Since phones have taken over it seems to me that people are reading less in public spaces. My children and I flout this at every opportunity. On a trip to the shops all three of them can often be seen trailing behind me, book in hand. (No one has met with calamity yet.) If I know I’ll be wasting time in queues, I’ll stuff my current novel into my bag before I leave home. But then as I stand in a line of people bent over their phones, I often feel almost mournful. Perhaps those either side of me are reading ebooks, but their scrolling fingers suggest otherwise. And I wonder, are we losing the art of reading? Are people reading less? Are we so spending so much time on social media that we are no longer taking time for deep reading?
A 2016 Nielsen report puts average media consumption (social media, TV, radio and all electronic devices) at 10 hours a day. How is there time for anything else? And in 2016, a National Endowment for the Arts survey found that only 43 per cent of American adults had read ‘a work of literature’ for pleasure in the previous year. That stat depresses the hell out of me. More than half the country hadn’t read even one book in a whole year. That’s 163 million people who didn’t pick up a book for pleasure.
Anecdotally, the word from my children about their classmates’ lack of interest in recreational reading doesn’t paint a rosier picture. Last week Miss 15 reported that her English class complained volubly about a Roald Dahl short story they were asked to read. It was too long, they all said. Miss 15 rolled her eyes as she recounted this. It was 10 pages.
In order to make a living most writers take on a range of different work, and Nigel Featherstone may have one of the best jobs in the biz. Managing the HARDCOPY program, he works with emerging writers and industry professionals — agents, publishers, editors — from around the country. Having been involved in a very minor way (speaking on a panel of authors one year, assessing applications another), I’ve seen firsthand what a unique and transformative program HARDCOPY is. So I asked Nigel to share the top ten things he’s learned from spending time with so many industry greats.
Although I am lucky enough to spend the majority of each week writing, and primarily writing literary fiction, I am also lucky enough to spend a day each week at the ACT Writers Centre delivering HARDCOPY, a national emerging writers program funded by the Australia Council for the Arts. Having been involved in every element of the program — behind the scenes and as well as facilitating some of the sessions — I have had the opportunity to meet many key figures in the Australian publishing industry and authors, as well as get to know almost 120 new Australian writers, some of which have work that has hit the bookshelves or are about to. Needless to say, I have learned a huge amount, and in a moment I’ll share with you the ten key things I have learned from coordinating HARDCOPY.
But first, what exactly is HARDCOPY?
Established in 2014, HARDCOPY is a six-months-long national professional development program that helps build the capacities, aptitudes and resources emerging Australian writers need to reach their potential. The program is the flagship initiative of the ACT Writers Centre.
By creating an environment that is educative, vigorous and nurturing, HARDCOPY helps writers develop their manuscripts; increases industry knowledge; facilitates relationships between writers and publishing professionals; and breaks down the barriers of location and geography. HARDCOPY aims to develop writers who will have longevity as Australian writers, and the program is underpinned by the principle of pragmatic optimism: being aware of the challenges, but also being positive about the future.
There are three key stages to the program: a three-day manuscript development intensive with Nadine Davidoff, in May; a three-day series of industry presentations and panels, in September; and one-on-one feedback sessions with prominent Australian agents and publishers, in November. Each year, thirty emerging writers are selected to participate in the first two stages, with ten of the thirty then being selected for the agents/publishers feedback sessions.
So what have I learned about writing from coordinating HARDCOPY?
2017 is the thirteenth year of the ACT Chief Minister’s Reading Challenge, but it’s been anything but unlucky. This year saw more students than ever before take part, with 34,000 kids from 91 schools reading their 15 books. Twenty-six schools finished with a 100 per cent completion rate across the school — bravo! And 49 schools with the highest percentage of students completing the Challenge were invited to attend the awards ceremony.
The ceremony is always a wonderful celebration, and this year I was honoured to speak on behalf of the Ambassadors. Our job is to promote reading (could their be a more perfect role?) and visit schools. I was asked to talk about how I became an author, and so I shared how I began writing and making my own books when I was just a wee thing. I remember hours spent on my bedroom floor, writing fairy stories and researching books on hard-hitting topics like the royal family. But I never imagined that I could actually become an author.
I spent my childhood in England and I assumed that authors must be terribly posh people who wore tweed suits and spectacles, and lived in mansions where they wrote in cavernous personal libraries that required a ladder to reach the books at the very top. They definitely weren’t people like me who lived in the suburbs in a noisy, chaotic house with five annoying younger brothers and a dog who liked to eat socks.
One of the perks of being Ambassador for the ACT Chief Minister’s Reading Challenge is visiting schools to talk about my favourite topic—books (duh). This week I headed to Holy Trinity Primary to meet the Year 1s and 2s. Here we all are getting a bit crazy together.
Talking about reading got me thinking about my own special reading memories, and one teacher in particular. Her name was Miss O’D and she was my Grade 6 teacher. She wore blue mascara and shoulder pads and was every kind of eighties cool. She was young, not that long out of university, and she made everything fun. And I mean everything. It was the only year that I enjoyed maths as we played ‘The Footy Game’ to learn our times tables. It involved an actual footy and four teams and much laughter. That year everyone’s understanding of maths skyrocketed.
But for a booklover like me it was the literary activities that got me all shiny-eyed. Every week Miss O’D wrote a Poem of the Week on our blackboard and illustrated it with Dr Seuss-style characters. We would copy out the poem (using smelly glitter pens) and create our own illustrations. I still remember the time I got a rare and coveted 10 out of 10 for my work. ‘Perfect!’ she wrote, and my feet did not touch the ground for the rest of the day. She also constructed a haunted house reading corner from a massive crate painted black. It was full of cushions and dangling streamers and clearly sent one message: reading is fun. But best of all, she got us to write, illustrate and ‘publish’ our own picture books. I had been writing stories and making my own books at home for as long as I could remember, so the opportunity to create a shiny hardback (well, more laminated cardboard) had me practically salivating. I still have those two books and I often take them with me on school visits, as I did to Holy Trinity, to encourage kids to make their own.
So as all the Reading Challenge Ambassadors head out for their school visits, I thought I’d ask them about their own special reading memories. Here’s what they had to say.
Jack Heath: At Lyneham Primary School I had a wonderful teacher librarian named Kay Pietsch. When I missed school due to a crippling ear infection, she hand-picked books for me to read during my recovery. Thanks to her I discovered Claire Carmichael, Jackie French, Brian Jacques and many others. When I finally got back to school, I wasn’t behind my classmates. I might even have been ahead.
Harry Laing: There’s a nursery rhyme that’s always stuck in my head with a particularly vivid quality. I think my grandmother read it to me (and I’m sure my mother and maybe a favourite great aunt). I think it was probably just before I was reading properly so the words had that talismanic quality…
Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark
Beggars are coming to town
Some in jags, some in rags
And one in a velvet gown.
Listening to this as a child gave me a delicious shiver. Something to do with the wonderfully tight and expressive sounds and rhymes of hark/bark and jags/rags. It was scary to think of the beggars coming to town, and their power to provoke the dogs with their rags and then the really scary last line ‘and one in a velvet gown’. What did that mean? I’m sure I barely understood what velvet was or even a gown but it was such a smooth and sinister phrase. I still get the same feeling 50-odd years later. I can go back and look at Mother Goose and there’s the nursery rhyme with illustration but it’s the sound of the words that lingers. And how precious that is, to be able to go straight back to being five years old with nothing in-between. Mind you I did have to look up the meaning of ‘jags’ (tatters, rags).
Tracey Hawkins: As a child I owned a boxed set of Golden Press books, Wonderful World of Walt Disney. There were four books in the set, Fantasyland, Worlds of Nature, America and Stories from Other Lands. My favourite was Stories from Other Lands. Turning the pages took me to a world far away from the small coastal town I lived in. Books provided knowledge and escapism, and fascinated me. Reading fed my imagination as I unearthed the mystery, myths, legends and cultural diversity of other countries. I read thousands of books as a child, but I believe it was this book led me on my future path as an adult to explore and travel the world.
Tania McCartney: One of my earliest and most precious reading memories is with my mum, reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. The intriguing thing about this persistent memory is that it’s not the actual story I remember. It’s the warmth of her lap. It’s her arms around my shoulders and the rumble of her voice, resonating from her diaphragm into my back. It’s the smell of her clothes and the smoothness of the book’s pages. I can still feel my little toddler fingers poking through the holes in the page as the caterpillar eats its way through a multitude of delicious treats, and how the paper scratched my skin. I can also feel the rumble in my tummy, wanting to join the caterpillar for cherry pie, watermelon and a lollipop. It’s all those tactile elements, yes, but it’s also the less tactile—that envelope of love, that feeling of belonging, that parental attention and sheer enjoyment of story. And that, my friends, is how children fall in love with books.
Just look at all those hands! Such enthusiastic little readers!
As Ambassadors we all hope that our school visits will inspire kids to explore many more books and develop a lifelong love of reading. So I was so thrilled to receive a stack of letters from Holy Trinity with beautiful words of thanks and equally beautiful illustrations. I wish I could include them all here but since there’s not space here’s my lounge room carpeted in them, and one of my favourites from Lachy. His exclamations (‘Your visit…OH! I loved it. Please come again!’) brought a big grin to my face. Also, I am ‘awsem’. That’s the best bit of being an author right there.
Above: a carpet of thank you letters. Right: One of the gorgeous letters: ‘Dear Irma, Thank you for visiting Holy Trinity. Your reading of Megumi and the Bear was wonderful (and the book itself). Your visit…OH! I loved it. Please come again! From Lachy.’
Yesterday I got up before the sun and jumped on a bus to Sydney, headed for the Sydney Writers Festival’s one-day publishing forum, Forest for the Trees. The bus originally seemed like a good idea, preferable to navigating peak-hour traffic myself, but after being trapped beside a man who was attempting to cough his lungs up for four hours, I wasn’t so sure. I arrived at the State Library frazzled and late and practically inhaled a large coffee. Thankfully, it got me back on track.
The day consisted of two keynote speakers and a number of panels that addressed various aspects of publishing. I must admit that I love a good stat (even when it depresses the hell out of me) and there were plenty of stats thrown about during the day. None of them were particularly new to me but I often find myself startled anew. For example, based on Nielsen Bookscan’s data, Julie Winters concluded, ‘We’re lucky to get 80 per cent of the population reading two books a year.’
Two. I cannot conceive of reading only two books a year; I often read two books a week. When I shared this stat with a friend she expressed doubt at its validity. But, sadly, I believe it. Bookish people surround themselves with other bookish people and the result is a skewed picture of what the general population is doing, which seems to be pretty much anything other than reading.
Despite that Winters said there is an English-language book published somewhere in the world every three seconds, and in Australia 20,000 new books (including self-published titles) are produced each year. Children’s literature is the fastest growing market, and currently makes up eight per cent of onshore sales. Read More »Forest for the Trees
Jonathan Green, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Sophie Hamley, Juliet Rogers, Julie Koh
Talk naturally turned to writing and how to get published. It always irritates me when industry professionals dance around the truth, making claims that offer false hope to inexperienced writers with limited understanding of how the industry works. But thankfully there was none of that during Forest for the Trees. Sophie Hamley from Hachette revealed that over three years she has only published two manuscripts from the slush pile (where unsolicited manuscripts end up). Ask any major publisher and their stats will be equivalent, if not worse. In other words, if you’re an author you want to avoid the slush at all costs. There are a number of ways to do this. The most obvious is to acquire an agent (easier said than done) but there are other avenues too. Manuscript prizes are a good entry point, and a number of festivals and conferences now offer opportunities to have work assessed by senior editors.
Once a book is published, Hamley explained that 85 per cent of authors don’t earn out their advance. This is something that writers often worry about (amongst so many other things) and that huge figure should put their minds at rest. As everyone in publishing knows, what makes a book succeed is often a combination of intangible circumstances that even the best publicists can’t deliberately create (or recreate). Harry Potter is the quintessential example. Why did that particular book, and not another, become a publishing phenomenon? Any number of reasons can be given but, in truth, no one really knows. Bestsellers keep the industry afloat and offset the other books that don’t earn out their advances. In Australia Hachette publishes Rowling and Hamley coined it the ‘JK Rowling subsidy for local publishing’. So I guess thanks are in order, JK.
Hera Lindsay Bird, Alexandra Payne, Connor Tomas O’Brien, Matthia Dempsey
Naturally talk turned to how authors can best promote themselves and the value of creating a brand. Publishers are looking for strong author platforms and social media engagement, but as poet Hera Lindsay Bird said, ‘Don’t do social media cynically. You can’t fake it.’ Alexandra Payne, nonfiction editor at UQP, added that an author might have 23 followers on Twitter but it’s the work that matters. ‘Publishing is purely subjective,’ she said. ‘I’m publishing what I fall in love with. Authors need to find someone who gets their work.’
That said, it’s not just the editor who needs to fall in love with the book it’s also the acquisitions team, and that ultimately comes down to projected sales. Book scout Catherine Eccles said, ‘We do often find ourselves saying with Australian and Canadian books that they’re ‘too quiet’.’
‘So what about Alice Munro and Elizabeth Strout,’ an audience member piped up. ‘They’re ‘quiet’ and I love their writing.’ Eccles agreed on both counts and referred to an issue that I’ve written about previously. It used to be the case that writers were given three or four books to establish themselves, to develop their work and build an audience. Eccles cited Hilary Mantel as a classic example. It wasn’t until her tenth book, Wolf Hall, that her career took off. But these days writers live or die by their debut novel. If it’s not a success, they are unlikely to get a second shot at it. So would Mantel or Strout or Munro get a second book deal these days? Eccles said she’d like to think so, but realistically it would be unlikely.
But Michael Mohammed Ahmad was adamant that ‘a good writer will always do well’ and will eventually find a publisher to champion them. He spoke at length about the number of wannabe writers who think they are creating works of genius but are completely deluded. ‘They self-publish because they suck,’ he said. As the Australian Society of Authors’ Juliet Rogers said, ‘Whoever said everybody has a book in them deserves to be shot.’ Her comment received laughter and cheers. And that’s where I’m going to leave you, because it’s a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy picture. Onward.
A 2016 Nielsen report puts average media consumption (social media, TV, radio and all electronic devices) at 10 hours a day. How is there time for anything else? And in 2016, a National Endowment for the Arts survey found that only 43 per cent of American adults had read ‘a work of literature’ for pleasure in the previous year. That stat depresses the hell out of me. More than half the country hadn’t read even one book in a whole year. That’s 163 million people who didn’t pick up a book for pleasure.
