All settled? Google Books deadline soon

Google has been making headlines for its new stance on China after re-thinking a censored version of its search engine within China. It's bold dragon-slaying stuff, but there's another Google story that's been bubbling away since 2005. Last week Australia's Copyright Agency (CAL) ran a series of information seminars that told authors how to go register if they wanted their slice of the settlement pie and published their notes online.

The kerfuffle started when the US Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sued Google for its project that aimed to digitise publications for an online library. Google's defence was that their digitisation constituted 'fair use' under US copyright law, though in 2008 offered US$125 million in an out of court settlement.

This will be a one-off payment to rightsholders (usually publishers and authors or their heirs) and asks you to opt-in for future use. It's reminiscent of an episode of The Simpsons where Mr Burns is fined US$3million for polluting which he pays for out of his wallet then says "Oh, and I'll take that statue of justice too."

Still most of those rightsholders could use a chunk of change to help them through rights wrangling of the future. With over US$100million on the table you think you'd need a wheelbarrow to carry home your bucks. Well, not quite.

Turns out just over US$35million will be required to set up a Registry to pay rightholders. This Registry will continue to manage pay outs in the future and will licence content exclusively for Google. If you're paying the kind of money that sounds like a Hollywood film budget to set up an organisation then I guess you'd want that organisation to help you out in the future.

So the agreement guarantees that Google will pay at least US$45 million into a fund for rightholders. I'm not sure what "at least" entails and my maths isn't great but that sounds like almost FIFTY GRAND that's fallen down the back of a couch somewhere. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Google has to pay the plaintiff's legal fees.

So the bottom line for authors? According to the huge settlement doc (download the 170 page doc and sub-files if you have a week off work) it sounds like if you wrote a book and opt-in to continued re-use, a rightsholder will get a one-off payment of at least US$60 plus 63% of the revenue your book attracts in the future. Inserts (articles or short stories) receive a payment of US$15 though there's something called a Partial Insert (defined as "An Insert other than a Partial Insert") that sounds like an unpleasant medical intrusion and attracts a lesser payment.

But wait there's more. Before you use the lavish payment of US$60 to pay the electricity bill, be aware that this money is paid to rightsholders. Some publishers buy up your rights while other share them so this payment may not even get to the scribes that are just about to have their power cut off. And your publisher may have opted in for the partner program which may mean you've already given away your rights.

Still most authors will hit up the settlement registry site to see if anything they've written has been digitised. Some will opt in by the 28th of January deadline, but others won't which could mean that their books will be removed from Google Books. But Google Books will be so huge that some have called it a monopoly particularly for 'orphan works' where no rightsholder can be found.

One author who isn't phased by missing out in Google Books is Ursula Le Guin. She's gone a on a crusade and has amassed a growing petition of more than 300 authors against the settlement. Even if her appeal is unsucessful, there's an excellent fictionalisation that the sci-fi/fantasy author could produce based on a monster that swallows information until only a few heroic authors dare bounce on its belly to get it to cough up more cash.

Disclaimer: Hackpacker is not a lawyer and none of this post constitutes legal advice. Read widely about this issue and seek further legal advice if pain persists.

How to become a Lonely Planet author

Seconds after telling anyone you're a Lonely Planet author, they'll ask how you got the job. Sometimes it's just polite curiousity other times it's because they think it sounds like a dream job, but mostly it's because they believe there's an arcane ritual that you have to pass through be annointed by guidebook brahmins. If there was a ritual then I missed it and the truth is it requires an odd collection of skills.

If you're looking to get a job as a guidebook author the first place to check is the Lonely Planet's own instructions on becoming an author. For the last year there's been a hiring freeze, but word is that this will soon be thawing as they begin refreshing the pool of around 300 authors.

There's no secret to the recruitment process. As well as normal material like a CV and examples of previous work, new authors can be asked to write a sample chapter to show how you'd write a guidebook. You'll get some instructions on how to write this so follow these as closely as you can.

Choosing where to write your sample chapter about is crucial. It needs to both showcase your writing but also be the kind of place you'd see in a guidebook. Originally I did mine on a small town and found there just wasn't enough material. Plus there wasn't much significance or history to the town so it was hard to see why it would appear in guidebook with 2000 words dedicated to it. It's about selecting somewhere that suits the word count. Trying to cover all of metropolitan Melbourne is tough and will give you only the roughest sketch, but covering a suburb in depth is going to give richer writing.

And what about your writing? Travel writing is really competitive so your sample needs to be distinctive and show that you've got your own style. Brochurese ('stunning vistas' or 'luxury options' anyone?) and cliches are the unexceptional kids picked around the middle in playground football. Challenge yourself to write like nobody else in the slush pile and even if you're bad at least you'll be exceptionally bad.

Accuracy is always important and you can bet that anyone assessing it will fact check with a phonecall or even visit. In guidebooks even the best writing is worthless if your basic information is wrong and you see a lot of reader's letters where people have got the maps wrong.

Oh yeah - the maps. You need to do a sample map that points out everything you mention in the text. Map-text consistency is important, but maps need to be both clear and complete. It's not just about writing and you'll need to be an amateur cartographer as well. Generally you can work from existing maps but knowing where to put each item is important.

Having in-depth knowledge of destinations is important and having a language or two is useful. The Lonely Planet website sometimes targets difficult destinations where they need specific skills or specialists. Getting the balance between writing skills and specialist knowledge is important though so lecturing professors need not apply (though these kind of specialists might be useful on a specific books).

Many Lonely Planet authors (including me) get experience with house style and guidebooks by working in-house. This used to be called 'jumping the fence' as even in-house staff have to do the same process of writing a sample chapter and have it assessed.

Assessment is usually done by skilled editors who've worked on their fair share of books. They're looking for something that has no errors (so don't just spell check your work) but also reads well and is accurate. Getting rejected can give you some good feedback that will improve your writing and your chances next time.

While not quite an arcane ritual, the sample is a big hurdle but if you're given the nod as an author then you can start pitching for books anywhere in the world.

Brisbane's Asia Pacific Triennial 2009

Many Australians still think of the Queensland capital as a cultural backwater. Although it's Australia's third largest city, the memory of conservative premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen still casts a shadow. Once every three years Brizvegas hosts one of the world's biggest arts events, the Asia Pacific Triennial (the sixth is abbreviated to APT6). Gathering works from Iran to Hawaii, one gallery isn't enough to hold the exhibition so it rambles through the Queensland Art Gallery (known unprosaically as QAG) across to the Gallery of Modern Art (or GoMA to his old army buddies).

Entitled People holding flowers, this years coverboys decorate most promo materials, marching across the gallery floor. Chinese artsists Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu created the seriously dressed businessmen each holding aloft a lotus flower to play on Mao Zhedong's Hundred Flowers campaign of encouraging artistic opinion. Ironically the flowers and their bearers are identical much like political thought after Mao's crackdowns on the campaign after 1957.

Elsewhere Taiwanese artist Charwei Tsai has created Mushroom Mantra, a living garden of mushrooms each inscribed with the Bhuddist Heart Sutra. It's a strong argument for a living religion as each mushroom needs to have the sutra re-written by the Brisbane's own Chung Tian Temple as the fungi grow.

Many of the works tackle global problems. Take Subodh Gupta's Line of Control (1), an enormous pile of brass cooking pots shaped into a mushroom cloud. The Line of Control divides India from neighbouring Pakistan and the artist is pointing to nuclear tests that both nations indulged in until they became commonplace along their shared border. It's a gutsy piece of art that catches the eye while stabbing at the heart.

APT6 is no stuffy exhibition that pushes viewers away or waggles fingers at snapshot takers. Lots of the crowd when we visited looked into Yoshitomo Nara's custom built van that was loaded up as a mobile studio for making his cute-but-creepy characters. Elsewhere there's a pile of paper planes made by little patrons of the arts from recycled materials with the best suspended from the roof or hung from the walls.

This Brisbane is a long flight from Bjelke-Petersen's parochial Queensland. The APT6 would have bugged the former premier who in a Mao-like fashion banned public protest and narrow-mindedly ranted "What's good for Queensland is good for Australia." The APT6 involves Australia in the world's most important political and social debates from a place that's anything but a backwater. It could even make a claim for Australia's most outward looking city. What's good for the world has become good for Brisbane.