Legal Matters Seminars Sydney and Ballarat

Sydney, 22 May 2009
Ballarat, 29 May 2009

A typical day at the ASA brings questions about contracts. There are queries about terms, rights, digital contracts, and of course the legal jargon. A different publisher will present a different contact, and you need to clearly understand your obligations and entitlements. Be informed before you sign. Prepare yourself for the legal challenges involved with getting published at this customised workshop. In addition to contracts, other topics covered in this half-day workshop include:

• Who owns copyright? Intellectual property rights
• Copyright protection and moral rights, copyright territories
• Copyright permissions
• Reaching other markets: licensing your rights
• Winning negotiations with your publisher
• Services to the creator – PLR, ELR and CAL
• Avoiding defamation: being clear and careful.

The ASA’s popular Legal Matters workshop has been held in various capital cities and regional venues. Here are some participants’ comments on the benefits of a Legal Matters workshop:

‘You can read things till you're blue in the face, but sometimes they don't strike home till you're part of a discussion about them. The interactive nature of it and the differing concerns of other authors was a big plus for me.’

‘More confidence to read and negotiate terms of contracts.’

‘Lots of good solid information!’

‘Adds to understanding of a very complex area.’

‘Interaction with a variety of writers … made it additionally interesting as different points came up.’

Sydney
Date: 22 May 2009, 2-5 pm
Venue: Australia Council, Rover Thomas Auditorium, 372 Elizabeth Street (cnr Cooper Street)
Cost: $55 ASA members, $187 non-members. Non-members pay the member's rate plus $132 – the cost of Affiliate membership. We encourage non-members to join and receive all the benefits of ASA membership.
Download your registration form here.

Ballarat
Date: Friday 29 May 2009, 2.00 pm – 5.00 pm. Afternoon tea provided.
Venue: BEST Community Development Conference Centre, 28 Victoria Street, Ballarat, VIC.
(03) 5329 1500
Download your registration form here.

For further information phone 02 9318 0877 or email Kris Clarke.

Parallel importation: Cheap books, but at what price?

My book Perfect Timing is about to be published in a Vietnamese translation. It will sell for 20,000 Dong, about A$1.45. I’ll receive 5% of that price on each copy, a princely seven cents, so I’m not about to retire.
But what this makes clear is that books are much cheaper in Vietnam than Australia. I could buy 15 copies of my Vietnamese edition for the price of an average Australian paperback. So, why is the book cheaper? The paper and print quality will be lower than the Australian edition for one. Another is there’ll be several more thousand copies printed in Vietnam than were ever printed in Australia, but the book will still be a tiny blip in a market of over 80 million readers. And those readers are much poorer than readers in Australia. To them, spending 20,000 Dong on a book is a luxury purchase.
So the price of books is relative from one country to another. The return to me from sales in Vietnam will be small financially, but large in the sense that I will have many more readers. I’m assisting with a tiny bit of cultural exchange as well. These are immeasureable benefits with no financial value.
But they’d still be there if I was lucky enough to sell US rights to my book, although the financial implications would be very different. I’d actually make some money – again, not enough to retire on, but enough perhaps for a new computer or new car.
As an author, I can trade my rights in different markets for different reasons. Trading of rights is the commercial basis for life as an author. We can sell Australian publishing rights, rights for translation into Vietnamese or rights to an American edition. This is intrinsic to our continued livelihood. Quite a few authors have different publishers in different markets. Australia, in line with most major book markets in the world, including the United States and United Kingdom, is currently a “closed “ market. Books can only be published here by the entity who holds the rights to the Australian territory. These rights are saleable parts of the bundle of rights that make up an author’s copyright. For example, popular author Jodi Picoult is published by Allen & Unwin in Australia, but by Hachette in the UK and Atria in the USA.
However, there are moves afoot to take some of these rights away from us. The moves are being led by booksellers, particularly, Don Grover of Dymocks (Sydney Morning Herald, September 4, 2008). Booksellers are usually an author's best friends, but not Don at the moment.
Why? Don wants an open market. He wants to take away the right of Australian authors to transact their rights in different markets. His argument is driven by the profit motive of course. Don claims the wholesale price of books is cheaper in the United States through competition. And there is undoubtedly more competition in the US in the book industry than there is in Australia. The US book market is more than 10 times the size of Australia. Don also says books are expensive in Australia because the Australian publishing industry is artificially protected from competition. This is his subtle reference to our Copyright Act and the protection it gives to rightsholders – like authors.
But the US is by no means an open market. Nor should it be. Both the United States and Australia are separate copyright territories, and books are licensed into each territory by their rightsholders. Few Australian books receive much attention in the US. The Australian market is far more competitive than the US market because Australian books have to compete with those from the US and the UK. Under our law as it currently stands, all books published outside Australia must be made available in Australia within 30 days of their publication, or the rightsholder loses their exclusive licence to publish the book in Australia.
Grover’s suggestion is for those rightsholders to lose their right. The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) announced at the end of July that it had asked the Productivity Commission to review Australia’s copyright laws so far as they related to the parallel importation of books. Grover is pushing hard to destroy Australia as a distinct publishing territory. In his argument, he ignores the fact that the US and UK are closed markets. He also ignores the fact that book prices in open market territories such as New Zealand and Singapore are equal to or greater than those in so-called closed markets.
His fallacious argument is designed merely to increase Dymock’s profit margins, not to make books cheaper. Dymocks could make book prices cheaper in their stores overnight, if that was their real interest. How? Dymocks receives a minimum 40% discount on the Recommended Retail Price (RRP) on books it buys from publishers so they have nearly half the price of the book to play with in -- and often more when they negotiate bigger discounts. We don’t know how much of the 40% of the price of a book is Dymocks profit, but the company appears to be doing well. And it’s not as if Dymocks is a risky business, like drilling for oil. Their purchases from publishers are on a sale or return basis. What they haven’t moved off the floor after six weeks gets sent back to the publisher for credit.
In contrast, life is bit tougher for the publisher, and much more so for the poor author. When a book is sold by Dymocks, the publisher gets about 12% (at least ABS statistics from 2004, the most recently available, show that) and the author generally receives 10%.
What’s clear from this is Dymocks is in the best position to immediately reduce the price of books by passing on part of its discount to consumers. No need to change our copyright laws. No need to destroy the livelihood of Australian authors and their ability to transact their rights both here and internationally for whatever those markets will pay.

A pencil needs no electricity

In the June issue of Australian Bookseller & Publisher, retiring Wiley MD Peter Donoughue wrote a swansong article claiming the ASA knew next to nothing about educational publishing and rubbishing our research in the area. Donoughue was so pleased with his opus he rushed up to me at the Australian Industry Book Awards to ask if I had read it. I have now, and I can only say it’s fortunate Peter is retiring. Another educational publisher, Peter Debus, offers a more balanced view of educational publishing in the August 2008 issue of the Author. Debus accepts that the ASA is right in its assessment that the educational publishing sector is in its death throes. He doesn’t maintain Donoughue’s “head in the sand” position.
Yet the ASA, Debus and Donoughue are all describing the same elephant. How can we diverge so much in our descriptions?
The answer lies in judicious use of the facts. The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 25 July that federal public servants were involved in a systematic revision of Wikipedia entries about federal politicians. The parliamentary librarian was reported to have emailed instructions on how to alter Wikipedia entries to ensure the entries displayed only favourable information.
We can be sure that the practice is not unique to Canberra. It goes on all over the world. Why? Because it can. Wikipedia is open to all. It claims that this is its great strength. It says it can collect a massive amount of facts. And it does. You can read biographies of porn stars alongside entries about Australian politicians as well as overlong essays on arcane musicians and brief entries on Australian poets.
I even rate a mention. And that’s just a few of the reasons why Wikipedia’s authority should never be trusted.
The trouble with a freely available and editable source of information like Wikipedia, or the entire internet, is that it is so easily manipulable. And believable. That’s why politicians in the UK, US and Australia increasingly use YouTube and internet communications in elections. And it’s also why governments in China, Vietnam and Burma attempt to restrict access to the internet, or at least try to control content. Even a lovefest like the Olympics was not enough for Chinese authorities to release their grip on internet communications. And maybe we have to ask if they are right when our own politicians use the internet for their own nefarious propaganda purposes.
Wikipedia makes some claims to informational authority. Because of this, or perhaps because journalists like anyone else prefer the easy option, Wikipedia seems to have replaced a number of journalistic research skills. Students also relay on its immediacy and convenience. I’m not averse to it myself. I will often check for information there. However, and I am thankful for my editorial training for this, I don’t take Wikipedia information as the ultimate authority. Goodness, I’ll even consult some fossil reference source such as a book.
I admit I may be too much of a cynic, but these days I don’t trust any source of information unless I can verify the information there with at least two independent sources. Such rules used to be de rigeur for editors and journalists, although there were some sources we accepted.
In times past I would have trusted the Australian Encyclopaedia, for whose fourth edition I created the index, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Both of these publications had in place sound editorial polices and practices that ensured any errors were kept to a bare minimum. Were they error-free? No, but they had the gravitas of both peer review and editorial rigour.
What do I mean by editorial rigour? This is best answered with an example. As the literary heir of our Founding President Dal Stivens, recently the ASA received a number of his files and manuscripts. Included in these is the original copy-edited manuscript of Dal’s children’s book The Bushranger (Collins, 1978), the corrected galley-proofs and a letter from Miss Margaret R. Jones, the copy-editor. Among other queries, all guided by the purpose of making the book as accurate as possible for young readers, Miss Jones asks Dal to check his references to “pines”. She notes that Pinus radiata was not introduced into Victoria until 1857, leading her to question his usage since the book is set at an earlier time. Miss Jones was relying only on print sources, but I wonder whether anyone would even think to query such a point today.
I understand that the creators and editors of Wikipedia claim their data has a level of accuracy similar to the old print encyclopaedias, but the only research I have been able to uncover to validate those claims considers scientific articles. Wikipedia articles, contributed by over 13,000 volunteers, vary in quality, style and accuracy. They haven’t been subjected to a rigorous editorial audit.
Still, that doesn’t alter the fact that printed encyclopaedias have passed on, victims of the instant “authority” of the internet and Wikipedia. The skills involved in their production are being forgotten in the rush to accept instant information. But is that information any use? It is not the amount of information we can access that is fundamentally important, but what we do with it, which is why the governments of China, Vietnam and Burma have a much better understanding of the power of knowledge than do the politicians of the UK, US and Australia.
Knowledge is power.
I could lament the good old days. But again why? What was good about a reference book so heavy that it could cause a hernia? Or door-to-door salesmen hustling working class families into over-priced payment schemes for a rapidly aging set of books?
Even when I was doing my bit for the sum of knowledge about Australia in 1983, we were aware the encyclopaedia had a limited life. We had no idea of the internet, though. At that time, the IT specialists advised us that printed information would all flow onto CD-ROMs and these would be what people would use to access reference works. Hence part of my indexing brief was to ensure my index comprised logical indicators for both print and electronic formats.
But as we know the CD-ROM revolution never happened. And now we have the internet and DVDs to play with. So much so that many children these days gain almost all their information over the web, using a computer keyboard and mouse. On 28 July 2008 the Herald reported that some students preparing for the NSW Higher School Certificate needed to learn handwriting to be able to sit the written exams, which restrict typing to disabled students.
It shocks me that students could reach adulthood and lack the ability to write words. I imagine there will be some who would argue that this is just the way of the world, another sign of “progress”, another change to the way we live life.
These people would argue that life changes because technology changes. And I agree that the wheel was only invented because it made life easier than dragging things along the ground. But I worry that our current dependence on technology puts us a precarious position because the technology we rely on is dependent upon the provision of energy, particularly electrical energy, and in creating that energy we threaten our very existence.
We need to keep some skills that do not require any more energy than picking up a pencil. We need to be able to check our facts and, a very old skill, sort the wheat from the chaff, even in our assessment of the state of educational publishing. Otherwise we trust only new technology, turn to our plasma screens and burn down the future.
But what’s the point in going faster if we are merely going to crash into a brick wall sooner?

Copyright © 2008 Australian Society of Authors and Jeremy Fisher

Brisbane Writers Festival:

What a busy festival! My workshop "So you want to be an author" went very well and the feedback suggests that those attending are better prepared for a writing career now. That's always a pleasing result for me.
On Thursday, I chaired a very interesting conversation between Rod Morrison, publisher of Picador, and Judith Lanigan, who received an ASA Mentorship in 2007. Judith's book will be published by Picador next year. This was a really useful session for those who attended. They were able to gain an insight into the evolution of a book and the processes that go into its writing.
On the Saturday, Dr Anita Heiss, chair of the ASA and author of Avoiding Mr Right (Random House -- it's a funny, entertaining read) presented a compelling case for what is Australian literature in a debate chaired by Kerry Kilner of AustLit and featuring Madonna Duffy of UQP, author Matt Condon, and Rosemary Sorenson of the Australian. A great debate which you can follow on Anita's blog.
I was also pleased to catch up with Libby Gleeson (her new book is Mahtab's Story from Allen & Unwin and in its fourth reprint), the wonderful Kate Grenville who was launching her new book The Lieutenant (Text), Terri-ann White, publisher at University of Western Australia Press, as well as many aother ASA members, including the winner of the Prime Minister's Prize for Fiction, Stephen Conte. I was able to congratulate him again in person. His book The Zookeeper's War (HarperCollins) is in the pile on my bedside table and I'm looking forward to getting to it. I'm a little overwhelmed by non-fiction at present though as I'm a judge for the Walkley non-fiction book award.
One book I have got to is Narrelle M. Harris's The Opposite of Life (Pulp Fiction Press), which is a fabulous (literally!) vampire mystery set in Melbourne. Yes, it all works together to make a terrific read if you like contemporary vampire books set in Melbourne -- and who doesn't? Pulp Fiction Press is a new Brisbane publisher and its first two books set very high standards. Good luck to Ron Serdiuk and Diane Waters and their team!
The relocation of the BWF to the State Library of Queensland was a good one. And hats off to the State Library of Queensland Bookshop, which did a great job offering the books of the writers at the festival to the attending crowds. I hope for their sake that sales were robust.

How to tell your father to drop dead: Southerly 68.2 (October)

Southerly will be publishing my short story "How to tell your father to drop dead" in volume 68, no. 2, due out in October. The issue is edited by Debra Adelaide and John Dale, and has a focus on the short story as narrative form. I was humbled to be selected in this collection, which also includes works by, just as examples, Kathryn Heyman, Paddy O'Reilly, Derek Motion, Michael Wilding and Mandy Sayer.
Southerly is available from all good bookshops as well as by subscription.
I was very saddened to hear that editorial assitant to Southerly, Pat Skinner, died suddenly while this issue was in production. One of her stories is also included in the issue.
I've only seen the proofs so far, but there's great reading in this issue so don't miss it.

UTS Writers network at the Hughenden Hotel: Blood Shall Have Blood (Picador India)

On Saturday 6 September, in atrocious Sydney weather, I made my way to that artistic oasis, the Hughenden Hotel, in Sydney's Woollahra to give a talk to the UTS Writers Network. I spoke to the group, which is a UTS alumni inititiative (and I am a UTS alumni myself) on professional issues I felt they needed to consider for the development of their careers as writers.
These days the need for authors to present and market themselves as "brand names" is crucial to their success and sustainability. The ASA's professional development program offers assistance in this area. One of the attendees at the Hughenden (in fact its gracious co-host) is my freind Suzanne Gervay, who was one of the presenters at a recent successful ASA professional development seminar titles "The author as brand name".
I also spoke about the need to authors to raise their profiles through websites and engagement in social networking sites.
The attendees, reduced in number because of the bad weather, listened very attentively and asked a number of pertinent and revealing questions afterwards.
The UTS Writers Alumni Network is run by Sharon Rundle, who also operates Round Table Writing from her home in the Hunter Valley. She's dedicated to the UTS group. Her four wheel drive had to be towed out of the mud so she could make it to Sydney.
Sharon is also dedicated to increasing understanding and awareness between writers in different countries, particularly India. With respected author and academic Meenakshi Bharat, Sharon has edited Blood Shall Have Blood, a collection of narrative fiction that looks at how terrorism impacts on normal life. Picador India is publishing it November 2008.
I'm delighted to have my contribution "The Liberation Centre" included in the book, which also includes works by far more significant authors including Sir Salmon Rushdie, Thomas Keneally, David Malouf and Susanne Gervay.
As I write, the book is still without an Australian publisher, despite the stellar list of contributors (oops -- this makes me think that maybe I'm the problem!).
Look out for the book anyway.
Suzanne, Sharon and I will be making a big fuss about it.
And if you are a UTS alumnus in Writing, check out the Network and do yourself some good!

Brisbane Writers festival: Judith Lanigan/ASA members workshop

I'll be chairing a session Judith Lanigan's True History of the Hula Hoop: From mentorship to publication at the Brisbane Writers' Festival at 10.30 am on 18 September 2008. Circus performer Judith Lanigan (Miss Judy) had written the first draft of her book intertwining the history of the hula hoop, the true story of the Great Clown Kidnapping of 1572 and her own adventures as a contemporary hula hoopist when she successfully applied for an Australian Society of Authors mentorship. I talk to Judith and her publisher, Rod Morrison of Picador, about how the mentorship led to publication. Includes a short performance by Miss Judy. The event is free and open to members and the public.

On Friday 19 September the ASA is presenting a seminar for members on Legal Matters. I'll be running the seminar. All you need to know about publishing contracts, copyright, defamation and other matters pertinent to earning your living as a professional author. Members need to book and register on the ASA website or by calling the ASA on 02 9318 0877. The seminar is $82.50 for members.

On Saturday 20 September I'll be presenting again my popular seminar "So you want to be an author" at the Brisbane Writers Festival at 2 pm. This event has sold out at the Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Byron Bay and Darwin Writers' Festivals. Do you have a work in progress and not much experience with the publishing world? This workshop will put your writing into a broader perspective and give you an insight into the issues that will affect you. My comprehensive overview covers: the economic background to being a professional writer in Australia, how the publishing industry in Australia works, copyright and contracts, knowing your market and tips for getting published. Come along to this vital workshop for up-to-date information on a range of matters of interest to authors. Maximum 24 participants. This is open to the public and ASA members. ASA members receive a discount of $10 off the full price of $60. Bookings (which are essential) should be made through the Brisbane Writers festival.

Australian Literature In Asia

The Gioi Publishers in Hanoi -- An Asialink partner

I was delighted to be invited recently to join the Literature Advisory Committee of Asialink. Asialink is based at the University of Melbourne. It promotes public understanding of the countries of Asia and creates links with Asian counterparts. With Literature, Asialink partners with a number of institutions and publishers in a wide range of countries to provide Literature residences.
I believe this sort of interaction helps develop a greater understanding of Australian culture in Asia as well as helping our own writers gain a better cultural awareness of our near neighbours.
I have travelled quite a bit in Asia and engaged with the publishing industry there. There are vast differences between countries. Singapore for example is a market for both English and Chinese books. Singapore is an open market. My experience there though is that books are rather more expensive than they are in Australia.
Malaysia has an established publishing industry that is becoming more sophisticated. There is some English langauge publishing, but the majority of books are published in Bahasa Malay. This linguistic singularity tends to mean the market for Malay books is closed, except for what may be shared with Indonesia.
Thanks to a need to abide by WTO protocols, Indonesia has moved to control piracy in its publishing industry. Piracy is still a problem, but the Indonesians are more and more cognisant of their requirement to abide by international copyright treaties.
The same is true of Vietnam. While many of the publishing houses in Vietnam are still state-owned agencies, including Literature Publishing House which will be producing my book Perfect Timing in translation later this year, publishing is buoyant there. Literacy is Vietnam is high, so there is a potential market of 85 million people. The Vietnamese enjoy Australian literature but don't have access to enough of it. There is no regular exchange of rights between the two countries.
Economics don't help. My book will sell in Vietnam for the equivalent of A$1.50, and my royalty is shared with the translator. I'll only be able to retire on the proceeds if all 85 million Vietnamese buy my book, which I think is highly unlikely.
But the fact that the book will be there and available is a sign that there is interest. If only Australians were as interested in reading the works of our near neighbours.

Authors in Priority Schools Program report

The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) Authors in Priority Schools pilot project involved the Commonwealth Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR), the Australian Society of Authors (ASA), the Priority Schools Programs of the NSW Department of Education and Training (PSP) and the English Unit, Curriculum Directorate of the NSW Department of Education and Training (DET). A report on the project is available on the ASA website (http://www.asauthors.org/scripts/cgiip.exe/WService=ASP0016/ccms.r?PageId=10067).

The report demonstrates that:
• The Authors in Priority Schools project was highly regarded by students, teachers, parents and the authors
• Students’ positive attitudes to reading improved
• Students’ positive attitudes to writing improved
• Teachers gained useful knowledge from the project
• Teachers found the workshops useful in developing materials and strategies for engaging students
• Teachers valued the insights gained from observing an author workshop narrative
• All teachers agreed that the students’ attitudes and engagement had improved.
• Anecdotal comments indicated that participants agreed that the outcomes for the project were achieved. Comments to support these findings included: “Overall, the project has been a great success with tangible improvement in interest, engagement and writing skills of students … Students were extremely proud of their achievements ...(The) staff felt that they were given good ideas”.

Professional authorship: The key to living from writing

I am often asked to deliver a guest lecture or a seminar to university and TAFE creative writing classes, or a workshop at a writers’ festival. I am always happy to oblige. What I usually talk about is often considered boring – copyright, contracts and conditions. However, my audience doesn’t seem to think what I have to say is boring, since it relates closely to their ability to make a living from their writing.
They ask me detailed questions about the clauses of contracts, rights, subsidiary rights, what they need to do to obtain permission to use third-party works, how they can avoid defamation, the term of copyright in Australia, whether work published on a website is copyright, what is a standard royalty and a myriad other things with which they have never before had any connection in their course, but which they want to know. I hope I do my part.
The reason I am asked to speak, of course, is because I probably know more about these issues than most teachers of creative writing. I’m not a lawyer, but I can assist with the legal practicalities that are very much part of the professional practice of writing.
But it seems a shame to me that this sort of basic professional knowledge does not form a part of creative writing studies. Journalism courses, in contrast, have mandatory legal strands. They may also cover basic accounting practices for journalists who are freelance. Surely, since most creative writers are entering into what is essentially a freelance career, similar knowledge needs to be given to creative writing students to best equip them for the small business world of the professional writer?
I say this as a constructive suggestion for the evolution of creative writing as an academic discipline. As a graduate of writing classes myself, and some very good ones too, but with a background in publishing and an understanding of copyright, I feel strongly that writing students are missing out on a vital part of the skill set they needed to prosper as writers when they are not offered some legal and financial knowledge to help guide them as writers. The ASA is always happy to assist in the regard.
Another area that does not seem to receive much attention in creative writing at present is a sense of the market for writing. It is unfortunately true that the market for Australian “literary’ (I abhor that word) fiction is particularly dire at present. That doesn’t mean Australian fiction isn’t selling. As I write this, there are four Australian works of fiction in the top ten bestsellers: Matthew Reilly’s The Six Secret Stones is at number one, while ASA members Di Morrissey (Monsoon), Monica Mcinerney (Those Faraday Girls), and Judy Nunn (Floodtide) are at fourth, sixth and seventh place respectively and it is terrific to see them enjoying such success.
But students in creative writing classes ought to be aware that their chances of having non-mass market novels published right now is slim. Does this mean that they should not write them? No, but they would be better prepared for life as a professional writer if they had some knowledge of the dynamics of the publishing industry and the market for books in Australia. I try and provide some perspective on this for those who come to listen to me. I show the dismal statistics and break down sales into genres and categories. My information may not be what my audience was expecting to hear, but at least it provides them a degree of reality regarding their chances of succeeding as a professional writer in their chosen area.
One of the other things I suggest to beginning writers is that they should have more than one arrow for their writing bow. The skills of the craft of writing can be used in more ways than one. One of the suggestions I have put forward to the Literature Board of the Australia Council is for a program of residencies for writers within industry. I’d like to see creative writers learning the skills and craft of writing annual reports, press releases, and internal communications. At the same time, they could be sharing their creative writing skills with other employees. If they were employed on a half-time basis, say, they’d have some income to underwrite their own creative writing as well as the ability to learn other writing skills that can assist them through other lean times. I tend to think we have become too specialist as creative writers, particularly with regard to fiction. My November 2005 plenary address to the Australian Association of Writing Programs expands on these issues and can be read here.
This is not so true of creative non-fiction (which also has the largest market share of the book market at present), but often the writers who succeed at this have a journalistic background. Granted, Anna Funder’s Stasiland had its origins in creative writing classes and an ASA mentorship, but books like Chris Masters’ Jonestown benefit from well-honed journalistic skills. Over the years journalists have offered much to the Australian book industry and perhaps this has much to do with their ability to be flexible in their point of view. The leftish journalist Brian Penton wrote a couple of great Queensland novels (Inheritors and Landtakers) in the 1930s before becoming editor of Frank Packer’s Daily Telegraph in 1941 and excelling himself in emulating the outrageous industrial relations of his boss.
But let me leave the last words to the creative writers. Some years ago I was studying under the late, great Glenda Adams at the University of Technology Sydney. Glenda was a wonderful teacher who gently pushed her students towards narrative excellence. It was not her fault that I was too heavy to be pushed far in that direction.
Nevertheless a remark Glenda made in one seminar has stayed with me. Glenda remarked that we wrote, basically, because we were compelled to by our obsessions. She didn’t mean that writers were obsessive. Rather, she meant we were compelled to write because we had something to say. The point she was making was that this was not necessarily enough for our writing to meet a readership. We had to impose the discipline of the craft of writing on our obsessions so that we could most effectively communicate with our readership.
Even more years ago, at Macquarie University, Thea Astley worked hard to imbue me with an appreciation of Australian literature. In her measured fashion, she succeeded very well. Thea taught me to dissect books from the author’s viewpoint. We never discussed obsessions, but in our analysis of Voss, Maurice Guest, The Pea Pickers, To the Islands and Astley’s own The Acolyte this was the not-quite-invisible elephant in the room.
But Thea too concentrated on the art and craft of writing. The obsession was simply the kernel of the author’s desire keep refining their art and craft over thousands of pages and multiple drafts. This hard-working concept of the creative process is the one to which I subscribe. It may be that some people are born great writers, but many need a good deal of training. And all, I posit, need to understand the market they are entering as writers. The fact that a good manuscript receives continual rejections may not mean it is unworthy of publishing – it may simply mean that publishers can see no market for it. This is an unfortunate economic fact of life and we do all aspiring authors an injustice if we do not make this clear to them.

Parts of this article first appeared in the December 2007 issue of Australian Author. Copyright © 2008 Jeremy Fisher/Australian Society of Authors.

Let's remember freedom of expression!

Flying aeroplanes into buildings and bombing trains and buses makes for spectacular television footage. The events, horrible as they are, seem even more horrendous after hours of live coverage and endless interviews with shocked participants. The perpetrators of events like these are unconscionable. Regardless of motivation, by their actions they show they are incapable of sustained, reasoned debate. They are no different from sociopaths and psychopaths in that they lack the capacity to measure right from wrong. For this they might deserve our pity, but they do not earn our compassion.
However, in yielding them no moral ground, we need to be careful to maintain our current level of freedom of expression. Recently, a number of seemingly fair-minded commentators and government spokespeople have expressed support for the banning of publications and books that promulgate the views espoused by those who bomb and terrorise. The logic seems to be that if you ban the words, you cease the actions.
But this is flawed logic. It has never worked. The narrow attitudes and cultural insularity of our own past are near enough to make this abundantly clear.
For much of the 20th century, Australia’s access to information was highly regulated. The power awarded to the Customs Department under the Customs Act gave the responsible Minister the power to ban any imported work by proclamation. In 1933 the government established a Book Censorship Advisory Committee to provide the Customs Department with an educated and literary body able to prohibit the importing of inappropriate works. The members of the committee, all men, were professors, the parliamentary librarian and other distinguished Australians. They quickly established strict and rigorous criteria for the censorship of works. Anything mildly sexually explicit, positive about homosexuality or outside very narrow moral boundaries was prohibited. The department was soon banning an average of six books, newspaper and magazines a month. The censors prided themselves on maintaining ‘Anglo Saxon’ standards, as historians Nicole Moore and Deana Heath have discovered in their analysis of this process.
Along with Ireland and the increasingly apartheid-dominated South Africa, Australia was one of the worst censors in the Western world for most of the last century. Australian censors had no compunction in banning works that were acceptable in London, Paris and New York. There was a further extension of their narrowness of view in 1938 when the government set up a fund to encourage the development of literature in Australia. Those appointed to the fund were the members of the Literature Censorship Board. That is, literature in Australia was to be developed by the censors of imported literature. (Some cynics claim nothing has changed.)
But there was little discontent or commentary on censorship from booksellers or publishers or academics. It was authors who were active in the Anti-Censorship League. Authors such as Miles Franklin and Nettie Palmer opposed not only the draconian laws covering sexual expression but also those laws that allowed for the banning of books for their ‘seditious’ content. ‘Sedition’ was interpreted by those responsible for administering these laws as the ‘overthrow of civilised government’ and both novels and political tracts were banned.
The Left Book Club, founded by the famed British publisher Victor Gollancz in May 1936, had a missionary objective in educating its members with cheap, informative and readable books. A Sydney branch was established in 1938, and late that year there were over 4000 members in Australia. In 1939, after the signing of the Soviet–German non-aggression pact, the government unveiled plans to ban communist newspapers and severely censor other of their publications. Two months later, the CPA was declared a subversive and illegal organisation and party premises, including those associated with the Left Book Club, were raided.
Left Book Club publications seized by the Australian government included such subversive works as those of George Meredith, George Orwell (Down and out in Paris and London and Keep the aspidistra flying had been banned in 1936), Stephen Spender, A.L. Morton, Arthur Koestler and John Strachey. The Australian government banned all literature that dealt with the Soviet Union, despite such works being freely available in the United Kingdom.
While Customs Acts and Police Offences Acts restricted the importation of material deemed seditious or obscene from overseas, there were many other laws available through which authorities could prohibit the dissemination of information. These included advertising and gaming acts, crimes and vagrancy acts, Post Office acts, public health and venereal diseases acts, Commerce Acts, acts for the protection of children, acts covering defamation, printers and newspaper, as well as obscene publications acts.
Even after the war and during the fifties and sixties, Australia’s elaborate censorship system limited our ability to access a full range of information on a range of topics, but particularly sexuality. Christina Stead’s Letty Fox; Her luck was banned in 1947, Australia being the only country to find the work of one of our most significant writers offensive. Homosexuality was a special target of the censors who banned such respectable academic works as D.J. West’s Homosexuality as well as James Baldwin’s Another country and Gore Vidal’s City and the pillar.
In the end, though, the censors did not win and Australian society did not fall apart as a result of the increased awareness of sexuality and other cultures that resulted. In fact, the easing of censorship had an opposite effect, leading to a cultural renaissance, a re-establishment of Australian films and a recognition, with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Patrick White in 1973, that Australian writers were equal to those from the rest of the world.
Today, Australians are proud of their multicultural, multifaceted country. We are proud of our diverse culture. We are no longer confined by a narrow Anglo Saxon viewpoint. Therefore it behoves us to resist any efforts to bring back the constrictive censorship of the past. There is no justification for it.
Freedom of expression enhances communication. Without it, we close the doors to those with whom we should be speaking and we are no longer a free and tolerant society. That is, we become so like those zealots with their life-destroying doctrines that we might as well be them.
Copyright © 2007 Australian Society of Authors/Jeremy Fisher

What you can do for authors this election

The ASA has a number of concerns related to authors that we feel our politicians should address. We encourage members to take up these issues with their local member and the leaders of the major parties. Members can find contact details for their Federal parliamentarians here.

Traditional mail still works the best. Emails are a less effective means of registering your concerns with your parliamentarian or with our leaders. A key aspect of letters is that they reflect your individuality. Form letters or letters repeating the same phrases don’t carry the same weight as a letter from a concerned elector. If you are in a swinging seat, contact both the sitting Member and the candidate from the other party. Send copies to the party leaders, Mr Howard, Mr Rudd, Senator Brown, Senator Fielding and Senator Allison. Use your writing skills!

Educational Lending Right/Public Lending Right

The Greens, the Democrats, Labor and the Coalition have all committed to ongoing funding for Educational Lending Right (ELR). The Greens and the Democrats have also accepted the ASA’s proposal that ELR funding be increased and indexed (the details can be read on the ASA site here). Neither Labor nor the Coalition have as yet committed to any level of funding for ELR, nor have either party endorsed the ASA’s proposal to increase funding for ELR to $16 million and have it subject to WCI6 indexation. The ASA also calls for the Public Lending Right pool to be increased to $10 million. If you are in safe seat, send a letter to your local Member encouraging them to support the ASA’s proposals. Stress how valuable Lending Rights payments are to authors whose income is otherwise precarious. If you are in a swinging seat, you'll need to be more proactive and write to at least the two candidates most likely to win.

Literature in Education

The ASA has welcomed moves by the NSW Minister for Education and the WA Department of Education to strengthen the study of Australian literature. We have long advocated the study of Australian literature as a means of providing a sense of cultural identity, insight into our diversity and knowledge of our unique place in the world. Literature presents many perspectives on life, powerfully imagined and memorably expressed, and that exposure to this variety of ways of thinking about the world is one of the main benefits of literary study, particularly in a multicultural and diverse society such as ours.
It is important that all our Federal politicians commit to ongoing support for the teaching and use of Australian literature in ours schools. The Federal Government can do such things as fund the purchase of books for schools that use class sets. The teaching and study of Australian literature in schools and universities contributes to the domestic publishing industry and helps to support Australian writers. Australia’s literature, along with its history, has an important role in schools and universities in helping people understand and appreciate the Australian imagination.

Tax free awards and grants for artists

Motivated by Prime Minister John’s Howard’s move to make his $100,000 Award for History tax-exempt, the ASA calls for the removal of tax liability for literary prizes as one way of improving the level of financial support to Australian writers. Grants from the Australia Council would be included.

Australian publishing and decreasing opportunities for authors

There are some worrying trends in the sales of books in Australia. Sales of books declined by 19% after the introduction of the goods and sales tax (GST) in 2000, but GST cannot be regarded as the only as sales also fluctuated downwards by 20 million or 15% in 1997-98. They surged back in 2001-02, but operating profit for publishers continued to decline, particularly for the top 20, and sales again declined in 2002-03. The value of sales, however, has increased year by year, except in 2000-01 when GST was introduced, until 2003-04. The proportion of Australian books making up these sales has also increased to 64% in 2002-03, a proportion much the same for consumer books as education books (the figure is about 1% lower for educational books), but the figure dropped in 2003-04 to 60%. Sales of educational books also declined and sales of Australian fiction plummeted.
There are some in the publishing industry who look at these figures with alarm and argue that publishing is in decline, under threat from electronic competition from DVDs and computer games. But it should be remembered that the number of books published in Australia plummeted 20% in 1981, with consequent loss of sales, and the market recovered, even under the threat of videos. Books have shown remarkable resilience, even as the level of readership appears to be decreasing. What is remarkable is that readership levels maintain a relatively high standing despite the increased demands on leisure time provided by electronic alternatives.
Even so, there is plenty to be concerned about regarding the publishing of books relevant to Australia’s literary culture. The sale of Australian-originated books declined by $50 million in 2003-04 after healthy increases in previous years. The industry has only been subject to this degree of analysis since 2000, but the ABS does not propose to continue to survey the industry in such detail any longer, so this snapshot, inconclusive as it is, may be the only information retrievable on the state of Australian-originated publishing. The Australian Publishers’ Association, whose membership is dominated by large, overseas-owned corporations, interprets this information differently in the September 2005 APA Update. The APA records “the news is pretty good” and so it is for overseas-owned publishers. Profitability increased in 2003-04, a result of lower costs, even though sales dropped $18 million on those in 2002-03 and the hardest hit part of the market was Australian-produced books.
The publishing of Australian originated fiction publishing appears to have reached a peak of $125.2 million in 2001-02 when the category outsold imported fiction ($102.5 million) and is declining. Only $73.1 million in sales of Australian fiction were achieved in 2003-04 compared to $116.6 million for imported fiction. Generally, figures show mass market paperbacks have the highest sales value compared to trade paperbacks and hardbacks. Because the unit price of mass market paperbacks is much lower, however, the return to an author per copy is much less, assuming that all authors receive a royalty of 10% of recommended retail price (and publishers like Penguin are trying to drive the royalty rate even lower).
The decline in sales of Australian-originated books is reflected in the fact that royalties and fees paid by publishers in 2003-04 declined 11% on the previous year.
Sales of the nonfiction category, which covers cookbooks, self-help, and a diverse range of other subjects, is increasing. This is supported by data from Nielsen Bookscan which shows that nonfiction titles make up 53% of the market for books while fiction makes up 28% and children’s book make up 18%. ABS data show non-fiction books, both Australian and imported, were worth 59% of general content sales in 2003-04.
Sales of Australian originated childrens’ books increased in 2003-04, but this market segment is still dominated by imported books.
Of concern to all authors is the fact that the average selling price of Australian titles dropped from $11.36 to $9.10 (a 20% decrease) between 2002-03 and 2003-04. For royalties calculated on the selling price, this represents a drop in income for authors. In contrast, the average salary of a publishing company employee rose 9% to $52,300. Editors also had an award increase.
The market share of imported books is also a threat to Australian authors. The increase in non-fiction is not compensating for the drop in sales of fiction.
While the number of new titles in 2003-04 is marginally greater than the previous year, these titles appear on the face of the sales information to have lost market share.
More information is available in my publication Current Publishing Practice.

Australian Publishing: Don't forget the authors

Australian publishing industry exports have increased markedly in the past few years. In 2003-4, the export of Australian books, titles and rights was worth more than $195 million.
This fact alone makes the publishing industry Australia's leading creative industry. But, like almost all creative industries, it is the creators themselves who are least likely to benefit from the success of the industry.
Some Australian authors certainly do well, but publishers do better. It is important for authors that publishers makes profits so they can pay royalties, but surely it ought to be as important to publishers to ensure authors share in their success.
Apparently not.
Publishers like to place clauses in their contract that reduce royalties for reprints of 1000 copies or less, even though they will have made back their investment on the first print run. Another trick is to reduce royalties rates for other than the initial version of the work, say a mas-market edition, again flying in the face of publishing economics in that further editions maximise the earning for the publisher. That's the way publishing works, after all. And I say that with over 30 years experience in the Australian publishing industry as a publisher.
In the success of the Australian publishing industry, there seems to be some darkness for authors.
But we have to remember our past and learn from it and seek opportunities where we can.
The years 1940 and 1941 were dark indeed for Australia. Japanese forces moved steadily southwards, Darwin was bombed, the Brisbane line was drawn.
But in this darkness a benefit emerged for Australian writers. The Australian government, needing to maintain capital reserves, imposed an embargo on American imports, including books and paper. Suddenly, Australian writers were being sought to produce detective fiction, Westerns and other novelettes published to meet public demand. Writers no longer had to hawk their wares to London publishers. One of the writers who found his detective books being published locally was Alan Yates (“Carter Brown”), who later became a member of the ASA’s Committee of Management at its second meeting in September 1963.
Jon Cleary, who is still an ASA member, began to be published in Australia in the early forties, along with other early ASA members such as Morris West. The restrictions on imported books remained until 1959. A book bounty was introduced in 1969 to encourage printing in Australia, but by that time a pattern of reading Australian writers had been established.
Still, Australians’ literary diet today is spiced with writers in English from India, Canada, the UK, the US, and occasionally New Zealand, as well as Australia. Unfortunately, that means the competition for Australian writers in their own market is actually greater than that for American writers in theirs.
Australian writers are further disadvantaged by the fact that most of the 20 largest book publishers in Australia are divisions of multinational corporations whose accountants are based in New York, Paris, London or Berlin. The corporate eye is on return on investment, not, as in the days of Brian Johns at Penguin, the development of a thriving Australian publishing industry. A new author now is required to be instantly successful, able to sell the same number of books as an author who has crafted a reputation over a significant period of time. Authors whose books fail to meet these sales expectations are brutally dispensed with.
But sometimes we can spend too much time lamenting what’s wrong, and miss opportunities to improve our situation. Again, we can turn to history for guidance.
In 1905, the United States was in a similar situation to that which it is in today in that it had a Republican President (Theodore Roosevelt) who intervened in foreign countries (Panama) for American benefit.
Australia was quietly developing its newly won nationhood. Secure within their newly-federated island country, the citizens throughout Australia were placing plaques in churches and town halls to commemorate those who had served in the Boer Wars. Ten years later, the same people were counting more war dead, a count that would continue until late in 1918. Hugo (Jim) Throssell, husband of Katharine Susannah Prichard (a member of the ASA from 1964), was one of the lucky survivors of World War I, but survival did not ensure happiness. In 1933, he took his own life while his wife was travelling overseas.
Well before this, towards the end of 1905, Miles Franklin began planning a trip to London, of two minds about the success of My Brilliant Career. It had sold well, but most royalties were on “colonial sales” (copies sold in Australia) and earned only half the rate of those sold in the UK.
Nearly 60 years later, colonial rates was one of the issues that led to the formation of the ASA in 1963. The first Australian writer to have this anachronism removed from her contracts was Dymphna Cusack, an inaugural member of the Council of the ASA. The first issue of Broadside, the ASA’s first newsletter, reported that at least six British publishers had agreed to negotiate colonial rights, and, thanks to the ASA’s work, these unfair royalties have disappeared.
Regardless of the political situation in Australia or internationally, regardless of the waxing and waning of literary fashion, the ASA continues to stand for increased returns for writers and to argue for more channels of remuneration. There will always be some sad circumstance for us to lament—that is perhaps why some of us write—but nothing should stand in the way of writers achieving the right to maintain a living.
The ASA has achieved a great amount over the past 40 years. It also won Public Lending Right and achieved success with Educational Lending Right. The ASA was also instrumental in the establishment of the Copyright Agency Ltd (CAL), which now provides another income stream for writers, especially those in the education sector, for the photocopying of their work. It has also established minimum standards for book contracts.
But despite all this work there is still much to be done. In my office I have in front of me a contract from a publisher that asks the author to assign copyright to the publisher, which would spell the end to any additional remuneration -- such as a CAL payment -- for the author. As well, the contract offers a flat fee upfront and royalties only after the sale of 3200 copies, which may have an impact on the author’s right to Educational Lending Right (ELR).
These are issues of core interest to writers. The everyday task of improving the ability of writers to be able to make a living remains central to the ASA.
The publishing industry might be successful but the fight for authors to make a living from their writing continues.
Some of this material has previously appeared in Australian Author. Copyright © 2007 Australian Society of Authors/Jeremy Fisher

Arts Funding: Creators second fiddle

Arts commentator Marcus Westbury had an interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald of 18 October 2007 (the link to it is above).
His article made me think about how we fund creativity in Australia. Like Marcus says, we actually give more to "cover bands" than we do to original artists.
Let me give you some facts. When we start comparing contributions from different creators to Australia’s cultural life and development we can see creators, and authors in particular, are undervalued. We can see this through government funding.
In Australia, the Australia Council for the Arts funds artists and creators with grants and operational money. For instance, the Major Performing Arts Board of the Australia Council dispensed $78,182,476 to the performing arts in the period 2005-06.
Opera does especially well from Major Performing Arts Board funding. Opera Australia and the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra received over $14.5 million dollars between them.
If you like opera, that’s terrific! If you don’t, you might wonder why anyone would spend $14.5 million on an artform that engages with very few people, either as performers and audiences. It’s not as if the funding supports Australian composers and librettists writing operas. The works performed in Opera Australia’s October 2006 season were from the composers Gilbert and Sullivan, Verdi, Janacek, and Handel. Dead European composers.
Of course the Major Performing Arts Board’s funding of opera also supports Australian singers and musicians and that is undeniably a good thing. The funds made available to Opera Australia provide living wages for musicians and singers, in fact around 1300 of them.
There is no way I would take funding away from these dedicated performers. Yet I can’t help but dwell on the fact that in the same period Opera Australia and the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra received their $14.5 million, the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts dispensed a mere $4,526,308 in grants and funding to writers and organisations supporting writers. While this included seven fellowships of $40,000 and one Emeritus Fellowship of $50,000, it wasn’t exactly employment for authors. The allocation of funding in this way forces me to ask why is it that singers and musicians can receive a living wage from government funding yet the same is not true for authors. What I can’t understand is what makes the performance of a Verdi or Handel opera worth more than the writing of a book. That’s the logical conclusion you must reach regarding the funding of arts in Australia. Through the allocation of money in this way, the performance of opera works by dead European composers is valued more than the authorship of original Australian books.
This sounds like a whinge, but my argument is based on sound free-market facts. Despite its reputation as an artform appreciated by the high and mighty, opera is not a popular artform. In fact, very few people at all go to opera performances – only 294,000 in 2004. That’s a little more than 0.01% of the Australian population. It isn’t what I’d call successful market penetration by a vibrant, living cultural form.
And does opera make money? Not at all. It is highly subsidised. It doesn’t even make money on the recordings or televised broadcasts of performances.
Australian literature on the other hand earns around $100 million a year in Australian sales, even when it is claimed to be “in decline”. Why? Because Australians continue to read Australian books in significant numbers. According to BookData figures released through Books Alive, 35,230,246 trade books were sold in Australia in the first nine months of 2006 (that’s about 1.75 books for every Australian). Over 65% of those books are produced in Australia by Australians. That’s much greater economic success and market penetration than opera can claim. At the same time the ABS reports that there were 556,000 Australians who were involved in writing. That’s almost double the number of punters who rock up to the Opera House to sip champagne between arias.
So why is it then that 1300 performers and musicians can be paid a living wage and yet so few authors receive such compensation? Because we are not assessing government support for the arts in free market terms, that’s why. Why do we have this aberration in government policy? Surely not because MPs and Ministers like to hang out at “first” nights of an artform that reached its use-by date in the nineteenth century?
Regrettably, that may be exactly the reason, given the massive corporate sponsorship for opera from the likes of Exxon Mobil, IBM, Australia Post, Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank. But with this sort of corporate support, why does opera need government funding at all? If corporate Australia is so desperate to see another soprano warbling Wagner while mingling with Ministers, surely they can pay totally for the privilege.
Of course the soprano should still be paid a living wage. I’m not belittling the artistry involved in performing opera. I’m simply trying to value it in terms of its place in Australian culture.
I believe a strong argument can be mounted that only art forms that lead to the creation of new Australian works should be funded by the taxpayer.
All opera can claim in recent years is the creation of the Lindy Chamberlain opera and Batavia neither of which were mainstream successes as, say, Kate Grenville’s book The Secret River has been. On this basis, opera would be a big loser.
If opera’s funding was assessed according to this criterion, it would probably be about equal to its market size and its cultural significance; this is, not very much. The funding for literature on the other hand would be altered considerably, and more authors would be able to be paid a living wage.
So why isn’t literature getting this sort of funding? Is the truth that, as a nation, we believe dead European composers are more deserving of the money we allocate for the arts than living Australian authors? Are we still accepting a cultural cringe where we cannot accept living Australian creators are as good as if not better than dead European ones?
Or is our arts funding simply fundamentally flawed because it doesn’t follow free market principles?
Whatever, we undervalue authors.
Much of this material appeared in Australian Author, December 2006. Copyright © 2006 Australian Society of Authors/Jeremy Fisher.

ABC Radio 774 Melbourne Evening Program: How to get published

It was a pleasure to join Wendy Tuohy and host Derek Guille on the Evening program on ABC Radio 774 Melbourne on 29 August at 8.15 pm.

In a general discussion on books coinciding with the Melbourne Writers Festival (see my other blog entries below), Wendy and Derek asked me to provide some advice to listeners on how to get their novels published. It was interesting while I waiting to go live to hear the many listeners calling in to talk abouit their reading groups and the books they were fond of reading. Unfortunately, none of these readers mentioned any books by Australian authors, and that is significant. Ian McEwan and Dave Eggers appear to have a higher public profile than any new Australian author. That means their books are more likely to be read. It doesn't mean their books are any better than those of Tara June Winch, say, or James Bradley or Shane Maloney.

Derek suggested that everyone had a novel in them, but I don't think this is true. Writing is a specialised craft. Unfortunately, it is not one that everyone can master. But as I pointed out, knowing your market -- the potential of that market -- is very important for any writer. If you are writing for a niche market, your potential for return is going to be limited by the economic size of that niche. You may be very successful in that niche, however.

As I said, only 10% of the Australian book market is made up of Australian fiction. This is a distressing statistic for anyone who seeks to be come a professional writer of fiction in Australia, living off their writing. We just don't seem to see Australian literature as a vital part of our culture. I don't mean any insult to Derek, but the Freudian slips he made (calling the Miles Franklin Award the Booker, and confusing Alexis Wright's Carpentaria with Xavier Herbert's Capricornia -- easy enough to do when you're speaking off the cuff) suggest that foreign authors are more familiar to us than our own. Doesn't anyone share my outrage that this seems to be so?

Anyway, for any members of reading groups out there, why not read the two great books Capricornia and Carpentaria together and comprehend their revealing and contrasting views of Australia.

Kick-start to Creation: Some notes from the Melbourne Writers festival

Thank you to all those people who attended this session at the Melbourne Writers festival. I hope you gained some insight into the many issues that need to be considered if you are seriously going to contemplate the difficult life of a professional author.

I was pleased to be able to work with Louise Connor (Victorian Branch Secretary from Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance) and Joel Becker (Director of the Victorian Writers’ Centre) to try to alleviate your fears about life as a professional author. I think we managed to give considerable practical advice about support services, networking and negotiating your net worth as an author (book contracts) and a freelance writer (individual contracts) in the time allowed.

But if you need to know more, I highly recommend the Australian Society of Authors website where you will find an enormous amount of information to assist in setting you up as a professional author and help you towards getting published.

One thing that the MWF session made clear was the need for authors to feel they are not alone. Memberships of writers centres and professional organisations like the Australian Society of Authors are excellent ways of overcoming the lonelineness of the professional author and in creating the networks necessary to enhance your career prospects. If you want to be a professional author, you should become a member of the peak organisation represeting your rights and interests.

Copyright: Some notes after the Melbourne Writers Festival

Under the Australian Copyright Act of 1968 artistic ideas are reputedly protected from plagiarists and plunderers, but that is possibly only enforced when creators are backed by sufficient cash resources to defend their rights. Most cases heard in Australian courts relating to copyright have been brought by larger companies protecting their economic interests. It is rare that an individual creator has the resources to bring action against a copyright infringer.

But a creator at least has the ability to decide what to do with their creation. In the case of an author, in order to make a living, the creative work is usually licensed to a publisher who pays the author a fee or royalty for the use of the material in different forms, but primarily for publication in book form. It is always an option for an author to choose to give their work away if they do not wish to earn any income from it.

In the session on copyright at the Melbourne Writers Festival on 26 August I joined a panel that discussed many questions about how we can preserve and protect the intellectual property of authors who publish in an online environment and how we can predict the future of the printed word and the publishing industry. Other members of the panel included Hugo Award-winning author Cory Doctorow who has published three science fiction novels. Cory allows his books to be downloaded from the internet for free under a Creative Commons License (craphound.com). Cory argues that e-books should be seen as a way of winning new audiences rather than losing sales. Sandy Grant, Publisher of Hardie Grant Books and Director of Copyright Agency Limited, wondered whether there was any real advantage in this. He welcomed the free marketing, and was very complimentary about Cory's website, but suggested that there was far too much unedited material available on the net and publishers added valuable quality control to printed products.

Jessica Coates, project manager of Creative Commons, asserted that the e-age will empower online authors, but she cautioned that authors need to be clear what they want to do and the licensing terms they are entering into.

As Executive Director of the Australian Society of Authors and a member of the Board of the Australian Copyright Council, I agree entirely with this approach. An author should be very clear as to the terms of any publishing agreement, whether that agreement be for traditional print use or online use, and whether for payment or otherwise. Authors should also know what they have licensed. For example, if you use a creative Commons licence to allow your work to be disseminated and copied freely, you may find that you are not entitled to payments for copying of your work under the statutory licences embedded in the Australian Copyright Act (such licences do not operate in the Unted States). Also if a library downloads and prints a copy of your work, then stores it for access, you may find you are not entitled to lending rights payments for that copy.

The Australian Society of Authors can provide help and assistance to members seeking clarification on these issues. The Australian Copyright Council and Creative Commons also provide advice.