Off the Record Now Available in Digital
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.
Read MoreBook, launch, media, new, digital
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.
New story published: Polysomnogram
The kind editors at Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k) have once again confirmed their taste and style, choosing to publish my story Polysomnogram in their august electronic pages.
A polysomnogram is a test performed on people with suspected sleeping disorders; in this case narcolepsy.
Polysomnogram is an exploration of the ideas and techniques I would use for my second novel, None of the Other Flies Follow My Crooked Lines. Juggling work and a young family, I found my writing hours relegated to the hours of eleven and three. I suspect stories about sleep disorders were a natural consequence.
Whenever I told people I was working on a story whose main character has narcolepsy, people often assumed I was writing a comedy. Although the story has what I hope are amusing moments, Ryan’s narcolepsy is never played for laughs, though it is a handy device to rely on when your scene runs out of steam and you need a quick transition to the next.
So? What are you waiting for?
Read Polysomnogram (should be a permanent link).
Enjoy the rest of Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k).
Read MoreMasterclass at Brisbane Writers Festival
I’ll be lending my digital head to the Australian Writers Marketplace Industry Masterclass at this year’s Brisbane Writers Festival.
This industry seminar will introduce you to agents, publishers and writers and take you on a journey from manuscript development to published author promotion. It will cover the role of agents in a writer’s life, the publishing process, including developming and submitting your work, and new pathways to publication, and you’ll learn the tricks of promoting your book and yourself and the importance of both. This seminar is for emerging writers and those who are just plain curious about books and publishing. Walk away with tools and insider knowledge to help you navigate a pathway in the marketplace.
$100 from QTIX (price includes a copy of the new edition of The Australian Writer’s Marketplace valued at $49.95). Friday 3rd September 10am to 3pm. Queensland Art Gallery Lecture Theatre (opposite the watermall).
Read MoreSaccades: short stories delivered…
A newly compiled and polished edition of my short story collection Saccades is now available in both print and digital editions. It’s the first of two releases from the web site over the next few months leading up to Off the Record‘s launch in October.
Best of all, for the bargain hunters out there, the digital editions of Saccades are free. If you like the stories, feel free to share the love with others.
Enjoy.
Saccades has existed, in one form or another, for close on ten years. Originally a simple collection of short stories I wrote back in 2000 and 2001, the collection was refined and sharpened into a thematic collection grouped around a fictional building in inner-city Brisbane. Two years of frustrations and delays with publishers saw the collection fall apart and individual stories redrafted and tightened back into individual pieces. By 2005, a few of the stories lobbed up on this here web site as digital downloads. It was still early days for digital publishing and more than a few readers didn’t quite make head nor tails of stories offered up like iTunes tracks, though a few stories—Hemmingway and Lucky January for example—found a few fans. In the meantime, I busied myself with writing novels.
By the end of the decade, digital publishing had moved into a new high gear and I renewed my love of short stories with a few new published pieces. So Saccades was dusted off, gutted, and reconstituted as a collection again. Many stories from the original manuscript were dropped altogether, many more new stories were added. Some of those that remained were radically redrafted. Really, apart from the title and a handful of relatively untouched stories, the collections at either end of the decade are different books.
That’s okay. Things change.
Read MoreAuthditor
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?
Read MoreThe Books
