Contents

From the Director’s Desk

Editorial: Will We Miss Literature When It’s Gone?

The Reading Sickness

Focus: Libby Hart, Paul Dawson, Michelle Cahill

IP Soirée and Gala Spring Season ’06’Launch

Staff Changes

What’s Your Novel Worth?

IP.Sales

IP.Digital Buzz

Out & About

In Review

IP Picks 07

Your Deal

Welcome to issue 32. As we head towards the end of the year (thank you David Jones for reminding us with your Trim-A-Tree being put up on the 1st of September), we get closer to our first annual IP Soirèe, following the releases of our six new titles.

This issue includes wonderful interviews with three of our new authors – Michelle Cahill, Libby Hart and Paul Dawson. We also include a special feature about Libby Hathorn’s digital children’s project Wonderstop.

David’s editorial is of particular interest this issue, especially for those who are wondering about the dwindling number of Australian literary works available in our bookshops. He was responding in part to Carmen Lawrence’s recent Dorothy Green lecture, “The Reading Sickness”, from which we’ve provided a substantial extract.

As always, eNews is rounded out with reviews, digital news, the activities of our authors and special deals to tempt you to join in the David Jones spirit. And check out the IP store for wonderful ideas for people of any age. Great stocking stuffers!

Enjoy the newsletter, and we’ll see you again in the New Year, if not before as our Spring Season ’06 heads to Melbourne, Tasmania, Canberra, Sydney, and, of course, Brisbane, where we hope to bring down some needed rain during our Gala Launch on 5 November!

Regards

Anne Marshall
Newsletter Editor

From the Director's Desk

Just enough breathing space between stops in our Spring Season ‘06 tour to fit in our final issue of the year—and I’m sure you’ll enjoy every screen shot of it!

I’ve just returned from the Northern Territory leg of the Season tour, which included stops in Alice Springs, Katherine and Darwin, where I met numerous aspiring authors keen to learn more about IP. The highlights had to be the Meet the Author and Publisher sessions in those towns, and my Sell That Book! workshop at the NT Writers’ Centre.

There’s no rest for the wicked, though, with stops in Melbourne, Tasmania, Canberra and Sydney, as well as as our first-ever Soirée and Gala Launch in Brisbane the first weekend of November. Tickets are going fast for the Soirée, which will feature all six Spring Season authors, so book yours soon!

Our friends at the NSW Writers’ Centre will be offering IP featured slots at their annual Independent Publishers’ Book Show on the last weekend of November, which will include an in conversation session between me and Tilly Brasch, the Sydney launch of Nigel Turvey’s Terania Creek: Rainforest Wars by former Premier Neville Wran. In the same weekend and the days leading up to the Show, I’ll be attending launches for Paul Dawson’s Picks 06 winning Imagining Winter at UTS; Michelle Cahill’s The Accidental Cage at Gleebooks; and giving a reprise of my Sell That Book! workshop for the NSW Writers’ Centre.

Speaking of IP Picks, our popular national writing competition for unpublished manuscripts is well and truly open for entries now, with the usual closing date of 1 December. Be sure to check out the updated Picks Page, which features the 06 winners and gives all the essential info on how to enter this year’s competition. If the traffic on the website is any indication, we will have even more entries this year than last.

We welcome new Assistant Editor Jennifer Newbury, who’s on work experience with us from QUT, while bidding Erica Sontheimer bon voyage for her new post at The Griffith Review. Erica made quite a mark for herself in a short time with her expertise in promotion, and we expect to make the most of her advice in our revamped marketing plan.

With only 50 shopping days till the Silly Season, give or take a few office parties, we hope we’ve found a way to help you avoid fighting the crowds in our Deals section.

Happy reading, and let us be the first (along with David Jones) to wish you and yours a safe and joyous holiday season.

Cheers!!

Dr David Reiter

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[In this issue, we take a look at three of our authors: Libby Hart, Paul Dawson, and Michelle Cahill intervewed by Anne Marshall (AM) and Erica Sontheimer (ES)]

Libby Hart is from Melbourne, and her collection Fresh News from the Arctic won the Somerset Poetry Prize before being Highly Commended for the IP Picks ’06 Best Poetry Award. The collection was also supported by the Australia Council’s grant to IP in the Presentations & Promotions category.

AM: Fresh News from the Arctic is a collection of poetry that explores the physical and the imaginary. Are the poems included in this collection written specifically with those ideas in mind, or did the themes of the collection come to you after the poems were written?

LH: I didn’t write this collection with real and imaginary landscapes in mind. It actually began very differently when I was a recipient of a D J O’Hearn Memorial Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. In my first draft I was preoccupied with the idea of memory. Its working title was Sleepwalking, and, in a way, that draft now acts as the bones of this collection. Things began to take a different route when I completed the poems “Nicolas Baudin”, “Fresh News from the Arctic” and “Anatomy of Clouds” respectively.

These pieces were written quite close together and at the time there seemed to be something emerging in them that had hovered around me for a while – ideas that I had been trying to articulate as a person and as a writer. In that great and messy book East of Eden, John Steinbeck writes: ‘A child may ask, “What is the world’s story about?” And a grown man or woman may wonder, “What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the story about?”’ I think that statement – or at least my personal interpretation of that statement – is at the crux of all my writing and indeed most writers would probably say the same thing.

So, after these poems were written, I began to regard the manuscript very differently. Essentially what came next was a lot of time contemplating what I really wanted to say and then marrying it into a coherent sequence. I moved some poems around and replaced others and hopefully it is a better book for having done this.

I would add that I think my work has a preoccupation that lends itself to different landscapes – either physical or imaginary. Each time I attempt a poem I try and go somewhere that I haven’t been before. This can either be trying to explore a situation in a different way or by delving into topics I want to know more about. Sometimes I fail miserably and find myself on a well-trodden path while at other times I explore where I am or where I am going in a poem with new eyes and an open mind. I guess this is similar to travelling and because I am generally a restless person this method of writing seems to suit my temperament.

AM: The descriptions you use in your poems are full-bodied and evoke the five senses. Is that a device that occurs naturally in your poetry, or was it part of the thematic idea of the physical and imaginary?

LH: I’m not sure if “naturally” is the best way to describe it. Sometimes I don’t think there’s anything natural about my poems; in fact they are much laboured little animals that have at times been stubborn or a little too world-weary to get their words out succinctly. I’ve often had to have enough faith to stay with them and guide them on their way until I thought that they were strong enough to stand on their own two feet.

I do try very hard to evoke the senses in my work. The idea of conjuring up words and spinning them around to evoke something and make it live is very alluring to me. Again, sometimes I fail at it but the aim is there – that’s definitely something that resides in all my poems and not just the work that’s represented in this collection.

AM: The title of your collection comes from one of your poems, “Fresh News from the Arctic”. Was there a particular reason that you chose this as the title of the book?

LH: I think I chose Fresh News from the Arctic as the title of this collection for two reasons. Firstly, I had received some great feedback about it and I was extremely fortunate enough for it to win a Somerset National Poetry Prize. Secondly, Fresh News from the Arctic arrived at a time when my writing was ready to take a different direction. I say “arrived” because in a sense it was like a difficult labour and I pushed it out into the world where it struggled for a time to thrive. But I worked patiently with it for six months knowing in my own small way that it would be an important work for me. The prize seemed to validate my thoughts that the suite had something to say about life in general, about longing and the idea of exile.

Although Fresh News is very much a story in itself, I began to write it as I was preparing to leave regional Victoria after having lived in the town of Ballarat for three years. So there are references to packing up belongings and being restless to find a new path. I had the dodgy little house with its myriad of residents before me. I had the emotional landscape of leaving a place where I’d initially believed upon my arrival that it would reinvigorate me yet instead kind of wore me down. There were also events in my personal life during that period that shook me around a little – so a lot of introspection was had in Ballarat!

Having said that however, Fresh News from the Arctic is very much an independent story and its unnamed narrator can be male or female. In fact many people have read it as if this teller of secrets is male and perhaps this has something to do with the history of exploration. Needless to say it’s like a love poem and I had wanted to write about the Arctic for many years. I had compiled notes about it and I’d look at them from time to time but nothing really took off until I allowed the region to become an emotional landscape.

Because of all these reasons I felt that Fresh News was the right focus point for this collection.

AM: You’ve divided the collection into three parts. Does this signify a progression between the poems, or is it merely a way of presenting them?

LH: Yes – although the book no longer has distinct sections it is still made up of three parts. The first part loosely concerns itself with the natural world, whilst the middle of the book contains dreamlike poems. The final section has a particular “human condition” theme running through the poems and they are therefore concerned with mortality, sorrow, hope, endurance – all the fragile elements that make us human.

AM: One of your poems, “My Father is a Tumbleweed” was broadcast on ABC Radio National. Are there any other poems in this collection that you feel particularly lend themselves to performance and why?

LH: “My Father is a Tumbleweed” was included in a special broadcast that focused on regional writers around Australia. The reading of it was wonderfully evocative with sound effects and a beautifully trained voice performing it. It was extremely well done and I was especially moved by the experience. Performance is an interesting predicament and I don’t do it at all well. I think actors and other professionals with trained voices are much more suited to reading poetry in public spaces then I am. In that instance I welcome it and enjoy it, but I’m going to place my sacrilegious cards on the table and declare that I much prefer the page to performance. I know that this goes against the history and tradition of poetry, but there it is. I enjoy the page much more.

There is something very intimate about picking up a book and exploring the tattoo of words on the skin of a page. In that quiet moment a connection unfolds and hovers. It’s a place where the mind of the writer visits the mind of the reader. It’s a place where the reader interprets and takes something away from the experience. It’s a much more enriching experience and I respond more deeply to it than I would performance.

AM: Where does the inspiration come from to write your poetry? Do you find yourself inspired by everyday things, or do you think of a theme and work from there?

LH: I try to write about both, actually. I am, however, more inclined to hover towards writing about a topic. I really enjoy being able to research and explore a certain theme and then shape a response to it in a different and hopefully interesting way. These types of projects help me stretch myself as a person and develop as a writer. Progressing to another level is always a key ingredient in how I work.

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Paul Dawson’s collection Imagining Winter was the IP Picks ’06 Best Poetry Award winner. An academic from the University of New South Wales where he teaches creative writing, Paul’s poetry is challenging, original and confronting.

ES: The poems in your collection Imagining Winter take on a multitude of forms while covering a wide variety of topics, from erotic dialogue to national identity. In your mind, what unites these poems?

PD: These poems were all written individually over a number of years, so I have not consciously worked with a single unifying concept or tried to provide an overarching structure. Instead, when putting the collection together I used the three sections to organise some of the recurring concerns and interests in the poems.

The first section, Explorations, includes poems which, to varying degrees, manifest a reflexive awareness of the genre or of the process of writing itself: poems which consciously explore the ways in which a poetic state of mind can engage with experience and thought.

The second section, Assertions, includes my more declarative poems, ones which have a political point to make, or are concerned with social commentary. Poems in the third section, Preoccupations, are more concerned with personal emotions, with the nature of human relations.

In general I would say that the poems in this collection cohere around an interest in contemporary urban existence, including the politics of national identity and the culture of inner city life. A lot of the poems treat the urban landscape as a natural one, an organic part of our lives. This experience of urbanity can’t be understood in terms of that division between the city and the bush which has been such an important tradition in Australian poetry. National politics in the last decade or so has tended to revolve around an unfortunate symbolic division between cultural elites and mainstream ‘battlers’, an ideological debate which is mapped onto a geographic division between the metropolitan inner city one the one hand and outer suburban and regional Australia on the other. Australian urban poetry has engaged with this debate about our national identity (some great examples for me are Coral Hull’s “Liverpool” and Les Murray’s “The Suspension of Knock”) and the effects of this cultural divide are certainly a thread in my collection.

ES: At times – notably in the poem “Yabbering Sextons” – you banter about the vanities of the contemporary creative writing industry. Yet, you are nevertheless a published poet and a lecturer in creative writing and literary studies. How do you reconcile your criticism of the industry with your participation in it?

PD: Well, I think there’s a difference between seeing literature as an art form and literature as an industry. If, as a writer, you think in terms of the former, contemporary literary works become part of a republic of letters animated by debates about the possibilities of literary form, and they can be seen to engage with fundamental but historically shifting issues about the creative process, the nature of literature and its function in society. If you think in terms of the latter, literature becomes a profession determined by practical and institutional realities, with all the attendant operations of power this implies. Your ambitions as a writer, and the contributions to literature which you want to make, differ accordingly.

The two views can definitely be negotiated and reconciled, and I think to understand literature, and to be a practicing writer, it is important to be aware of the politics of marketing and self-promotion, of reviewing, distribution and the processes of canonisation. I guess what I’m criticising is a tendency to perceive literature simply as part of the culture industries, as entertainment for middle class readers, as an arena for professional self-aggrandisement and potential celebrity.

“ Yabbering Sextons” is certainly a satirical critique of literary festivals and writing programmes, the indulgent or uncritical practices of both, and their complicity in an impoverished view of literature. But I think it can also be read as the internal dialogue of an aspiring writer, exploring how anxiety about one’s talent and/or ability to succeed can turn frustration into a sort of deluded bitterness. I recall attending one writers’ festival where the most popular session by far was about how to get published. Heather Cam was one of the panel members and she noted that when editors receive a manuscript they are likely to look at the name on the back of the envelope and be more impressed if they know the name, if they’ve seen it before.

I heard aggreived mutterings amongst the crowd about how this was an example of cronyism, which was patently ridiculous because Cam was saying that, particularly with poetry, one needs to do the groundwork and publish in journals in order to establish a publication record. The session finished with one man standing up and declaiming that despite never being published he would not be deterred because he KNEW that he had talent. I was, and am, an aspiring writer, but I found myself squirming when he was cheered heartily by the audience.

As a teacher of Creative Writing, I’m not that interested in telling students about the profession, about how to get published. I don’t think there are any trade secrets. You write because you want to write, and when you think you have material which is good enough to submit to publishers you send it off and hope it gets accepted. If it doesn’t, you keep trying. Nor am I interested in helping students discover their ‘voice’ or tap into their unique creativity. I want students to immerse themselves in the republic of letters, to be aware of contemporary debates, styles and genres, where they have come from, and then produce innovative work which will make some sort of contribution to the artform.

The bulk of my research output as an academic has been an attempt to identify the pedagogical limitations, theoretical evasions and historical vacuum prevalent in writing programmes. In my book, Creative Writing and the New Humanities (Routledge, 2005), I seek to reconceptualise Creative Writing as an academic discipline within literary and cultural studies, and to conceive of writers as intellectuals engaged in public discourse, rather than artists dedicated to the expression of a private self or personal vision, or professionals in the production line of the publishing industry.

ES: One of the themes running through this collection is a call for personal, political, and social accountability. Do you believe contemporary poets have an obligation to address these issues?

PD: I would be wary of the word obligation, since you can’t expect poets to write anything except the poems they want to write, the poems which they feel need to be written. Personally, I’m not so interested in poetry which focuses on recording the quirky minutiae of quotidian life, on little emotional epiphanies, expressions of the self and observations of nature. I want poetry with guts, which has something to say. That’s just my personal taste, and may also be a reaction to the restrictive aesthetic views most students seem to have about poetry, and the limited scope and ambition I see in much student work.

Nonetheless, I also believe that, despite its limited readership, poetry is a vital element of public discourse, and one thing it offers, to invert a catchphrse of second wave feminism, is the ability to make the political personal. I think poetry offers a semantic ambiguity and emotional intensity which enables it to engage productively, at the level of language, with complex political and social debate. How has poetry allowed you to explore the darker sides of human passion?

I think here of an excellent quote from Bernard Welt in The Best American Poetry 2001:

the first person enforces a strange duality, opening up the floodgates of real emotion and memory while leaving you in the uncomfortable position of experiencing yourself as a literary character. That discomfort is the main thing I think of when people speak of a poet's voice.

A poem is not a diary or a confession. For me, a poem is a performance of the self rather than an expression; it can give you licence to access genuine emotion and then, through a focus on craft, enable you to attain a kind of intellectual distance from that emotion in order to explore all its complexities.

I appreciated the comment in the judges’ reports for Imagining Winter, which said that the collection “lays bare the things people will not admit to thinking, even to themselves”. This is certainly what I wanted to do in many of the poems, where I dredged up a number of my own fears and anxieties, not in order to purge them, but to use them as the starting point for a poetic exploration of emotions in their social context. As a result, I often tell my students it can be productive to write about the things they don’t want to write about, the things they don’t like to think about.

ES: In the past, you’ve worked as an actor, director and writer in community and co-operative theatre. Are there dramatic influences in your poetry?

PD: In terms of style, I wouldn’t say my theatrical past has influenced my writing. Nor do I think that there are any real dramatic or performative qualities to my poetry (although the last poem in the collection, “Tonight”, is a dramatic dialogue).

However, I think there is a connection between writing and acting. In Method Acting, the goal is to recall, through ‘sense memory’, an event from one’s past in order to access and re-experience the emotion one felt at the time. One can then draw upon that emotion to provide a ‘truthful’ or convincing performance when required to, say, cry or be angry on stage.

It is interesting to note that, in his autobiography, Lee Strasberg, the founder of Method Acting, discusses the correlations between the emotional memory of actors and the general affective memory employed by poets in their creative process. In particular he quotes the Romantics, and cites T.S. Eliot’s concept of the ‘objective correlative’. For me, there is a quote from Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads that speaks to this connection. Wordsworth argues that poetry
takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

Acting is a process of finding truthful emotional material to inhabit (or represent, if you are working in a non-naturalistic tradition) a character. Poetry, for me, as no doubt it is for many, also involves using your own emotions as material for exploration, or to lend intensity to what you are writing about.

ES: Do you anticipate that your future work will continue to explore different forms of writing, or do you find yourself being drawn to a particular style or technique?

PD: When I first started writing poetry most of the stuff I wrote was directly personal and about unrequited love, and I didn’t think too much about form, beyond the generic clipped line breaks á la William Carlos Williams, which seem to be omnipresent in writing programmes. Writing a poem was simply an emotional outpouring.

In recent years, as I have read and studied more, I have been far more interested in experimenting with the possibilities of different forms, and so have deliberately tried to employ parataxis, say, or write a prose poem. A lot of my recent poems have been self-reflexive and intellectually oriented, but that hasn’t stopped me writing love poems or descriptive nature poems.

I’m not too interested in developing a particular style, or a recognisable poetic ‘voice’. A lot of poets are praised for their ‘distinctive’ (meaning easily identified) style, and this probably comes naturally to them, but I think I would find that too restrictive. I’m more interested in exploring different forms of writing, from the confessional and scenic, through to more experimental and associative modes.

The American poet and critic, Mark Wallace, calls this a “free multiplicity of form”, referring to a kind of ideal state where we recognise that no poetic form is inherently conservative or radical, and where all forms are available to writers to explore, without being linked to various movements or institutional production networks. Committing to a free multiplicity of form, for Wallace, means maintaining a critical self-awareness of the possibilities of form when writing, and of the cultural and political implications of aesthetic decisions relating to the craft of poetry.

Wallace has also written about what he calls “postlanguage” poetry. He argues that contemporary poets who are consciously writing in the wake of Language poetry, have two identifiable aspects to their work. The first is hybridity, an emphasis on mixing traditions and crossing boundaries, which includes experimenting with those forms rejected by language poets, such as “narrative, lyric, spirituality, and a poetics of the everyday”. The second is a “resistance to definition.” According to Wallace, “many postlanguage writers refuse to fit single and identifiable categories, in some cases even switching forms and influences radically from book to book.” I certainly haven’t written consciously with this lineage in mind, but it is a practice I find appealing.

This is not to suggest a dryly technical approach to poetry. Charles Olsen’s great line in his manifesto on “Projective Verse” is “Form is never more than an expression of content” This is a postmodern exhortation to break the rigidity of closed verse forms, but an ‘open’ form can be rigid too if it is all you employ. The benefit of Olsen’s assertion for me is the belief that every time you write a poem, the form will be different. The right form doesn’t emerge naturally or organically from the material; it is crafted out of a constant awareness of the possibilities of form and employed to engage dialogically with the experience or thought you wish to explore at the time of writing.

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Michelle Cahill’s work actually came to our attention a few years ago when she submitted an earlier ms to us. We encouraged her to keep at it, and this year her persistence paid off with a win in the Best First Book category of Picks ’06.

ES: In The Accidental Cage, you have focused strongly on landscapes and the natural world—where does this interest spring from?

MC: Perhaps an intuitive affinity. I follow the Buddhist belief that we are part of nature. Ideas can seem infallible but the mind is subject to natural processes like birth, decay & impermanence. The study of experience, phenomenology and the way it is structured consciously has also fascinated me as a writer. In this book I’ve been interested in the tension between the inner and the outer worlds. Love, grief, the human cage. I think that’s where the poetry is engaged.

ES: There are many cross-cultural journeys in The Accidental Cage. Can you tell us what sparked these poems?

MC: My father is Anglo-Indian, my mother is Goan, both born in Bombay. They migrated to Kenya where I was born. I went to primary school in England before migrating to Australia where I completed my education & studied medicine. So the diaspora reflects my personal identity of not belonging to any one culture. In this first book I wanted to introduce something about myself, who I am & where I come from, although not predominantly in a narrative form.

ES: What have been some of your influences as a poet?

MC: I believe that the best way to develop as a poet, as a writer in general, is to be true to your own voice. I try to use my own editorial skills to work on the weaknesses and develop the strengths of my writing. In some ways you have to be your own teacher.

Having said that, I read lots of poetry. I’ve also studied Creative Writing at university as well Professional Editing. Reading other poets exposes me to a range of voices, techniques & meanings.

I am particularly influenced by Brigit Pegeen-Kelly, Robert Adamson, Yusef Komunyaka, Jennifer Harrison, and Robert Gray. I grew up on a staple diet of Stevens, Plath, Yeats & Auden. I enjoy most reading poetry that engages me both emotionally & intellectually. I like poetry to be reasonable, daring, to exploit sound, not merely to convey clarity.

My work as a GP has almost nothing to do with my poetry. I do find that having a practical “career” that focuses on the physical body, provides a grounding platform for the imagination’s trapeze. Without it, I could get dizzy, unbalanced or just addicted to the thrill of language & its abstractions.

ES: Do you think there is an inherent conflict between being a mother and a writer?

MC: Yes. My writing was the first creative impulse I felt as a woman, but nothing could have adequately prepared me for the emotional journey of parenthood. Motherhood is often a mindless and repetitive task full of interruptions and days spent seemingly without goals. It’s like the death of the mind and the birth of the heart. When my daughter was born it felt like for the first time I was beginning to understand love. I think this enriched my writing, bringing a new perspective.

But there are countless practical difficulties like dragging an infant to the post office to send off submissions, juggling housework and inspiration. Domestic experience has not been a traditional subject for poetry but I think it can be. Reproduction is arguably the most important human project, so why not write about it?

ES: What is the role of the poet in Australian society?

MC: In any society the poet’s role is manifold. Poetry fosters the private space of the imagination where as Voznesenski says ‘time slows down & possibilities expand.’

This is particularly important in a world of global multi-media where we are bombarded with often meaningless text. At this year’s launch of Red Room’s Toilet Doors Poetry, Bronwyn Lea made reference to this.

As a society unscathed by war or adversity we tend to be apathetic. I’m not prescriptive about the role of the poet but I do think that poetry can afford to be public within the private space it creates. It can be radical in style and meaning. It can speak up.

An audience can enjoy poetry even if they don’t identify with or understand it completely. This is where the music of poetry is important in conveying subliminal meaning. If there is an auditory pleasure and a sensory pleasure, if there is also an informing intellect then a sense of newness or wonder arises.
Poetry opens up new worlds.

ES: Can you tell us about the process you went through when writing one of the poems in The Accidental Cage?

MC: “Chimera” was originally written in the voice of a detainee. I was upset by the practice of rendition but I realised that the most authentic way for me to write the poem was to write it from my own perspective: an observer of the media experiencing through the process of dream what it might be like if the simulacra were real.

I am interested in how poetry can distort time to enter the surreal space of dream, memory and emotion where images are the most important means of communicating. Poetic imagery allows us to describe the kind of conscious experience which language otherwise fails.

I’m quite open to radical re-workings of poems that don’t work and sometimes this can take years. In a recent interview Seamus Heaney says ‘The quicker the better. Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.’ I’m inclined to agree.

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Entries have already started coming in for our national writing competition, with the closing date for entries being 1 December.

Again, there are four categories: Fiction, Creative Non-fiction, Poetry and Best First Book. All winners are guaranteed royalty publication by one of IP’s imprints. Generally we offer publication to some of the Highly Commended and Commended entries, too.

For further information on Picks ’07, including details on the past winners, check out the Picks Page. The required entry form and conditions are also now available for download from that page.

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We’ve confirmed the plans for our Brisbane Season launch, a gala featuring all six Spring Season authors (Nigel Turvey, Bill Collopy, Andrew Leggett, Libby Hart, Michelle Cahill and Paul Dawson) at the Performance Studio, 4MBS, 384 Old Cleveland Road, Coorparoo on 5 November from 2 p.m. The emphasis will be on performance in the Performance Studio, so do plan to come along if you’re in Brisbane that day.

And don’t forget our first IP Soirée at the Corner Bistro, The Corso, Seven Hills, where you’ll have the chance to meet all six authors up close and personal—or at least over a glass of champagne or across the table during the sumptuous three-course dinner. The soirée will be sponsored by the Queensland Writers’ Centre, and tickets are going fast.

RSVPs by 27 October at the latest—sooner if you want to be sure to be seated at the Soirée!

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Another issue, another changing of the Guard. Erica Sontheimer will be shifting soon to work in Marketing for The Griffith Review, just down the road at South Bank. It’s an even greater challenge keeping a print journal afloat these days than a small press, so Erica will doubtless find plenty of stimulation in her new role.

Jennifer Newbury has been working for us for the past couple of months in the capacity of Assistant Editor as a part of her studies at the Queensland University of Technology. Like several of her predecessors she plans to stay on beyond the time required under her internship agreement. Jennifer’s been acquainting herself with the business side of the company as well as first reading of manuscripts coming our way. Welcome, Jennifer!

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OK. You’ve written the Great Australian Novel, and it’s time to set the price. Someone suggests browsing the local bookshop where you find prices from $14.95 to nearly $40. What’s an author to do?

This is no time for modesty. What you do here may well mean the difference between making a loss or a profit. Unless you view your writing as cute form of negative gearing, it’s time to get PRACTICAL.

Tip #1: Get a Handle on Your Costs
Someone once said that most writers work for 50 cents an hour. When you consider all the costs, that’s probably not far off the mark. But that’s not why you do it, right? Recognition is more important than money. Then you see that mounting pile of bills on your desk with the glow-in-dark stickers—a friendly reminder: your account is overdue…

If you’re lucky enough to have a contract with a royalty publisher, this is a good time to take the cheque and run. However, if you’re self-publishing or “partnership” publishing, you might want to think again. You’re better off not trying to put a rate on all those long hours of composing, drafting, revising and proofreading. Let’s just say those hours are above crass commercial concerns, and get on to costs that can be counted when setting the recommended retail price (RRP).

What about that $880 you paid to have your draft professionally assessed? Should you add $1.25 to the cover price? Sorry, you’ll need to write that off, too: call it professional development. There’s a bright side, though. If you have an ABN, the Australian Taxation Office will regard you as a professional writer—at least for now. So take the deduction and be grateful if you don’t get audited. That goes for any freelance editing advice you paid for as well as the phone calls, postage and reams of paper it took to end up with that publishable version.

The bottom line is that most small and individual publishers cannot hope to recover much of their pre-publication costs on print runs of less than 3-5,000 copies in Australia. You’re better off focussing on printing costs and what comes after cartons of books are competing with your car for space in your garage.

There’s the rub that often leaves first-time authors with an itch: do you go for a large print run that drops your cost per book and hope to sell the lot in a hurry? Or do you play it cautious and only print what you think you can sell before your car threatens to move next door?

Few literary books sell more than 1,000 copies in Australia these days. If you’re young, sexy and can identify with any fashionable minority groups, you might add a few hundred copies, but don’t get carried away unless you have a publicist, whose fee will probably negate any gains in sales, anyway.

Let’s say you find a printer who will produce 1,000 copies with a nice four-colour cover for $8800. You’ll have to pay upfront—or even in instalments as the work proceeds—so consider your credit card limits. Sorry, interest payments can’t be recouped in your cover price.

That gives you unit price of $8.80 per copy. If you set your working RRP at $25, $16.20/copy seems like a tidy profit. And it is—if every copy sells for $25. But if you sell stock through a bookstore or distributor, you’ll have to allow for discounts from 30-65% off the cover price. A 65% discount means you get a return of $8.75 and are selling at a loss of five cents per copy—or more, if you consider other costs beyond printing. Better bump up that RRP!

Most publishers, even the mainstreamers, are happy with an average return of 15% of the cover price. This may include a narrow margin on copies sold via their distributor, or even a slight loss. But the distributor may sell copies that the publisher can’t, so sales that recoup most of the unit cost is better than no sale at all. Obviously the more you can sell yourself at close to full RRP, the greater your chance of making a profit.

The key is to sell as many copies as you can in the first six months before the bookshops consider your book old news. Increasing that RRP by a few dollars will probably not discourage many buyers, but it could make the difference between paying your credit card balance or working for others who will make a profit on your book.

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[Snippets from full reviews that we’ve posted elsewhere (click through to read the full review)]

On the 8th October 2006, Nigel Turvey and his book Terania Creek, Rainforest Wars, were positively profiled in The Sunday Territorian.

Dennis Booth says that “Terania Creek: Rainforest Wars is a timely book because of the surge of interest in global warming and because people need to read it.”

He also says that, in achieving a rare balance between the views held by conservationists and forest industry supporters, “author Turvey is an impeccable researcher and for this reason he comes up with some little gems that show that there was some humour in the events as they unfolded.”

For the full review, go to the Terania Creek mini-site.

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Café Boogie, Nixon’s first collection of poetry, may well signal the beginning of a similar process of catharsis through laughter. Her more playful poems, with their easy blend of high and popular culture, demonstrate her ability to meet the exigencies of both page and stage, and Café Boogie is accompanied by a spoken word CD in which Nixon reads the poems with her characteristic punchy relish.

The symbolism of the cover – café boogie in fluoro green lights in a shadowy film noir setting – effectively captures the tackiness of life’s garish surfaces, its inauthenticity and the pervasive emptiness and impersonality of the urban landscape, where people nonetheless strive for individuality happiness, and meaning, like the stage personalities arrested in a time-warp on the café walls.

— Louise Wakeling, in Blue Dog

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Not surprisingly, our new prose titles are leading the pack in terms of Spring Season sales. Terania Creek: Rainforest Wars has had brisk sales on the back of strong media interest in our extensive tour slated for the Eastern States and Northern Territory, registering sales of 230 copies via Tower Books alone. House of Given is close behind with an initial order of 150 from Tower before its official release date.

We expect firm sales for our new poetry titles, including Dark Husk of Beauty and Fresh News from the Arctic, which were supported by the Australia Council in its latest round of Presentation grants.

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We’re pleased to report a second printing of Joel Deane’s IP Picks winning novel Another.

This doubtlessly had something to do with Joel’s success in the Anne Elder Award with his Picks ’06 winning poetry collection Subterranean Radio Songs, but we have found it selling well into the YA as well as the adult markets, and it’s a damned fine read in its own right!

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We’re now on iTunes—and doubtlessly several other global audio sites, thanks to our American distributor CD Baby. You can sample audio from nearly a dozen IP.Digital albums that include artists like:

Jack Drake
Chris Mansell
Liam Guilar
Jenni Nixon
Jumbuktu (Paul Mitchell / Bill Buttler)
Alan Ferguson

This gives you the choice of downloading tracks at a time, or even the whole album from the audio site, or, if you still prefer to have the physical album, you can of course still order it from us!

We hope this will encourage overseas people to sample and buy our work without the delay and added cost of freight.

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[Children’s author Libby Hathorn has been leading the pack in the creation of exciting digital content for kids. While she’s not an IP author, we thought her story about how her titles have come into being and won recognition is inspiring. Here’s what she has to say.]

An Australian Storyteller’s Interactive Journey
The Weirdstop™ Series

The idea for the initial CDROM, Weirdstop, a suite of interactive stories, evolved in the late 1990s when the internet was brand spanking new! Given some of my children’s stories were adapted to plays, movies and opera, I saw the internet as potential for a happy ‘marriage of the arts’ with all the possibility of STORY being embellished and kid’s reading enhanced by animation, games, illustration, hypertext, voice-over, music, poetry or even text itself. But not only that, it seemed I was poised at a critical point in the history of children’s literature, in the making of STORY – the idea was an exciting one! So we began the slow process of development with the idea that a series could follow. And it did, but not until my small company began serious work on it in 2003 resulting in the series of interactive story suites namely Weirdstop, Coolstop and Wonderstop, with Poetrystop in development.

In the early days of the internet my author site with lots of flashing text, thanks to my son, was among the first author sites to be produced, and I believe my story The Wishing Cupboard was the first Australian interactive story online. This is a story in itself but suffice to say the tale of a little boy waiting, with his Vietnamese grandmother, for his mother to bring back his cousin from Vietnam, allowed me to tell his story (as in the book later published by Lothian) and also tell Vietnamese folktales with the click of a magic set of drawers, story within story. This is still available online.

Funding

Working with a son in the ICT business was an added incentive to realising story in many guises on the internet – the innovations seeming endless. Alas! cost considerations were a brake, but we could tell there was still much to be achieved on a budget. And our small company set out bravely. We’d try to get at least one story up, and then go for corporate funding.

An Australia Council grant gave us the means to develop my first story “Eye to Eye”. Developers were few on the ground, expensive and in high demand but we found one. This ghost story in a modern setting was trialled in a number of schools across Australia as a prototype for Weirdstop™. Using a graphic designer/coder to create an interface and ‘pages’ with graphics and simple flash animations, rather than scroll-through pages, the story was interspersed with three simple games relating to the text, its setting and characters. A drag and drop vocabulary game matching synonyms (Syno Signs), a memory matching game (Picture Power) and self-competitive hand and eye co-ordination game (Eyeball) were used in this story, all rich in well executed visuals. Both attractive flash animations and photo collages were used as artwork in the presentation of “Eye to Eye”. Like making a movie it became ‘our’ story instead of ‘my’.

Playfulness

We wanted to capitalise on the ‘playfulness’ of the medium, with games adding to the enjoyment of the story. And we planned to inspire kids, presenting quality artwork e.g. the slide game in Collector or the animations of Imagine Centre. All games were planned to be bright, attractive, varied, non sexist, non violent, simple to access and to use and above all relevant to the story being read.

A Quiz

Thinksmart consisted of nine comprehension questions based on the reading of the text which were self-paced and self-correcting.

Higher Order Thinking

Workwiz teacher/parent notes suggested more in depth responses to develop reading skills. These themed research suggestions could involve a variety of actions from using the internet to interviewing a community member face to face. In Coolstop the teacher notes were developed using Bloom’s Taxonomy.

The Lure

A certificate of achievement was planned to be downloadable with student name to be inserted at each story’s completion. Kids worked really hard to achieve this, typing in their name and printing out their personalised certificate. On the Newcastle campus, where we did some trialling, some kids who did not have good reading skills were not only ‘glued to’ the story and played the games with gusto, but sat round discussing the quiz (2 – 3 to a computer) and stayed in at recess, each to get his certificate. It worked! In some weird way that tiny screen has the power to captivate and engage kids immediately, as we suspected.

The Team

Securing corporate funding was so much easier once we had the prototype to show and our ‘trialing’story to tell. The development of the project brief was completed over a series of six weeks, involving meetings with those central to the team. Integral to the development of original interactive Australian stories was simply the enjoyment of story. And we knew we had the means of catering for a range of readers of differing literacy skills and with differing learning styles.

In the first instance, I didn’t realise how many people would be involved, from the writer to developer, graphic artist, animators, teachers, consultants and games developer to the sound technician, voice over artist, composer, tester and many more. Totally engaging and demanding, for this writer it was just as well our budget allowed for a full time project manager who worked the time line and co-ordination really effectively. Within a year our first story suite Weirdstop was completed and in the market place. Coolstop, the second story suite based on sporting stories was quickly underway with a new team.

Awards

Weirdstop won the 2004 AIMIA (Australian Interactive Media Industry Awards) as Best Children’s Product, 2003; and was short-listed for The Mayne Award for Multimedia in the South Australian Premier’s Awards for Literature in that same year. More recently Weirdstop won The Society of Women Writers NSW Biennial Book Awards 2005. Coolstop was short listed in the Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) awards in the E Best Primary Education Resource Category. Work is underway for such story sites to be included in many more children’s literary awards.

The Journey Continues…Wonderstop and Poetrystop

Our third suite Wonderstop for 7 to 11 year olds is just completed. We’ve taken a different tack on this environmental journey of two little wombats, Bodge and Widge, in that it’s a giant game, complete with stories, poetry, games and quizzes.

They travel through 10 STOPS in all, each with an environmental theme. At each STOP the kids will read/hear a story, play two funny games, find the hidden environmental message, discover a beautiful poem, watch a nature video and answer a quiz.

All of this to reveals the secret way to the next STOP and finally to get through to celebrate in the Land of Most.

And Poetrystop – how to enjoy and write poetry is in concept stage. That doesn’t mean to say there are no books in the wings. I’m always thrilled to see a new cover, always relieved to see a reprint, and love that feeling of the new book hot off the press and sitting in your hands where you can see, touch and smell it; and these days, sitting reading with my grandchild and watching her delight in the ‘page’. But it would be foolish to think that she won’t be a ‘digital native’ too. I would like to believe the book will always have its rightful place. However, I’m mindful that with the pace of technological change, even though schools have not adapted quickly, of how important computers are in the 21st Century and how engaging is interactive storytelling. Blogs, Forums, Chatrooms and Projects will become basic classroom communications; and mobile phone use, as another storyteller domain, has only just begun. We believe the Weirdstop interactive story series offers a range of opportunities drawing on young people’s understanding and engagement with websites, computer games, text messaging and emails as well as the enjoyment of story.

It’s good to think that the potential to ENGAGE kids in story in so many different ways, particularly those who are reluctant to read independently, is huge and as yet untapped; as it’s exciting to dream about what writers (adult and child) will come up with next, the original idea still being critical to a good story!

— Libby Hathorn

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A reminder once again to our readers that Tilly Brasch (No Middle Name) will be speaking at the General Meeting of the National Council of Women Group (Qld) on Thursday, November 23, 2006 at 6 pm, Harris Terrace, 46 George St, Brisbane. On the following Saturday at 3 p.m., Tilly will be “in conversation” with David Reiter in a Book Talk session at the Independent Publishers’ Book Fair about her appeal for reform of the mental health system as it affects vulnerable youth, as well as the process of writing her book, which deals objectively with the circumstances leading up to her son’s suicide.

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From January, 2007, Basil Eliades, author of 3rd i will be the feature artist and poet for Etchings, a new Arts Literary magazine.

IP expects to release the Audio + Text version of his book in the New Year.

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Two-time IP Picks winner Joel Deane was featured speaker for Overland Magazine in their latest Public Lecture series.

His talk ranged widely from cricket to politics to the cultural and social fabric of Australian society. As in Carmen Lawrence’s lecture, John Howard is criticised as someone with little respect or reverence for the literary fields.

Frequently asked why a poet would want to be Chief Speechwriter for a State Premier, Joel noted that he responds with “why not”? If it weren’t for his eloquence, we might suggest that Joel consider standing for pre-selection himself!

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IP authors Jenni Nixon and David Musgrave were part of the 5th Australian Poetry Festival, Between, at the Riverside Theatre in Parramatta, where they read along with Margaret Bradstock, joanne burns, and Kerry Leves.

The session was such a hit that there is talk of another performance in Sydney. A chapbook of the poets responding to each other’s poems with themes ranging from sex & the city to beach culture, political satire & cultural crossings is now available as a chapbook for only $6.00 from Puncher & Wattmann P O Box 441, Glebe NSW 2037.

In Brisbane, Andrew Leggett will read at an event. Here’s the blurb: The Velvet Landmine returns to Caro Mio Restaurant & Cafe (598 Stanley St., Woolloongabba). On Sunday 15 October the theme is Flowers & Bullets and will feature readings of Yevgeny Yevtushenko by Michael Beaumont-Connop, Sharon Olds & Diane Wakoski by Julie Beveridge, Jorie Graham by Sarah Holland-Batt & Zbigniew Herbert by Andrew Leggett. As always each feature poet will also perform from their own body of work. This is a line up not to be missed! Doors open at 6pm for a 6:15pm start, so come along and enjoy the fine dining & poetry experience that is The Velvet Landmine.

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David Reiter teamed up with Nigel Turvey on the first legs of our Spring Season ’06 Tour, with stops in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, an appearance at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival, and, most recently, events in Alice Springs, Katherine and Darwin.

The media gave us extensive coverage in Lismore and Byron Bay, with the ABC running stories on the half-hour news about the ongoing ill feeling between the forestry industry and conservationists, even 27 years after the Terania Creek dispute ended. It was true enough: the two groups had to have separate events to celebrate the book’s release!

Certainly a high point of the early phase of the tour was David’s “in conversation” with Nigel at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival. With a flair that reminded some in the audience of Peter Thompson in Talking Heads, David prompted Nigel to reflect on the issues surrounding the dispute that remain a sore point to this day, as well as the experience of distilling years of research into a very readable book. The Festival bookshop sold out of the stock it had ordered, but David just happened to have top up stock along with him!

While numbers were certainly disappointing at the Alice Springs event, we took heart from the fact that David Suzuki was scheduled for the next night at the Dymocks store and gratefully accepted the manager’s offer to promote us as Suzuki’s warm-up act. (He’d done the same for us at Byron Bay!)

But the overall prize for promotion on the fly has to go to the owner of Katherine Books, who proved to be a friend in need. We had been scheduled to appear at a local café that evening, but the owner was called away due to a sudden death in his family. Left without a venue only two hours before the starting time, we set about to find one, and Kerryn at Katherine Books proved to be an angel in waiting. Apologising for the fact that she couldn’t hold the launch that evening since she was on ‘cooking duty’, she offered to set it up for lunchtime the next day and invite “readers” as well as the media. She delivered, and we were VERY grateful. Thanks, again, Kerryn!

David held numerous Meet the Publisher sessions with aspiring authors in Alice and Darwin culminating in his Sell That Book! workshop at Frog Hollow, courtesy of the NT Writers’ Centre. Lack of a data projector only slightly cramped his style from his Keynote presentation. Workshop participants commended David on the wealth of information and advice he provided, and we expect to receive several proposals arising from the pitch sessions.

Our final Terania Creek event in Darwin was held at the Angus & Robertson in Smith Street Mall. Sales were brisk enough to prompt Nigel to hold a signing at the store, following a very positive review in The Sunday Territorian. Thanks to Anna and her staff for keeping the air con going until nearly 8 p.m.!

Here’s the schedule for the Tour as it stands till the end of November as we go to press:

23 October, 5:30 p.m.: Meet the Author/Publisher, Fuller’s Bookshop, Launceston (Terania Creek)

24 October, 7:00 p.m.: David “in conversation” with Nigel, Devonport Writers’ Group

26 October, 5:30 p.m.: Meet the Author/Publisher, Hobart Bookshop, Hobart (Terania Creek)

27 October, 5 p.m.: Melbourne Launch of Terania Creek, Victorian Writers’ Centre

28 October, 3 p.m.: Melbourne Launch of House of Given, Victorian Writers’ Centre

28 October, 6:30 p.m.: Readings from Terania Creek & House of Given, Reader’s Feast Bookshop, Melbourne

29 October, 2 p.m.: David “in conversation” with Nigel, Forestry Fiesta, Creswick, Victoria

30 October, 5 p.m.: Canberra Launch of Terania Creek, John Banks Courtyard, ANU

3 November, 7 p.m.: 1st Annual IP Soirée, Corner Bistro, Seven Hills (Brisbane)

4 November, 2 p.m.: Brisbane Spring Season Gala Launch (all six new authors), Performance Studio, 4MBS, Coorparoo.

11 November, 12:45 p.m.: Readings from The Accidental Cage, Ourimbah Literary Festival, Gosford

23 November, 6 p.m.: Launch of Imagining Winter, The Loft, UTS, Sydney

24 November, 10 a.m.: Sell that Book! Workshop, NSW Writers’ Centre, Rozelle (full day)

25-26 November (full day): IP at the Independent Publishers’ Book Fair, Leichhardt Town Hall

25 November, 3 p.m.: David Reiter “in conversation” with Tilly Brasch (No Middle Name), Independent Publishers’ Book Fair, Leichhardt Town Hall

25 November, 3:30 p.m.: Sydney Launch of The Accidental Cage, Gleebooks, Glebe

26 November, 4 p.m.: Sydney Launch of Terania Creek, Independent Publishers’ Book Fair, Leichhardt Town Hall

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Deal 1: Crime and detective fiction your thing? Order either of the following collections for a 20% discount.

You must order from the IP Shop via our orders page or by email to qualify.

Live by the Bottle by Margaret Metz
Sharpened Knife by David Reiter (CD-ROM)

Do it before 15 November and and we’ll throw in free postage and handling (a flat $5.45 charge applies thereafter).

Quote YD:32_1 in the Comments field on the Orders page.

Deal 2: Order an IP Six-pack for $66 + $6.

Your choice of any six IP titles published before 2004 for just $11 each, GST-inclusive, plus a flat $6 postage and handling.

Quote YD:32_2 in the Comments field on the Orders page. Payment by cheque, money order or EFT only.

FIPC members get a further 10% discount off the cost of either package plus free postage. Sign up now and get the benefits of Club membership today. (See Your Deal in eNews 15 for full details.)

Offers available only to individuals.

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