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Had a very interesting conversation with the always-delightful ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) catsparx during the awards banquet at WFC. We covered a lot of ground, but one place that we kept coming back to was the desire of Australian specfic writers to break out in to the American market, and some of their perceptions about that process.
It was fascinating. One of the most interesting things about the perceptions Cat was reporting was that if you took out the word "Australian" and inserted the word "aspiring" in the phrase "editors treat Australian writers...", it would sound a great deal like the sorts of things aspiring writers in the United States tell themselves and each other.
The really strange thing about that to me is that Australia has a perfectly healthy fiction scene that these folks have been building and creating within for years. I'm talking about respected writers and editors such as Cat herself, as well as Rob Hood, Lee Battersby, Trent Jamieson, Deborah Biancotti, Trevor Stafford, Martin Livings, Ben Peek, Tansy Rayner Roberts and Alisa Krasnostein -- just to name a few of these folks that I've come to know either IRL or through the virtual world. These writers have already "come up", in a scene which is even by demanding standards equivalent to the high end of the US independent press scene.
Yet they feel as if they're hurling themselves at same walls as any new writer here. The perception, for example, that only Big Name Authors get published. That you have to know people to get published. That perhaps being Australian is a strike against them.
Though I've addressed those first two here before (and would be happy to do so again if it would be helpful) I was especially croggled by that last one. As I told Cat, being Australian is a status marker in the US. A good one. For better or worse, in the grand scheme of our prejudices and loves of foreigners, folks from Australia rank very near the top. The accent alone turns heads, if one wanders the streets here in person. And Australia has a powerful creative tradition of which many Americans are aware -- Peter Carey, Peter Weir, Nick Cave, to name three artists across three disciplines. Not to mention the usual A-list genre suspects from over Oz way, such Jonathan Strahan, Sean Williams, Sean McMullen, Garth Nix, Justine Larbalestier.
We also talked about how to start an author fund, modeled on the various fan funds, with the idea in mind of exchanging authors every year between the two scenes. I know Cat, Deborah and Trevor at least have all been over here in the last couple of years.
All that being said, my basic comment to the writers in the Australian scene is the same one I make to anyone else, anywhere else: "Write more." To them in particular, I add: "Put it in the mail." I can guarantee you that most editors never notice where a manuscript comes from geographically, and if somehow they do, being Australian is more likely to be a plus than a minus.
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I ask, in all seriousness, Jay: do you know me because of my work, or because of our recent LJ chatting? Do you know I'm up & coming/established because of my work, or because cat (or someone else) told you? Because I don't think the weight of my work can lead anyone to that belief.
It's not a slight, or anything narkey, but a perception I have: I don't think that many people have read my work. I've published quite a bit in the Australian market over the last five years, but very rarely in the States, so I'm prepared to be an unknown in the US while I bang my head against that market. Just like any other unknown.
I know writers here in Australia that feel like it's a closed shop, but to me, it's just a market in which I've failed to establish myself yet. I am, however, burdened by the somewhat egotistical belief that I'm good enough to do so. My failure to establish myself comes from my failure to mount a concerted attempt, not from lack of talent or ambition. I hope :)
When I have established myself to my satisfaction, when I have what I can call a career without adding a self-deprecating comment at the end of the statement, and when I can actually afford to make it across the Big Pond and attend a US convention or two or two hundred (5 kids: never gonna happen, sigh), it'll be because I've managed to do what I set out to do. Not becuase anybody let me.
Postage and email, in my experience, eliminate national boundaries, not reinforce them.
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| jaylake |
| 2006-11-13 06:38 (UTC) |
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Um, I *bought* a story from you, dude. Two, I believe.
I think that counts as knowing you through your work.
Postage and email, in my experience, eliminate national boundaries, not reinforce them.
Yep, exactly my point.
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| jo_r_lucas |
| 2006-11-13 06:38 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| chocolate |
the accent turns heads... followed with "what did you just say?" :) i had to make adjustments to my pronunciation when i was living in puyallup. i had to sound more american to be understood - especially on the phone! mind you, it made me popular with the opposite sex... being aussie here is not a novelty :)) thus, i need to go back to seattle :))
aussie literature is my absolute favourite. tim winton especially :)
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| corvida |
| 2006-11-13 06:41 (UTC) |
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It's funny how people will find reasons why they aren't "making it". While in publishing it sounds like it's because of those Evil Publishing House Conspiracies are against the unknown writer, in art it is more often then not because people believe they are no good at it (most irritating excuse evar!) However, I think if art were a more limited market like publishing, artists would have the same gripe. Your advice works for both disciplines, I think. You just have to do more of it.
Oh, and I think Lian Hearn is Australian, too. Well, British-born, but living there. Does that count?
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It certainly does!
Sarah Douglass is Australian too, and she's hardly been a failure. Terry Dowling, Peter Carey, Greg Egan (Shit, Egan lies in the same city as me!), Stephen Dedman. All Australian. Jack Dann is a transplanted Yank who happily calls the wilds of Victoria home. Jay Caselberg has gone in the opposite direction and lives somewhere 'over there'. Damien Broderick. I could probably go find some publishing figures to unearth some even better examples, but that's just off the top of my head and I think it's a pretty decent list.
The 'we can't succeed overseas' argument is a lazy and scared one.
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| benpeek |
| 2006-11-13 07:12 (UTC) |
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Oh, and I think Lian Hearn is Australian, too. Well, British-born, but living there. Does that count?
she's also the popular YA author, gillen rubenstein, i believe.
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And just think of the poor Canadians, who get overlooked time and time again.... (no joke: it's actually tougher in some cases for a Canadian to break in than it is an Asutralian or a UK writer. There's so much overlap in book publishers between the two countries, the rights situation can really screw up a career.)
Amusingly enough, Jay Caselber (agamisu) is often overlooked by people who think that he's part of the UK crowd, rather than Australian, despite having been published in all three (Aus, US, UK) countries...
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| benpeek |
| 2006-11-13 07:07 (UTC) |
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Yet they feel as if they're hurling themselves at same walls as any new writer here. The perception, for example, that only Big Name Authors get published. That you have to know people to get published. That perhaps being Australian is a strike against them.
i just wanna say, jay-man, i don't think that. i've never thought that. i'm a happy little vegemite :)
when i got into the scene and started writing, i heard a lot of people say its hard to get overseas, and that being australian is a strike against you, alla that, but i've never experienced it. in fact, i've found that the american scene, being bigger and thus able to sustain larger pockets of niches, is more open to writers. you just have to know it--and sadly a lot of people here just know the big, public top end of it.
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i'm a happy little vegemite
So you are banned in the US then!
Okay, so I know it was only an urban myth, but it amuses me.....
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| jaylake |
| 2006-11-13 14:26 (UTC) |
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Yep. You're living my point.
BTW, my name check wasn't intended to be an exhaustive list of Australian writers, nor a docket of the accused, just those with whom I've had some form of interaction, contact or meaningful awareness...
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| jjsass |
| 2006-11-13 07:55 (UTC) |
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Australia is a small market - I was published there in the very beginning of my career, and I sold two hundred books the first six months. My publisher was Elated. (So you can see that it's a very different numbers game, lol.) When Penguin opened shop in Australia, I think a lot of writers were hoping it would open the doors to publishing in the US.
Australian authors can only make decent money if they are published and promoted in the US. Being Australian is not a strike against them, but the market is simply not even a thousanth of what it is in the US, even for midlist books. (did you leave out Garth Nix?) LOL
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| jjsass |
| 2006-11-13 08:12 (UTC) |
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No, you didn't - I see his name! LOL
Neville Shute was English but emigrated to Australia. I guess he was published by English Press though.
After reading the other comments and finding a thread of 'Don't whine because you're not a best-seller - it's because you're not trying hard enough, not because you're in a foreign country' theme, I think I have to disagree. If you want to make a decent living writing you have to have decent promotion and distribution for your book. In this day and age of internet, there is the possibility of doing everything online, but even in this day and age, people don't always know where or how to find things Online, and e-books are not yet really accepted as 'real' books.
I live in France, and talk about a SMALL market. The most an author makes off a book is about 20,000$ - which sounds like a lot - but this is for a Best Seller folks, and there are only a couple of them a year. Most of my friends who write have full time jobs here, (and two of them have had best selling books and Still have full time jobs!) They would Love to be translated into English and hit the US market.
And it's true about the Canadian market too - because of distribution. The two countries don't overlap for that, believe it or not. And you'd think the French Canadian and French market would connect, but it doesn't even come close. There are practically No french Canadian books for sale here in France, unless it's a best seller in Canada.
If there was a world-wide distribution chain, it would be an immense break for authors averywhere. (But maybe the US would object because of protectionism?)
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For me as a publisher, the challenge is to promote and sell our work in the US/rest of the world. While I don't think that Aussie writers have many barriers to selling work overseas, I feel that there are real challenges in selling Aussie-produced publications to the US.
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| jaylake |
| 2006-11-13 14:53 (UTC) |
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Agreed. Those barriers are very similar to the barriers experienced by US independent and small presses, with the added bonus of it being fantastically expensive for you to show up and man your $40 dealers' room table, which at the least USAnian small presses can do.
Does the Australian publishing scene have a co-operative process, for example, that would allow for a frontperson here, and an Aussie table at selected cons?
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| deborahb |
| 2006-11-13 12:14 (UTC) |
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Nah, I've never bought the argument that we're too 'australian' to be published overseas, as if there's some intrinsic difference that makes us too foreign for everybody else. And actually, I don't know that it really is a prevalent attitude here in Oz. I'm always a bit baffled by the argument, really.
I love Lee's comment: that assuming failure is easier than risking it.
There certainly is an interest locally in getting published overseas, but that's largely to do with audience size & perceived buzz/energy/dialogue rather than validation -- IMHO.
But I do dispute the idea Australians have accents! What the! We are Australian. There are no accents here (until you bring yours over, Jay).
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Different groups here have different thoughts.
The ones who yearn after US publication express that yearning loudly and frequently.
The ones who are published in the US don't express this particular yearning and we spend our timing talking of other things. In my case recently I've talked an awful lot about maps and about food. Justine Larbalestier blogs regularly about sport. Trudi Canavan talks about knitting. I *don't* know how you would interpret that except that Justine and Trudi are known authors and I'm not, so obviously sport and knitting are more important than maps and food.
People who couldn't care less are also oddly silent on the subject.
What I yearn (to be honest) for is for more readers of *any* nationality. One of these days I will move from small-publisher-published to big advances and enough money to buy a new stove. Or maybe I won't. Maybe I'm a niche writer and will learn to accept this.
Australia is really not very monolithic (except for Uluru, which is still monolithic from any angle) and Australians really enjoy arguing with each other about what to do next or what we should have done or why one writer is published or noticed and another writer isn't. Each of our paths as writers is as individual as the writing voyages of other writers in other countries - don't let the noise of one type of yearning blind you to this.
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I talk about food too you know! And I like maps . . .
I think that it is harder to get published in a country that you've never been to and don't know a lot about. Knowing the market you're submitting to is incredibly important.
When I started out I was sending stories to all the big magazines in the UK and the USA. I read those magazines but even so I knew nothing about who they were produced by or what the scene was like. And the stories I was sending weren't actually a good fit for those magazines. Though at the time I couldn't see it.
I knew NOTHING about the non-big magazines where I would have had a bigger shot at being published and so did not submit to them. Back then, before the internet, it was a lot harder to find out all that stuff.
And even now there's nothing like going to a couple of US cons to really find out what's going on over there. The intramaweb has made everything much much easier, but nothing beats face to face contact.
It is an advantage in the US of A being a native English speaker who's not from the US. Yanks wet themselves over Oz, English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish etc etc accents. It's kind of embarassing. Every time I give a reading the main response I get is, "I just LOVE your accent." So, really, you could read out the phone book and they'd be happy.
Oh, and that furphy about US publishers not being interested in stories with Australian content? It's utter rubbish. The Oz content of my trilogy has been one of its selling points. And it's certainly worked for the likes of Jaclyn Moriarty, Marcus Zusak and the like.
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| frogworth |
| 2006-11-13 13:18 (UTC) |
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Thanks for this post, sir, all lovely. Even though I'm not an Australian writer at all.
Btw, it's Alisa, not Alicia, Krasnostein. Just thought I should stick up for her :) But that's a nice list of Aussie editors ya got there!
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| agamisu |
| 2006-11-13 14:04 (UTC) |
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Reality is, strategically, I set the US market clearly in my sights from the start, even though I was based in the UK at the time. As a result, I think I suffered in the UK, at least at book length. There is a weirdly parochial sense to the UK market. It took me a long, long time to crack any of the UK markets. Now that I don't live there, I sometimes wonder if I'll get published there again. I have also, religiously mentioned that I'm an Australian writer in cover letters, at least until I become a known quantity. I certainly don't think that having done so has harmed me in any way. My public performances are enough to do that on their own.
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This has been going on for a long time, and things may have changed for the better. One of the reasons I started writing so many book reviews for Emerald City was to give my Australian writer friends better exposure in the US and UK (I was living in Melbourne at the time). I have no idea whether that worked, but I do think that the Internet has encouraged US publishers to view the universe of authors in a more international way. Overseas authors are now much easier to communicate with and work with, and publishers see reviews of good foreign books much more quickly.
I'll be seeing Stephen Dedman and Trevor Stafford in San Francisco on Wednesday. They have have opinions on this.
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| wendy_waring |
| 2006-11-14 13:39 (UTC) |
| Forget the US, what about Oz? |
| Waring |
So why are there no experts from a Department of Writerly Demographics and Statistics we can call upon?
We could learn definitely whether the whole "Australians can't get into the international market" is a furphy or not. After which, we could read a juicy report on how long it actually does take to finish a novel, complete with writing profiles and mean and average completion times.
With a total of three fiction sales to me name, one to Westerly, a small literary mag in Oz (a story workshopped at Clarion South) one to Tesseracts 10 (also workshopped at CS), and the latest to Interzone (#207, in bookstores now, folks), I can deduce without a doubt that it's the Australian SpecFic market that can't be cracked.
Must be my Canadian accent.
;)
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| jaylake |
| 2006-11-14 13:56 (UTC) |
| Re: Forget the US, what about Oz? |
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The sad thing is, I do a fair amount of Writerly Demographics and Statistics. (My day job is in technical marketing, so I'm kind of wired for that.) Most people do not want to read it...I can't imagine why.
And congratulations on the Interzone sale!
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| benpayne |
| 2006-11-15 08:51 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Who are these people? I dunno... I know they're out there, but I don't know anyone who thinks that, really...
I wouldn't think it's that common an opinion that being Australian is a disadvantage... I tend to think it's kind of an *ahem* older generation thing... but I'm not sure:) Back from the world before the net, you know...
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| wendy_waring |
| 2006-11-15 12:08 (UTC) |
| Canada: 28 Australia: 3 |
| Waring |
After our little chat about obsessive compulsive writerly demographickery, I decided to compare the eligibility lists for the Aurealis award for short fiction (all categories) and the prix Aurora award. They're similar sizes, between 18-19 million English speakers, in a similar political system, post-colonial political 'heritage', multi-racial history, public schooling, and a system of social welfare.
You can read the details on my blog (http://wendy-waring.livejournal.com/2674.html), but the bottom line is
Canada: 28 Australia: 3
The question is...why?
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