He Edits

Hand Made High Tech

Posted by The Author on 20 Dec, 2011 in Digital Publishing, He Edits, Stuff That Happens | 1 comment

Throughout 2011, if:book Australia commissioned essays from ten Australian writers on the future of writing and reading in a future tilted towards the digital. Each writer drew on his or her experience in fields diverse as publishing, transmedia, gaming, and comics to observe the changes taking place in ‘books’ and discussing where this might lead for authors, readers, and reading culture.

Originally posted at the if:book web site, the articles have now been compiled (some updated) into a single volume under the title Hand Made High Tech with an introduction by me and a brilliant cover design by Daniel Neville.

It’s free to download in any format or to read online. If you have any interest in books and publishing futures, it’s worth a read. Check it out.

Off the Record Now Available in Digital

Posted by The Author on 13 Feb, 2011 in Digital Publishing, Featured Articles, He Edits, Stuff That Happens | 0 comments

After much technical jiggery-pokery, Off The Record is now available in digital form, including the Kindle store for all you kindlers out there. The book is also coming soon to Apple iBookstore and Google eBooks.

In time it will also be available from all major vendors, including Baker & Taylor, B&N, Borders, Bowker, Ebooks.com, Ebrary, Follett Digital Resources, Kobo, Lightning Source (Ingram), Netlibrary, Overdrive, Sony, and Tecknoquest.

The ebook for Off the Record will be available to customers worldwide, so if you have had any trouble finding yourself a print copy (you obviously haven’t tried here), now is your chance to pick yourself up copy in fully recyclable pixels.

Book, launch, media, new, digital

Posted by The Author on 4 Nov, 2010 in He Edits, He Writes, Stuff That Happens | 2 comments

It’s been a busy few weeks and there is little sign of things slowing down any time soon, so allow me to wallow in that desultory refuge of the most vile corporate hacks: the dot point.

• Off the Record: 25 Years of Music Street Press is available now in all good bookstores. Check the web site for details on where to get it online or walk into your favourite independent bookshop and demand it on the shelves in great quantity.
• We are holding an official book launch with John Wilsteed of the Go-Betweens as the official book launch launcher. It’s at Avid Reader in West End on Wednesday 10 November at 6:00pm. It’s free to attend, but you’ll need to book with Avid Reader.
• We had a great discussion with Richard Fidler on ABC Brisbane last week. You can listen to it here.
• A new novel exists in a rough-as-bags 20,000 word draft. I can guarantee it will include a Hofner bass, a car named Cedric, and a C90 mix tape.
• I’m about to get even more insufferable on the topic of digital publishing because I have just taken up a new post as the manager of if:book Australia.

Authditor

Posted by The Author on 23 Jul, 2010 in He Edits, Stuff That Happens | 0 comments

Author. Editor. I tried coming up with a portmanteau for what I do, but the best I could manage was ‘authditor’ (given that ‘auditor’ was already taken). Somehow this unholy Vulcan-mind-meld of roles has not so far completely done my head in. Then again, maybe I’m not the best judge of these things.

Being both an author and an editor means you sympathise with parties on each side of the brilliant-writing divide. You know how hard it is to crank out a draft, but you also know the groaning horror of facing trite, clichéd, poorly spelled, and even more poorly punctuated slop from overly sensitive and precious wordsmiths. Being an authditor is like being a swinging voter, except you’re not necessarily also a bogan.

So in late October, my collaboration with Sean Sennett on an anthology of Australian music street press will be marching inexorably through the landscape in what I hope will be plague proportions. Like any good anthology, it will be big and fat and absolutely chock-a-block with references to Iggy’s Fun House record. It even has the word ‘boner’ a few times for good measure.

To create the book, Sean and I trawled (really there’s no other word for it) through more than 1,300 issues of Time Off. A conservative average of three interviews per issue still comes up with around 4,000 stories to consider. We had to reduce that to under a hundred. It was a wild ride. Digital files exist only for articles published since around 1997. Everything before that had to be eyeballed. Neck pain, eyestrain and inky fingers were standard fare. It was fun, though. Prominent advertisements for massage parlours jostled with exhortations about how AM Stereo was going to transform Australia’s radio landscape. I took photos. When you’re locked in the world of your subject, strange things happen. I almost wet my pants when I saw a 1984 interview with Johnny Marr. Then I almost threw the computer through the window when I Googled the quotes and realised the story was rehashed from a contemporary article in The Face.

To help us deal with the volume, we identified early on a core list of artists we thought should get a jersey. That list ran to about two-hundred. Each of those artists might have featured anywhere from a single interview to ten or more. We had to decide not just on artist, but the era (was that period interesting for the artist?) and author (did the piece take an interesting angle?).

We were working with previously published pieces, but pieces composed in a very different environment to ours. A few people pulling together pages and pages of articles, information and ads every single week. As an editor, when I came across a rough patch of prose, I mostly sided with the authors. Spelling howlers? Blame the lack of resources or the deadline. Change the text, shrug, and move on to the next sentence. As an editor, it was easy to take a withering approach. As an authditor, the feelings were mixed. Still, the results are exciting.

There was a point to this article when I started. Now I’m just in need of a good editor. Know any?