I have blasted on this overall theme before today and now I’m at it again.
Recently there were some noises being made about the review-for-hire scene where an author could pay these dodgy operators the appropriate fee in return for which the ‘reviewer’ wrote glowing things about the author’s work. So I blasted about that over at awritergoesonajourney.
On top of that, articles seem to be popping up all over the place about British crime writer, RJ Ellory, being caught out and admitting to writing reviews of his books on Amazon under pseudonyms. Needless to say these reviews were glowing. For example, writing as ‘Jelly Bean’ he described his work as ‘one of the most moving books I have ever read.’ Other alleged comments include: ‘It is so beautifully written I felt as though it enabled me to be a part of that era even though that can never actually happen’ and ‘I would highly recommend this book to anyone who really wants to experience a class read’ and even better still, describing his own work as a ‘modern masterpiece’. Even more moving was ‘whatever else it might do, it will touch your soul.’
Remember – this was the author describing his own work while pretending to be other people. How does he even have the gall to be doing that?
Not content with using his masquerade to write his own bogus reviews, Ellory used the same opportunities to blast some of his competitors’ work while remaining safely hidden - or so he thought.
Bear in mind this was not just a once off. It seems that Ellory has done this multiple times under different aliases. Yet now that he has been caught out he has admitted to doing it, noting that ‘I wholeheartedly regret the lapse of judgment that allowed personal opinions to be disseminated in this way and I would like to apologise to my readers and the writing community.’
A ‘lapse of judgement’ implies something less than a series of deliberately written and posted bogus reviews with Ellory pretending to be someone else. But note that his apology is not actually apologising for that. His apology only seems to be for letting his personal opinions sneak in ie deriding the work of others. If he really does think his work is actually represented by those over-the-top descriptions, then RJ Ellory has MAJOR egotistical problems and needs to be worrying about psychiatric care and getting fitted for his straight-jacket. Nonetheless, I am not seeing any apologies from him for a quite deliberate deception of others.
I recently had a brief online debate with someone else on this subject. That other seemed to think that writing bogus reviews was nothing more than a bit of harmless self-promotion. I heartily disagree. It is nothing short of deliberate deception, telling lies to the whole world in a deliberate attempt to con people into buying your material. That is not self-promotion. How can it be self-promotion when you are in fact hiding the fact that it is yourself writing that nonsense?
Equally interesting in the article linked above, another author, Stephen Leather, justified his admitted practice of writing bogus reviews by saying “Everyone does [it].” I disagree in the strongest terms. If you have any personal ethics, you don’t do that. If you have any basic decency and honesty, you don’t lie to the world like that. And I do NOT know great swags of authors who think this is all such a great idea as Leather does. I can only think of one rather self-righteous author/self-publisher whom I believe engages in that style of behaviour. And in my opinion they have the morals of a particularly unscrupulous sewer rat.
The argument has become that nobody is being hurt by this practice of bogus reviews. Like hell! While Amazon’s ‘review’ system has quite rightly become thoroughly discredited for just the sort of practices being discussed, the genuine reviewers at other places and in other media are also sooner or later going to find themselves quite wrongfully disparaged.
These idiots should be supporting genuine reviewers as good reviews, provided they are warranted, can mean more sales. Instead, these fools have been pursuing stunts that damages the credibility of reviewers and thus in the long run, only doing themselves damage.
It disgusts me that the likes of Ellory has stooped so low. It further disgusts me that his apology does not seem to extend to being sorry that he deliberately lied to and deceived people. It infuriates me that the likes of Stephen Leather insist that nothing is wrong with such a practice, quite falsely stating that ‘everyone does it.’
My counter-argument is how about people show the likes of Ellory and Leather what they think of that duo and anyone else pulling such stunts – boycott them! Refuse to buy their work! Hit them in the pocket as cheats should never be allowed to prosper!
Now if you have an opinion on what I'm blathering about or even just
feel like saying hi, then don't be afraid to leave a comment or post
something to me via Twitter or Facebook. I don't bite - at least not
always.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Friday, August 24, 2012
Vale: Leslie Nielsen - and his lesson for all of us
In a very sad day, Leslie Nielsen has passed away at age 84.
To a great many of us, Nielsen was best known as a comedy actor but this came very much in the latter part of his career. During his approximately 60 years in front of the camera, he was for the longer part a serious actor. Looking back, his was one of those faces that only in later years were you able to recognise.
In my opinion at least, Nielsen's turning point for wider-spread popularity and recognition was being featured in the 1980 film Airplane (Flying High in Australia). There he was able to play some very funny lines with a wonderful deadpan attitude. I vividly recall seeing this at a drive-in theatre one evening in the small northern Victorian town of Kerang, together with my fellow boarder where I lived. We were both bored and he suggested we go see a film. We didn't know what was being shown and it just happened to be Flying High. And this became the start of Nielsen's career as a comic actor, best known for his role in The Naked Gun series of films although those were far from the only comic roles he played.
Nielsen was a real prankster behind the camera and sometimes in front of it as well. Some years ago I saw a clip of him being interviewed. He was answering things in a generally serious manner. But the whole time he had a rubber bulb secreted in one hand, squeezing it as he spoke, making copious farting sounds. And he had the poor interviewer completely fooled into thinking Nielsen was indeed suffering from copious flatulence until late in the interview when he revealed just what he had been doing.
It was this transition into comedy later in his career that saw Nielsen doing what he really wanted to do. And he was damned good at it in terms of delivery, timing, body language and facial expressions.
I think that there is a lesson there for all of us. What is that we really want to do? And if we aren't already doing it in some way, then why not?
Rest in peace, Mr Nielsen and thank you for the entertainment - and the inspiration.
Now if you have an opinion on what I'm blathering about or even just feel like saying hi, then don't be afraid to leave a comment or post something to me via Twitter or Facebook. I don't bite - at least not always.
In my opinion at least, Nielsen's turning point for wider-spread popularity and recognition was being featured in the 1980 film Airplane (Flying High in Australia). There he was able to play some very funny lines with a wonderful deadpan attitude. I vividly recall seeing this at a drive-in theatre one evening in the small northern Victorian town of Kerang, together with my fellow boarder where I lived. We were both bored and he suggested we go see a film. We didn't know what was being shown and it just happened to be Flying High. And this became the start of Nielsen's career as a comic actor, best known for his role in The Naked Gun series of films although those were far from the only comic roles he played.
Nielsen was a real prankster behind the camera and sometimes in front of it as well. Some years ago I saw a clip of him being interviewed. He was answering things in a generally serious manner. But the whole time he had a rubber bulb secreted in one hand, squeezing it as he spoke, making copious farting sounds. And he had the poor interviewer completely fooled into thinking Nielsen was indeed suffering from copious flatulence until late in the interview when he revealed just what he had been doing.
It was this transition into comedy later in his career that saw Nielsen doing what he really wanted to do. And he was damned good at it in terms of delivery, timing, body language and facial expressions.
I think that there is a lesson there for all of us. What is that we really want to do? And if we aren't already doing it in some way, then why not?
Rest in peace, Mr Nielsen and thank you for the entertainment - and the inspiration.
Now if you have an opinion on what I'm blathering about or even just feel like saying hi, then don't be afraid to leave a comment or post something to me via Twitter or Facebook. I don't bite - at least not always.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW: Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas
Review originally posted at awritergoesonajourney.com
Throne of Glass
Sarah J. Maas
Bloomsbury Publishing
2012
9781498832322
Blurb
In the dark, filthy salt mines of Endovier, an eighteen-year-old girl is serving a life sentence. She is a trained assassin, the best of her kind, but she made a fatal mistake. She got caught.
Young Captain Westfall offers her a deal: her freedom in return for one huge sacrifice. Celaena must represent the prince in a to-the-death tournament - fighting the most gifted thieves and assassins in the land. Live or die, Celaena will be free. Win or lose, she is about to discover her true destiny. But will her assassin's heart be melted?
Review
I did not initially realise that this title was actually young adult but I think it has sufficient story-telling to fit either young adult or adult markets. The protagonist, Celaena, is a strong character and in many respects this is a fairly strong and quite creditable novel. I did however have some concerns.
The first and biggest of these, at least to my anal retentive nature, is an error I like to refer to as Spidie Screw-up. In the 2002 film Spider-Man, our arachnid hero, Spidie, leapt off a tall building after his love interest had fallen over the edge. He accelerated through the air, caught her and with a deft squirt of spider web, was able to save her. That scene was strongly criticised for the simple reason that it defied the reality of gravity. Even allowing for Spidie streamlining himself to be less air-resistant that his sprawling, arm-waving target, he simply could not have caught up with her as depicted due to the fixed nature of gravity and it should have been bye-bye to Kirsten Dunst.
Unfortunately Mass has made the same error, even worsening it by having Celaena not just catch up to someone in free-fall but at such as speed that the collision knocks the wind from her chest. Sorry, but that’s Spidie Screw-up all over again. It is disappointing that this was not picked up on and corrected during editing.
The above was a continuity or reality error. My other couple of concerns are more structural. Without being able to describe it too much and avoid spoilers, there were some unexplained and quite curious deaths around the Glass Palace. Overall there seemed to be much less concern being shown about these by people in general than one would have thought. This is also a country where magic was suddenly forbidden in relatively recent times. The appearance of some cryptic marks at the scene of the killings, apparently drawn in blood, did not appear to strike anyone much as possibly being magically related. For me at least, both of these points detracted from the
Sarah J. Maas
Bloomsbury Publishing
2012
9781498832322
Blurb
In the dark, filthy salt mines of Endovier, an eighteen-year-old girl is serving a life sentence. She is a trained assassin, the best of her kind, but she made a fatal mistake. She got caught.
Young Captain Westfall offers her a deal: her freedom in return for one huge sacrifice. Celaena must represent the prince in a to-the-death tournament - fighting the most gifted thieves and assassins in the land. Live or die, Celaena will be free. Win or lose, she is about to discover her true destiny. But will her assassin's heart be melted?
Review
I did not initially realise that this title was actually young adult but I think it has sufficient story-telling to fit either young adult or adult markets. The protagonist, Celaena, is a strong character and in many respects this is a fairly strong and quite creditable novel. I did however have some concerns.
The first and biggest of these, at least to my anal retentive nature, is an error I like to refer to as Spidie Screw-up. In the 2002 film Spider-Man, our arachnid hero, Spidie, leapt off a tall building after his love interest had fallen over the edge. He accelerated through the air, caught her and with a deft squirt of spider web, was able to save her. That scene was strongly criticised for the simple reason that it defied the reality of gravity. Even allowing for Spidie streamlining himself to be less air-resistant that his sprawling, arm-waving target, he simply could not have caught up with her as depicted due to the fixed nature of gravity and it should have been bye-bye to Kirsten Dunst.
Unfortunately Mass has made the same error, even worsening it by having Celaena not just catch up to someone in free-fall but at such as speed that the collision knocks the wind from her chest. Sorry, but that’s Spidie Screw-up all over again. It is disappointing that this was not picked up on and corrected during editing.
The above was a continuity or reality error. My other couple of concerns are more structural. Without being able to describe it too much and avoid spoilers, there were some unexplained and quite curious deaths around the Glass Palace. Overall there seemed to be much less concern being shown about these by people in general than one would have thought. This is also a country where magic was suddenly forbidden in relatively recent times. The appearance of some cryptic marks at the scene of the killings, apparently drawn in blood, did not appear to strike anyone much as possibly being magically related. For me at least, both of these points detracted from the
Monday, July 30, 2012
BOOK REVIEW: Stormdancer by Jay Kristoff
originally reviewed at awritergoesonajourney
Stormdancer
The Lotus War Part 1
Publisher: TOR
ISBN: 9780230762886
Release: August 2012
Blurb
The Shima Imperium verges on the brink of environmental collapse; an island nation once rich in tradition and myth, now decimated by clockwork industrialization and the machine-worshipers of the Lotus Guild.
The hunters of Shima’s imperial court are charged by their Shōgun to capture a thunder tiger – a legendary creature, half-eagle, half-tiger. But any fool knows the beasts have been extinct for more than a century, and the price of failing the Shōgun is death.
Yukiko is a child of the Fox clan, possessed of a talent that if discovered, would see her executed by the Lotus Guild. Accompanying her father on the Shōgun’s hunt, she finds herself stranded: a young woman alone in Shima’s last wilderness, with only a furious, crippled thunder tiger for company. But together, the pair will form an indomitable friendship, and rise to challenge the might of an empire.
Review
When a new title is heralded as dystopian Japanese-inspired Steampunk Fantasy, that definitely catches my attention. Yet can it live up to such hype? Yes it can – easily!
Steampunk is one of the curiosities of the literary world. It either seems to work or it doesn’t. There does not appear to be anything much in the way of middle ground. Jay Kristoff’s debut novel has easily landed in the ‘it’s working’ territory.
The way Kristoff has made his novel work has been by creating something that is eminently believable. And while I am hardly an authority on Japanese culture, the little I know being more inspired by James Clavell’s Shogun years ago than anything else, I was never in any doubt that I was in an alternative Japan, where much of the power was indirectly held by a Guild whose insidious side effect of their technology has thoroughly impregnated this society. I felt a distinct sense of this novel’s setting describing our world in a not-that-far-off future with the impacts of global warming, pollution and land degradation. In that sense, the dystopian aspect to the novel rings true.
The implications of political power are never far away. And like anything with a quasi-feudal setting, it is ripe with intrigue and rebellion, although in the end not quite where you expect it to be coming from. Yet even with that development, while aiding the dissenters, could it not cause even more difficulties in the longer term? Sadly, to find out we shall have to wait for subsequent instalments in The Lotus War trilogy.
If I was going to be critical of anything in particular, it would be that the bonding between Yukiko and the thunder tiger seemed to occur a little too easily, considering the earlier degree of the beast’s hostility. But misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. [Oh dear Lord – did I really just go and quote Shakespeare? After high school I swore I would never do so again. Damn.]
While steampunk-inspired, Stormdancer is not just a novel for fans of that subgenre. It should appeal to fans of speculative fiction generally.
For me the ultimate test of a story is do I want to keep reading. And the answer is an unqualified yes!
Good one Jay
The Lotus War Part 1
Publisher: TOR
ISBN: 9780230762886
Release: August 2012
Blurb
The Shima Imperium verges on the brink of environmental collapse; an island nation once rich in tradition and myth, now decimated by clockwork industrialization and the machine-worshipers of the Lotus Guild.
The hunters of Shima’s imperial court are charged by their Shōgun to capture a thunder tiger – a legendary creature, half-eagle, half-tiger. But any fool knows the beasts have been extinct for more than a century, and the price of failing the Shōgun is death.
Yukiko is a child of the Fox clan, possessed of a talent that if discovered, would see her executed by the Lotus Guild. Accompanying her father on the Shōgun’s hunt, she finds herself stranded: a young woman alone in Shima’s last wilderness, with only a furious, crippled thunder tiger for company. But together, the pair will form an indomitable friendship, and rise to challenge the might of an empire.
Review
When a new title is heralded as dystopian Japanese-inspired Steampunk Fantasy, that definitely catches my attention. Yet can it live up to such hype? Yes it can – easily!
Steampunk is one of the curiosities of the literary world. It either seems to work or it doesn’t. There does not appear to be anything much in the way of middle ground. Jay Kristoff’s debut novel has easily landed in the ‘it’s working’ territory.
The way Kristoff has made his novel work has been by creating something that is eminently believable. And while I am hardly an authority on Japanese culture, the little I know being more inspired by James Clavell’s Shogun years ago than anything else, I was never in any doubt that I was in an alternative Japan, where much of the power was indirectly held by a Guild whose insidious side effect of their technology has thoroughly impregnated this society. I felt a distinct sense of this novel’s setting describing our world in a not-that-far-off future with the impacts of global warming, pollution and land degradation. In that sense, the dystopian aspect to the novel rings true.
The implications of political power are never far away. And like anything with a quasi-feudal setting, it is ripe with intrigue and rebellion, although in the end not quite where you expect it to be coming from. Yet even with that development, while aiding the dissenters, could it not cause even more difficulties in the longer term? Sadly, to find out we shall have to wait for subsequent instalments in The Lotus War trilogy.
If I was going to be critical of anything in particular, it would be that the bonding between Yukiko and the thunder tiger seemed to occur a little too easily, considering the earlier degree of the beast’s hostility. But misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. [Oh dear Lord – did I really just go and quote Shakespeare? After high school I swore I would never do so again. Damn.]
While steampunk-inspired, Stormdancer is not just a novel for fans of that subgenre. It should appeal to fans of speculative fiction generally.
For me the ultimate test of a story is do I want to keep reading. And the answer is an unqualified yes!
Good one Jay
Saturday, July 28, 2012
The spectre of editing
Having reached the lofty ranks of people with their own book being published by a 'real' publisher (OK, it's only a novella being published by small press in the UK, but allow me my brief moment of grandiose self-appreciation), this in turn lead to the dreaded final editing phase.
I freely admit to being an appalling self-editor, quite probably worse than average. It seems the more I study a wretched piece of prose, the more I see what I want to be there rather than what is. It was only on seeing the actual proof that I discovered errors that had slipped through. Oh shit. So another editing phase was put back in my hands. After I finished crying out "woe is me," I was able to talk an editor friend of mine into going through it for me as well. Between the pair of us we (meaning mainly her) discovered a real barrow-load of things that needed fixing up.
So there's lesson number one - get someone else to go over your work with that fine-tooth comb.
Then it was fix-it-all-up time. And I was thoroughly cranky and annoyed with myself by the time I had finished that. It was a considerable relief to send the finished thing off. But this was only a short novella.. I thought about what it must be like to properly edit a novel-length manuscript in that degree of detail, or my wretched thesis that I am currently writing. Good Lord Almighty - if I let my hair grow long enough, I'd be tearing it out in fistfulls trying to fix up my usual scatter-gun collection of errors in a 70,000-plus word piece.
Lesson number two - get it right in small batches to begin with and save the little that is left of my already dubious sanity.
Now if you have an opinion on what I'm blathering about or even just feel like saying hi, then don't be afraid to leave a comment or post something to me via Twitter or Facebook. I don't bite - at least not always.
I freely admit to being an appalling self-editor, quite probably worse than average. It seems the more I study a wretched piece of prose, the more I see what I want to be there rather than what is. It was only on seeing the actual proof that I discovered errors that had slipped through. Oh shit. So another editing phase was put back in my hands. After I finished crying out "woe is me," I was able to talk an editor friend of mine into going through it for me as well. Between the pair of us we (meaning mainly her) discovered a real barrow-load of things that needed fixing up.
So there's lesson number one - get someone else to go over your work with that fine-tooth comb.
Then it was fix-it-all-up time. And I was thoroughly cranky and annoyed with myself by the time I had finished that. It was a considerable relief to send the finished thing off. But this was only a short novella.. I thought about what it must be like to properly edit a novel-length manuscript in that degree of detail, or my wretched thesis that I am currently writing. Good Lord Almighty - if I let my hair grow long enough, I'd be tearing it out in fistfulls trying to fix up my usual scatter-gun collection of errors in a 70,000-plus word piece.
Lesson number two - get it right in small batches to begin with and save the little that is left of my already dubious sanity.
Now if you have an opinion on what I'm blathering about or even just feel like saying hi, then don't be afraid to leave a comment or post something to me via Twitter or Facebook. I don't bite - at least not always.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
What is the future for literary review in Australia?
The Fairfax media group has been in the press quite a bit lately. This coverage has primarily been about the attempt by mining-heiress Gina Reinhardt to basically force the Fairfax Board to give she and her allies three seats on the Board and editorial hiring-and-firing control, in defiance of the Board's existing stance of editorial independence. To the Board's credit, they have to date refused to bow down to that pressure of someone who rather obviously has ulterior motives behind her move. Anyone who thinks it is merely an investment decision by Hancock Prospecting is kidding themselves but that has already been extensively covered elsewhere.
In other circumstances, the real Fairfax story would have been its financial difficulties but these do not make nearly as dramatic reading as that of the Reinhardt push. Fairfax announced not long ago that 1,900 jobs were to be lost across the group. One of the impacts has now been announced. At the Canberra Times, the literary editor's job has been canned and all book reviews in the daily newspaper for Australia's capital, are to be simply taken from existing reviewers in Fairfax publications in Melbourne and Sydney.
Now I can hardly blame the Fairfax group for needing to rationalise things on a purely economic basis. But there are some other quite noticeable flow-on effects, externalities to use a term from my old economics background.
In global terms, Australia is still a relatively small fish with a population of a bit over 20 million. There are a limited number of large metropolitan papers with literary reviewing. By reducing the reviewing to merely that of Melbourne and Sydney, the review of literary matters has been significantly reduced. The critical pool of information being made available to the public is therefore also reduced ie the opinion of an even more reduced pool. This also means in practical terms that with fewer books being reviewed, details of fewer books will be going out there to the public. This is bad news for all authors and literary consumers.
There is yet another aspect - what type of literature is now going to be reviewed? Perusal of the literary pages of either Sydney Morning Herald or The Age, the two main mastheads of Fairfax, sees a distinct preference for what I like to call Serious Literature. This Serious Literature is not necessarily the popular literature that actually sells. The concept most definitely does not include genre fiction - crime, sci fi, fantasy, horror, and romance. While the odd one may be reviewed, that is an exception rather than the rule. The Canberra Times, in part due to the efforts of reviewer Colin Steele, did see genre fiction being reviewed to an extent - perhaps not enough to keep the genre authors and fans as happy as we would like, but it was occurring. With this cutting of Canberra-based reviewing, a source of genre-review is gone. Please do not think I am entirely opposed to Serious Literature. For example, Tim Winton's literary ability as a wordsmith puts me in awe. But, rightly or wrongly, it isn't necessarily the style that I wish to read for pleasure. And I am sufficiently self-aware to realise that I sure as heck don't have his stylistic abilities in my own writing.
Now I am sure that there will be those out there who are already saying "well all you need to do is get your reviews into the Melbourne and Sydney press." However Fairfax are in a cost-cutting mode. There is no way that they are going to expand literary pages to increase the amount of reviewing, for the simple reason that this means more expenditure.
There are one heck of a lot of books being published every year across the world. Australian authors are competing in a pretty tight market. Having your work reviewed is a way of generating sales. By reducing the total amount of significant reviewing, Australian authors therefore have even fewer opportunities for review. And the statistics reveal just how poor a return the overwhelming majority of fiction authors in particular actually make from their writing. The JK Rowling's etc with the headline-sized advances and royalties are very much the exception. So this move by Fairfax reduces the amount of local content being covered and Australian authors will find themselves in increased competition to try and get their product covered.
Yet another externality rears its nasty little head - gender representation. The disparity between coverage of female and male authors respectively has been a real issue. Reducing the amount of reviewing merely reduces the opportunities to ensure this gender disparity - intended or not - can cease to become a matter of concern. Perhaps even more concerning was that in response to a quite reasoned and sensible blog post by author Tara Moss which discussed this issue, one Cameron Woodhead responded with " this is the kind of privileged whining that annoys the crap out of me" - and Mr Woodhead's claim to fame - a book and theatre reviewer for The Age. When I politely asked Woodhead a question by a responding comment to that blog, he was quite rude and disparaging.
Uh oh.
The primary reason for Fairfax's financial difficulties was the Board's failure about ten years ago to realise the impact of increased online news reporting and advertising. The 'golden stream' of classified adverts became increasingly lost to companies on the Internet. It is hard to see how that lost ground can ever be recovered. Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd were similarly caught out but have had the greater size and disparity to cover that loss by other means. Not so Fairfax even though it is the second largest media operative of this type in Australia. Yet finger-pointing about whose fault it was does not address the simple economic reality in face of falling revenues to cut costs otherwise we could all wave bye bye to Fairfax.
So just how do we go about addressing the damaging impact arising from Fairfax's self-preservation tactics? Unfortunately I do not have an immediate answer. But it does strike me that perhaps there is a role for government here in funding or subsidising increased literary reviewing and coverage? How about the ACT government subsidising this sort of coverage in the Canberra Times? Or a federal scheme for the press in general seeking to retain, replace or even increase these opportunities for literary reviewing and coverage.
Before closing, I would like to give a shout out to the literary editor at the Canberra Times, Gia Metherell. Gia has been a strong supporter of the arts in Canberra, particularly in coverage of not just national literature but also the strong Canberran literary scene. Gia's position has been declared surplus to requirements under the cost-cutting. So it's goodbye to Gia and thank you for your efforts. Similarly, Colin Steele, a long-time reviewer who was indeed prepared to cover genre fiction, shall similarly be lost to reviewing, along with the rest of the reviewers producing content from Canberra - a perfect example of the resulting loss of critical reviewing coverage. Frankly speaking, it's a major bummer.
It is a sad day for authors and readers as well as those who are losing their livelihoods.
Now if you have an opinion on what I'm blathering about or even just feel like saying hi, then don't be afraid to leave a comment or post something to me via Twitter or Facebook. I don't bite - at least not always.
In other circumstances, the real Fairfax story would have been its financial difficulties but these do not make nearly as dramatic reading as that of the Reinhardt push. Fairfax announced not long ago that 1,900 jobs were to be lost across the group. One of the impacts has now been announced. At the Canberra Times, the literary editor's job has been canned and all book reviews in the daily newspaper for Australia's capital, are to be simply taken from existing reviewers in Fairfax publications in Melbourne and Sydney.
Now I can hardly blame the Fairfax group for needing to rationalise things on a purely economic basis. But there are some other quite noticeable flow-on effects, externalities to use a term from my old economics background.
In global terms, Australia is still a relatively small fish with a population of a bit over 20 million. There are a limited number of large metropolitan papers with literary reviewing. By reducing the reviewing to merely that of Melbourne and Sydney, the review of literary matters has been significantly reduced. The critical pool of information being made available to the public is therefore also reduced ie the opinion of an even more reduced pool. This also means in practical terms that with fewer books being reviewed, details of fewer books will be going out there to the public. This is bad news for all authors and literary consumers.
There is yet another aspect - what type of literature is now going to be reviewed? Perusal of the literary pages of either Sydney Morning Herald or The Age, the two main mastheads of Fairfax, sees a distinct preference for what I like to call Serious Literature. This Serious Literature is not necessarily the popular literature that actually sells. The concept most definitely does not include genre fiction - crime, sci fi, fantasy, horror, and romance. While the odd one may be reviewed, that is an exception rather than the rule. The Canberra Times, in part due to the efforts of reviewer Colin Steele, did see genre fiction being reviewed to an extent - perhaps not enough to keep the genre authors and fans as happy as we would like, but it was occurring. With this cutting of Canberra-based reviewing, a source of genre-review is gone. Please do not think I am entirely opposed to Serious Literature. For example, Tim Winton's literary ability as a wordsmith puts me in awe. But, rightly or wrongly, it isn't necessarily the style that I wish to read for pleasure. And I am sufficiently self-aware to realise that I sure as heck don't have his stylistic abilities in my own writing.
Now I am sure that there will be those out there who are already saying "well all you need to do is get your reviews into the Melbourne and Sydney press." However Fairfax are in a cost-cutting mode. There is no way that they are going to expand literary pages to increase the amount of reviewing, for the simple reason that this means more expenditure.
There are one heck of a lot of books being published every year across the world. Australian authors are competing in a pretty tight market. Having your work reviewed is a way of generating sales. By reducing the total amount of significant reviewing, Australian authors therefore have even fewer opportunities for review. And the statistics reveal just how poor a return the overwhelming majority of fiction authors in particular actually make from their writing. The JK Rowling's etc with the headline-sized advances and royalties are very much the exception. So this move by Fairfax reduces the amount of local content being covered and Australian authors will find themselves in increased competition to try and get their product covered.
Yet another externality rears its nasty little head - gender representation. The disparity between coverage of female and male authors respectively has been a real issue. Reducing the amount of reviewing merely reduces the opportunities to ensure this gender disparity - intended or not - can cease to become a matter of concern. Perhaps even more concerning was that in response to a quite reasoned and sensible blog post by author Tara Moss which discussed this issue, one Cameron Woodhead responded with " this is the kind of privileged whining that annoys the crap out of me" - and Mr Woodhead's claim to fame - a book and theatre reviewer for The Age. When I politely asked Woodhead a question by a responding comment to that blog, he was quite rude and disparaging.
Uh oh.
The primary reason for Fairfax's financial difficulties was the Board's failure about ten years ago to realise the impact of increased online news reporting and advertising. The 'golden stream' of classified adverts became increasingly lost to companies on the Internet. It is hard to see how that lost ground can ever be recovered. Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd were similarly caught out but have had the greater size and disparity to cover that loss by other means. Not so Fairfax even though it is the second largest media operative of this type in Australia. Yet finger-pointing about whose fault it was does not address the simple economic reality in face of falling revenues to cut costs otherwise we could all wave bye bye to Fairfax.
So just how do we go about addressing the damaging impact arising from Fairfax's self-preservation tactics? Unfortunately I do not have an immediate answer. But it does strike me that perhaps there is a role for government here in funding or subsidising increased literary reviewing and coverage? How about the ACT government subsidising this sort of coverage in the Canberra Times? Or a federal scheme for the press in general seeking to retain, replace or even increase these opportunities for literary reviewing and coverage.
Before closing, I would like to give a shout out to the literary editor at the Canberra Times, Gia Metherell. Gia has been a strong supporter of the arts in Canberra, particularly in coverage of not just national literature but also the strong Canberran literary scene. Gia's position has been declared surplus to requirements under the cost-cutting. So it's goodbye to Gia and thank you for your efforts. Similarly, Colin Steele, a long-time reviewer who was indeed prepared to cover genre fiction, shall similarly be lost to reviewing, along with the rest of the reviewers producing content from Canberra - a perfect example of the resulting loss of critical reviewing coverage. Frankly speaking, it's a major bummer.
It is a sad day for authors and readers as well as those who are losing their livelihoods.
Now if you have an opinion on what I'm blathering about or even just feel like saying hi, then don't be afraid to leave a comment or post something to me via Twitter or Facebook. I don't bite - at least not always.
Monday, July 9, 2012
It’s all in the wording…
To my considerable delight, not long ago I received word that a horror novella of mine had won a competition run by a publisher in the UK with the prize being publication as a standalone book.
The competition was for unpublished authors (prior publication in anthologies did not disqualify from being considered ‘unpublished’).
The proof arrived via email for me to proof read. So I went through it very carefully, found some errors on my part and raised some queries.
Where I now became unstuck was in certain matters relating to those edits. The publisher referred me back to the submission rules which were that the submission was to be ‘print ready’. The distinction here was that this meant ‘ready to be directly turned into print’ and not the more usually experienced process of final editing before going into that final proof stage.
This was my misunderstanding. On re-reading the submission rules etc., I now see what they meant. But as usual, I had rushed off to the end point of submission without thinking a little more deeply about this ‘print ready’.
The down side is that I now feel more than a little foolish for not realising that there was a quite specific aspect to the wording that they had used. However the up side is that in agreement with the publisher, I can make those changes and fixes myself, paying more attention to their house style and send it off to them once more for the publishing to proceed. That in turn means a better looking product.
So the lesson is – pay attention to the words.
Lesson learned.
Now if you have an opinion on what I'm blathering about or even just feel like saying hi, then don't be afraid to leave a comment or post something to me via Twitter or Facebook. I don't bite - at least not always.
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