23 Comments
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Anwen C's avatar

Lucky I've still got my Gerald Murnane cyanide capsule – they hand one over when you sign a Giramondo contract.

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Patrick Marlborough's avatar

I hear Ivor makes them himself!

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Kris's avatar

Indeed. Australian publishing isn’t just fucked, it appears actively hostile to good writing. We’ve got the same ten editors commissioning the same ten books from the same ten writers, all while clutching their pearls over why no one reads anymore. Anything genuinely fresh? Buried. Meanwhile, historical fiction now comes with a mandatory diversity bingo card, even if it’s set in a convict pisshole with a population of twelve in 1823.

The truth is, Australian readers want books with a bit of fire in them - books that entertain, take risks, and don’t read like a rejected Guardian pitch. Still, the business gods are too busy rubber-stamping recycled autofiction, ghosted kids books by [insert sporty-type here] and trauma-bait memoirs to notice.

It’s exhausting. It’s infuriating. The only solution is a full-scale clearing of the dead wood. Until then, we’re stuck watching the industry nosedive into self-parody, waiting for someone with taste, cash, and a spine to fix it.

Anyway, I'll keep an eye out for Nock Loose.

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Wayne Bradshaw's avatar

This is life. 10/10 no further comments. I look forward to reading your book and writing about it by the sounds of things

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William Poulos's avatar

Brother, I'm with you. Let's make it happen.

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David Eedle's avatar

A friend of mine had a book contract cancelled because they lost their nerve after one contrary social post from a third party. The world is messed up.

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Caitlin Kotula's avatar

And now I’ve read all three versions — keep em coming I reckon

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Patrick Marlborough's avatar

It’s honour to make myself more and more unemployable. I can’t stop.

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James Beavis's avatar

And yet despite all this I kind of still want to give it a go.

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Dr Kerry King's avatar

Noice. I am pretty sure that Henry didn't say “shit’s fukt, cunt”, but thanks for killing me on a Friday night. Hilarious. Hopefully you won't end up butt naked at the traffic lights. I've been around the publishing malarkey myself. It's a bitch. Great news about Fremantle Press (that's serious esteemed company). I shopped around the world and ended up with UWAP.

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Ange Yang's avatar

“The dolts call the shots, and it gives me the willies. Call me basic, but I believe Good Writing is a profitable business model. I just wish those in charge agreed with me. “

FYES.

Petition to print “good writing is a profitable business model” on shirts, sell them, get cash, build that mid-sized risk-taking publishing house 😂🫡

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Patrick Marlborough's avatar

Go for it

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Liam Blackford's avatar

You ate with this

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Patrick Marlborough's avatar

RIP my IBS

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Liam Blackford's avatar

You left out the journals. Do them next

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Patrick Marlborough's avatar

I can’t, some of them still want to pay me

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Ruv Draba's avatar

Just approaching my morning coffee, Patrick, and didn't expect to read this. I'm glad I that I finished it before sipping, or I'd have been cleaning my screen.

I realise that your rant was therapy, but the point of therapy is that *you're* supposed to grow from your discomfort: the world's not going to change to make you comfortable.

As a generalist skill, writing must adapt to need. The way previous generations of writers did it changed with the economy. Some wrote advertising copy; some penned magazine articles; some worked for literary agents... Many had to work in some other industry.

Sadly, we don't directly consume much written entertainment anymore -- not in Australia nor in the Anglosphere. We also have technology that lets anyone self-publish anything. We're a global gannet rookery nowadays; everyone's squawking amid the ammoniac reek of their own droppings not because what they have to say is that important but because self-promotion offers an alluring path to commercialised narcissism for people who have high self-importance but low self-reliance.

My constructive suggestions?

If you want to make a reliable dollar from writing, then don't write for yourself. Write for someone who has money, needs to communicate but can't write. That writing might not be for direct consumption. Writing is transmissible structure; the structure could be part of something else, and it might not be for entertainment.

But even so, don't assume that just because you can do it, writing is how you'll make a dollar. If it doesn't build shelters, grow food, exchange goods, heal injury or grow our young then it's a want and not a need. Writers love arguing that it should be otherwise (they do it in every generation), but your should is not my must. Artists are always in the precariat. If you don't want to live precariously then cross-fund it from something else you do that people want.

As for the global relevance of Australian writing, a lot of what makes a modern Australian perspective useful is in what it isn't -- we have nothing like the insularity of US parochialism, nor the weight of UK traditionalism and our urbanisation is sparse and relatively recent. Some of what makes our perspective useful is how close we are to some things that the rest of the Anglosphere finds hard to see -- think environment, or cultural and geopolitical proximity to Asia-Pacific.

But in the world's eyes, we're never going to be the nexus of popular academic themes like class stuff, postcolonial identity stuff or sexual revolution stuff. Regardless of how much that happens in Australia, and even how uniquely it might sometimes happen, nobody else cares that it does. We can explore those themes domestically if we want, but commercially, the centre of gravity for those conversations will always be somewhere else.

Conclusion? I think we're crazy to try to compete purely on themes set by Atlantic academia. We need something else to say too.

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Patrick Marlborough's avatar

i’ve earned a stable living as a writer for over 10 years, i’m fine, cheers.

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Matthew F.'s avatar

Whoo, this was a bracing read. Every so often I think about sticking my head up over the parapet of tie-in writing and trying to be a Real Author for a change, but I think you might have just chased me back underground.

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conor king's avatar

Will it be literature with a L? I will keep an eye out for it in Readings.

I am skeptical that there are so few chances to publish a novel. That risky thing memory suggests many more come out than four or five decades past. Perhaps the average level of Literature was a little higher but that is a very risky assertion. The safer is to observe that more people may have the chance to publish but the number of people with a serious capacity to write with a distinctive and long lived voice will not be that much greater.

the difference between a Claire Keegan and a Sally Rooney to name names from a different jurisdiction.

Not sure why you want to study writing - any evidence this has helped the seriously great writers. Do you want to sound like a vast array of others trained in the US creative writing world - where characters family background and school and financial standing are sketched out in the first few pages, and in a para for any new entrant? Perhaps you do sound like that - I will see from a test page or two if your book is on a stand before me.

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Normal Matter's avatar

Here is the next ingénue though. See, Australian publishing is not that bad. I wonder how they anoint the next ingénue and then what happens to the old one?

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Patrick Marlborough's avatar

It was an eyes wide shut type party but everyone was mingin’

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Normal Matter's avatar

ingénue mingin’ or the mingin’ ingénue? Sounds like they will turn that into a good author brand 😅

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