Shane Maloney: I am a leech on my readers
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Last January, I went into a bookshop in Queenscliff and found multiple copies of several of my novels on the shelves. They were American hardback editions of books. At $26, they were a steal. Literally. The books were remainders, probably bought for next to nothing. The bookseller stood to make a considerable margin. I stood to earn nothing, since no royalties were payable. My Australian publisher stood to lose a sale. The bookshop was acting contrary to the current parrallel import regime. But the Productivity Commission has just recommended that exactly this kind of dumping onto the Australian book market be allowed. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not in the wrong line of work. The Australian says I am a leech on my readers. Bob Carr reckons that little kiddies in Penrith are illiterate because of my unbridled greed. Dymocks, Target, Woolworths and Coles think it would be best for everybody if I worked for nothing. According to the Productivity Commission, I should be stripped of my property rights, given a taxpayer-funded grant and forget about trying to build an international readership. Writing a novel is an act of hope. You hope it is good. You hope it will be published. You hope critics will like it and people will read it. You even dare to hope you might make a little bit of money from it. You hope your publisher might make a bit of money so they’ll want to publish the next one. So even in the nutty slab of ideological boilerplate released yesterday by the Productivity Commission, I cannot help but look for a sliver of hope. I certainly do not hope PC’s recommendations are implemented. That would be sheer vandalism, the infliction of injury on a healthy industry without heed to the possible consequences. But I do hope that the government sees this as an opportunity to declare its support for our writers and publisher and bookprinters and independent booksellers who have all done the hard yard to make our story so successful. Last time these proposals went to parliament, they were opposed by Kevin Rudd, Wayne Swan and Lindsay Tanner. Under the current arrangements, Australian publishing has flourished. If there are new and compelling reasons to kick it in the guts, they have not been persuasively argued in the Productivity Commission report. The ball is now in the government’s court. I hope it has the good sense to sort fact from fiction, possibly even undertake a proper study of the Australian publishing industry, one informed by more reliable data and rigorous analysis than employed by the Productivity Commission. In the meantime, I’m thinking about getting into the fantasy genre. I’ve got an idea for a story set in an imaginary world in which a band of selfless superheroes known as the Coalition for Cheaper Books rescue Australian readers from the greed and tyrany of local authors, publishers, booksellers and printers by using a magical talisman called the Hidden Hand. I’m sure it’ll find a ready market. Some people will believe anything. Shane Maloney is authour of the Murray Whelan series. |
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31 Comments
Shane
I have a Plan B - maybe all your readers and those lovers of Australian literature of all genres could exercise some self-discipline and, in the event that government does not put these proposals where they belong, just buy the Australian version (with Royalties flowing) from a good old fashioned Australian owned bookshop, regardless of whether its $10 or whatever more expensive!!
And Shane, its been a bloody long time since a Murray Whelan novel came out. I’m still hanging and I’m prepared to pay pretty much anything…
Kind regards
Jennifer Dillon
Shane,
Given Murray Whelan’s working knowledge of politics, you would be intimately aware of the treacherous and venal thread that runs through the Labor movement. Just ask the ex-singer of Midnight Oil.
Love your work,
Grahame Cox
The Productivity Commission is the Federal Government department tasked with protecting Australians from those able to rig the market. It listened to book cartel apologists before coming up with its findings. It is now crying foul on behalf of all Australians. If the Productivity Commission is wrong and the book cartel are not rigging the market and ripping us off, then surely Shane and all the other cartel apologists have nothing to fear from competition.
The productivity commission correctly notes there are far better, cheaper and more efficient ways (such as direct payments) for Australian taxpayers to increase Australian authors and publishers incomes, if that is to be a national objective, than disadvantaging all book purchasers by artificially rigging the market for the benefit of a minority, but highly vocal, cartel. Naturally if you are a cartel, rather than a consumer, hidden rigging of the market is the preferred option.
If the book cartel can keep up their constant misinformation barrage then Kevin07 will probably again go to water and announce what the car manufacturers got when the productivity commission tried to remove car manufacturer’s snouts from the trough.
An “enquiry” at which the productivity commission was prevented from making any submission and whose terms of referance were limited only to what was best for the car industry. No pesky referance to what was in Australia’s best interests or to Productivity Commission research. Result - a $A14bn free hand out to US creditors of bankrupt US car companies courtesy of you and me, despite Productivity Commission studies showing such handouts as a costly waste of time and money, causing net job losses overall, and despite spin to the contrary, incapable of producing a “green” car industry.
If it was wrong for cardboard box billionaires to run a cartel, why is it right for book trade insiders?
Excellent perspective.
If Rudd, Swan and Tanner originally opposed these actions one wonders why their government created this commission in the first place (I know, Bob Carr, Allan Fels,…). It seems to be the ultimate in economic rationalism, topped by creation of a new government-controlled subsidy to undue some of the damage (“cultural externalities”) that they admit the abolition will wring. I think they must have been reading too much Lewis Carroll.
Shane (1.19pm). If you read some of the comments to my article in yesterday’s Crikey, you will weep. Some will sell out Austalian authors, bookshops and publishers for as little as 46 cents! (I am being a bit facetious here but….). Alas your Plan B is doomed, but look at my table and see that the three independent bookstores were surprisingly competitive, and were never the most expensive.
“Book cartel”? Authors now rip-off merchants on the scale of Richard Pratt? Jesus wept…
What bothers me most about the debate, aside from the contempt in which some people seem to hold writers, is the disinformation that is being bandied about. For example: if the market is “artificially rigged” by PIRs, the same thing is happening in the UK and the US. These countries are lauded by the Commission as Meccas of cheap books. Yet their authors have Territorial Copyright, and what is more, the authorities have no intention of dropping them. Which begs a really big question - if Australian books do cost more (which is highly arguable - the consensus, even from the Commission, seems to be that some books are cheaper, some more expensive) how come they say it’s due to PIRs? The Commission doesn’t offer any evidence that is the case: they just say it must be so. Yet if it were, the same “upward pressures” would apply in the UK and the US, surely? If not, why not? Perhaps if they think books ought to be cheaper, they are looking at the wrong issue. Certainly not a question addressed in the report, and one I would like to see answered.
I am ignorant of the finer points of the book publishing industry. What I don’t understand from this story is how an American publisher can sell a novel by an Australian author without paying a royalty to the author.
Welcome to the world many musicians live in. You may well produce fine art, but you had best do it on your own time while performing a valuable service to society. I’ve yet to figure out what such service might be, but I suspect the MP-as-novelist look went out with Disraeli.
I may be wrong, but I’ll hazard the answer is something like this, David:
Shane Maloney voluntarily signed a contract that incorporated a remainder mechanism that, when applied, meant that Shane was no longer entitled to royalties. At some point his US publisher on-sold the surplus stock from the print runs - that is, over-published books that no-one in America was prepared to buy, or not sufficiently briskly - to a remainder warehouse, who then punted it to that Australian retailer (busting PIR’s). Or something like that.
Stop me anytime I’m wrong, Shane. I’m keen to learn about your industry.
When signing his original contracts with the US publisher Shane and his agent presumably failed to give sufficient aforethought to downstream contractual ramifications of a too-ambitious production run (maybe their clarity of sight was blinded by the Yankee bucks), maybe the Yanks made ‘em an offer dey couldn’t refuse…maybe Shane thinks he’s such a shithot deathless prose merchant that the Yank readers couldn’t possibly fail to recognise his incredible Cultural Significance And General Brilliant Elmore-ness and would line up in droves to buy every last copy going. As he says, that’s the hope…and in a perfect world, Shane…your upcoming fantasy one, say.
Alas, they just did not…as is the case with the vast majority of hard copy novels, the hard copy industry ran off more dead trees than readers wanted to buy. It’s a pity, and it’s doubtless disappointing for Shane, but no-one’s forced to be a writer and no-one is forced to sign any contract, agree to any remainder provision, etc. The Yanks are red-hot ruthless on remaindering but that’s the game you choose to play when you set out to ‘build an international readership’.
Stop me any time I’m wrong, Shane. I’m keen to learn more about ‘how publishing works’. Mate. Thanks, by the way, for ignoring me on the other thread after sneering and then running away. Alas - this is the internet, Shane: it’s not like your lob-from-the-lofty-heights Tweedy Biz. You pick a fight in words in this joint, you can’t just withdraw and maintain a lofty aloof silence like Timbo up on his fishing boat when some of us punch back, resolutely unimpressed by your six ripper Whelan yarns. You’re a fine novelist, a ripper, but bullshit from even Shakespeare would still smell as sweet, Shane, and you’re talking bullshit in this post…’leech’ indeed - what a strawman whine…ah, how I love the internet…brave new interactive worlds…etc etc…)
Look, all joyously fun Dead Tree Man stoush-baiting aside, Shane, you - our book writers - need to get a damned grip on your stupendously over-inflated senses of mercantile exceptionalism, workplace entitlement and Grand Cultural Importance. You’re not the only bastard small biz’s in Australia who work hard for f**k-all or at best uncertain return. You authors are not the only bastards in Australia who have had to adapt their industry to globalisation. (You’re about the last bastards among us the PC has come a-door-knockin’.) You’re not the only IP bastards in Australia who are having to cope with the erosion of market segregation and massive changes in the remuneration and business models brought on by the digitalisation of words. Chatted to any journo’s lately?
You’re also not the only bastards in Australia who tell ‘our’ stories, or contribute to ‘our’ vibrant - *coughs* - literary conversation, or write, or read, or Make Benefit For The Glorious Culture of Oz, etc.
You signed a contract, took a punt on shifting units in America, didn’t work out as well as you hoped, your industry in general is too lazy or opportunistic to take responsibility for the excess unwanted books it routinely churns out (and how they may affect its own supply-and-demand calculus across markets), and so you want Big Mummy Government to save your local bottom line from any inter-market bleed. Can’t work any more. The book business model is changing. Everything’s up for grabs. It’s a writerly free-for-all. Not my fault. But stone age industrial policy is like so yesterday. Deal. If you all stopped obsessing over PIR’s you might recognise that, properly handled, the digital revolution will make things infinitely more viable for far more marginal writers and small publishers than hard copy ever did.
By the way: give the bloody mock ‘umble jobbing scriv’ shtick and the self-pitying hysterics a miss, matey. Nothing’s more nauseating that an elite-educated writer pretending to be a laid-off fitter & turner. It’s like a pox infesting our literary community, this blue collar posing. Tell your drip of a mate Winton to knock it off, too. You blokes choose to write. You two do pretty well compared to most. Be grateful. Or change gigs.
Alison Croggon, before you diss me for ‘contempt’ for our writers, let me tell ya something: you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet, love. This precious lot deserve everything they get, given the load of bollocks they’ve collectively spruiked on this relatively mouse-poo sized issue. We should go the bastards until they get narky and start writing as if they mean it. Might stick a firecracker up the arse of Lit Oz at last.
Ah, I love the internet.
Shane, should you be interested, as an independent Australian imprint I have self-published an analysis of the modest flaws in the PIR case made by you and your dead tree colleagues during this debate, here (byebyegatekeepers.blogspot.com). According to the ‘highly-regarded’ (by J Robertson) independent literary critic J Robertson, it offers ‘profoundly insightful insights’ in an ‘exciting new Australian voice’ into the ‘vibrant thriving dazzling innovative compelling culturally singular oh you know just like totally brilliant really’ Turning Dead Trees Into Dead Words industry. As a stand-alone Considered Work of Wordy Art it is of course better written, better edited, better informed, more genteel, dispassionate, measured, respectable and respectful of our book publishing’s hard-earned authoritative stature in matters literary than the thoroughly-illegitimate blog-rant above.
Not.
By the sound of Jack Robertson’s raving I’m wondering if he’s a wannabe writer who’s had too many rejection letters.
My biggest concern is the damage to Australian children’s books if American editions are allowed to be imported here. I’ve seen the US version of an Australian picture book, a book of subtle humour (that Aussie kids understand perfectly) changed by the US publisher’s gatekeepers into a bland, humourless, dumbing-down, lollypop sweet facsimile of it’s original twin, the version first published here.
Then there are the Australian junior fiction and YA novels by well-known authors sold to US publishers for sale in the US where the spelling is changed - colour becomes color, Mum becomes Mom, pavement becomes sidewalk, rugby becomes gridiron; and where the essence of Aussie humour so loved by our kids has been re-wired to connect with American children.
Now, if that dumbing-down is what American parents want for their children who am I to argue. BUT this is what could be imported for our children to read in the future because Dymocks, Woolworths and Coles want to profit big time and be damned with the consequences. I call it un-Australian.
Jack Robertson may not have considered this aspect of the lifting of Territorial Rights, but many parents, teachers and librarians find the idea absolutely abhorent.
Who is Jack Robertson, I wonder? And where did he buy that big chip?
I’m a big fan of the net, Jack. I edited a literary ezine (operating on the gift economy that drives much literature) for years, I ran an email list for ten years back when email lists and internet publishing were the driving force of innovation in international poetry, I have a couple of ebooks of poetry out. And I exploit the autonomy of the internet to distribute my theatre criticism free of charge and at the length I want to write it. Yes, it’s changed the rules.
But it’s got nothing to do with Territorial Copyright in the hard copy publishing industry, which for all the big claims isn’t going away any time soon. The PC didn’t begin to look at copyright provisions and what is happening with digital publishing (outside its purview), which is probably a more urgent question right now, and might have been more useful.
But re protection: perhaps the most telling paragraph in the whole document is where the Commission considered the possibility of preserving TC for Australian authors but not foreign authors. This is not an option. Why? Because it transgresses international trade agreements - most notably the pact Howard signed with the US a couple of years ago. The US sure doesn’t give up its own market protection. Why we should just weakly open our markets, when our much bigger international competitors are closing their fists on theirs, beats me. And I just don’t see why it’s a grand idea that those companies should exploit the investments of local publishers in local writers - which includes the long process of building up a readership and the investment of publicity - by being able to dump stock that they haven’t bothered to give the same publicity to. Especially if we can’t do the same to them.
Meanwhile, it might be an idea to do some research, if you really want to know how publishing “works”.
Jack Robertson (12.29am and 6.25am). By all means express an opinion reflecting economic rationalist thought but you are being less than honest with some of those remarks. First-time authors or Australian authors not established in the North American market are hardly in a position to dictate fine points in what will be standard industry conditions in contracts. For established authors like Peter Carey, it doesn’t matter much, even if it could be undermining his sales in Australia since that market is miniscule compared to the rest of the English language world. For both type of authors the remaindering of books unsold from the usual major outlets in the USA is not a disaster because that market has been largely exhausted, and indeed might be an advantage (for the lesser known author) in reaching a wider audience for his next book. BUT what does matter to the lesser-known Australian author is if the books remaindered in the US, which might be many times the number ever published/retailed in the Australian market, find their way back into the Australian market. Where they can be sold for uncompetitive/anti-competitive prices and do not earn their author a cent in royalty but actually undermine their best market where they might earn some royalties.
If Jack Robertson wants to live in such a brute-force market-driven economic world without any other issues given any weight, fine. But he will have trouble finding such a world because most countries, especially the USA, have many barriers against such anti-competitive practices (and many perfectly competitive ones too, just ask the beef and sugar farmers, or even steel producers).
Hi all, thanks for responding.
Sheryl Gwyther, I most certainly am a failed and failing writer, like most of us. I’ve written four crappy novels - five if you count my embarrassing attempt at a Mills & Boon - and at last count had a splendid collection of rejection letters, probably about 300 odd from publishers here and overseas, across fifteen years of dogged persistence.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way.
You write this: “My biggest concern is the damage to Australian children’s books if American editions are allowed to be imported here.”
It’s a concern shared by your colleague Mem Fox. You should go and read her heart-rending tale (DR542) of the cruel fate that befell Possum Magic when first published in the States. The US publisher insisted on a glossary for the Australianisms. Oh, the horror, the horror…still, brave Mem - aghast! - held out, by golly. Yessiree, she went to wall for our poor little kiddies, who might one day otherwise have had to suffer the ‘insult’ of stumbling across a US edition with a glossary. Brave Mem!
Alas, o woe and alack, in the end…well, Mem weakened. (An action she now deeply regrets, apparently.) Why did she ‘weaken’? Because like any ambitious wordsmith with huge talent she wanted to have a go in a bigger market. Fair enough. So she signed a contract authorising changes to appear under her byline. That’s her right - here copyright, no less. It’s also her right to regret it later.
What it’s not is government’s reponsibility to supply a substitute for what should be her sense of writerly vocation. You worry about the damage to Australian books if US editions of Australian kids books appear here. Fine. Lobby every Australian author of kids’ books to ‘hold the line’, refuse to water down their o/s editions in the first place. That’s where the ‘cultural purity’ battle should be fought (if that’s what you reckon is needed). It’s not government’s job to get involved in authorial content debates, much less frame legislation designed to shape it.
Shane Maloney - you know, author in the great Definitive Australian Culture Genre that is gumshoe private eye pulp fiction - also witters on about his ‘stylistic purity’ being misrepresented by the cruel imposition of US vernacular demands over in America, or some such nonsense, in his submission, too. All kinds of Australian writers of US/UK-originating genres do: fantasy, military-techno-schlock, procedural thriller. It’s a bit rich to nick everything else about how to tell your stories from Raymond Chandler, who was basically British anyway, wasn’t he, or maybe he was Irish, and then slag off the Yanks when they politely ask you to talk Yank in their patch. Meanwhile Peter Noo Yawk Carey’s next great ‘Australian’ novel is about, what, a couple of 19th Europeans wandering through the Civil War south, or something? Way to come home to Penguin to man the Oz Lit ‘story-telling’ barricades, Pete.
Come on, Sheryl. Firstly, the cultural impurity talk is rubbish in a globalising Google-web-English melting pot. Second, just maybe it’s a tad rude and culturally arrogant to suggest that American literary culture is a sullying influence…when the most overwhelmingly popular writers in Australia are generally…erm, Americans. That an American Mormon Mom who writes about vampires and a British Yummy Mummy who writes about wizards speaks more directly to Australian youth readers than you or even Mem Fox might just give less artistically…mmmm…self-regarding writers pause for professional contemplation.
Finally - most importantly - to repeat: Australian authors alone control what words appear (legally) under their byline. This is what universal automatic copyright means. Authors do not need ‘extra’ (‘territorial’) so-called ‘copyright’ provisions to protect to their creative satisfaction their stylistic, vernacular and mise en scene purity. They just need a spine and some principles and a personal-creative-moral line in the sand - where-ever they decide it’s going to be for them - that they ain’t gunna cross, no matter how much it costs their income and reach.
It’s what artists do, by the way, and how they truly define themselves as such.
Thanks again for your comments. Still waiting on Shane’s confirmation that you signed that contract, Shane.
Ah, yes, but the problem with your argument, Mr Robertson, is Mem Fox had no idea there’d come a time when her Possum would be available in all its Americanised glory for Aussie children to read instead of the real Australian edition. Unsuspecting parents don’t look inside the cover to see where books are published and whether the spelling would be Americanised or not. We’ve never had to worry about that before. Now we might have to.
And it’s chicanery to suggest Australian authors have total control over what words appear in their books - you must not know the publishing industry very well. To be published in America or Britain as an Australian means losing even more control.
What you really mean is … if authors don’t like the conditions offered then they should lose the chance of publication.
I suspect you are suffering from an overindulgence of author-envy which is why you write such long and gleeful comments, and that’s okay. It’s good for the soul to let it all hang out, but sitting too long on blogs is bad for the mind and the body. You know the saying about it making Jack a dull boy.
So as I understand it from Jack’s comment, (and not contradicted by anyone else), Shane (allegedly) signed a publishing deal which included a print run by a US publisher. The publisher paid a royalty to Shane and took all the risk of printing, distributing and selling a specific number of books. Some of those ended up in a Queenscliff bookshop. So Shane’s statement “no royalties were payable” is false, self serving and a manipulative comment regarding the whole PIR debate. What Shane would prefer is that the US publisher, having paid Shane a royalty for these books, should send unsold copes to the tip, leaving the Queenscliff bookstore available to stock local, more expensive, extra royalty paying copies. Have I got it right, Shane? Love your work, Jack.
Hi Allison. Yeah, I’m well aware of who you are and what you’ve achieved. I’m a bit of a shy fan, actually. Your theatre reviewing’s fantastic. I wish you would come to Sydney or do more here. Our playwrights are shithouse and our theatre critics are worse, alas. All bloody misogynistic poofs, up themselves and up each other.
Look, does it matter who I am and where I got the Uluru sized chip on my shoulder? (I can assure you I have worked long and hard and at great cost for it…) I’m a literate Australian with access to a modem. I feel strongly about words and I rather like the sound of my own. Welcome to Dead Tree Inc’s worst nightmare, AS.
Your knee-jerk resort to credentialism and provenance-querying and intimidatory suggestions that I go and ‘do some research’ are quintessential Australian Literary Discussion 101. They do not become you. On the research side, I’ve read every single PC submission and a fair whack of the stuff Google-able, along with everything written in the current debate in the MSM. I’m a bit thick, I concede, but it’s telling, isn’t it, that I still don’t quite understand - just for example - how to reconcile THE two fundamentally contradictory pro-PIR arguments (advanced, often in the same submissions, let alone by the ‘lobby’ generally):
1. Allowing parallel imports will not lower book prices noticeably at all, as consumer advocates claim.
2. No, sorry, allowing parallel imports will threaten local edition sales (and so local royalties/publishing confidence, etc), because parallel imports will be cheaper and sales of them will thus cannibalise local edition sales.
Allison, I don’t claim to be an expert on current industry intricacy but I think that that’s actually a real advantage at this present time. We - especially someone like you, actually - are right smack in the middle of the biggest epistemological discontinuity since the printing press. For once it’s not hyperbole. Everything is up in the air, and - whether or not the PC’s terms of reference say this or this (we’re not part of the PC, are we) - now…NOW is the time to be grappling with huge questions, liberating questions, questions of epistemology.
Excuse me for a tic:
(Still waiting on your reply, Shane. Tick tock, Dead Tree Man. Come on, ‘fess up, Whelan: you signed that contract, dincha, you doity rat…).
What’s heart-breaking about this botched affair has been the way a small number of fairly unrepresentative (newish) publishers have duped a smaller number of writers (ie those with o/s editions) into going in to bat for a status quo that actually makes it harder for most writers to be viable across a long career. Winton, Carey, Grenville, you, Shane, with your Whelan franchise…and by the looks of your blossoming fantasy career, you too, Alison, you’ll all be fine, or at least viable, feasible, able to go on doing what you love and are good at.
It’s the second and third and fourth tier - and especially the next generation - of fiction writers that stand to gain from a radical re-think about how their industry produces text-based stories, how we store them, market them, sell them…imagine (fantasise, Shane!) a publishing world in which no book was ever remaindered or went out of print, was kept in (virtual) print forever, could be issued by its rights-holding publisher on a drip-drip basis - hard copy or eBook - as demand required it, in perpetuity, with an easy and permanent marketing presence (a ‘shop window’), with scrupulous tabs being kept on royalty payments and updated editions easily tweaked in the event of late-career blossomings or film rights purchases, etc, few warehousing costs, low over-heads, feasible legal control, a reduction in income wastage to second-hand trade and library use…gee - doesn’t that sound like it might be a job for the internet?
I know you know this. You personally are about about a decade ahead of most of us. You’re the future of writing-fiction-for-money: you’re what it’s going to look like. So why on earth are you defending an old industry so sclerotic, so smug, so complacent and so self-satisfied that they (collectively) can’t be arsed even to run a cheap comb through Louis Nowra’s adjective-infected Ice, or look up the meaning of ‘clammy’ for Christos Tsiolkas, or smack Tim Winton across the chops and say: ‘must try harder’ with the abysmal ‘Eva’ get-out-jail-free, plot-gap plugger?
A good example is this: I’m about to buy a copy of Kerryn Goldworthy’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ short stories, which went out of print two decades ago I think, from a remainder/bulk shop in Sydney, for about $25. That might = something like a $45 buck investment (in original value terms) I’m still, after all this time, prepared to make in KF’s copyrighted output. Presumably Kerryn won’t get any royalties at all on this sale. That’s not fair, and it’s not what I want as a consumer. Now I’ll happily pay higher-ish prices for Australian writing, in the name of cultural autonomy even, but it’s got to be efficiently targeted. Re-arranging the book publishing paradigm around digitalised units will allow the efficient delivery of fair payment to an overwhelmingly larger number of writers than the hard copy paradigm currently allows. Whole lot easier to mouse-click her publisher - it was Booksearch that found me the bulk place that has it - order a print-on-demand, happy in the knowledge that KG gets some dough and I was getting a nice new copy (maybe with a natty design by a tenured/freelance designer and a fresh copy-edit - even updating, with KF’s approval, chronological bits-n’bobs, font styles, slang, anything the author felt like tweaking, as her baby, for the new era).
Honestly, AC, being outside the Guild Secret Knowledge Circle re: the current set-up - if I really am, which I don’t think I am on the major stuff - is where everyone needs to start, if the process of retooling is going to get traction before it’s imposed on us from overseas anyway. Which is why - since you also asked, and as the PC report explicitly says is a good idea - we should ignore what the US and the UK does at the mo’, when deciding what we’re going to do next. (I think the Trade stuff you cited is a bit of a rhetorical red herring, btw.)
IMHO we can get the jump on the inevitable changes that are coming. So long as we don’t waste time and energy rear-guarding dead systems. For once - for ONCE - let’s not follow world best practice, let’s invent it.
Ta for taking the time to chat. ‘Preciate it. Glad to be set right on any errors.
Why don’t these bloody “authors” tell us how much income they are getting.
I heard one author winge about how if he didn’t get the royalties he would not be able to pay his kids university fees!!!!!!! No award worker can afford to pay their kids university fees - this is just for rich folks.
Authors need to achieve a fair wage for their work, but why should they play the system to get more?
So we need to restrict imports of offshore printed version of Australian works but only by authors whose tax returns indicate they are in financial need.
One policy does not fit all.
Michael James, sorry, most of your points I have responded indirectly to already but to this statement elicits two responses:
“First-time authors or Australian authors not established in the North American market are hardly in a position to dictate fine points in what will be standard industry conditions in contracts.”
Firstly…well, quite. But what are you suggesting? That such writers should be able to dictate terms on a par with Will Shakespeare’s agent? It’s art, mate. There ain’t no ‘entitlement’ to anything. They have the power to not sign a contract they don’t like. The terms they get are a function of what they’re putting on the table.
By the way, an absence of PIR’s here may well make their negotiating pozzy stronger.
Ta for commenting.
Meanwhile, I was still waiting to hear from my industry inside source, Murray ‘The Leech’ Whelan…word on the mean streets of Q-cliffe was some Stateside Big Boy had put a lousy contract out on Shane Maloney…
Chris of Canberra: I’m an author and I get 10% of the Retail Rec Price of my books. That is $1.49 per book. And that’s only if it sells for full price. If my books are sold to schools at a discount rate I get 8% (if I’m lucky). I earn well below award rates, like the majority of hard-working, not well-known authors. But we do provide brilliant reading material for children and of that, I’m proud.
As you can see I can’t pay for my kid’s university fees either. I, like many authors have to make ends meet by running writing workshops for kids. This takes time to plan suitable programs and then to run them.
This type of extra-activity takes me away from writing - bit of a vicious circle actually. Like the chicken and the egg situation - what’s most important?
So get off your high horse and while you at it, get the blinkers off your eyes.
Sheryl Gwyther
Don’t worry about high horses - read my text and digest the words.
All this: I earn below award … can’t pay fees … etc etc indicates you have NO comprehension skills.
Just to remind you very clearly …. I said precisely that we should restrict imports where there is financial need.
So - if your income is below award rates then books authored by you should not be imported if they damage your earnings.
Self promoting, pretentious authors, claiming they provide “brilliant material” and not listening to what other people say, simply bugger-up proper consideration of real issues.
So get back in your box.
Yes, Jack, I should be fine whatever happens. To be personal for a moment: the fact is that although I spend a lot of time on the net, it’s not what puts food on my table. My books do. I don’t earn a cent from my blogging. Objectively speaking, I’m crazy to spend so much time on it. (There are of course pluses, even financial ones, but they are indirect). If you don’t accept advertising, as I don’t, and don’t charge for your work, which I don’t, it’s a moot point how the net can be sustainable. Last time I looked, human beings had to eat and find shelter in order to survive. Writers, believe it or not, are human beings. Many even have children.
Like most authors, I am earning off my backlist. My English language overseas publishers, fortunately, are high end and don’t do cheap shitty editions with bad paper and binding, as happens with many of my colleagues. They are the ones with a lot to lose. So far, my books are unlikely to be remaindered and I live in hope that they will not be. So for the moment I should be ok. Others will not be. And they are right to protest. Why is it “pretentious” for people to ask to be paid fairly for their labour? Writers only earn if people buy their books: they don’t get a nice weekly wage. Why should their success be punished? Is it “pretentious” for workers to object to their earnings being cut? Are they wankers for doing so? Or is it just that people basically think that writing isn’t work? That it’s a kind of hobby?
If this goes through, authors lose an aspect of their ownership of their books. If I don’t have territorial copyright in my home country, what do I have to sell here? I am actually quite confused about this one: exclusive territorial copyright is the basis of all international book trading. So basically, the market in Australia would effectively become part of the English or US market. So what’s the incentive to publish here? Not much, actually. I and others like me would be better off going elsewhere, where we can get the benefits of territorial copyright. Publishers earn quite a cut from selling international rights as well as from domestic sales. So all that money instantly leaves the economy, and our own publishers get less and less viable, thus beginning the spiral of less investment in new authors, fewer books, less lively readership, etc etc.
Authors who do not already have an international presence will have a much smaller chance of getting one - it’s very difficult to get an overseas contract without a contract in your own country, and as the publishing industry “contracts”, which the PC admits it will, it will get harder and harder for Australian writers to break in. (If you read the submission, you would have read Harper Collins, who publish a lot of Australian writers, saying frankly that they will have to cut back on local publishing, though they will be fine as a multinational company - they’ll just import titles.) Yet at the moment, contrary to many assertions here, book sales in Australia keep going up and up. Clearly people are buying Australian books. But they can’t if they’re not in the shops because they’re not being made.
And Jack, the contradiction is simple. At the moment, publishers here - like publishers elsewhere - are protected from dumping. And no publisher, however streamlined, can compete against remainders. If foreign publishers can dump excess stock here, they - and writers - stand to lose a lot, since none of the original investors (writers and publishers) make any money from remainders (which is a standard thing in book contracts everywhere). And there are many cases where an author is popular here, because of years of patient building of a readership and investment by a publisher, and books don’t sell elsewhere because that investment doesn’t exist in another country. So why should overseas publishers and greedy local retailers ride in on the backs on that investment and make a killing?
The digital thing is a bit of a red herring too. My kids download lots of music, like everyone of their generation. But they still want the object: if they like a band, they go and buy the CD. Or even the vinyl. Downloading is really “try before you buy”, it gives them a wide tasting plate. I think the same applies to books. Newspapers and magazines probably will go digital: some books too. E-readers are getting pretty sophisticated these days. But the fact remains that the book is extremely efficient technology, and a deeply pleasurable object. Not a lot beats the pleasure of turning the page. And book design at the moment is in a golden age. It will be a long time before the book disappears.
Anyway, none of these arguments are going to sway anyone who thinks writers just laze about in their jacuzzis sipping chardonny and ripping people off. And maybe the most depressing aspect has been the resentment expressed against writers who, it seems, contribute nothing to anybody’s quality of life and have no socially redeeming qualities at all. And who certainly don’t do any “work”. Oh well.
…and PS - having been ripped off by a local print-on-demand publisher (none of my current publishers, I hasten to say) I’m very wary of extolling the virtues of POD technology as a liberating revolution for writers. Long story which I won’t bore you with, not only because it does my blood pressure no good: suffice to say that copyright issues there remain extremely unresolved, and not to the advantage of writers.
David Hand (2.26pm) and Jack Robertson (5.30pm). I think I give up on trying to get the message across to DH. Authors (anywhere) do NOT receive royalties on unsold books; ie. that retailers (not the publisher or wholesaler) do not sell. And incidently this is at least partly why it is more economically sensible to print more copies rather than fewer (and obviously print runs become more economic for everyone as they become larger; the additional copies beyond a certain point are almost printed for free — -standard industrial economics; though we will have to see if print-on-demand technology can change this entire model).
Jack, of course I am not saying that Australian authors should be able to dictate terms to American publishers/printers/retailers. That is silly and there was zero hint of that in what I said. But the PIR is the mechanism to control this kind of anti-competitive and cross-border breakdown of orderly markets. And it works, and NOT to huge detriment to Australian book buyers (as all my articles and tables and arguments show). The childrens book thing is a separate but also valid argument.
@ Sheryl
I don’t think Chris was talking about all writers being pretentious, just a certain subset.
Also @Sheryl
When you talk about fair, what things do you think should be taken into account?
Ah, Michael, but in many cases authors DO get paid royalties for remainders: when they haven’t paid out their advance(-on-royalties) in actual sales, but get to keep that dough anyway.
Authors are typically paid lump sums as payment for ‘selling’ their publishing rights, right? This rights ‘trade’, by the way, isn’t really a ‘trade’ at all. It’s simply the preliminary setting up of a contractual mechanism to sell actual product (one - happily and rather uniquely for writers, involving a generally non-refundable cash flow up front ahead-of-sales). So your advance payment in any territorial rights deal doesn’t represent your ‘selling’ anything, Allison C: when you’ sell’ your overseas rights, or your local ones for that matter, all you are doing is setting up a copyright-licensing contractual framework for the expected - hoped-for - actual sales payments to flow via. Sure, I know advances for most have been shrinking, but that’s the basic set-up, right?
So the answers to this, are…:
“If this goes through, authors lose an aspect of their ownership of their books….”
No, you don’t. You can still make any equally-effective territorially-excluding arrangement (by insisting on a remainder pulping clause, or even a ‘for sale in US only one, or whatever - it’s CONTRACTUAL negotiation). Calling it territorial ‘copyright’ is - as I’ve said - not accurate. It’s simply territorial ‘retail exclusivity’. It’s a trade barrier. And ‘teritorial rights trading’ is not the ‘basis of all international book trading’, Alison. Selling books, not rights, is. You ask:
“If I don’t have territorial copyright in my home country, what do I have to sell here?”
You have - like everyone else - books to sell here, Alison. BOOKS. The vast majority of Australian (and all other) writers don’t have international editions at all. They sell BOOKS, not ‘rights’. International ‘rights’ trading - if you insist on continuing to call it ‘selling’ or ‘trading’ anything - is a bit of a phantom sub-set of the overall book trade, because once an advance has been paid out, that ‘rights’ transaction ceases to be part of a stand-alone (so-called) ‘rights’ trade activity only, and becomes just…selling books. This whole idea that ‘rights trade’ is somehow a discrete derivative strand of the book-selling business is a real clue to what’s actually going on in this debate.
So how about some honesty for once, writers? As far as local writer incomes go, you want PIR”s kept in place because it makes easier to get paid advances in overseas rights ‘trades’ for copies you may never actually sell, do so ideally in multiple segregated ‘territorial’ markets, while still protecting your main (local) ACTUAL books sales from any undercutting by all those perhaps-never-to-be-sold copies you’re inflicting on a planet already choking with dead dead tree stories.
Anyone who actually sells X books via a publisher overseas, rather than just the right to that publisher to produce X books, has absolutely nothing to worry about from the removal of PIR’s. It’s not as if overseas publishers WANT to have to go to the trouble and loss-making expense of parallel importing your damned unsellable books all the way back here to recoup a miserable buck, via a damned wholesaler. And if a book is still selling overseas, why would the publisher there (or even a bulk remainder dealer) send those (foreign) copies back home to compete with local editions - on their home ground? Shipping books costs money.
So really, overseas advances on books never subsequently sold are what this is mostly all about as far as local writer’s income is concerned. I think it’s a bit rich for writers not to be open about the fact that in most cases, these ‘remainders flooding home to threaten your local sales income’ will likely be books you have actually been paid for (to some extent) without actually selling. Not many small businesses get that luxury.
As far as the ‘benefit’ to local publishing goes from PIR’s, local publishers want to maintain the pick-and-choose-proven-winners-only monopoly they have on incoming o/s titles, which act as a subsidy-that-s-not-called-a-subsidy on their business viability, paid for by book payers, much of it to already-successful overseas writers and houses.
Right, Alison? Right, Shane? Right, Michael?
I have nothing against writers wanting to maximise their income, AC. Nor do I wish for anything but a good prosperous, vibrant, Australian industry that publishes lots of Australians. I’d be happy to fund the local industry directly to a much greater amount to achieve that more efficiently and without bleeding so much benefit overseas, and especially to consider systemic tweaks like no income tax for writers and even Indy publishers, removal of GST on local books, whatever. I’m a writer, too, albeit a lousy, very probably insufficiently talented one to earn a quid. But that’s the point here, isn’t it: I’m not good enough.
Me, I have have four dead manuscripts in my bog, god knows how many other unremunerated words lying about, across ten, 15 years of no-less-diligent-than-JK Rowling slog. I have a two year old son, too, Alison. My last paid job was washing dishes at $15 an hour. I’m lucky to have a supportive partner (so far). But I will never gripe - how the hell can I? - about not being paid ‘enough’ for my writing, because…well, it’s creative, industrial indulgence, this, isn’t it. It’s a choice we’re all making, daily. It’s a hugely desirable, hugely competitive thing we are trying to pull off. Getting paid for telling stories. What a gig.
But all this hysterical whining and wailing and sense of ‘entitlement’ to this or that level of payment is a really bratty look.
Because our stories have to be GOOD enough for us to be paid at all, and how good we are determines our income. Readers have to want to BUY our stuff before we can get paid. If we do not sell our stories - if our overseas books get remaindered before we’ve paid out our advance, say, or if we can’t get a favorable enough contract deal, or an o/s publisher at all, or (like me) even in the basic door of getting our stories into print - it means one thing only. Not that the anyone has ‘contempt’ for us, or that the PC hates us, or the world is full of free market zealots, or Australia is a philistine country, or any of that rubbish…but simply that our stories aren’t good enough. We aren’t GOOD enough writers, story-tellers, artists, creative producers.
Surely that’s not an unreasonable industrial parameter to accept?
Books aren’t essential produce. It’s silly even to talk of ‘books’ and ‘writers’ in any generic sense. Writers and books are as varied as humanity. (I bet Dan Brown DOES do a fair bit of lazing around his jacuzzi, Alison. I hope he damned well does). Each one doesn’t only have to create their stories. They simultaneously have to create the market for their stories, too. That’s not just a matter of selling ‘publishing rights’ and getting a book on shelves. It’s a matter of convincing, enticing, every single merely potential reader to actually buy a copy, too.
If they don’t, simply being on the bookshelves makes you no more entitled to be paid for your long years of toil than me.
Before anyone can talk about ‘writers’ being ‘fairly’ or ‘unfairly’ paid, you have to dissect each case, individually. Especially in the context of remainders and royalties and local sales. What we need are some more concrete numbers on those Q-cliff remainders, Shane. Were you paid an advance on them? Did you pay out that advance in real sales in the US?
If not, you have already been paid something for that Q-cliffe remainder, haven’t you. At least part of it, anyway, if you want to get finicky.
Shane’s case aside, I suspect - in most cases - that remainders do represent unmet advances - that is, writers being paid for books that have never sold - although I could be wrong on this. But the trouble is no-one in this debate wants to come clean about actual numbers, actual books sales that arise from the (derivative) rights ‘sales’, which, as I’ve said, isn’t really a sale of anything at all, it’s an advance-on-book-sales. Like territorial ‘copyright’, the self-serving term ‘rights sale’ has been allowed to give a wholly-misleading impression of what actually represents.
So really, Michael, sure, technically, a discrete royalty payment on a remaindered book sold eventually may not go to the author there and then. But often they’ll have received it long, long ago, in advance. So maybe David’s more right than, or as right as, you are about remainders and royalties. Right?
I’m not complaining, Jack. (And I’m slightly cross-eyed with repeating myself. ) We’ve all done the hard yards - one bad year not so long ago my entire annual income was $700. That’s how it is for a writer, and if that’s what you want to do, you wear it. But it does mean that when you do make money, you want your share, which is after all little enough. Other people make money from the labour of writers, especially retailers who get the biggest cut - around 50 per cent (much more if the book is, like Shane’s Queencliff copy, a $1 remainder) - of the cover price of a book. So why should writers be abused because they object to others exploiting their hard work and making money, but cutting the writer out?
And why do you assume this is about books that don’t sell? Australian authors sell very well, thank you, and not just the big literary names. They’re huge in the fantasy genre, and give the big international titles a run for their money. My books pay out their advances and then generate royalties, which means their print runs overrun the initial advance. I’m sure Shane’s do too. My advances are modest (in my world, six figure advances happen to other people) and what I live on is actual sales. So I repeat: if there is no territorial copyright in Australia, but it exists everywhere else as the basis of international books trading, what have I got to sell if I publish here?
The other point is that every market is different. That’s why the same book will have a dizzying variety of covers in different countries. And books that sell well in the UK or the US don’t necessarily hit the mark here, and vice versa. Sometimes publishers are going to get it wrong, and a book that’s a hit here will go nowhere elsewhere. That’s not the author’s fault, nor a reflection of the quality nor the success of a book.
Publishers advances are educated guesses on the likely market, which is unpredictable: some writers sell less than expected, others more. The publishing business is speculative, like mining: an assay won’t necessarily strike a gold mine, but sometimes it will hit the big vein, and finding the mineral and setting up a mine is an expensive process. Publishing is a business too. They have slim margins and, like mining companies, they’re going to make canny guesses about what they’re investing in. And sometimes they will get it wrong. It pays to overprint, also, because it’s much cheaper to print large numbers of books than to have small print runs. Over a certain number, each copy is virtually costless. This is really where Australian publishing loses out big time to international publishers - we have a much smaller market than the US and Britain, and we can’t practice the same economies of scale.
The “subsidy-that-is-not-a-subsidy” of local printing of international titles - routine, I remind you, in other countries - will simply go to international publishers if PIRs are removed. All of it. Whether this is really good for everyone, or whether it really means cheaper books for consumers, given that the PC very carefully didn’t add the expenses of freighting books to Australia (and that is a big expense) into their price comparisons, is moot. And the PC has argued it with some very big glosses, some deeply uncertain evidence and some very begged questions.
“if there is no territorial copyright in Australia, but it exists everywhere else as the basis of international books trading, what have I got to sell if I publish here?”
And I repeat, also a bit cross-eyed, books. Now I do agree that a good solid 8% or 10% ‘full’ royalty (on your Oz sales, at least) looks better in the bank than 5%, or 3.5%, ‘international’ royalties on the lot, if you end up having to flog world rights (say). I also get it that, in both yours and Shane’s case, and maybe many/most (who really knows, except their own team?) returning remainders/surplus copies are as likely to be due to deliberate o/s print over-runs or publishing/marketing/retail factors beyond the writer’s control (ain’t they all!) . I note your earlier point about backlist earnings (adding that few authors have the luxury of a well-curated backlist), and especially your fairly graciously-restrained gentle reminder - and I have tended to get a bit mesmerised by my own simply astounding rhetoric and irresistible logic in this thread - that writers, even the stars, tend to be at the very arse end of the publishing gravy train. Such as it is. Maybe spam scooter is more apt. Or offal trike.
Note your point about Australian international success in certain genres of late.
Also note your earlier suggestion that digitisation may be a bit of a red herring, but still have to disagree. In fact so many of exactly the iniquities, inefficiencies, power asymmetries and unfairnesses in hard copy publishing of which you speak are likely to be vastly ameliorated by the migration from dead tree to digital publishing houses: everything from abandoned/neglected backlists to slack royalty administration to income leakage via the 2nd hand trade, to disparities of marketing investment across stables to logistical and operational overheads siphoning writerly income, to the SPLASH!/crash (fizzle) cycle increasingly still-birthing promising newcomers, to routine overprinting…you are dead right, books will endure forever, no matter how comprehensive (or not) the eventual e-book take-over; what will slowly fade will be books that nobody has bought, because most books won’t be produced until someone wants to buy it, or, in the case of proven names like you and Shane, will be produced/marketed in the first instance in much smaller numbers, as ‘marquee’ writers for the houses, and, indeed, the industry. I see most new writers doing a kind of e-book ‘apprenticeship’ with their imprint, until proven, with eventual membership of the ‘hard copy’ authorial elite (whatever the genre) a far more exclusive a club than now - replete with bespoke design, fonts, binding, crisp paper, the author tours and PR (rather than virtual), the groupies, the sex, drugs, the jacuzzis - I WANT a jacuzzi, AC - the reward for finding your market and holding it. Many more e-books, many more new and innovative e-writers on offer; far fewer hard copy books, far better written, edited, designed, bound, printed…aesthetic marvels every time.
Because the house margins are now there to do it right for the few, rather than shoddily for everyone, without dumping the risky/unviable parts of the list.
Achieving this will this will take time, painful transition, probably great injustices in that transition, certainly a lot of pitched battles. But it will come. And it will more beautiful than any of can imagine. This is stunning to be alive, and a writer, AC. We’re living in Elizabethan England. We’re writing the day after the first mass print run in Gutenburg. Maybe - you’re a fantasymeister, go with me on this one, dude - we’re those hooting monkies in 2001: a space odyssey, discovering not just a new mode of communication, but a whole new level.
One last thing, if you can stand the run of my voice any longer: as I said, multi-tasking writers like you are on top on this cyber/hard copy amalgamation on a personal level already. Birmingham’s another, with his cheesy gothic readership-cultivating online, his freelance gigs, his (f**king awful, but in a pretty cool way) Postmodern MIC Schlockamuckies paying the bills. Tranter, with his online mag. (If it does nothing else at all, rescuing poetry will justify the internet…)
You’re in the vanguard, Al! Feel epistemologically weighty, do we?!
Can’t thank you enough for taking the precious time to chat online, Alison, with thought and candor and good grace in the face of…well. I can be a real little tw*t online, let’s put it that way. Good luck with next books, thanks again for your theatre stuff, and I hope you make a million…
Shane - the same applies to you, if you’re still reading. Pardon my smart-arsery. All in a good cause, a good word being cause enough. And all that. Having six in print is, of course, the only argument that matters, huh.
Ta for the space, Crikey.
Does it make sense to propose a system of free-imports but with opt-out.
In other words if an author’s tax file indicates low income, they can apply so that their publications are protected from adverse imports or presumably if they register, this can be done automatically?
Wow… alot of chips and alot of misconception.
I am a independent bookseller, and I will tell you this: Authors don’t make alot of money. Independent booksellers and franchisees don’t make alot of money. Publishers… wait for it… don’t make alot of money.
So why to they do it? For the love of what they do and what they see as vital to the world. Authors need to share their love of writing and the stories that come to them. Publishers share that love and want to bring the books to the greater public and Independent booksellers and smaller franchisees love those books and want to introduce them to the people who will love them.
And yes, we would also like to pay the rent and eat, but seriously - YOU DON”T GET INTO THIS BUSINESS IF YOU WANT TO BE RICH. It is the love of books first and foremost that drives you.
The big chainstores?? Now, they make a fair bit of money. And coincidently, they are behind the drive to drop the PIR laws. hmmmm, you think that is for our benefit cheapening up those books? Or because they really want you to get young up and coming Australian authors published? Surely people realise that the main protagonists have their head offices overseas.
Surely people realise that means the chainstores will be ordering in huge amounts in the US and importing in, to sell at the SAME price as previously sold, to make - gasp - more profit! Call me a cynic, but can you really trust a “coalition for cheaper books” run by a company that already charges ABOVE RRP. Hang on… wait, does that seem a little odd?
Sheesh…
More importantly, the US and the UK would NEVER give up territorial copyright as they know it would be a death knell to their publishing industry. So why the hell would we?
So we can argue points of supposedly greedy authors (LMAO) and finer technical details but my main concern is that as a bookseller - I can easily circumvent the PIR laws RIGHT NOW… but I don’t. Why??? Because it DOESN’T make the books cheaper for me or my customers. And it rips off the Australian publishers and authors.
Jack Robertson (and Alison, sorry I thought I needed to be fair…):
This blog is probably dead and buried but perusing it just now, it seems like no one on either side has had their mind changed or even properly exposed to the argument. And Jack, have a quick look at the word counts below. I reckon I often get carried away and end up a bit prolix! I will give you some free advice that your book editor has probably already given you: make it snappier and to the point. I must admit I just couldn’t wade through all your words. If you had a valid argument with an evidence-based rationale, I’m afraid it was utterly lost. Honestly, no offense intended but I would have liked to have understood what your argument was but you need to distill it down to about 500 words max.
Word counts:
Shane Maloney’s original article=506 words.
#8 Jack Robertson Posted Thursday, 16 July 2009 at 12:29 am | 861 words
#9 Jack Robertson Posted Thursday, 16 July 2009 at 6:25 am | 123 words
#13 Jack Robertson Posted Thursday, 16 July 2009 at 1:41 pm | 701 words
#16 Jack Robertson Posted Thursday, 16 July 2009 at 2:51 pm | 1124 words
#18 Jack Robertson Posted Thursday, 16 July 2009 at 5:30 pm | 162 words
#28 Jack Robertson Posted Saturday, 18 July 2009 at 11:20 pm | 806 words
Grand total=3777 words.
#5 alison croggon Posted Wednesday, 15 July 2009 at 5:33 pm | 205 words
#11 alison croggon Posted Thursday, 16 July 2009 at 11:17 am | 334 words
#21 alison croggon Posted Friday, 17 July 2009 at 10:08 am | 886 words
#26 alison croggon Posted Saturday, 18 July 2009 at 9:47 am | 581 words
Grand total= 2006 words
#4 Michael James Posted Wednesday, 15 July 2009 at 5:30 pm | 146 words
#12 Michael James Posted Thursday, 16 July 2009 at 11:40 am | 268 words
#23 Michael James Posted Friday, 17 July 2009 at 1:12 pm | 188 words
Grand total=602 words
No offence taken, Michael. Thank you for taking the time to analyse my comments and for your valuable advice. I’ll try to take it on board and apply it to my writing. Thanks again for the thread space. Crikey.