experiments and hopefully with a few of us reporting on our progress, we can learn something. One thing Shane is doing to increase his sales and impact on the market is releasing multiple eBooks, which is an argument for leaving Sanity Juxtaposed there and releasing something new as well.

But at the moment, what I need is feedback on what people think about my eBook, the sample and the possibility of releasing something else. I have a story called ‘My Boss Sucks’ that myself and others like but can’t find a market so it could be a way of releasing it out into the wild and being done with it. What do people think?

Update: Sanity Juxtaposed is now no longer available after finally having some honest feedback from people. It is well worth reading the comments below. It has some decent advice for writers.

Readings and SPUNC reject eReaders with new eBook Store

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Books from independent Australian publishers have made their long awaited entry into the eBook market this morning. With the opening of the Readings eBook store in conjunction with SPUNC, a whole range of titles from publishers such as Text Publishing, Scribe Publications, and Sleepers Publishing are available for you to purchase and read. But if you’re looking to read any of these titles on an eInk eReader, prepare to be disappointed.

Finally Let the Right One In is available in Australia digitally thanks to Text Publishing but after I eagerly clicked on the title this morning, my heart sank upon reading the compatibility information. No .ePub, no .mobi, no downloadable files to speak of. All eBooks on the store are available though modern web browsers.

The store is a very conscious rejection of eInk devices and seems to force people to mostly use backlit devices like computers, iPads and smartphones. Granted, it says you can access the titles via the browser in the Kindle 3 but aside from this being much more fiddly, a heap of other devices are excluded including the Sony Reader and Kobo.

And there was hardly a comment this morning on Readings and SPUNC snubbing eReaders. Twitter was full of praise. Am I the only one that sees eInk devices as key to the adoption of eBooks?

In the opening blog post on the store, Readings Managing Director Mark Rubbo urges readers, “don’t shackle yourself to Amazon’s Kindle or Borders’ Kobo!” but in response shackles readers to other devices. The lack of choice is obvious. Whilst making eBooks available to those without specialised devices should be welcomed, to in turn remove the choice to use those devices seems illogical.

I thought the rise of eInk devices was a way to introduce readers to eBooks without the annoyance of eye strain from backlit devices and to keep reading portable. Now I wonder if we’re beginning to already see the rejection of these devices in favour all reading happening on back lit screens.

Confronting the monopoly of one device by rejecting those devices completely in favour of this browser-only method is just as bad. It is not hard to have both. Smashwords.com, mostly for self-published titles, offers a variety of choices. You can read titles in a browser, download a PDF to read on your computer or download EPUB or .mobi to suit various eBook devices including iPhones and iPads.

With all this eBook business being in its infancy and lots of unknowns still to emerge, I think it’s a mistake for any bookseller or publisher to lock themselves into one type of technology. Surely it would be smarter to give consumers a wide variety of options of methods, at least until one key method of reading emerges.

Update: It should be noted that I’ve later discovered that Text Publishing have made Let the Right One In available as a DRM-EPUB at both Kobo Books and Borders.com.au. Though, most titles through SPUNC members don’t have the same distribution or it isn’t seen as important because news of those releases have been pretty limited.

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2010 in review

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I’m off to Sydney tomorrow night so this could possibly be my last blog post of 2010 (“Awww!”) and in the theme of it being the end of the year and getting all nostalgic and stuff, I thought I’d look back at all the things I achieved this year. I kind of think I did a lot and made a bit of a leap forward.

Performance Poetry
I think adding spoken word or performance poetry to my repertoire is probably the most significant thing to happen to me this year. In May, after some encouragement from Santo Cazatti, I read for the first time at an open mic night in Brunswick and haven’t looked back.

Over this year, I’ve read at many open mic nights, slams and events around Melbourne, regularly producing new work to perform. It’s paid off because next year I’ll do my first feature poetry performance.

#SpokenSunday
Inspired by my foray into spoken word as well as my regular contribution to #FridayFlash, I started up a new thing, a kind of twitter meme, called #SpokenSunday where each Sunday I got people to record spoken word pieces or readings and post them to Twitter and on the blog.

It was a modest success, thanks mainly to Annie for keeping it ticking, as Sundays got too busy and I fell behind in keeping it running. It’s moving across to the writing blog, Write Anything with me next year.

My first eBook Reader
In September, thanks to my tax return, I bought my first eReader, a Sony Reader Touch. This is significant because eReaders and digital publishing have been probably the most talked about topics in the literature world this year and I wanted to be an early adopter considering I’ve been obsessed with the topic as well. I probably haven’t used it as much as I’d have liked but I bought an Amazon Kindle too that’ll be delivered in January.

The Red Pen – Issue One
In October, I launched the debut issue of my radical zine, The Red Pen, which is full of fiction and poetry from other radicals and was a way for me to get explicitly left-wing fiction out there. The launch with spoken word from some Melbourne’s best radical poets was one of the highlights of my year.

Chinese Whisperings and ‘Somewhere to Pray’
This project consumed up most of my year and I wouldn’t give it up for anything (and I’m led to believe I’m doing it again next year!). Thanks to Jodi Cleghorn for getting me in on this and teaching me so much in terms of writing and editing. ‘Somewhere to Pray’ is my story in the twin anthologies and if you’re allowed to have a favourite story of your own, this would be my one currently. It’s out as an eBook but is coming out in paperback next year too.

Interviewing China Miéville
This would have to take the prize for the most exciting opportunity of the year. When Angela Meyer asked me to do the interview with her at the Melbourne Writers Festival, I think my reply was something like “Fuck yes!” Angela and I got a little under half an hour to quiz China on his work and as could be expected, I asked about how it links with his politics too. This was amazing not only because I consider him the closest to my own style, but also because he’s an incredibly warm and intelligent man.

Launching the Sanity Juxtaposed eBook
I thought this one wasn’t going to happen. Between working out what to put in the thing, editing, proof reading and formatting the eBook, I learnt a lot from the process and am still learning now with the sale of it. I launched it in October and for Kindle this month. Working with Smashwords has been fun and I hope to experiment more with them next year.

50 Stories for Pakistan
I never actually blogged about this when it happened, but at the end of October, Big Bad Media and Greg McQueen launched 50 Stories for Pakistan, a book of short stories to raise money for victims of the floods in Pakistan. I have a little story, ‘Packages to Neighbours’ in there and it’s my first story somewhere in print (other than zines), which is a bit of a milestone.

NaNoWriMo
In November, I won National Novel Writing Month for the second time, working with a story arc paced at around 50,000 words, which isn’t technically a novel but I’m looking forward to rewriting it after I finish that final scene. Writing felt tougher this year but I’m glad to feel like I’m getting better at this novel writing thing.

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I don’t think I did too badly this year. I’m still missing finishing that elusive major project like a novel or short story collection but perhaps that can be for next year.

Sorry, this title is unavailable: the state of digital book selling in Australia

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I’ve owned a Sony Reader Touch edition since mid-September. It’s a device I’d been waiting to hit the Australian market and I believed more access to devices like these, as well as the Kindle and Kobo, would mark an increase in the popularity of eBooks in Australia.

Print and DigitalSadly though, I haven’t read all that much on the Sony Reader and as such, haven’t been able to come to some sort of conclusion about the device to post a review. The problem isn’t the device, it’s the lack of availability of books to put on the device. So long as the books I want to read are not available as an eBook and only available in print, print book reading will remain the dominant way I consume books.

There are plenty of books available, if I want to read the selection available at Borders.com.au provided through the Kobo eco-system, but I would be selecting books on the basis of getting to read them on the Reader, not the books I want to read.

It seems to me that the range available consists of mostly best sellers and mainstream titles and at the other end, unknown titles and some small or independent publishers. There are a lot of mid-level or small press publishers in Australia that haven’t made their books available yet. Of all the books on my to-read list, most are not available.

In doing research and investigation for a piece for Ricochet Mag’s blog, I contacted some publishers about the progress of transitioning to the digital marketplace. In searching for some titles, such as John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In, I found that whilst it was available overseas, it was not licensed to be sold in Australia. In a global marketplace such as the Internet, this makes little sense to me. Why would someone want to stop me from wanting to purchase their book?

Kobo Store

A quick search on Google led me to numerous pirated files of the same book (poorly formatted, mind you) and so the archaic divisions around territorial rights seem even more absurd and counter-productive.

I was pleased and surprised however to hear that some publishers are on their way and it’s just a matter of the titles being converted into the right formats. So it’s not all just lost in the purgatory of bullshit legal negotiations.

I can’t help though but be continually frustrated with the whole marketplace at the moment. It is moving too slowly for my liking and even from the perspective of capitalism, it seems problematic. The progress of publishing and reading is being held back by sectional interests and this unwillingness to realise that this is what is happening.

Looking across at competing devices and eBook eco-systems such as Amazon and their Kindle hasn’t brought much more hope. The same titles I’ve been looking for are unavailable there too. Even if it was a closed system with annoying DRM, if the titles were available, I’d switch. As it’s not like Borders.com and the EPUB format are free of DRM and bullshit restrictions.

The Borders eBook store powered by Kobo is horrible to find books and the process of ‘authorising’ the use of files you paid for is unnecessary, frustrating and bug prone. Even after authorising a file, there can be problems accessing it. Also, some titles have formatting not suitable to certain devices and makes the files unreadable, this includes titles from major publishers.

The problems with DRM and finding books make Borders and the Sony Reader not that much better in my opinion from Amazon and the Kindle.

Aside from releasing my own book, Sanity Juxtaposed and having access to a whole range of DRM-free eBooks released by independent publishers via Smashwords and other avenues, my digital reading experience has been frustrating and underwhelming.

Publishers and digital book sellers need to pick up their act and remove a lot of the unnecessary barriers that get in the way of honest readers just wanting to read books.

Talking writing and politics with Kalinda Ashton – part four

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This is the fourth and final part of what has been an enlightening discussion for myself with Kalinda Ashton on the issues around politics and writing. I hope it’s been useful for you or at least raised some questions for you to think about.

Part One, Part Two, and Part Three are available if you need to catch up.

I’d like to thank Kalinda for taking the time and effort to thoroughly answer my questions and really get to the heart of it all for my modest little corner of the Internet.

I’d like to congratulate her on making the longlist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for her novel The Danger Game. It’s an award which is nominated by libraries worldwide so it is quite an honour.

I’d also encourage you to pick up a copy of The Danger Game and I’ll be sure to review it myself when I finish it.

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What are some of the common mistakes made about the way you get your point across, in terms of literary devices and the style of writing?

I’m not sure if you mean me, personally, in which case I could write you a long missive, or authors generally, in which case I’m uncertain I have useful things to say.

One of the many difficulties I’ve had with writing with a political investment is to understand that politics can’t be the backdrop to the story it has to be the story. You have to dramatise the political questions and conflicts in an actual narrative, otherwise it isn’t really at the centre of things.

In general I am a very bad plotter and planner. I struggle with structure and so I think about it a lot and talk about it a lot. I am quite drawn to tiny moments, and the everyday in my short stories so this is always hard to translate into an engaging narrative over a longer form. And for a long time I felt trapped by realism – as Helen Garner called it, “realism, bloody realism” – as if I could never write in any other mode, although this is recently changing in my short fiction.

I can be too oblique in my writing to the point of producing incomprehensible sentences. And sometimes I overwrite, reaching for tangled metaphors, which, if you untangle them, don’t tend to mean anything at all.

From time to time I get stuck in a journalistic mode that’s too expositional and not interesting.

I get frustrated with the sense that much of my writing has been almost micro – small moments, a single family, a main character – so the novel I’m working on now has a larger canvas (cliché alert! That’s another of my difficulties…)

One thing I am conscious of is never to write a character with my own politics. I don’t superimpose my political beliefs onto my characters because very few people have exactly the same outlook on the world as I do. I’d love to read a novel about revolutionary politics and its successes and discontents but I wouldn’t write it. Could it be done? I’m not sure; I don’t know who it would interest; it seems memoir is the dominant form for this exploration and yet the notion seems compelling. Segue aside, I don’t make my characters ultra-sophisticated beings or ultra-Left beings. I try to write more closely to the way things are now, to the ordinary.

And I’ve written some fairly reprehensible unreliable narrators and characters.

Perhaps one mistake young writers who want to write novels that challenge how things are make is to have too narrow an idea of what “politics” is. Another is overestimating what a book can actual do in a struggle to change the world.

I think the major challenge in all writing and certainly in fiction from the Left is how to resist the obvious.

Is it always the case that it has to be story first? Or is can you write a story with the message at the fore front if it’s done a certain way?

Hmm, I hadn’t heard this argument about “story first”.

No. I almost always start with a character, a voice, a place or a single scene. Years ago I was briefly enrolled in postgraduate journalism at RMIT and our teacher said that most people want to be journalists because they want to “make a difference”. I think many writers feel the same. Even though it’s almost blasphemy to claim your starting point is that you have something to say, I have no shame about beginning with a message. But then authors have to establish how this story will be told. If you really burrow into a story then the story and the message become Siamese twins – inextricable. But if the clarity of the message consistently triumphs over the story you’ve built – its logic, its momentum, its trajectory – then something has gone wrong. This is not exactly a novel. Either you’ve written something incredibly interesting or you have a weird peculiar hybrid that is monstrous.

If you have a message, complicate it! Find the complexity in it. Write about the contradictions of things. I am by no means suggesting we find sympathy in our hearts for the humanity of George Bush, or notice the kind way a war criminal treats his wife – I have no time for this, that’s the easy option, that’s the obvious and that’s shirking from your ideas. But think about people’s mixed consciousness, the way they can be sophisticated about some things, and unknowing about others. Or how a great campaign can fail because of reversals in circumstance or coincidences or minor defeats, or splits. It’s just about looking at the whole full picture. (I say “just” but I haven’t worked out how to do it yet.)

Some people have said to me that I should write so that can ‘both sides’ can enjoy the story or get something out of it. Is this something you try to do or avoid?

Obviously not, although that’s not to say that my own blindspots and oversights don’t intrude on my writing. I think the notion of “both sides” enjoying your writing is utterly Utopian. For one thing, most of your own side won’t read your novel (statistically speaking: sales of Australian novels are very low at present). For another, you’ll struggle enough to gain the interest of an audience that is already sympatico, or curious about your writing, let alone reaching out to all the neocons out there (or, God forbid, the Tea Party). If you are lucky – and I’m tempted to say this is out of your control – you might manage to somehow capture the zeitgeist of the age and find an audience who reads your work on multiple levels and finds all sorts of competing and incommensurable ideas, reassurances and challenges in it. But this is hardly something you can plan for – it’s not as if we have computer software that can spout out a ‘spirit of the age, taking the temperature of our times, touching a nerve in mass culture’ novel for you!

On the other hand you want to appeal to people who aren’t themselves political machines with their minds made up about all the problems of the world (or, in other words, the 99.9 per cent of the universe at present), otherwise why write a novel? A novel needs to move people, to confront them, to take them places they don’t really want to go and this isn’t exactly a question of sides per se. And even for the ‘converted’ you hope to capture positions and sensibilities in a new way, in another light. Even people who are incredibly politically invested recognise the need to relate to people, movements and things beyond their own ranks.

Because if you just write a statement of principles about how the system ought to work, or a series of points about why it doesn’t or why it is exploitative or oppressive or unequal, you haven’t written a piece of fiction, you’ve written a program for a political organisation.

So I wouldn’t worry about trying to have balance, or ‘both sides’ in your work so long as the side of the story you are telling is imaginative, engaged, multi-faceted and has depth. It needs to work in the structure of fiction. Sometimes things are clarified not by ‘balance’ or so called ‘objectivity’ but by making the case for something strongly, by arguing hard for it. But a novel is not an argument, or not only an argument, it is also observation, creativity, emotion, character, mood, fear, hunger…

Left-wing authors, like any authors, still need to learn craft, control, mechanics of writing, even if they do so with a healthy dose of critical thinking. A great message poorly rendered is not enough.

All this should prompt the question of whether you want to write a novel at all. After all there are forms like creative non-fiction or even journalism that might offer more opportunities to emerging writers who want to speak out about the system.

Do you have any other words of advice for emerging political writers?

Read all the time and read very widely. I mean it – read everything!

Get involved in campaigns because these, more than novels, can change the world. Learn about activism and politics – become a political person if you aren’t already (you probably are!)

Acknowledge that you don’t know it all yet. (That would be advice I would give to my younger self who was so polemical and incensed that I often did not know the arguments of my enemies or even, if they weren’t what I deemed “Left wing enough”, friends, your fellow travellers. No doubt most emerging Left-wing authors know better than I did.) I still know very little so I’m not sure what equips me to give this advice…

Be honest in your writing and be honest with yourself. “No tricks” as the famous catchphrase goes.

Even if you know many of the left-wing theorists ended up on the wrong side of the barricades, or far from the barricades altogether, have a grasp of contemporary Marxist and Feminist cultural studies/literary theory, which helps frame debates about political writing, culture and the role of literature that can enrich your perspective of what it is, exactly, you are trying to do.

Find a network of like-minded people, whether that be a writing group/workshop or trusted readers who can give you fair criticism. Think about what you like and what is effective in the work of authors you admire.

Watch television. Some of the most layered and confronting political writing is happening in TV: think of The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad. In one sense or another all of these are about gender, class, ethnicity, power, the legal system, corruption, the role of the police, the education system and ideology.

Read in the tradition that has come before you. Dig out the novels by political activists and the novels that do what you are trying to do (political or none).