Tick, tock, time's up, dead tree literature

Reference: debate at the ALR's 'Ragged Pair of Claws' blog, here.

Hi, welcome to this off-site rant. Saves space at SR's joint. And demonstrates what the internet can do - is doing - to the nature of out 'collective literary community'. Feel free to comment here. It's a quickly bodged up, one-off site. There are no rules. All I ask is that you be really honest about our literary community.

Bye bye dead tree literary gate-keepers.

In response to comments on the debate over at Ragged Claws so far:

Mike Heyward has a nerve pressing the populist button on taxpayer funding, as does Jeremy Fisher with his tosh about Australian publishing thriving 'without any support from the taxpayer'. Really, Australian literature's profile gobs have a self-important flair for making you automatically back the opposite of whatever it is they're demanding as their god-given right as purveyors of a cultural 'essential'. Neither of these two influential Men of Australian Letters should be allowed to tell outright lies about their own industry without challenge, though.

Even with PIR's, Text Publishing snaffled at least $11,000 from the Arts Council last FY, to fly to Frankfurt for some 'International Market Development'. Hustling rights deals for Text, schmoozing at the 'last great book party' (Harper's); that is, exactly the kind of 'trade activity' Big Swingin' D*ck Mike has been arguing PIR's have enabled our 'going concern' industry to fund all by its bwave widdle 'big end of town' self, but in quiet fact stumped up for to a fair extent by us after all, PIR's be buggered.

He's not on his Pat Malone. Go and check out the Lit Board breakdown from last FY, if you want to see rampant hypocrisy in action. Do your own Googling, it's easy to find this stuff. Bulging with taxpayer-underwritten, otherwise-marginal writers, publishers, industry groups...even billionaire Rupert Murdoch gets in on the literary subsidy act, huh, SR (so we're partially funding/underwriting your literary taste-making/influencing career just as we are Heyward's, right?). Let's have some honesty and humility from out literary insiders, for once: this country is extraordinarily indulgent of aspiring literary would-be's.

We have a more comprehensive, artificially-sustained network of writerly seeding schemes, programs, literary festivals, highly-funded competitions and awards, writerly retreats, writers' centres, fellowships, subsidised academic courses, writer-paying little magazines, and private-public benefactorial arrangements...than the vast majority of literate nations, certainly per capita. Australia is probably one of the most prodigiously indulgent public supporters of literary aspiration on the planet. (And I think it's no accident that our writers, across all genres except perhaps poetry, are so underwhelming, mediocre, dull, lumpenly-derivative, so complacent and self-satisfied).

Yet for all this, so many inside our 'literary community' clamour for additional market protectionism through PIR's, simultaneously claiming credit for being an industry that's 'come of age' in a mercantile sense anyway.Nowhere do you see a shred of humility, much less gratitude, from men like Heyward and Fisher, for the taxpayer's role in helping a tiny few to the privilege - in so many cases contrived on little more than a flair for working the system and a big fat contacts book - of a life in letters at all. Nope. Apparently the supercalofragelisticexpialadocious contribution towering tweedies like Mike and Jem Make Benefit For The Glorious Culture Of Oz is thanks enough sent our way.

What tw*ts these cultural egotists are.

I have no problem supporting open honest arts funding. I'll happily triple our writerly w*nk-world's cash handout if that's what Jem and Mike want (though whatever it is they use it to create, it won't be a 'vibrant' literary community of the kind they claim). But it's rich to behold those with snouts already in the taxpayer trough taking credit for forging a bold new Oz literary international presence...wholly 'unassisted'.

Go and read Heyward's submissions, they are masterly exercises in rampant self-interested turf protection masquerading as dispassionate-analytical-exposition-scarcely-masking-bewildered-but-stubbornly-open-minded-exasperation (we are talking about professional bullsh*t-artists here, y'know). And so here they go now, for broke, nuthin' to lose...opening fire with all dog-whistling, anti-intellectual 'O Won't Somebody Think of the Poor Taxpayers?' guns blazing. What cynics. Really, they both need to get a grip and climb down off their self-constructed literary pedestals - the ones with the natty little hand-engraved 'Cultural Noblesse Obliger' tags.

There have been so many dishonesties in the case mounted against change that it's hard not to feel rather vindictively pleased at this recommendation on 'up yours, you pack of impostors and liars' grounds alone. But were these recommendations to be accepted t'would actually be a very good thing for Australian literature in itself, whatever 'status quo' blowhards like Winton (and his fellow writers) and Heyward (and his fellow publishers) claim.

Some things to chew on:

1. Territorial 'copyright' was always a dishonest label for what is a trade barrier, nothing more. There's only one source of 'copyright', as enshrined in international conventions; it's bestowed automatically and universally, and the only thing that shapes its practical (ie industrial) application is what contracts the holders of it sign VOLUNTARILY. No international edition is going to be parallel imported into Australia to undercut local sales unless the rights holder has authorised their existence in the first place, while not paying enough attention to what provisions exist in the contract for unsold/remaindered units - which is really what this issue is about: whatever's to be done with/about unsold/overproduced hard copy books in a fast-digitalising copy world.

Every other bastard who lives off the mass distribution of copyrighted IP is having to fight for their livelihoods and rapidly adapt their industrial paradigms to the realities of a digitalising world (which are also great opportunities), not the least among them journalism and all wot sails in her. Why the f**k book workers expect special treatment - especially those whose hard copy units struggle to make their advances at the best of times - escapes me. It's not that government 'shouldn't' protect the book industry's traditional mode of doing business. It's that it CAN'T. The accelerating migration of words from paper to screen is a pressing business model problem for men like Heyward and Fisher and Winton alone to grapple with. The industry has lazily expected governments to 'quarantine' any oversupply across discrete markets, after each habitually incontinent hit-or-miss hype/production phase/project has left them with too many books no-one wants. It's time publishing got serious about matching writerly supply and readership demand more efficiently.

That's probably going to mean far fewer hard copy book titles, especially of the more unreadable 'high literary' ones (mostly) only lit-insiders habitually read out of choice, and only then (mostly) because they're too devoid of independent judgement and/or too pretentious to admit they're unreadable, and/or it makes the industry they're in feel both posh and Culturally Important. I have nothing against the more unreadable books; some of my own very favorite Australian writers are hard going and always low sellers. But the internet has changed the mercantile dynamics and cultural imperatives underpinning what a sustainable publishing industry 'must' feel obliged to put into (expensive) hard covers forever. Unviable low sellers, however culturally important (and who gets to say, and how?), should be banished online, or to print-on-demand or e-Book, or at best to a wholly-private philanthropic publisher, where the inviable writers properly belong (just as Ulysses was first published philanthropically, by installment I think). They'll still be there, Being Great Literature, for the few interested readers to read and posterity to glorify in retrospect.

But the days of book publishing's pompous pretensions to elite-literary singularity, to 'leadership' in and of our literary taste-making covenant, are gone. Thank god. Deal with it, Mike Heyward: you're not a cultural gate-keeper any more. You're just another jobbing small business trader.

2. For those writers hoping to sign overseas contracts...fine, good on you and good luck. But the parallel import risk now has to be yours to take (or leave). What that means is what it has always meant with any kind of Intellectual Property: you take a punt, when signing a copyright-licensing contract, that the sales benefit of having more IP-derived units out there in a new market is worth the risk of undercutting existing sales in current ones, should you fail to sell in that new market and the surplus flaps homeward to roost on your bottom line. Or fight harder in contract negotiation to pulp remainders.

Territorial so-called 'copyright' has always been a semantic con, but the book industry could pull it off because geography used to be a feasible trade barrier, for big bricks of paper with words on them. That's all history now. The internet is rendering PIR's irrelevant, via both online buying, but also simple online/digital reproduction. The entire existing book business model is under the hammer. Really, in an era of Google archiving, Amazon, e-Books, near open-slather 'fair use' cut&paste fair comment, self-publishing/blogging, open share literary sites...it's just a category error to think PIR's are any kind of thing to go to the literary barricades against government over. It's as pathetically anachronistic and sulky as demanding a duel with the minister for aviation to save the zeppelin industry, some time in 1930.

3. WRITERS TAKE NOTE: Before an overseas edition can undercut your local sales...it's got to fail to sell in the overseas market. The stink of entitlement that has pervaded this debate beggars all belief. Being a paid writer is a Dream Job. Competition is rightly fierce. Writing a MS means nothing. Getting a book deal is a start. But until you sell a book to a reader, you're just another wannabe, and a coterie of self-interested insiders assuring you you're a 'great writer' and 'culturally important' to Australia is irrelevant, empty rhetorical smoke being blown up your ass - sorry, 'arse' - if you just can't sell enough copiesof your words to a) be commercially viable and b) demonstrate (in sales) that what you write IS culturally resonant with a LOT of other Australians, not merely your own publisher, their lit-world mates, and their lit-world mates' lit-world mates.

Audiences define artistic worth, not artists, and certainly not self-appointed artistic taste-makers, certainly not ones partially suckling the public teat for their existence and with a vested interest in applauding their own output as loudly as they can. Such is what exists in Australia, if we can all be honest for once, and it is a poisonous, ossifying killer of real cultural vibrancy.

Writers and publishers: Do we understand the business concept that producing a product and bunging it in a marketplace doesn't automatically entitle you to financial reward (not even if you're Shakespeare)? It has to...erm, SELL. Radical. Writers and Indy publishers aren't unique among primary producers and secondary in working long hours to earn nothing much, btw. Welcome to the world of many farms and most small businesses. Ain't vocation fun?

4. The so-called 'cultural risks' posed by overseas versions poisoning our local cultural purity aren't guv'mint's problem, because they aren't guv'mint's doing. Again - it's up to writers to prevent such 'poisoning' (if that's what it is, which it's not, anyway) by refusing to agree to changes under their bylines in the first place. What, o/s publishers give you 'no choice'? Bollocks. It's your copyright. And your contract to negotiate. Christ, Australian artists: they really do want every-bloody-one else to do the grown-up stuff, like, erm, standing on principle even if it costs 'em bucks, for example. Sorry, but it's not up to government to help our precious writers sleep easier at night. (I recommend, among many others, the hilariously hypocritical submissions of Mem Fox and Shane Maloney on this point, basically: "Yes, we did agree to their evil Yankeefying changes, for the Yankee dollar, but gee, as proud Australian artistes we feel just terrible, won't the guv'mint DO something to save our stylistic originality and artistic purity from our own greedy selves???')

5. Finally, what I most vehemently object to about PIR"s is their subtly serving to ensure that a small number of Australians - men just like Heyward - get to ride roughshod over our 'literary community'.

Don't forget that what PIR's do is make it very hard for overseas books to have a 'local presence' here without a smug, freeloading local chaperone that is plugged squarely into the incestuous back-scratching love-a-thon that is local letters. Sure, I can buy any book I want online, but for a book to get traction in our local literary debates and general awareness as a retail option it has to get the box-tick from a local publisher, who then gets to schlep alongside it manning the bells and whistles of its local existence, like some gurning two-bit local rock promotor who gets to muscle in on The Rolling Stones' latest tour. Quite aside from the outright piggybacking effect in fiscal terms, which allow our local publishers to pay less attention to local readership demands than they really should, forcing overseas writers and books through the cultural choke of PIR's bestows our pissant 'literary community' with a contrived globally-disposed substance and imprimatur that in my view is self-deluding. In fact I think that with some fine exceptions - Nam Le is a thrilling new one (and of course, he's so far been launched/shaped in a writerly sense o/s, get it?) - our local product and scene is lame, derivative, often cringingly mediocre, and above all else, unbelievably provincial, desperately parochial, so self-consciously, insecurely trumpeted as 'Newly Internationalised' as to be an inversely-illuminating embarrassment.

The great irony of this debate is that - as I see it anyway - PIR's actually give rise to the worst kind of 'branch office' literary mentality of all. Go and check out the website of Hachette Australia. 'Australians for Australians books' they trumpet. Of their top-selling books, those few that aren't Stephenie Meyer are all from overseas anyway, too. Their major PR focus is on those o/s writers, their list is overwhelmingly skewed o/s, their current marquee writer practically OWNS Australia's reading sweet spot. Then, tacked in there - for show, like some Special Olympics category - are some shabby 'Australia manuscript development' nods, some half-hearted local guernseys...come on. I mean, come on.

This isn't helping Australian writing, guys. It's damning it into a State Subsidised Home for Crips and Spazzes. The way to develop a truly international writing dispensation is to start at home: force your industry to learn how to - to stand and fall on their ability to - hit local readership demands smack on. Force our writers - high and low - to write to an audience, to WIN an audience, to prevail. THAT'S what real story-telling demands, and it's a universal job requirement for fiction writers, and it's WHY WE LIKE MEYER et al so much. Not because the Yanks are evil cultural imperialists, but because their biggest names know how to write stories that people WANT TO READ, and they know that, because to survive in the States, long before they get anywhere overseas, they have to learn how to do it.

That's the apprenticeship we need to impose on our own writers: the apprenticeship of the paying marketplace.

Instead, we are training our writers to expect not to have to win an audience to be a 'career writer'. We are subsidising this disastrous state of affairs with both taxpayer money AND via a siphoning tariff-barrier on the overseas writers local readers do want, a humiliating exercise in cultural self-subjugation that keeps local publishers afloat who should not be kept afloat, because they can't or won't publish Australian books that are viable. We excuse this by claiming that the 'trickle down' editorial impact on our local industry is beneficial. Not if it weakens the imperative for our writers/editors/publishers to produce to/for a viable stand-alone market, it isn't.

I'd almost call the 'success' story since PIR's' everyone's been raving about the Great Regression. Tim Winton whines about the old 'colonial dispensation', but Patrick White won our only Nobel under that 'culturally oppressive' regime, with a sustained batch of breath-takingly global, universal stories that were never-the-less uniquely, unmistakably Australian. And still are. His output still makes Winton's dreary, unambitious, artistically-diffident Oz Novelty Act read like a Colleen McCullogh stab at a screenplay for Crocodile Dundee. Some 'colonial dispensation' White's cultural legacy was crippled by, huh.

Really, I've had well enough of our whining and mediocre literary cliques. One thing they are right about: literature matters. Well, I reckon ours is chronically under-performing, no matter what self-spruikers like Heyward claim. IMHO Australian letters is dull, tired, petty, same-ish, low-grade, brittle and reactive, deeply insecure...we need a ferocious literary and especially lit-critical culture subversive revolution, in which those of us who care about words care about them enough to jeopardise friendships - even careers - rather than tell reassuring lies to each other about the quality of ours. The recent Miles-Franklin short-list was a f**king joke. Has anyone noticed the absymal standard of the editing in Ice, in The Slap, FFS (A&U both times)? Has anyone noticed the structural and plotting amateurisms of Breath? Did anyone actually read The Pages or Wanting? Did any of the writers...show up for the award ceremony?

So I say Bravo! to these recommendations. I say let all Australian writers get a blog, and let's only stick into hard copy those writers who SELL hard copy, and only then in on-demand numbers.

Gee whizz, wouldn't that be a whole new 'literary' ball game to be going on with? Hmmm? Wouldn't that sort out the book men - who would likely be mostly women, going on current form - from the book boys. No-one could lay down the law from a contrived authoritative podium about what is 'good' writing and what ain't, what is 'good' for Australian culture and what is bad. Ever, ever, ever again.

It would be a matter of readership pulling power, as writerly efficacy should alone, properly, be judged by.

Personally I say bring it on. I say: the readership market shouldn't scare any writer who is serious about their own art. I think what second-rate literary posers like Mike Heyward are really scared of is losing their literary gate-keeping roles.

I say: suck it up, Dead Tree Man. And get a blog. And game on.