Hackpacker

If you want to look into the future of books and publishing, the record industry makes for a pretty good crystal ball. The iPod took music out of the physical into the digital in the same way e-books will take books off the page. The documentary I Need That Record looks at how music stores in the States have been gutted by the changes in music, not only by MP3 downloads but also by 'big box chains'. These stores stock the big records (the doco says 1 in 5 albums sold in the US goes through a Walmart checkout) at lower prices because of their huge volumes. If you followed the recent parallel importation debate then you'll see similarities big bookstores and big box chains. Does it follow that independent bookstore will be pushed out by the evil machinations of the big stores and the unstoppable march of e-books? For me the answer is: not so much. Independent bookstores remain a sensual and social experience that will be tough to replace. Going to a bookstore is as m

Like most writers, I've had my fair share of "de-sucessings", "thanks but no thanks" and "If you continue to send your work to us we will release the hounds" letters. Part of 'getting your work out there' is that often it gets bounced back to you, but it makes it all the more satisfying when a reader/editor/intern actually "gets" your work. To paraphrase one of my favourite rejection letters – they're opinions are learned but also subjective. Your work can fall on their desk at exactly the wrong time, be in the middle of a lump of stories on the exact same subject or just be the piece that’s read before an editor has a cup of coffee. Don’t take it personally because there are a thousand decisions between your submission and publication. Some writers develop such strong relationships with their work that a rejection letter hurts like getting dumped. So like a good break-up, a good rejection letter is clear and concise but respect

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

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

The new year means resolutions to break or bend. Here's one for travel writers everywhere: no more lazy writing. It's hard with the deadline breathing down on you and the cliche close to hand or the pun headline just screaming at you, but better writing is a stretch away. For cliche junkies, you don't have to go it alone. Courtesy of Cassowary Crossing comes this link to 60 Pun Headlines That Travel Editors Love A Little Too Much . There's some groanworthy material here. I'm certainly guilty of Start to Finnish, but I'd restrain myself from Kenya Dig It and the horrendous Brazilliant. And Czech puns are as fashionable as plaid. If you're still looking to kick the cliche then Chuck Thompson makes an excellent sponsor. His Smile When You're Lying serves up cynicism familiar to anyone who's ever felt like they'vw overdosed on sugar after reading the travel pages. He says that almost any city can be described as a "bewitching blend of the anc

Nocember is the cruellest month - no matter what TS Eliott says. It masquerades as two months but long ago blurred into one which crams in too many events to reasonably attend. Worst of all it forces bloggers to do wap-up blogs as there's not enough time to attend and blog. Here's my pre-Christmas fast forward: This Annoying Opening Kicking off on 19th of November, Paul Oslo Davis ' show This Annoying Life showcases his illustrations particularly his Overheard series in the Sunday Age that joins conversational snippets with his minimalist style. The poster is characteristic of his style - several bitter dancing couples exchanging lines like "Let's play hide the resentment" or "Let's run away in opposite directions". It's humanity at it's best and bleakest. It was a crowded little space with most of the fun in watching people making the connection between text and images. Some of the city's best cartoonists were along to raise

A little while ago I wrote about being inside the mouthful that is the Centre for Books Writing & Ideas . A few other people must have been having trouble with the name because it is now the Wheeler Centre . At a function this morning the curtain slid back to reveal a Lonely Planet founders, Tony and Maureen Wheeler. According to the speeches, they're funding top-class or "Melbourne standard" events at the new centre named in their honour. It's all part of their Planet Wheeler foundation . The first program of events was unveiled in a glossy brochure. The big gig is A Gala Night of Storytelling , which boasts some of Melbourne's biggest personalities from Paul Kelly to John Marsden all telling stories passed down through their families. It's an intimate look at the cities literati. Its an exciting start to Melbourne's biblio-hub.

This weekend I went to the first workshop at Melbourne 's brand spanking new Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas . It's the jewel in the crown of UNESCO's City of Literature and, based on the construction work going on out the front, there's a bit more polishing before it's fully open to the public. Even still it's up and running in a pilot mode with most of the resident organisations already moved in and some even starting their events. Six resident organisations - Australian Poetry Centre , Emerging Writers' Festival , Express Media , Melbourne Writer's Festival , Victorian Writer's Centre and SPUNC - all seem to be in various stages of unpacking. The centre itself starts programming events early next year. It's an impressive building from the inside and out - keeping the State Library's classic look while making it contemporary enough to be a work place. There's still a few bugs to iron out with the entrance which was still draped i

November will see the release of Peter Carey's latest, Olivier and Parrot in America . I was lucky enough to snag an advance of this thumping tome and it's an impressive work. One of the things I like about Carey is that he is very much an Australian abroad so his writing looks at being stretched between two cultures. In his latest Europeans head into the belly of America just as that nation was the hope for democracy. But don't take my word for it. Here's what the man himself has to say: Interview with Peter Carey from Granta magazine on Vimeo . Today another Australian writer kicks off a new project. Under the dubious title of Marieke Hardy in Your Hand , The Age has launched a venture into m-fiction, or stories delivered by text. While it may be a first for Australia, cell fiction is already popular in Japan where keitai shosetsu (cell phone novels) have pulled in millions of dollars from subscriptions of less than two bucks a novel. Fairfax are relying on disco

Working from home you develop a special relationship with the postman. Your ears become attuned to the whirr of their motorbikes, the creak of the mail slot and the gentle thump of a letter arriving. This is the symphony of procrastination. This week the thump was not so gentle as a package arrived from the publicity people at Allen & Unwin . It was an advance of the Tango Collection , an anthology of the excellent romance comic that won't be in stores until December. Bernard Caleo is the genius editor/illustrator/writer/male model behind Tango , collecting some of Australia's best comics in a bumper edition that tackles 'Love and...'. This plump package arrived wrapped in brown paper (very much in keeping with the DIY craftiness of the original Tango ) bound in a custom comic strip by Caleo himself. It was a nice little bonus that should make it into bookstores even if booksellers find it an annoying gimmick. The survival of the book as a physical artefact will

There was a marketing questionnaire that came from Lonely Planet asking authors how many reviews they reckoned they'd written. I really wouldn't have a clue. As a guesstimate, there's hundreds in any guidebook you write then there's a gagillion food reviews, plus about a billion shadow reviews. These are the reviews you start writing then work out that your subject is never going to make it in, so you keep writing it just for yuks. Some of them are pure fiction while in others only the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Here's a couple from the notebooks - including my Scotland blog : Seven-11 The ambience is bright, fluorescently so, with an emphasis on brand names and logos that lends a pop culture chic. Chef “Hi, I’m Dave”, whose career we’ve followed from the Dandenong Rd’s Shell Servo, offers us the five chocolate bars for two dollars, but go for the house special – the caldo cane . Rolling over on a unique warmer/disinfector, the “dogs” (indulgen

Thursday the MWF got all digital. There were sessions dedicated to marketing in the info age and showing off the latest e-readers . I got along to three sessions but the whole day proved too much of a test of stamina and battery life. The opening was called the State of Digital Publishing . Victoria Nash and Elizabeth Weiss grappled with the huge subject from the publisher point of view. They were concerned about the rise of the $9.99 e-book and how it had pushed them into what Elizabeth refererred to as "Get all out books out there and have them competing" mentality. Victoria mentioned piracy and how they saw it as "protecting our authors' copyright and obviously our revenues". It all looked very industry-focussed and I felt like the author was out of the picture. Thirty minutes in Bob Stein got a word in about the future. He pointed out that more than a million books are available on public domain and that the book industry was facing the same challenges

Finns are an enterprising bunch. Take the Freeplay keynote speaker Petri Purho. From his flat in Helsinki, he created Kloonigames with the goal of creating a game a week . This led to his rapid protoyping method that built his creative game Crayon Physics Deluxe . He believes the next big development will be a "YouTube of games" where developers will be able to push their work to global audiences to play, comment and refine - though he admitted to being nervous about business people crowding out the creativity for the dollars. Purho believes making a lot of games will eventual create a good game. Make a lot of what he calls "shit games" and you'll eventually hit on something that resonates with an audience. The only way to get over your fear of the inner-critic and your lack of technical skills is to churn it out. It's an idea that applies across the arts. Purho referenced the Scarlet Letters: Notes on Making Art , written by two visual artists. Many of t

Later this year I'm teaching a Travel Writing Bootcamp . It's a slightly ridiculous name I know, but it should sound like a way to kickstart your writing while sidestepping the traditional workshop model. Not that there's anything wrong with the traditional workshop. I still have a great creative writing workshoppping group and use workshops in most of my classes. But as Louis Menand points out in the New Yorker article, Show or Tell , we've been using workshops as a method of teaching writing for more than 50 years. In all that time shouldn't we have evolved some new tools for writing? Menand's essay tackles questions like can you teach writing succinctly ('What is usually said is that you can’t teach inspiration, but you can teach craft.') and gives a romping history of how creative programs grew up in the States throughout the 1940s and much later in the UK and Australia. Workshopping as a technique isn't really discussed in depth, but essent

I wrote this piece for the Victorian Writer magazine last year as an introduction to web 2.0 for creative writers. Some of it has dated (to update it yourself: swap all Facebook references for Twitter, ignore all MySpace and yawn loudly at mentions of UGC, plus John Birmingham's new book has inspired a slew of new fanfic ) but a student asked where they could find it so I thought it deserved a second life (whatever happened to Second Life?). NB. There'd be a few more additions to the top 5 (whittled down to top 4 with the disappearance of Sarsparilla) now - you'd be mad not to include Literary Minded or Max Barry's Machine Man plus a million others - but this was way back in the ancient history of last year... Around the turn of the millennium the web looked in trouble. The information superhighway of the 1990s seemed to have led nowhere and content was largely re-hashed from print media and ‘brochureware’ and advertising cluttered the web. Into this great

This week Australian publishing was rocked by the recommendations of the Productivity Commission into Parallel Importation of books. The Australian said there'd be elegantly expressed outrage as authors and publishers as they talked about how importing books from overseas would seriously damage the local industry. Several writers have spoken out about the report's findings including Sophie Cunningham , Shane Maloney and, previously, Tim Winton using his Miles Franklin acceptance speech to point out what this means even to mega-sucessful authors. But what about eloquent voices for the Productivity Commission? In the interests of balance I've animated the report so you can hear the commission's own words (there will be no reading in the future obviously): Want more of the commission's report ? You can buy it in book form off the website for their $18 ( possibly cheaper in Britain ). It's good to see someone can still make money out of books.

This weekend saw the opening of the Emerging Writers' Festival , a uniquely Melbourne event that was created to showcase "the best writers you haven't heard of yet". Friday's opening night First Word was a packed program that included hilarious sketches by List Operators , launching of the 48-Hour Play Generator, a Call to Arms from comic book writer Shane McCarthy and a hypothetical about the city's Centre for Books Writing and Ideas . And all this just on the opening night. The ever-witty Michael Nolan hosted the hypothetical which looked at what the centre for Books Writing and Ideas could be as it prepares to open at the State Library of Voctoria later this year. There were a few digs at Readings becoming the official bookstore of the State Library of Victoria (the store's owner is a board member of the Centre) and some pointed remarks about it creating an ivory tower (from memory Nolan's delightful phrase was "Stalinism with good coffee&qu