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Pathways to Publication

Chris Flynn July 16

In the increasingly competitive publishing market, a number of houses are finding clever means to develop and nurture promising new talent without waiting for manuscripts to land fully formed in their laps. Favel Parrett’s Miles Franklin shortlisted debut Past the Shallows came out of a manuscript development program run by the Queensland Writer’s Centre in conjunction with Hachette Australia. Given the book’s rubber-stamping by various prize juries, Hachette will be mightily pleased to be part of such a worthy endeavor.

Past-The-Shallows-Favel-Parrett

Allen & Unwin’s five-year old Friday Pitch has proven to be another excellent method for wading through the thousands of manuscripts that must surely be in progress on Australian desktops. Every Friday authors can send a brief synopsis and first chapter of what they’re working on to A&U, and if they like what they see, they’ll ask for more. Even better, they’ll get back to you within a fortnight. It’s basically unheard of for publishing houses to do this sort of thing overseas, which makes Australia one of the most open and approachable publishing environments in the world. If you can’t get your book published here, then sorry to say it’s probably best to head back to the drawing board.

The mighty Penguin has even got in on the act now too, with The Monthly Catch. More in tune with the old school method of manuscript submission, it is still remarkable that a house of Penguin’s size and influence should indulge in such a practice, but there it is—they accept general submissions the first week of every month. All great news if you’re a budding scribe with a great idea for a novel and the chops to turn it into a readable manuscript, but what if you need a little help with that stage of the process?

There are of course many programs held in state writing centres that can point you in the right direction and help mould the story you want to tell into one a publisher might fancy taking a punt on, but one has drawn attention due to its outright awesomeness—the Faber Academy. Faber and Faber have been around since 1929 and made a bold move when they opened a straight down the line creative writing business in 2008. The big difference with the Academy is that students are taught by the likes of Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Andrew Motion, Margaret Atwood and Hanif Kureishi. Not only are you pretty much guaranteed to have a damn good manuscript by the end of their short courses, or at least be well on your way to one, but the course has quickly gained a reputation for being of the highest order, quality-wise, with agents and other publishers casting around the graduate list for talent. Their first high-profile success was S.J. Watson, whose book Before I Go To Sleep has been sold in an eye-popping 42 territories and is about to become a Nicole Kidman movie.

Since there is no standalone Faber presence in Australia, the Academy here is run through those clever devils at Allen & Unwin, who clearly have this whole investment in the writing community thing licked. Courses are conducted in Sydney and Melbourne and whilst they’re not exactly cheap as chips (a six-month part-time novel writing course costs a little under six grand) that’s a hell of a bargain compared to attending University for three years, not to mention a bit handier if you can’t spare thirty-six months out of your life. There are much more affordable one-day workshops too, and as in the UK everything seems to be taught by experienced published authors who most of the time you’d be stoked just to meet, let alone be schooled by. James Bradley and Emily Maguire are amongst the Sydney-based authors involved, whereas down in Melbourne Sophie Cunningham, Carrie Tiffany and Cate Kennedy will keep you on the straight and narrow. Not only that, but you get a cavalcade of star guests popping in to lend a hand. Not a bad deal then, in the end, and a clear indication that the pathways to publication in Australia are more open than ever before.




 

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Comments

by Emmett Stinson
16 Jul 12 at 13:20

On top of the excellent pathways to publication mentioned here, it is also worth noting that there are also hundreds of small publishers and independent publishers across Australia who accept unsolicited manuscripts at any time and work carefully with their authors to craft the best possible titles. Many larger houses are increasingly focused on publishing obviously commercial works (celebrity bios, cookbooks etc.), which is why they are searching for ‘innovative’ methods that basically allow them to outsource the process of editorial selection. Rather, it is the mid-level and smaller houses (like Black Inc., Text, Giramondo, Sleepers, Affirm Press, UQP, Transit Lounge, UWA and many, many, many others) who often produce the works of lasting cultural significance, precisely because they are less motivated by immediate commercial considerations. To take just one recent example, the excellent author Wayne Macauley may have never received any broader recognition if the Melbourne small publisher Black Pepper hadn’t published his first three books—all of which were passed on by larger houses.

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by David Ryding
18 Jul 12 at 16:28

Good to be clear, on behalf of all the the state writers centres who can point you in the right direction and help mould the story, we too use experienced published authors. Emily teaches with us and is one of our mentors, James has appeared at our festival, and Cate is here in a month just to name a few.

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