publishing

The Invisible Thread series: Jackie French

by Irma
7 October 201229 August 2017

I meet Jackie French at Floriade on Gnome Hill, a grassy area peppered with a collection of porcelain gnomes. We walk across to a quieter spot beside a stream. She has come from giving a ‘Gourmet Garden’ presentation where she has managed to splatter herself with soup. ‘I never wear an apron at home,’ she tells me, but using unfamiliar equipment she has managed to make a mess of herself. Not that the evidence remains.

A bestselling author of children’s and young adult books, Jackie is also well-known for her books on gardening and cooking. She has published over 140 books in all, but today we are talking about Hitler’s Daughter, which is extracted in The Invisible Thread, an anthology of 100 years of writing from the Canberra region. On a gloriously sunny day we speak about Hitler and the nature of evil. One of the troubling questions Jackie poses her readers is: when you’re a fourteen year old surrounded by evil, how do you know it’s wrong?

It’s the first time I’ve filmed an interview outdoors and this location presents multiple challenges. Before Jackie arrives, the cameraman, Dylan, tells me about the times he has filmed outdoors, entertaining me with stories of disaster, of intrusive drunks and unrelenting rain and teens desperate to get on camera at any cost. For us it turns out to be the buskers.

We find a spot under a pair of willows away from the streams of people. Halfway through setting up the camera equipment we realise that a lady with pigtails and a pink tutu is preparing for a show just metres away. There appear to be fire clubs and ladders and head mics involved. ‘This is our spot,’ she tells me. On we move.

Finding a location with a suitable backdrop that doesn’t intersect a walkway and isn’t overwhelmed by the pop music pumping from the main stage proves to be a challenge, but we succeed in the end. Setting up in our new location a dozen magpies decide we must be picnicking and strut boldly about our feet. When Jackie arrives Dylan mics us up and we perch on chairs that I’ve lugged from the car park, across the bridge, and through fields of flowers (next day I will feel as if I’ve been punched in the crook of both elbows).

Interviewing Jackie French it is immediately evident that she is a born storyteller. Every time I ask her a question she doesn’t give me an answer, she tells me a story. When she responds to my first question she touches on multiple areas that I intended to ask her about. ‘You were almost redundant!’ Dylan says to me afterwards. ‘She was amazing.’

Despite her natural gift, Jackie tells me that ‘parents, teachers and guidance counsellors always pushed me away from writing. They always said no one in Australia can make a living being an author — do something else when you leave school. But every daydream, every time I envisaged myself as an adult it was as a writer.’ Jackie pursued a ‘sensible career’ and writing became a ‘private, guilty indulgence’ until one day money forced her hand. Her marriage had broken down and she was living in a shed in the bush with a brown snake, a wallaby and a wombat for company. She needed $106.46 to register her car and only had $72 in the bank. A friend, knowing she was an amateur writer, suggested she write for money.

Using an old typewriter that she found at the dump, Jackie wrote her first manuscript. She submitted it to Angus & Robertson but it was so messy and riddled with errors that it was pulled from the pile and flapped about the office with laughter. They read it aloud, expecting it to be hilariously awful. Three weeks later she had her first publishing deal.

I won’t rehash the interview here since you can watch that for yourself, but after the cameras are switched off we continue chatting. Jackie asks me about what I’m working on next and I tell her about my debut novel, which I have just finished, and my kids’ book, Megumi and the Bear, out next year with Walker Books. She offers all manner of invaluable advice. I feel as if I could chat to her all day, but eventually we part and I am left with the impression that Jackie French is possibly the most natural storyteller I have ever met.

A version of this post was first published on Kids Book Review here.

Delivery day

by Irma
5 October 201229 August 2017

If this arrived on your doorstep would you feel terrified? Because I did. Terrified and excited all at once. Why? Because I knew what was inside that little parcel sitting innocuously on my doorstep. Advance copies of The Invisible Thread.

Inside I place the parcel carefully on the dining room table. I pick up the scissors, and cut.

The first emotion I feel when I open it is a little bit relieved. The cover looks just as I imagined it would from the proofs, better even. The texture of Judy Horacek’s illustration invites touch. And I do, holding it in my hands like some foolish, lovesick teen.

Then I feel a little bit proud. Of all the unseen work that has gone into this book. The days, nights, weekends I’ve invested in it, sometimes even working in my sleep. And all the others (so many of them) who’ve worked in different ways to transform this book from a bold idea into a tangible object with that delicious new book smell.

Almost (not) famous

by Irma
8 June 20123 July 2017

Here are ten reasons why you shouldn’t despair if you have an unpublished manuscript. These famous rejections are sure to cheer you up:

1. Can you imagine a world without Possum Magic? Apparently many publishers could. Mem Fox’s classic was rejected nine times over five years. Little Hush would have remained invisible were it not for Omnibus Books in Adelaide. Originally called Hugh, the Invisible Mouse, Omnibus suggested changing the mice to possums, and the rest, as they say, is history. Since 1983 Possum Magic has sold 3.5 million copies, making it the bestselling Aussie kids’ book of all time. And speaking of magic leads me to…

2. Harry Potter, of course. It was turned down by twelve publishers including Penguin and HarperCollins. In the end it was a child who made it all happen. Bloomsbury only took it on because the CEO’s eight-year-old daughter begged him to print it. Thanks to that little girl JK Rowling is now the world’s richest author. In one year alone (2007–2008) it was estimated that she made $300 million, and it’s rumoured that she’s now a cool $50 mill richer than the Queen. Enough said.

Read More »Almost (not) famous

3. Even authors with a publishing track record sometimes struggle to get their newest work into print. Lionel Shriver’s controversial seventh book, We Need to Talk About Kevin, was rejected 30 times before finding a publisher. It went on to win the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction. If you haven’t read this book yet go out and buy it immediately. Yes, immediately. It is compelling, disturbing, haunting and beautifully written. A stunning book that I can’t get out of my head.

4. This one has got to break some kind of world record for the number of rejections it received. Chicken Soup for the Soul, by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, was turned down 140 times. Publishers claimed it was ‘too positive’ and that ‘anthologies don’t sell’. I bet Canfield and Hansen have been laughing their way to the bank since Health Communications took a chance on it. The 200-title multimillion dollar series has since sold more than 112 million copies in over 40 languages. Touché.

5. Ted Geisel, aka Dr Seuss, was rejected by 27 publishers before Random House picked up his first book. Just imagine if he’d chucked it in after the twenty-seventh rejection! We’d be without Which-What-Whos and Fox in Socks and Green Eggs and Ham — my children would be none too pleased about that. And I’m guessing there are a few others who might agree. Seuss was advised by one rejecting publisher that his work was ‘too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling’. In contrast, former president of Random House, Bennett Cerf once said, ‘I’ve published any number of great writers, from William Faulkner to John O’Hara, but there’s only one genius on my authors’ list. His name is Ted Geisel.’ At the time of his death in 1991, Dr Seuss’ 44 books had sold more than 200 million copies.

6. Stephen King may never have been published if it wasn’t for his wife. King threw his novel Carrie in the bin, but his wife retrieved it and encouraged him to keep going. He did so, but it wasn’t smooth sailing from there. He received 30 rejections for Carrie, with one publisher commenting, ‘We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.’ Eventually it was picked up by Doubleday (who had previously rejected three earlier novels of King’s) for a modest $2500 advance. The book that would ‘not sell’ found its way into the hands of over one million readers in its first year. King’s books have now sold over 350 million copies making him the third richest author in the world.

7. Lord of the Flies is a standard on school curricular across the globe but William Golding’s classic novel was initially rejected by 20 publishers. One nastily pronounced it to be ‘an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull’. I bet they wish they could take those words back now. Golding went on to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, and, in 2005, TIME magazine ranked it as one of the top 100 English-language novels ever written.

8. To say I’m a John Grisham fan would be untrue, but he certainly has a devoted following. It wasn’t always that way. His first novel, A Time to Kill, was rejected by 16 agents and 12 publishers. Of course when the book did make it into print it became the first in a series of bestsellers. The sweetest kind of revenge.

9. Who knew that a story told from the point of view a seagull that flew for pleasure, not just survival, would become a bestseller? Certainly not the 18 publishers who rejected Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Macmillan finally took it on and the book sold more than a million copies in its first year. Then came a movie, a Neil Diamond soundtrack, and a paperback version that sold 7.25 million copies, despite one publisher’s claim that ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull will never make it as a paperback’.

10. Pretty much everyone has read The Diary of Anne Frank, right? But the English language rights were passed up by 16 publishers, including Knopf whose reader dismissed it as ‘very dull’. He advised: ‘Even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject was timely, I don’t see that there would have been a chance for it.’ This was in 1950. It was Doubleday who finally published the diary and made it one of the bestselling books in history, with over 30 million copies sold. Take that, Knopf!

So if you have an unpublished manuscript in a bottom drawer and a growing pile of rejection letters, take heart. You might just be the next Golding or Grisham poised on the brink of stardom.

And even if you’re not plucked from the jaws of a publisher’s bottomless slush pile it may not signal the end. The landscape of publishing is currently undergoing a period of dramatic change. The digital age means that rejected manuscripts (both good and bad) can find their way online. Perhaps a list of famous rejections such as this will soon be antiquated.

This post was first published on Overland literary journal’s blog.

The art of book trailers

by Irma
9 May 20121 July 2017

I love a good book trailer, but I must admit that when I was first introduced to the idea I found the whole concept a little odd. A movie trailer draws on ready-made material but a book trailer has to create something from scratch, converting written words into visual images.

Although book trailers have been around for about a decade, it’s only in the last few years that they’ve really taken off. Now they’re part of many publishers’ marketing strategies, but the good ones are more than a marketing tool — they’re works of art in their own right. I still adore the trailer for my short fiction collection, Two Steps Forward, produced by filmmaker Daniel Cahill, that, for me, falls into that category. It offers a taste of the mood and tone of the book without giving anything away. Daniel also produced The Sound of Silence trailer (a collection of nonfiction stories on miscarriage edited by yours truly) that manages to be both informative and moving (the single heartbeat at the end gets me every time).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQXM1bqywO0

The quality of book trailers varies enormously. Some of them are produced by the author without a budget to speak of and are just plain awful. They look cheap and tacky. Or are too long. Or the camera work is amateurish. Or the author pontificates about their book in a yawningly tedious manner. I could go on but you get the point. (I’m going to save you the agony of sharing any of these.)

The short of it

by Irma
15 March 20123 July 2017

With the release of my debut collection of fiction I’ve been talking about the short story a lot and it’s got me thinking. To my mind the short story is undervalued. There are a plethora of short fiction competitions and a handful of literary magazines that will publish them, but a collection in book form? Unless you’re Tim Winton forget it. Nam Le’s debut collection The Boat (2008) is one notable exception. It won every award imaginable and became an international bestseller. Then A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Writers were no doubt hoping all this was a sign of changing times, a sign that the short form was gaining greater recognition. But even Marion Halligan, one of our most celebrated authors with 20 books to her name, recounts how when her latest short fiction collection, Shooting the Fox, landed on her agent’s desk she phoned her up and groaned, ‘Oh, Marion. Short stories?’

As Halligan says, ‘Publishers don’t think much of them, though they may be changing their minds.’ Craig Cormick who’s published over 100 stories and eight collections does believe publishers are ‘starting to value (or re-value) short stories again’. Just five years ago when he was working for Ginninderra Press on their Mockingbird imprint, dedicated to producing short fiction collections, he felt ‘the short story in Australia was on life-support’. ‘It was obvious that in places like the Queensland Premiers’ Steele Rudd Award [for a collection of short stories, the only one of its kind in Australia] there were not the number of contenders they were getting in other categories. During that time Mockingbird had several collections shortlisted for the award.’

Read More »The short of it

The recent announcement of this year’s Queensland Premier’s Awards proves Cormick’s point that short story collections are regaining some favour. The shortlist includes a more diverse range of publishers: Patrick Holland for The Source of the Sound (Salt Publishing), Amanda Lohrey for Reading Madame Bovary (Black Inc.), Wayne Macauley for Other Stories (Black Pepper) and Emmett Stinson for Known Unknowns (Affirm Press). But as Cormick says ‘there is still a long way to go’. Note, for instance, that these four publishers are all small independents who are willing to take risks to publish books they are passionate about.

Martin Hughes at Affirm Press knows all about risk and passion. When he announced his Long Story shorts series, six collections of short fiction by new writers, everyone from the commercial side of things told him he was ‘absolutely bonkers’. Of course the initiative was highly valued by new writers because it is so difficult to get a collection published before having a number of runs on the board. As Hughes says, ‘publishers are not interested in short story collections, unless you’re Nam Le or already a celebrated novelist and they just want to repackage your earlier work.’ Little wonder then that they were flooded with 450 manuscripts. Fortunately for me my manuscript, Two Steps Forward, was selected as the series’ swan song and has just hit shelves. And fortunately for Affirm the series has garnered critical acclaim. Among other accolades, Long Story Shorts author Gretchen Shirm was named Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist of the Year and Emmett Stinson is up for this year’s Steele Rudd Award. The illustrator and designer of the series, Dean Gorrisen, also picked up Silver at the Illustrators Australia Awards 2011 for the first three covers in the series.

So what’s to love about short stories? For Hughes ‘it’s the vitality of short fiction that excites me most; how it forces you to imagine what happened before and after, and how a story gets precisely the number of words it needs rather than approximately the number of words it needs to find a place in a bookstore and be commercial’. And for Halligan it’s the form’s ‘brevity, its elegance, its subtlety, the fact that you have to make such drastic choices about what to put in, what leave out. I think it is like a poem, in that it is much larger than the sum of its parts. I like the small window it gives on to a much larger world.’

The short story is also the ideal form for our fractured, time-poor modern existence. Nigel Featherstone and Alec Patric have been capitalising on this with their online literary journal, Verity La. It is an unexpected pleasure to be eating breakfast or enjoying an idle cup of tea when a new short story arrives in my phone via Verity La. The pleasure of these ‘lovely little distractions’, as Featherstone calls them, is that ‘the work is coming to readers; readers don’t have to make a conscious decision to go and search this stuff out’. He adds, ‘I sometimes get frustrated with writers who whinge and complain about publishers and readers not valuing short stories…Verity La is a way of saying, as writers, we value short stories so how can we get them to readers; in a way it’s writers doing it for ourselves.’

Halligan goes further: ‘A lot of people say they love reading short stories, but don’t actually do much about it—don’t subscribe to magazines, etc. Years ago Elizabeth Webby [former editor of Southerly] said if everybody who tried to get published in Southerly took out a subscription the magazine would have a large and viable circulation. There are few outlets and those that exist are disappearing fast, for example Heat.’ And just days ago Island magazine announced that after 32 years the Tasmanian Government has withdraw its funding and the publication’s future is uncertain.

So if you love the short form why not go out today and buy a collection or subscribe to a literary magazine or check out an online journal like Verity La. As Cate Kennedy says, ‘the short story is alive, part of our collective national voice, and a form to be treasured’. Viva la short story!

Thanks to Craig Cormick, Nigel Featherstone, Marion Halligan and Martin Hughes for their contribution to this conversation, and to Du mbo Feather for some of the quotes from Hughes. This post was first published on Overland literary journal’s blog here.

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