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In “Rudd ducks again: book import slug stays” (yesterday, item 3) Guy Rundle wrote:
The free trade/hayek/alcan foil hat nuts never acknowledged the real problem of remainders (saying that authors shouldn’t sign up to such contracts is ludicrous — no one offers non-remainder contracts).
Alcan foil, yes, well, that would include me, I expect.
- I doubt it’s anywhere near as common as has been claimed to have an o/s remainder that’s still selling significantly at home.
- Even if one is, the owner of all those $1 copies has to reckon it’s worth shipping them down en masse to try to cannibalise those retail sales likewise. In the internet era, why anyone’s going to do that rather than set up a website and shift them direct to shop-around punters who’ll bear the freight costs themselves escapes me.
- Even if they make that commercially odd decision they’re hardly out of the woods in the “floods of cheap imports” stakes. Local publishers have the home ground advantage, ntm (presumably) the actual, um, author’s backing in squeezing out the interloper. So, for example, when Toni Jordan’s Addition got a local boost off her MF longlist here — even with thousands of unsold UK editions remaindered/log-jammed overseas — her local imprint released a sexy new version.I’d have backed them to easily fight off — commercially — any UK attempt to dump their surplus into the warmed-up market here. That is, local publishers aren’t commercially passive in this; nor do local sellers particularly want to poo in their local nests, presumably. The local industry — even including big bookchain sellers — is not some kind of bizarre unpeopled vacuum, run by automatons who want to hurt literature and screw our own writers. Is it? If so, it’s not government’s job to save your industry from itself.
- A) Re: those contracts you so haughtily dismiss: the way books are produced is changing in fundamental ways and that includes the deal side. Authors and agents are going to have to grasp — like everyone else has over the past 30 years — that contractual law and workplace negotiation actually matters on a singular basis, in a climate in which industry-wide protections are goners. “Standard contract” is the oldest hick’s dupe in the book. I just don’t think you are right, by the way, I think there are such things as “remainder pulp” clauses and … oh, look, what do I know, I’ve never even seen a publishing contract, have I? But it’s a contract. It’s a negotiation. Before you sign up, you fight to get what you can down. Write better books, get more negotiating grunt. I doubt Dan Brown has much trouble from cannibalising remainders. Could be wrong, Guy, me in my tin-foil hat.B) But this is not simply about authors and publishers, anyway. Far more important in the ugly and anachronistic matter of remainders are the downstream deals between publisher and through-distributor and outlets, etc. The big end of the industry has been lazy and self-interested — not to mention enviromentally criminal — in the matter of planned-for surplus stock for years. No other industry on the planet would get away with the sustained, built-in wastage of hard copy publishing.
Game’s up, tree killers; way past time those who churn out tons of excess dead tree they know no one will buy; who ship them all over the joint at great carbon footprint; who pulp them after a month at yet more AGW cost, and start all over again … got their industrial poo in one sock and were made to take responsibility for — made to properly factor in the cost of — their unwanted dead tree products. Sorry, but that includes writers. (As for the Oz printing sector, why they aren’t madly tooling up to pwn the coming bespoke PoD era has got me buggered.)
- Finally, there’s us, the readers/buyers. Remember us? Just because we “can” buy a slightly cheaper US remainder doesn’t mean we “will”. Especially if we know what it means for the author’s income, which even if we don’t by now rest assured we’ll be made aware quick smart. Hey — maybe we’ve even taken all the sprayed cultural xenophobia of the last X years to heart, Oz writers; maybe we, um, don’t want to read Cloudstreet in an Yank accent any more than you want to write it in one, either.
Maybe we, um, are capable of making purchase choices with half a view to helping out Australian literature all our ownsome, i.e. without needing big mummy government rules to ensure that not only do we have no choice but to do so; not only are we told how to do so; but we are told to do so in an untransparent and, frankly, culturally railroading way that is also (just by the way) laughably inefficient, wasteful and misdirecting of that extra money we’re clearly willing to shell out. All such that — among much else, true — ambitious publishing players such as Lousie Adler and Michael Heyward can run around playing Important Cultural Icon & Big Swinging Publishing D-ck rolled into one. Champion.
Australian writers who we agree are in want of and worth subsidising don’t need these charismatic figures strutting around the joint in their name, and they don’t need PIRs. What they need is $20,000 put quietly each FY year into their bank accounts by the Literature Board with no questions asked. And then they need to be left the fuck alone, to write.
This stupid, stupid campaign by a handful of loud-mouthed industry egotists has just waved bye-bye to the PCs practically begging offer to throw more cash at Australian literature in just such a useful, efficient, targeted way. How many more would-be pens might we have thus funded with a greatly expanded direct allocation? 500? 1000? This decision is a rotten one, most of all for Australian writers. A real own-goal. Check out the “careful-what-you-wish-for” tone of that press release, and weep.
Jack Robertson is a miserable, bitter, nasty and vindictive failed writer who despises Australian publishers and more successful, famous Oz pens. He is also a Howard-hating, tin-foil hat wearer who contributed to and MS-edited Margo Kingston’s Not Happy, John! bestseller in 2004, receiving only a small payment (on-paid by Margo out of her own advance), and helping her publisher Penguin Australia market it for months online for zip.
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24 Comments
Told you so Jack! Great insane rant. My favourite quotes:
- ‘“Standard contract” is the oldest hick’s dupe in the book.”’
- ‘Game’s up, tree killers’
- ‘Finally, there’s us, the readers/buyers. Remember us?’
Quality spray.
failed writer
Confirmed by article.
A lunatic rant that would have a Soviet style agency handing out public money to its favourites as some sort of viable option for Australian publishing?
Oh, spare me!
What a lot of drivel.
And isn’t it ironic that Crikey is touting Murdoch’s mob at the Australian as some kind of bastion of ‘free thinking’ because it slags off the Australian publishing industry as the “publishing mafia” because, gasp, horror, it actually lobbied politicians?
FFS
This is asinine, and beyond belief. So what is it when Rupe leans on politicians with all his might and money? A ‘friendly chat’?
The hypocrisy is near putrid.
Mind you, Guy Rundle would NEVER have been published if Penguin Australia couldn’t make a slim living on the likes of Jamie Oliver, but he’s not likely to tell anyone about that. Kill PIR and Guy Rundle (and many more) get it in the neck.
Sorry, but this ‘debate’ is being run by the puerile and the hypocritical.
When an industry about the size of some backwater’s GDP stands up and fights for itself against global forces that would annihilate it, every nutjob dives in with an opinion about this ‘monopoly power’?
What’s the line about opinions and ars-holes again?
(Oh, and where’s the ‘outrage’ about the price of food being run up by our very cosy duopoly? You know, one of whom is behind ‘cheaper books’? What is it now: “Let them eat books”?)
@Christopher
“Oh, spare me!” No I don’t think I will
.
“Guy Rundle would NEVER have been published if Penguin Australia couldn’t make a slim living on the likes of Jamie Oliver”. True, but nothing to do with the PIR in my opinion.
“When an industry about the size of some backwater’s GDP stands up and fights for itself against global forces that would annihilate it, every nutjob dives in with an opinion about this ‘monopoly power’?”. Yes. Welcome to Crikey!
And:
- “The hypocrisy is near putrid.”
- “Sorry, but this ‘debate’ is being run by the puerile and the hypocritical.”
- “What’s the line about opinions and ars-holes again?”
Seriously with the ad hominem attacks? Some thoughts (just my 2 cents):
- No need for name calling.
- You won (the PIR remains in place).
- The only think worse than a bad loser is a bad winner.
Angus, it has EVERYTHING to do with the PIR.
Let me try and explain it to you, shall I?
If, say Penguin Australia did not have PIR, ie it could not take books published by its parent company and sell them here for a profit, it would not be a viable company. If you think they survive on the likes of Guy Rundle or Australian authors for that matter, then you really do not have a grasp of basic arithmetic.
Without PIR there would be no Australian publishing of Australian authors, and anyone claiming otherwise is simply enthralled with the type of cant and lunacy promulgated above.
Meanwhile, Rupert wants to create his own private walled off domain to ‘protect his copyright’! What a laugh that his paid scribblers are then let off the leash to slag anyone who wants to publish Australian talent and defends themselves against a couple of big retail chains. And Crikey is playing echo chamber to Rupert!
Thanks @Christopher
I agree with you about Our Rupert. He is in la-la land. But that is a different issue.
Firstly, some context. I have read Guy’s latest book. It is important that it was printed. It’s fantastic. Well, the end at least. He should have chopped everything in it prior to the start of the GFC. Just my opinion. What was I saing again? Ah yes …
If Penguin’s parent company prints books by Australian authors in the US (or China) and then ships these books to Australia to sell, then I don’t care if there is no Penguin Australia manufacturing arm. In other words, I think that Penguin would publish Guy’s books (possibly in the US to be shipped to Australia) without the PIL subsidy.
The pro PIL argument seems to be that the location where books are physically printed is somehow linked to whether or not Australians will actually buy the books (and thus whether or not Penguin will actually sell them). Your argument seems to be that having a Penguin Australia manufacturing arm somehow magically means that more books by Australian authors will be published and sold in Australia. I just don’t see the logic.
What am I missing?
The point Angus, you are missing the whole point.
No PIR, no Australian publishing, and no, once again, the tiny numbers of Australian books created and sold here will find no one to publish them without a local industry.
What’s difficult to understand about that?
You’re either being obtuse, or are utterly ignorant about Australian book publishing. Suggesting that PIR had nothing to do with it would strongly suggest the latter.
Like I said about opinions…
@Christopher, I do understand. I can see that you are trying not to be annoyed
. I am sincerely not trying to be obtuse.
I just don’t agree that it necessarily follows that:
- no physical printing of books in Australia means no Penguin Australia; and
- the tiny numbers of Australian books created and sold here will find no one to publish them without a local _manufacturing_ industry.
I understand that you think otherwise. I respect your view. But given that the PIL is in place (i.e the alternative has not been tried), I think it’s fair to say that your view that “the tiny numbers of Australian books created and sold here will find no one to publish them without a local [manufacturing] industry” is a view, and not a locked in certainty.
OK Angus, believe what you obviously want to believe, but the reality is exactly as I’ve outlined. It’s not a matter of what “I think”.
Given the result I hope you’re right.
“Jack Robertson is a miserable, bitter, nasty and vindictive failed writer…” - writes Jack Robertson.
Jack. Jaaaack. It’s not too late you know. You could start subbing your own stuff and cheer the funk up.
Having said which, buried among all the ranting and the raving (anyone would think you were being paid. By the word) you score some palpable hits. Just a bit too much of the misery, bitterness, nastiness, vindictiveness and failure and not enough of the writer.
@Steve is right. With apologies in advance to Jack:
It’s not government’s job to save your industry from itself. In the internet era, why anyone is going to ship books to Australia rather than set up a website and shift them direct escapes me.
Local publishers aren’t commercially passive in this. Local sellers don’t particularly want to poo in their local nests. The local industry (even big bookchain sellers) is not some kind of bizarre unpeopled vacuum, run by automatons who want to hurt literature and screw our own writers.
And no other industry on the planet would get away with the built-in wastage of hard copy publishing. Game’s up, tree killers.
The way books are produced is changing in fundamental ways. A publishing contract is a contract. It’s a negotiation. Before you sign up, you fight to get what you can. You write better books. You get more negotiating grunt. “Standard contract” is the oldest hick’s dupe in the book.
Finally, there’s us, the readers/buyers. Remember us? Just because we can buy a slightly cheaper US remainder doesn’t mean we will. Especially if we know what it means for the author’s income.
Maybe we have taken all the sprayed cultural xenophobia of recent years to heart.
Maybe we don’t want to read Cloudstreet in an Yank accent any more than you want to write it in one.
Maybe we are capable of making purchase choices with half a view to helping out Australian literature.
Or shall we let the publishing players run around playing Important Cultural Icon & Big Swinging Publishing D-ck rolled into one? Champion.
All Australian writers need is $20,000 put quietly each year into their bank accounts by the Literature Board with no questions asked. And then they need to be left the f-ck alone, to write. This stupid, stupid campaign by a handful of loud-mouthed industry egotists has just waved bye-bye to the Productivity Commission’s practically begging offer to throw more cash at Australian literature. How many more would-be pens might we have funded? 500? 1000?
Check out the “careful-what-you-wish-for” tone of that press release, and weep.
Jack Robertson is a writer. He also contributed to and MS-edited Margo Kingston’s Not Happy, John! bestseller in 2004.
I’ve just strung a few sentences together. Can I have $20,000 now?
Angus, thanks. Murray, ta. Steve, quite. Christopher, ouch. Mark, no.
Thanks again for the opp, Crikey. Jack R.
Angus, ask yourself where the profits (on VERY thin margins I might add) come from in the Australian publishing industry?
The answer: what Guy Rundle said, the odd successful salmon that makes it up the falls. These few salmon are invariably ‘international’ best sellers, and are published by big houses overseas and their local divisions here. Without PIR these companies cease to exist, it’s that simple, whether you or anyone else wishes to believe it or not.
This tiny industry gets no government funds, runs on the smell of an oil rag, and has to try and pick ‘winners’ in a VERY crowded market that now has the internet to contend with, (which is, quite another issue).
Near hysteria, from the ‘left’ of all places (!), who have been banging on incessantly against ‘globalisation’ and exposing the myths of the ‘free market’, suddenly get all lock-goose-step with the likes of Woolworths!
Bizarre.
Ha! The SMH has done a ‘me too’ on the issue. What to make of this from Malcolm Maiden?
“The abandonment of import restriction on books in New Zealand in 1998 also did not kill off the local industry in that country.”
…oh yeah? Well why not quote the The New Zealand Society of Author’s submission to the Australian Productivity Commission? Oh, because they argued from their own experience of how removing parallel import restrictions killed their local industry.
The straight out lies from the likes of Bob Carr and Dymock’s CEO were simply breathtaking, as all you had to do was google the books they mentioned as being ‘overpriced’ to see that you could get them here for the same price (within a few cents ex-GST, anyway).
Goebbels would have been proud; and the sheep dutifully swallowed it all.
@Christopher, I like that you are still trying to convince me even though I obviously annoy you! And this was on the front page of the AFR again today. The AFR doesn’t agree with you either. Not that that means anything …
‘…this tiny industry gets no funds, etc…’
Sorry, Christopher, but you’re just wrong. Go through the most recent Literature Board break-down of hand-outs and you will see that it features quite significantly the very same people - lik Heyward of Text - who’ve been racing around for the last six months proclaming their ‘stand-alone’ viability. Heyward in particular has been relentlessly Gordon Gekko-ing himself about the joint, thumping his chest about how much selfless, risky promotion of ‘Australian literature he and his market chums do, sniffily disdaining ‘hand-outs’…all while trousering them anyway, often in very untransparent ways. So, for example, Text gets $11,000 of taxpayer dough under ‘international marketing’, ie to fly to Frankfurt, and - presumably - hustle up deals for Text - NOT ‘Australian’, but TEXT - writers.
You go and have a little peek at the nitty-gritty detail of where our LB dough currently goes. All sorts of sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing largesse, a heavily taxpayer- subsidised ‘serious literature’ sub-sector of the overall picture, disguised as part of a ‘viable’, ‘self-sustaining’ cuturally-critical national asset. You’ve even got someone like Rupert bloody Murdoch milking the taxpayer to set himself up some ‘literature’ credentials, in the $100,000 grand a year wetaxpayers stake him for the ALR. This comes partly via MUP - Louise Adler crew - footing half of it. Hard to know what underpins their contributions; very hard to figure out how some of these University presses, in particular, are financially underpinned. we can argue forever about whether the total amount the LB hand sout is a lot, or a little; the points are a) the pC was urging us to increase it, and b) it’s characterised by a complete lack of transparency and clarity of aims.
Have a close look at some of the mechanistic (inefficient) trickle-downs the dough has to run through to get to writers: Nominally ‘market player’ little magazines funded by taxpayers (sending money down the chain to contributor-writers); taxpayer funded education programs (giving writers gigs of various kinds); sinecures, qangos, competition running, boards, workshops…quite aside from the direct allocations to actual writers (to bloody well write), the ‘serious’ - that is, ‘culturally important’ - end of Australian publishing is awash in hidden subsidy, one bloody great taxpayer sheltered workshop. The edifice thus created is enormous, shadowy, draining, and drenched in hangers-on. Whether you piss a thousand or a billion dollars in one end of the taxpayer pipe, if there’s multiple fund-allocation chicanes to bloody go through before it gets to the writer, you end up with a tiny percentage left when it gets there.
I have no problem with giving dough direct to writers. I have no problem with having the Lit Board do it - they’re just writers and publishers, by the way, Christopher, peer reviewers from exactly the stock as the PIR-subsidy ‘gatekeepers’, anyway. Often, the same people, actually. But subsidy for writers must be transparent, direct and unfussy. I meant it when I said a simple annual funds transfer, no questions asked. Anyone who thinks arts patronage should be about more than that is probably an egotistical Arts groupie looking for some reflected kudos. The last thing an artist needs is to have to dance for his supper. (OK, unless he actually is a dancer…)
‘Transparency’ in subsidy is not just about supporting the artists, by the way. It’s also about giving us taxpayers - who foot the bill - a conscious and collective chance to ‘embrace’ support of literature as a proudly-acknowledged ‘common public good’ beyond any user-pays calculus, or heavy-handed middle-class condescension. But for that sense of mutual, symbiotic inclusion in the act of public arts subsidy, what you need is clarity in the process and - big one, this - some humility on the part of the recipients, as a sector and as individuals. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. I mean it in the sense of the dignity that comes all round with an open shared acknowledgment of the two-way benefits - and obligations - of patronage.
Instead, the subsidy-that-dare-not-speak-its-name system, and the towering egos that occupy its high chairs (and who in their upper middle class aspirational insecurity can’t, apparently, bear the thought of being supplicant to the great filthy masses), makes the whole f**king set-up - all the huge amounts of dough we pump into the Australian ‘literary scene’ - seem shameful, underhand, grubby, shabby, gossippy, bitchy, log-rolling, nepotistic, blah blah. That is, all the cliched Culture War attack dogs claims, and - Chirs - all the things you reckon would characterise MY preference: to ditch PIR’s, flush the LB system of top-heavy litfest dreck and the work-the-system careerists, thin out and fine-tune the desired target of the money (ie writers)…and then triple, quadruple the net funds available to spend on WRITERS sitting on their bums, alone, far away from the distracting and money-wasting me-me-me-athons orchestrated by the Adlers and Heywards of ‘Australian publishing’, to write.
This kind of path is exactly what the PC’s report urged. EXACTLY. This is a colossal, awful, arrogant blunder.
Christopher, I heartily recommend you go and ferret about in the numbers. And especially, keep your eye on to whom the dough goes. The sovietised system you wave about like a scarecrow has been with us for donkies’, mate.
I haven’t subbed this, btw. I’m sure you’ll all cope. JR
Angus, you are welcome to the groupthink, I really do not care, but I’m happy to tell you to think it through for yourself, without the snow job from all the usual suspects.
JR, I despair! All your rant shows is that you are, indeed, as bitter and twisted as you say!
Argue about the LB, fine, but that’s NOT the point. Argue that arts funding is a rort, (sometimes, always, mostly…or whatever), but once again, that is NOT the point. It’s irrelevant to the issue: PIR is the protection of copyright and allows local publishers to risk their capital on bringing local authors to print. Remove it and local publishing will virtually cease. Is that a subsidy, a ‘protection’, well, in some ways it is, but the alternative? What’s the alternative? A pile of sludge (aka ‘cheap books’) in supermarkets and no independent booksellers or local authors in print? Go ask the Americans or British to remove their trade restrictions and see what answer you get. Go ask the New Zealand authors, they’ve got an opinion AND some experience on this matter. (You’ve clearly just got the former.)
When you’ve risked your money, (ok, maybe with a few crumbs of encouragement from government…occasionally), to publish local authors, you might just understand what’s involved, but bleating on with with piles of invective just does not explain how this industry will exist without PIR.
Or conversely, you can kidnap the issue for a soapbox to stand on, and rant on about everyone else getting a buck, and how they don’t deserve it, and…
Listen, Christopher, don’t protest so much. You got what you want. You won the day. PIR’s stay. The status quo remains. But that does not just mean PIR’s stay. It also means nothing else changes (except as a result of non-governmental pressures, of course). Because it’s you who are missing the point: the PC’s report specifically urged - as an adjunct recommendation to removing PIR’s - the full scale revamping of the direct funding system. With enormous hints that, um, maybe a lot more cash would have to be thrown, as a transitional compensatory quid pro quo.
Nup. Didn’t want any of that. So Louise Adler can belatedly rabbit on about GST for Amazon all she likes. And etc, from all the other noises now being made about direct funding reform. This PC Inquiry was a government gift horse - in a rapidly up-ending industrial climate for publishing, anyway - and it got looked in the mouth.
I think it’s a pity, but if as you suggest I’m bitter and twisted I probably don’t have much more than passing ‘soap box’ interest in the ongoing health of Australian publishing. What I am curious about is why you are so sensitive to scepticism, from me, a complete industry nobody and self-confessed literary failure, about what your side of the debate are all calling your policy/ lobbying victory. Take pleasure in it. And all the best to the industry into the future. I just think it’s no such thing; that there are grim times ahead for book publishing, anyway; that this Inquiry was a very good chance to preempt and ameliorate those times to the maximum extent possible; but that you blew it, for less-than-genuine reasons.
Cheers, and good wishes.
Need anybodies help
I see the PIR as protecting the publishing industry.
The question I have is why didn’t we protect our manufacturing or farming industries in the same manner?
Did/Do we? Or is it a case of who you know not what you do?
Jack, I’ll grant that ‘reforms’ may needed, not everyone gets everything they want, but once again, that is NOT the point, it’s not the salient one, at least.
So I’ll say bye bye to you, and leave you with the Australian Booksellers Association’s clear statement of support for PIR:
‘The ABA is pleased that the hard work of its members has borne fruit in the rejection of the open market,’ ABA CEO Malcolm Neil told WBN. ‘The significant work done at the grassroots level, involving letter-writing campaigns, petitions and other more innovative methods was a major factor in the government’s decision [and] we congratulate the government for listening to the collective voice on this issue’. However, Neil said the challenges faced by booksellers ‘through the digital revolution, whether that be the ebook market just over the horizon, or the massive growth in online retailing, is not going to diminish’.
…so authors, and booksellers, and publishers, are a mean and nasty cabal against poor old Dymocks and Woollies!
How twisted beyond recognition does one need to be to believe that?
‘…I’ll grant that ‘reforms’ may [be] needed…’
Yeah. Good luck with those, Kit. Be heaps of interest inside Cabinet now, I’d reckon.