Melboure Writer’s Festival – How they got published.

At the recent Melbourne Writer’s Festival, six of the authors I saw mentioned how they got their book published.

Jo Case was asked by a publisher to write her non-fiction book Boomer and Me after the publisher read an article Jo had written about her son’s Asperger’s.

Graeme Simsion originally wrote The Rosie Project as a film script. It won an Australian Writers' Guild award for the best romantic comedy script. But he had no luck getting the film made, so to get the script noticed he decided to turn it into a novel. The novel won the 2012 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. A bidding war then broke out for the manuscript.

Catherine Deveny said she submitted the manuscript of her novel The Happiness Show by mistake, she sent the publisher a file containing it rather than the memoir they had contracted her to write. The publisher read the novel manuscript and liked it so much they wanted to publish it (Note: Deveny already had had six books published). 

A friend of Lucy Neave’s had an agent and recommended Neave to that agent. But the agent said Neave’s manuscript of Who We Were needed work. Neave worked on it for a couple of years and then sent it back to the agent.

Bali Kaur Jaswal did a mentorship with an agent. The agent helped develop the manuscript of Inheritance, but did not take her on. Jaswal sent the finished manuscript straight to its eventual publisher.

Many publishers rejected John Weldon’s manuscript Spincycle before it was picked up by an independent publisher. Weldon (pictured above) said that about a year later, a major publisher finally got back to him, but they were too late. Weldon didn’t have an agent.

Obviously the chances of getting published greatly increase when you know someone in the right place in the publishing industry. Those of us who don’t know anyone (yet) can take a bit of heart from Jo Case, John Weldon and Bali Kaur Jaswal’s experience. But note: Jo Case worked in the book industry as a reviewer and still works as a senior writer and editor at the Wheeler Centre. Lucy Neave, Bali Kaur Jaswal and John Weldon all teach creative writing. And Catherine Deveny had a long history in writing for a major newspaper, television and radio. So the only route open for those of us who aren't working in the business could be winning awards like Graeme Simsion did.

Book Readings at the Melbourne Writers Festival

 

At the recent Melbourne Writers Festival, Max Barry asked why do audiences sit around and listen to authors reading from their books at writer’s festivals? Shouldn’t they instead be watching authors write? A few years ago, he attempted to put that thought into action. He set himself up in the concourse at the Melbourne Writers Festival so people could watch on a big screen as he wrote. He said it was the worst writing experience in his life, as every murmur or giggle from those watching had him thinking he had made an grievous error. So he now much prefers to do readings from his books.

I heard him and a number of other authors reading from their books at the festival. Some of them had me wanting to buy their book, while others did a good job of convincing me not to buy their book.

Graeme Simsion

If you are an Australian writer and haven’t heard about Graeme Simsion and his book The Rose Project, then you haven’t been paying attention. Simsion has now sold his romantic comedy to 40 countries for around two million dollars. He is in negotiation with Hollywood studios to have it made into an A-list movie. The novel is about a scientist who sets out to find a mate, with a 32 page questionnaire. The main character, Don, has some of the characteristics of Asperger’s Syndrome.

At the festival, Simsion read from the start of the novel. He read very quickly to mimic the voice of his character Don. The section he read was very funny, getting many laughs from me and the audience. He put on a very energetic performance, and I have since purchased the ebook of the novel. 

Max Barry

 Max Barry is an Australian whose book, Lexicon, I had purchased the morning before I saw him read. Lexicon had been getting a lot of good reviews from my Facebook friends, and I had very much enjoyed Barry’s last novel, Machine Man. Both novels are science fiction. Barry choose a section from the start of his novel, where there was a lot of action happening. What struck me about his reading was his unusual descriptive word choices, for example:

He didn’t understand the question. He had run into a pole and all his thoughts had fallen out. He groped for them and found Cecilia.

Catherine Deveny

Catherine Deveny was on the same panel as Max Barry. The panel was appropriately called Dying is Easy, Comedy is Hard, because Deveny tortured her reading to death. She had selected a section from her novel The Happiness Show, but she spent ten minutes, at least, trying to set up the scene. She then interrupted her reading with more background explanation. Her reading, which I found neither funny nor memorable, was cut short by the moderator so the other authors could make a contribution to the one hour panel. If there is one thing I will take out of the festival it is that if I am ever doing a reading from a novel, I will choose a section that requires minimal backgrounding.

John Weldon

John Weldon is a first time novelist. He was on a panel with two other first time novelists. He had a big Aussie personality, much like the character in his book, Spincycle, where a man who recently separated from his wife. In the section John read, his main character needs to wash his underpants, but his wife took the washing machine. The section was humorous in a blokey way, not really my cup of tea. It also didn’t seem appropriate for an audience of 80% females. But if the rest of his novel was like his reading, then what choice did he have.

What I learnt about doing readings

Choose a section from near the start of the novel where the hook is, and where the assumed knowledge about the plot and characters is not that great for the reader/listener. Choose a section with humour in it, as laughter from the audience is great feedback. Mimic the voice of characters if you can. Put some energy into reading it, so you sound like you are proud of what you have written.   

The Future of the Novel.

Recently I attended the Melboure Writers Festival. I went to a panel called The Future of the Novel. Most people would expect a panel with that title to be a discussion about the demise of book reading in the near future. Refreshingly, that was not what this panel was about. Instead the panellists were concerned about the effect social media could be having on what novelists write.

The panellists were an impressive intellectual in Nigerian born American novelist Teju Cole, who wrote the much lauded Open City. The other, much quieter panellist, was transmedia creator Christy Dena.

Cole began with the proviso that anything he had to say about the future of the novel was likely to be wrong. He then tried to describe what makes a great novel. He said a novel was a place where life slows down. He said great novels always had something wrong with them, and this was a good thing, because in their wrongness they managed to create something unique. He then asked, in a world full of social media and its instant feedback, would this wrongness continue?

Let me explain. The panellists felt that writers who used social media extensively, which is most of us, now receive instant feedback on anything they post. In our attempts to increase the number of hits, retweets, and friends, most writers seek to avoid offending their readers. They also endeavour to write positive posts as no one likes a whiner.  Many writers like to look busy to, as though they are leading pro-active lives. So writers adjust what they write on social media based on the feedback they are receiving.

Before social media arrived, a writer might worry about offending their mother with their writing, but now they risk offending the twitterverse. So social media could lead to writers, tooled in its rules, writing sanitised versions of their novels as they impose social media learnt self-censorship.

I found this self-censorship concern interesting in relation to another panel I attended: Healing Words. The panel was about how reading and writing can help the healing process. It was about how reading about someone who had gone through similar health problems, could be beneficial or console the reader. But what if the reader is reading a sanitised, self-censored version of what really happened?

Another panel I attended, On The Spectrum, was about writing about Asperger’s Syndrome. Jo Case was a panellist who had written a non-fiction book about bringing up her son who had Asperger’s. I have nearly finished reading her book. In it she says she blogged a lot about her son. The book itself reads like a lot of blog entries. She said she received a lot of comments on her blog, a lot of empathy for her situation. Then finally some bloke made a comment that her son might have Asperger’s.

I have to wonder how the blog feedback she received influenced the writing of her book. As it is, the scenes in the book seem to go a bit like this: Leo doing something strange and then Jo or someone else doing something that, for the moment at least, causes Leo to acknowledge or modify his behaviour. There are very few dummy spits in the book by the author.

Feedback from social media might also affect how novelists write their self-censored novels. Most writers try to write easy to read blogs and tweets in order to make them as accessible as possible. This might lead to a lack of experimentation by writers. So the future of the novel could be bland, unchallenging, self-censored writing.