Why social media isn't the magic bullet for self-epublished authors

In the third in a series of essays on digital media and publishing, Ewan Morrison, who will appear at the Edinburgh World Writers' Conference, claims that as the project to monetise social media falters the self-epublishing industry's defects will be laid bare

• • Ewan Morrison
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 July 2012 

Social media: great white hope, or albatross? Photograph: Alamy

"Authors – become a success through building an 'internet platform'!". For almost five years we've been subjected to the same message. At the London College of Communication's iGeneration conference this year, I heard that social media was now the only way to sell books, and witnessed glowing examples of the successful use of SM from epub authors such as Joanna Penn (who has her own consultancy and sells $99 multimedia courses on How to Write A Novel). At the Hay festival last month, I heard Scott Pack – self-described "blogger, publisher and author of moderately successful toilet books" – declare that mainstream media, papers and TV "no longer function in selling books"; that the net is now the only way for authors to – you've heard it before – "build a platform". Already every fourth tweet I receive is from an "indie" author trying to self-promote, saying things like "Hoping for a cheeky RT of my last tweet on my book & the 99p offer. B v grateful." And another – "Hope all is well! My dad just published his latest book on Amazon – if possible, I was wondering if you had any tips for him getting his book reviewed by any relevant bloggers. Appreciate any insight." And then there are the hundreds of tweets from social media ebook consultants and so-called specialists offering "the key to online marketing success".
I'm convinced that epublishing is another tech bubble, and that it will burst within the next 18 months. The reason is this: epublishing is inextricably tied to the structures of social media marketing and the myth that social media functions as a way of selling products. It doesn't, and we're just starting to get the true stats on that. When social media marketing collapses it will destroy the platform that the dream of a self-epublishing industry was based upon.
First, though, I conducted my own experiment. I decided to take these "platformers" at their word and seriously consider the possibility of self-promoting my books online (I even bought an iPhone so that I could get with the revolution). I am not alone in this: authors who have contracts with the big six publishers are now being asked, or obliged, to "get out there" and self-promote; something that 10 years ago would have been seen as selling-out is fast becoming the norm.
What follows is what I discovered about self-promotion in the digital utopia of social media marketing.
Read the rest at The Guardian.

Ruth Rendell: the peer who never stops plotting

At 82, Ruth Rendell rises at 6am, exercises daily and writes a crime novel a year. But despite her Swedish background, she’s no fan of Nordic noir

Baroness Rendell at home. She has changed her mind about Lords reform: 'I’ve thought about it and I don’t think it’s going to work’ Photo: Andrew Crowley

By Elizabeth Grice

The Telegraph 30 Jul 2012

Some time ago, Ruth Rendell described herself as “an old lady who lives alone with two cats”, a statement nearly as absurd as saying that Alan Ayckbourn is a balding man who lives in Scarborough. Now she is an even older lady with one cat. But where is the evidence?

At 82, she looks about 59 and is still writing a crime novel a year, as well as walking two miles to the House of Lords every afternoon. Her cat is nowhere to be seen. Archie, the illicit offspring of a prize-winning Persian and a predatory ginger tom, has declined to be interviewed. “He’s beautiful and nice but he doesn’t want to meet you,” she says. “I’m sorry about that. I feel it’s a bit rude.” No offence taken. I’m not sure I could submit to the cat’s psychometric examination as well as the scrutiny of his mistress.

For Baroness Rendell of Babergh is never off guard, not for a second. It is her business to observe and her habit not to relax. At one point I apologise if, on behalf of her millions of readers, I am asking questions she has heard before. “You’re doing all right so far,” is her verdict.Discipline and order are deeply ingrained. You can see it in the symmetry of box hedges and a monkey puzzle tree in her front garden; in her trim figure, tapered black trousers and sharply cut hair. No surprise, then, that her day starts before 6am, with an ascetic breakfast and vigorous workout. “I am very fit and I take great care to remain that way. I have several [exercise] machines in the house.” For three hours, if there are no irritating interruptions from people wanting to mend things or deliver things, she writes, always knowing what she is going to say when she sits down – and always obsessively storing the day’s words on a computer memory stick which she carries in her handbag. “I love memory sticks. They seem to me to be magic.”

When Rendell became a Labour peer 15 years ago, she vowed to put in the hours. It takes her 40 minutes to walk half-way to Westminster from her imposing home in Little Venice – travelling by one of 15 different routes – and then she catches the Tube. Walking frees her mind for plotting. Sometimes she writes as Ruth Rendell and sometimes as Barbara Vine – more than 60 novels in all, which have sold millions and made her very rich. It is alarming to think what her output might have been if she had not become a life peer.

Read the full story at The Telegraph

TV REVIEW: Sex Story - 50 Shades Of Grey - The Study Of A Phenomenon Of BDSM, Or 'Mummy Porn'

Posted: 30/07/2012 - Caroline Frost -Caroline.Frost@huffingtonpost.com - HuffPost UK

Every season pops up a book “they’re” all reading. Once, it was Birdsong – wartime love and honour. Then it was Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – wartime love and honour. Now, it’s 50 Shades of Grey, peacetime lust, a red room of pain and nipple clamps. We’ve evolved.

50 Shades of Grey can be safely termed a phenomenon, with 30 million sales worldwide


Last night’s Channel 4 show documented this undoubted phenomenon – the UK’s fastest-selling paperback of all time, with 30 million copies sold worldwide SINCE APRIL, translation rights sold to 41 countries, including six reprints already in Germany (???) – and had a game stab at explaining its success.
Inspired by the teenage hormones of Twilight and penned by E L James, a mother from Brentford (brilliant – somewhere between the Coach and Horses and the Gillette Tower, passions were stirring), 50 Shades tells the age-old story of a young virginal office-worker Anastasia fall into the clutches of the enigmatic billionaire Christian Grey - Barbara Cartland would be proud. But instead of throwing her on his horse, he throws her in his red room of pain and proceeds to take her through the manual of BDSM – “I thought that was a driving school,” admitted one pundit.
I am reliably informed this, in fact, refers to Bondage, Dominance and Sado-Masochism, the appeal of which was debated by pundits.
“It’s Mills and Boon with butt plugs,” said Kathy Lette. “It taps into a lot of women’s need for non-consensual sex,” explained Bonnie Greer. “We’re fed up making decisions every day, we just want to be dominated sometimes,” was the conclusion of a reading group. “I don’t know a woman who wants an anal fisting of a Friday night,” disagreed Rachel Johnson.
Full story at HuffPost

15 of the Greatest Lists in Literature

by Emily Temple. Flavorpill -  July 28, 2012

This week, Threaded reminded us of one of our favorite moments in Joan Didion’s The White Album — when she lists her packing list, incredibly simple and yet so revealing. Lists, of course, are no rare thing in literature, and have many uses, from adding quirk to showing off knowledge, and have storied positions in classic texts like The Faerie Queene (so many different kinds of trees) and The Illiad (200+ lines of Greek chieftains). Inspired by Didion, we spent some time thinking about our favorite lists in literature, from short to impossibly long, from lists that catalogue items to those that follow the train of imagination. Click through to check out the literary lists we think are the funniest, most revealing, most interesting or flat out strangest, and if we’ve missed your own favorite, tell us about it in the comments. And yes, it does not escape us that this is a list of lists. Meta is the way we like it.

Mystery fiction recognized at RWA conference with 2012 Daphne du Maurier Awards

• July 29, 2012
• By: Carol Thomas - eaminer.com

Second Grave on the Left by Darynda Jones

Credits:

St. Martin's

The Kiss of Death Chapter of the Romance Writers of America (RWA) brought mystery fiction into the limelight at the association's 2012 annual conference, held July 25-28 in Anaheim, Calif. Formed with the goal of promoting suspense and mystery fiction with strong romantic elements, the chapter recognizes excellence in these categories with its annual Daphne du Maurier Awards, presented during the national conference.

Issued in multiple categories, the prizes go both to published and to unpublished fiction. RWA's Kiss of Death chapter also presents awards for overall winners. In 2012 the overall winner among unpublished works was Amy Rabi's "Flood and Fire," which won in the unpublished paranormal category as well.
Darynda Jones headed the published works division with her novel "Second Grave on the Left," the second book in her "Charley Davidson" series, which was also a paranormal category winner. Other published winners of the 2012 Daphne du Maurier Awards appear below.

• Category (Series) Romantic Mystery/Suspense Winner: Julie Miller, "Nanny 911" (Precinct: S.W.A.T. Team series, book 4)
• Historical Romantic Mystery/Suspense Winner: Katy Madison, "Tainted by Temptation"
• Inspirational Romantic Mystery/Suspense Winner: Renee Ryan, "Courting the Enemy"
• Mainstream Mystery/Suspense Winner: Julie Kramer, "Killing Kate" (Riley Spartz series, book 4)
• Paranormal (Fantasy/Time Travel/Futuristic) Romantic Mystery/Suspense Winner: Darynda Jones, "Second Grave on the Left" (Charley Davidson series, book 2)
• Single Title Romantic Mystery/Suspense Winner: Christy Reece, "Sweet Justice" (Last Chance Rescue Trilogy 3, book 1)

Suggested by the author:

• J.D. Robb's 'New York to Dallas' wins RWA's 2012 Romantic Suspense RITA®
• Andrea Camilleri's 'The Potter's Field' wins CWA's 2012 International Dagger
• Crime fiction awards highlight month of July 2012
• Joseph Finder and George Pelecanos tie for 2011 Strand Critics Best Novel Award

Two Versions, One Heti

July 27, 2012 | by Anna Altman - The Paris Review

I recently picked up a copy of Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, out last month from Henry Holt, to find a favorite passage. It appeared at the beginning of the novel’s fifth act, or at least it had in the first copy I had read, a Canadian version published by Anansi in September 2010. But flipping through this new edition from Heti’s American publisher, I couldn’t find it. I felt disoriented and wondered if my memory was failing me, and as I looked more closely at the American version, I saw that much else had changed: passages had been deleted or transposed; new characters appeared; objects changed value and form.

After a few minutes of searching, I found the passage I was looking for. It hadn’t changed much between the first publication and the second, but its new placement left me confused, and surprisingly disappointed. I wanted to find the book exactly as I’d left it, and felt the same as Jonathan Franzen, who recently expressed his misgivings about e-books: “When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing—that’s reassuring.” Books often feel like restorative, reliable old friends—and although Heti’s book hadn’t forfeited its material qualities, my assurance of its fixity had been shaken.

Volume of mobile tweets at Games so high it interfered with Olympic broadcast

• By Robert Andrews - paidContent

Irony of ironies – after encouraging fans to tweet copiously, the International Olympic Committee requests London 2012 attendees limit their output only to “urgent” status updates. The problem – mobile updates from some attendees have clogged a mobile network used by official TV data suppliers.

photo: Nick J Webb

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Twitter have worked closely in recent weeks to promote the microblog service as a means to engage with athletes, competitions and London 2012. But mobile social media users are proving so voluminous at some Olympic venues that they are now interfering with mobile networks on which the games themselves depend, the IOC says.
During Olympic cycling road races this weekend, television broadcasters say they were let down by a lack of official timing data supplied by the Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS). One BBC commentator relied on his own stopwatch.
IOC communications director said (via Guardian.co.uk): “From my understanding, one network was oversubscribed, and OBS are trying to spread the load to other providers.”
Adams did not name the underperforming network. And his plea to tweeters, in the circumstances, goes against the social media project the IOC had tried to create: “We don’t want to stop people engaging in this by social media and sending updates, but perhaps they might consider only sending urgent updates.”
Full story

Writing competition champions a dying art

The team behind the successful Global Short Story Competition has launched a new free competition dedicated to championing the art of letter writing.

The competition, which asks entrants to write a letter of no more than 200 words that tells a story, is sponsored by artist Pam Bassington, who recently launched a campaign to save the letter as it battles to survive in an age of email and Twitter.

Pam, who lives in Darlington, County Durham, England, bases much of her work on the idea of letter writing and is a follower of the Mail Art project that has brought together an international community of artists and illustrators. Each artist sends one of the others a posted package but, unlike a traditional letter or parcel, it is intended to be received and admired for its own sake.

Pam, who is championing letter writing on her website www.pambassington.com, said: “The art of letter writing is dying out, which is a real shame because it is such a powerful medium. Receiving a letter is one of the great joys of life and, through my art, I am trying to persuade people to keep writing them. Sponsoring the competition is an ideal way of furthering that work. The letter has always played a key part in fiction.”

The challenge for the writers entering the competition is to produce a letter that is informative, entertaining, revealing and provides enough back story for the reader. Stories can be entered at the Group set up on the home page of www.globalwriters.net, the prize is £50 and the deadline is November 1, 2012.

* More about the Global Short Story Competition can be found at www.globalshortstories.net Pam‘s work can be viewed at www.pambassington.com

　

The unnoticed bias of the Booker prize

Can a prize which has honoured such a disproportionate number of English writers really be choosing the best of Commonwealth literature?

Posted by - Alan BissettFriday 27 July 2012 guardian.co.uk

Great Scot ... James Kelman, who won the Booker prize in 1994 for How Late it Was, How Late, is the only Scottish writer to have claimed the award. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

It's been the curse of the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish that even though they've had some world-class footballers – Souness, Dalglish, Law, Giggs, Best – their national sides have accomplished little of note. If we take the Man Booker prize as a symbol of international literary status, a similar pattern emerges.

Since the prize's inception in 1969, only one Scot has won: James Kelman in 1994 with How Late it Was, How Late. Even then, there came a storm of controversy, with the media and booksellers roundly denouncing the decision, one of the judges publically slamming the book, and Salman Rushdie calling it "the wrong choice". In 1993, two judges successfully pulled Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting from the shortlist by threatening to walk out. Only five other Scots have been shortlisted: Gordon Williams, Muriel Spark, George Mackay Brown, Andrew O'Hagan and Ali Smith (one may or may not include "almost" Scots William Boyd and Bernard MacLaverty).

That might seem like fair representation, until the stats are examined. Only 3.6% of all shortlistees (4.4% if we include Boyd and MacLaverty), 3.3% of the judges and a paltry 2.9% of the longlist have been Scottish. Wales has produced only one winner – Bernice Rubens in 1970 – while Northern Ireland has none. Such luminaries as Alasdair Gray, AL Kennedy, Alun Richards, Ron Berry, William McIlvanney, Janice Galloway, Niall Griffiths, Rachel Tresize and Iain Banks have never even made the longlist. In the usual round of chatter about the exclusion of Amis, Barnes or McEwan in a given year, this anomaly goes unremarked. To ask ourselves why reveals uncomfortable truths about the structure of the "United" Kingdom.

Booker is far more generous to former British colonies than it is to home Celts. Australia and the African nations have both won four times, Canada has won three, the Republic of Ireland three, India twice (thrice if one includes Anglo-Indian Salman Rushdie), and there are another two writers, VS Naipaul and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, whose nationality is difficult to pin down. New Zealand is an honorary Celt in this respect, with one winner, Keri Hulme. Two possibilities emerge from all this: either Celtic novelists (and pundits, for that matter) are not good enough, or there is an institutional bias on the part of the Booker prize. But what kind of bias?

Perhaps this is really about class (which tends not to be too far from the minds of Celtic writers), since novels about the English proletariat have also rarely featured on shortlists. It's easy to suppose that judges prefer to see their own middle-class life reflected in ficiton, and shun novels about the ravages of post-industrial life. The visceral reaction to Kelman – who won with a novel about urban deprivation, written in Glaswegian demotic – would suggest this. But if class, not nationality, is the crux of the matter, it still makes Booker complicit in a form of cultural oppression.

Let's give the prize a futher benefit of the doubt: Scotland, to take one example, has a minuscule 0.2% of the total Commonwealth population, and so, if anything, has been over-represented. However, of the 46 Booker winners, 24 have been English – over half – although England represents a mere 2.5% of the Commonwealth. Even discounting the possibility of anti-Celtic prejudice, this huge, undeniable bias emerges.

Is English literature is simply better than that of the Celtic nations? Pure objectivity is never possible, even on judging panels, but it should not escape our attention that an overwhelming number of Booker judges are middle-class English people, who are perhaps likely to prefer their own nation's literature.

We should call the Booker prize for what it is, then: not an award for the best in Commonwealth literature, but a reward system for the English establishment masquerading as magnamity. It should come as no surprise that the Man Booker prize for Commonwealth literature mimics the empire itself.

Rare books discovered in hidden cupboard

Published in The Scotsman on Sunday 29 July 2012 

A COLLECTION of rare books, including an illustrated copy of Paradise Lost, has been discovered in a hidden cupboard in a Scottish library.

The literary haul was found in Greenock’s Watt Library by archivist Neil Dickson.
The collection includes a 1538 edition of letters by Roman philosopher Cicero and an 1827 illustrated 
edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost – one of only 50 copies.
The books have now been put on display at the town’s McLean Museum.
Dickson, who discovered the cupboard behind an old plan chest while working his way through the archives, said: “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the cupboard, which obviously hadn’t been opened for 20, 30 years or longer.
“I was absolutely stunned when I realised what was inside. I have never seen such a collection of books in one place, and certainly not under these circumstances.
“I am sure the find will be of enormous interest.”

The collection also includes volumes from the 17th and 18th centuries on surgery, witchcraft and exploration and a 19th-century Hamnet edition of Shakespeare’s plays published in Greenock and edited by its then librarian, Allan Park Paton.
Inverclyde Council’s education convener Terry Loughran said: “This really is an incredible find, and one that will be talked about in literary circles up and down the country and beyond.”

News from Publishing Perspectives:

Novellix, Dejavu Push Publishing Innovation in Sweden The Big Three may dominate Swedish publishing, but innovation is happening on the periphery at start-ups like short-form publisher Novelix and POD provider Dejavu. Read more »

Call for Stories: Who are the Publishing Innovators? Publishing innovators are springing up in increasingly unexpected places. Publishing Perspectives wants to hear your story. Tell us about yourself or another. Read more »

What Are UK Publishers Reading This Summer Vacation? (Part 2) The second installment of our survey of UK publishers on their summer reading. Perhaps you’ll find something to add to your own beach bag? Read more »

Brush Up Your Shakespeare This Summer, Join Us for Henry IV Publishing Perspectives' year-long group read of the works of Shakespeare has reached Henry IV, beginning his long line of "masterpieces among masterpieces." Read more »

What Are UK Publishers Reading This Summer Vacation? (Part 1) With the papers full of the summer reading of celebs, we though to ask those who actually work in the book business what they are reading on their summer break. Read more »

From the Archives:

Eva Gabrielsson, Stieg Larsson, Actes Sud and the Languages In Between Stieg Larsson’s life partner Eva Gabrielsson wrote her autobiography in Swedish, worked with her French co-writer in English, and had the book translated into Norwegian — all this to protect the manuscript from falling into the wrong hands at home. Read more »

The Best Photo of the Day

Art Daily News

MEXICO CITY.- A library worker wearing white gloves holds a rare book from the personal collection of Mexican diplomat and intellectual Antonio Castro Leal in the room that bears his name at the new City of Books library in Mexico City. AP Photo/Christian Palma.

Hachette author picks up award

Hachette NZ advise as follows:

2012 RITA Winner for Romantic Suspense

New York to Dallas by J.D. Robb

Her latest title released in NZ in February 2012 was the thriller Celebrity to Death published by piatkus -  NZ$36.99

Under the pseudonym J.D.Robb, Nora Roberts published her first Eve Dallas novel in 1995. With the series "In Death" series, Robb has become one of the world's most successful thriller writers.

Janet Frame Memorial Award and Beatson Fellowship Now Open

 The NZSA is calling for applications  for two of the literary community’s most popular grants – The Janet Frame Memorial Award and The Beatson Fellowship.

 The former biannual award is for $3,000 and is offered by the NZSA from a bequest generously provided by The Janet Frame Literary Trust to support a mid-career or established author to further their literary career.  It is open to authors of poetry, literary or imaginative fiction and who are members of the New Zealand Society of Authors. In 2010 the award went to Wellington poet and novelist Tim Jones.

Deadline: 31 October 2012

The Beatson Fellowship is an annual Fellowship generously donated by Peter and Dianne Beatson and provides the successful applicant with $7,000 and the choice of a one month residency in their holiday house at Foxton Beach.

Last year’s recipient Catherine Chidgey  had this to say:

“The Beatson Fellowship allowed me the freedom to focus on my novel without the usual worry and distraction of making ends meet, and the validation of my work-in-progress gave me a great boost of confidence. I am tremendously grateful to the Beatsons for their generosity and support."

The award is open to writers of fiction, poetry and drama who are members of the New Zealand Society of Authors.  Deadline: 30 September

“PANZA News: Issue Ten of Poetry Notes available now

The tenth issue of the newsletter from Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa is available now for download as a pdf. Inside Winter 2012, volume 3, issue 2: Niel Wright on the poetry of Esma North; classic New Zealand poetry by George E Dewar (1891?-1969); children’s author Margaret Mahy dies; new publication of Ivy Gibbs’ poems; new publication by PANZA member: ARTIST: Artworks and words by Michael O’Leary; donate to PANZA through PayPal; recently received donations; about the Poetry Archive.

http://poetryarchivenz.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/issue-ten-of-poetry-notes-available-now/


Winter catalogue update
The Poetry Archive of NZ Aotearoa now has over 5,000 titles.
Thanks to all those who have donated to the Archive over the past year. The Poetry Archive of New Zealand catalogue has now been significantly updated to reflect new acquisitions in June and July.
The winter update includes the receipt of 15 titles from publisher Roger Steele, of Steele Roberts Ltd.


The Archive began in February 2010 with around 3,000 titles and has grown substantially in the past year. PANZA would particularly like to thank Auckland poet, editor and novelist Alistair Paterson, Wellington poet/publisher Mark Pirie, Wellington publisher Roger Steele, Cecilia Johnson and the late New Zealand anthologist, poet and memoirist Harvey McQueen for their sizeable contributions to the fast-growing collection.


A full list of donations is listed in each issue of Poetry Notes, the PANZA newsletter.
http://poetryarchivenz.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/winter-catalogue-update/”

Two NZ non-fiction titles in the limelight, both gaining headline-grabbing attention

Headlining the front page of the New Zealand Herald this morning is this story:


Henry's book lights a fire - By Vaimoana Tapaleao
Sir Graham Henry's admission that he wondered whether match-fixing was to blame in the All Blacks' shock quarter-final defeat in the 2007 World Cup has fuelled an international debate about sportsmanship, fairness - and sour grapes.

In a new book out today, the coach - who won the Cup last year - lays bare his agony after the shock loss to France.
And he admits that he pressured the New Zealand Rugby Union to push for an International Rugby Board inquiry after he considered whether match-fixing might have been involved.
More at NZ Herald.

The Sunday Star Times ran this banner on their front page yesterday:

Henry suspected match-fixing after '07 loss - by Steve Kilgallon

Read the SST story here.  There is also an excerpt from the book in the SST.        Photo right - Iain McGregor/Fairfax NZ

Graham Henry -  Final Word  By  Bob Howitt - Harper Collins - Published today - $49.99
My review copy arrived by courier today, the publishers had a strict embargo on it which reading the reactions to it I can understand why.Haven't had a chance to other than dip into at the moment, a handsome hard-cover book with lots of interesting photographs.

Meantime The Search for Anne Perry by Joanne Drayton - Harper Collins - $44.99 - released last Friday seems to be everywhere.

Last night TV3's 60 Minutes was lead by a lengthy London interview with Anne Perry by Guyon Espinor; the NZ Listener now on sale carries Diana Wichtel's interview of Anne Perry in a 7 page cover story, and I see the August issue of the Australian Women's Weekly (on sale today) has a four page excerpt from the book. Both of these magazines carry photographs from the book.

Both these headline-grabbing titles are published by Harper Collins NZ who must be thinking all of their Christmases have come at once. It is not often that NZ non-fiction titles grab the headlines in this way. Booksellers should be sure to   have plenty of stock on hand and to display both titles prominently.

High Season - review by Nicky Pellegrino

Twelve years on from its initial publication the ultimate bad-boy chef’s memoir remains Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. So do we really need to return to the underbelly of the kitchen for more of the same? Australian Jim Hearn thinks so. His new book High Season (Arena, $28.99), billed as a memoir of heroin and hospitality, is highly reminiscent of Bourdain’s classic – pacey, upfront and sharply written. But Hearn seems a more introspective character, less passionate about food than Bourdain, less of the charming celebrity chef, more intense and troubled.

The memoir has two strands running through it. In one Hearn describes a single day as head chef during the high season at high-end, beachfront Bryron Bay restaurant Rae’s on Watego’s. This is a day that begins with Paris Hilton’s unexpected arrival for lunch and ends in far more dramatic fashion. In the other he takes us back to the beginning of his accidental career in hospitality and provides readers with a front row seat to the theatre of his heroin addiction. Both strands are raw, confronting and honest.

Central to the whole book is Hearn’s love/hate relationship with heroin and, while ultimately it serves as a cautionary tale, there are places where he describes the drug with an almost romantic sense of longing. Take this description of how he first experienced getting high:

“The sensation of my heart pumping heroin through my bloodstream was profound. Prior to that life as I understood it could be depicted as a series of random sketches that formed a clumsy whole. Now it all came together in the most warmly felt of ways, like hollandaise sauce”.

Hearn had a pretty rough start in life. His parents had an alternative lifestyle and gave away all their money. By the time he was 15 his mother had left the family to become a prostitute and he was a kitchen apprentice in a local restaurant. He doesn’t dwell on this, however, or use it as an excuse for passing the greater part of his youth consistently off his chops on hard drugs. There’s no self-pity and certainly no embarrassment as he describes the downs and downs of those difficult early years.

Just as compelling is his account of an eventful day behind the six-burner stove at Rae’s. It includes the things you would expect – the rough kitchen repartee, the scramble to get plates of food onto the pass and into the dining room; but there is also a tenderness in Hearn and the way he relates to his crew: Jesse, Choc and Soda.

Hearn wrote High Season after quitting Rae’s and enrolling on a university writer’s course. His prose is fluid and succinct whether he’s describing intense grief or the skill of cooking a perfect steak.

Foodies won’t find much to turn them on here - Hearn is more about the relationships in a kitchen than what ends up on the plate. But as an insider’s expose of the high drama of both restaurant life and addiction it’s fascinating.

It may not be as well seasoned as Kitchen Confidential, but High Season is still worth digesting.

Footnote:

Nicky Pellegrino, an Auckland-based author of popular fiction, is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on 29 July, 2012.
Her next novel When In Rome is set in 1950s Italy and is due out in September this year.

How To Save an Indie Bookstore

By Ron Charles - The Washington Post

Praveen Madan, left, explains his vision for the storied Kepler's bookstore to about 80 volunteers in Menlo Park, Calif. (Ron Charles - The Washington Post) PALO ALTO, Calif. — 

We had brainstormed. We had mind-mapped. We had performed corny skits and written rhyming poems and scrawled our life stories on yards of white paper. We had broken into stakeholder groups and synthesized, prioritized and summarized. Although we sometimes rolled our eyes and grumbled cynical cracks under our breath, we had “honored our differences” and agreed that “all ideas are valid. ”

And now the end was in sight.

Saturday, July 28, was the final day of a remarkable three-day process to reinvent Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, Calif. Some 80 booksellers, community leaders, publishers, authors and customers sat in a large conference room in the Oshman Family JCC, buzzing with new determination — even a touch of anger.

Armed with dozens of strips of paper, masking tape and glue sticks, the participants quickly distilled their previous 14 hours of discussion to eight foundational principles and activities. 

The new Kepler’s Books must:

1. Be financially sustainable.
2. Have a clearly defined mission.
3. Be dedicated to community outreach.
4. Serve as a gathering place for creative events and social events.
5. Support life-long learning and literary education.
6. Sell books in any form, on any platform.
7. Maintain a virtual presence, with technology fully integrated into the store.
8. Provide a carefully curated selection of books.

Some participants felt inspired by this final list; others complained it didn’t go very deep for all our hard work. “When I look at these ideas,” said Antonia Squire, the children’s buyer at Kepler’s, “they’re wonderful, but I don’t see anything new.”
Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised. This hyper-deliberative process — called “Future Search” — isn’t meant to produce a revelatory business plan. It’s meant to make the participants feel personally committed to helping the struggling indie bookstore in the months and years ahead.

For the full story and links to the first two days of the conference link here.

Te Papa Press page on Facebook

Now up and running...  http://www.facebook.com/TePapaPress - do have a look

Ebooks: do we really want our literature to last for ever?

A book published earlier this year by an Argentine firm raises questions about the desirability of indelible ink and trackable data

• James Bridle
• The Observer, Sunday 29 July 2012

Sci-fi author William Gibson had a role in pioneering the idea of a transient book. Photograph: Christopher Morris/Corbis

In 1992, William Gibson, famed for the cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, published Agrippa (a book of the dead), with visual artist Dennis Ashbaugh. The artist's book was printed in photosensitive inks which gradually faded on exposure to light, while Gibson's contribution, a 300-line poem, came on a floppy disk, which encrypted itself after the first reading (although the text escaped and spread across the internet). Recently, a team at the Maryland Institute for Technology launched a competition to reverse-engineer the cryptography which obscures the book.
If digital cryptography isn't enough to hide a book for ever, physical inks still might. Argentinian independent publishers Eterna Cadencia recently released El libro que no puede esperar (The Book That Can't Wait), an anthology of new writers printed with ink that disappears in two months. As the publisher noted, books are patient, waiting for us to read them: good for us, not so good for new authors in need of attention. Most reactions to this experiment have been negative, not least because the proposal seems to invert the primary quality of the physical book: its persistence over time. While ebooks are often characterised as lightweight and transient, we are also horrified by aspects of their persistence, such as their ability to be "tracked" – see the controversy in these pages recently over analytics in ebooks. And the persistence of books is a myth in any case: acidic papers, weather and age conspire to yellow much of our literary heritage.
My favourite page on the music tracking site Last.fm is the one listing user's deleted tracks: songs they've definitely listened to, but chosen to erase. Predictably, Adele and Lady Gaga figure prominently. If the internet is a medium of memory, what does it mean to forget a book? One of the advantages of ebooks might in fact be that they are easier to move on from, to delete, to forget, preventing us from getting bogged down in bad books and past selves, and, as Eterna Cadencia want us to do, move on and discover new things.

A lion in her field - Margaret Mahy 1936 - 2012 - The Listener editorialises

The Bookman was greatly taken by the reflective editorial in this week's NZ Listener which carries the above heading. The Listener has kindly agreed to allow me to carry that editorial here in full. Note that it is not only a fine tribute to Margaret Mahy but is also thoughtful piece on New Zealanders making their mark internationally through creative endeavours and the importance of government support to the creative industries. 

Which is more important, imagination or knowledge? It’s a trick question, of course, because true genius requires both.

No less a brainiac than Albert Einstein recognised this fact. Asked by a curious mother what she could do to encourage her son to be a scientist, Einstein supposedly replied that she should read her boy fairy tales. And yet more fairy tales.

The quote is disputed, but it may well be correct, given that the brilliant physicist later told a notable German doctor: “When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.” It was the ability to ask “what if?”

In any case, New Zealand author Margaret Mahy, who died on Monday, was well aware of this truism. Like another notable author, CS Lewis, she knew perfectly well that children’s fiction often says best what needs to be said.

There were lions and witches in Mahy’s wardrobe. Plenty of pirates, too. Her musical ear enabled her to trip the light fantastic in her waltz with words, while her deep understanding of children’s psyches enabled her to delve into the depths of fantasy that some adults struggle to understand.

Over the past few days, the nation has fondly remembered her wigs, her warmth and her wild streak, as well as her joie de vivre. But it should not be forgotten that she was also fascinated by science – both natural and social. As children’s literature expert Betty Gilderdale once noted, Mahy’s novel The Tricksters is basically a speculation on quantum physics, and The Catalogue of the Universe plays with Ionian philosophy.

As many have suggested following Mahy’s death from cancer, she, too, was a genius in her field. That she touched so many ­people’s lives in a positive way, not just in New Zealand but around the world, is testament to the power of skilful storytelling.

It is also a fine example of how New Zealanders are able to make their mark internationally through creative endeavours. Mahy won the Carnegie Medal – the children’s literature equivalent of an Olympic gold – not just once, but twice, and she also had a slew of other awards to her name, assuring her place in the pantheon of New Zealand writers, alongside Janet Frame and Katherine Mansfield.

More recently, writers such as Lloyd Jones and Emily Perkins have continued to show that New Zealand’s voice is being heard globally, while filmmakers such as Sir Peter Jackson are proving that size and distance don’t necessarily matter when it comes to securing locations for big-budget productions.

Thanks to such developments, our creative industries these days carry considerable economic clout. And they will undoubtedly get a further boost in October, when New Zealand is the guest of honour at the world’s biggest and most important book fair, in Frankfurt.

It will be a shame, then, if our Tourism Minister John Key does not put his mana where his mouth is by showing up. He has, after all, damned the industry with faint praise by reportedly noting that “while our literary heroes may never challenge the glory and respect given to the All Blacks, we still need role models to inspire us”.

There is much speculation about the future of the book industry and the impact of new technology, but no one is seriously suggesting humans are losing interest in good yarns, as the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises showed.

And the outpouring of emotion in the wake of Mahy’s passing should give the Prime Minister pause for thought about literature’s legacy in this country.

One suspects Mahy herself may have been surprised by how much she is already missed. She once explained to the Listener about her early books: “What I was doing was simply making the world a nicer place through the power of imagination.”

As far as role models go, that seems sufficiently inspirational to us. 

Footnote:

Thanks to the unnamed person/s at The Listener responsible for this editorial. I hope it is read by many. It deserves the widest possible audience which is why I sought their permission to reproduce it here on the blog.

May I also add that in my view The Listener is itself a huge and valuable supporter and contributor to the NZ creative arts sector. Week in and week out the magazine provides many pages in their fine books and culture section and beyond that frequent interviews with authors and artists, other back stories and features on the arts from their fine stable of reviewers and columnists.

Look this week for the three page story on NZ author Jacqueline Fahey and her new book, Before I Forget; a review of Witi Ihimaera's latest, The Thrill of Falling; as well as a roundup of recent crime fiction and thriller titles, and much else besides. And of course the sensational cover story coinciding with  publication of Joanne Drayton's The Search for Anne Perry.








Listener Arts & Books Editor Guy Somerset has collated memories of Margaret Mahy here.

Six Book Challenge exceeds targets for 2012 - 23,000+ adults sign up in fifth year of adult literacy scheme

 The Reading Agency is delighted to announce that a record 23,500 less confident adult readers registered for its 2012 Six Book Challenge programme. That’s 1,000 more readers than anticipated, with figures set to rise further as public libraries, colleges, workplaces, prisons and other settings around the UK conclude and evaluate their Challenge activity for this year.

Launched in 2008, when 7,000 people took part, the annual Six Book Challenge encourages less confident readers to develop a new reading habit and improve their skills at the same time. Participants are invited to pick six reads of their choice and complete a reading diary in order to receive incentives along the way, a certificate and the chance to enter a national prize draw. Ninety per cent of survey respondents this year said that they were more confident about reading after taking part in the Six Book Challenge.

The Six Book Challenge is run by independent charity The Reading Agency to help tackle the UK’s continuing skills deficit. Recent Government figures show that 15% (5.1 million) of the working age population in England are still at or below the literacy level expected of an 11 year old. (See “Notes to editors”.) Top authors back the Six Book Challenge to help get more adults reading more, including Adele Parks and Andy McNab, who are official Six Book Challenge ambassadors.

Of the record-breaking 23,500 people who signed up for the 2012 Six Book Challenge, 12,000 came through public libraries, 6,000 through further education and sixth form colleges, 4,000 through prisons and

1,500 through workplaces. And 44 organisations around the UK have qualified for new awards to mark the number of completers they supported. Northampton College and public library services in the London Borough of Brent and Blaenau Gwent in Wales have won gold awards for achieving more than 150 completers, with 11 organisations winning silver awards (100+ completers) and 35 winning bronze (50+ completers).

Genevieve Clarke, Six Book Challenge programme manager for The Reading Agency says: “It’s fabulous that the Challenge has increased in scale by another 30% this year but there’s a long way to go. It’s such a simple scheme and yet its impact is enormous. Everyone should be doing it!  So please get in touch with us if you’d like to support the Challenge in any way.”

Fort more about the Six Book Challenge visit www.sixbookchallenge.org.uk

Photo below shows bestselling author Adele Parks meeting Six Book Challenge completers at Harlesden Library in the London Borough of Brent on 1 February 2012.