overland literary journal

OVERLAND 196
spring 2009
ISBN 978-0-9805346-3-4
published 22 August 2009

COPYRIGHT, THE MARKET AND THE SURVIVAL OF AUST LIT

Rodney Hall on making a backlist free online

For the first time in thirty years, I find myself with no backlist in print. After thirty-six books published – ten of them internationally – a couple of Miles Franklin awards and a few other prizes, this puts me on the back foot. To address the situation, I’ve agreed to make one of these titles available free online on the Two-up Publishing website. And for all sorts of reasons I feel good about it.

The pattern of publishing has changed. Many writers are affected by this. I’ve seen figures from the USA and UK showing that, over a period of ten years, the number of new literary fiction titles listed by mainstream publishers is down by more than half. Doubtless, the internet is a factor, but I can’t see it as the main culprit. I am more inclined to suspect corporatism: the very same corporatism that has taken over society, running (and, incidentally, ruining) hospitals, universities, schools, privatised transport systems, government itself and even the world economy.

Put it down to prejudice, if you like. Maybe it is. But I can testify that, even at the genteel end of the business, the pinch is felt. A few years ago a London publisher told me his hands were tied concerning a manuscript of mine, because the enthusiasm of independent booksellers would not be enough to ensure its success. ‘As for the bookshop chains,’ he explained, making an unhappy gesture with his hands, ‘such a novel is … well … an uncertain commodity. And without the chains, we really cannot afford to proceed with publication. Much as I love the writing,’ he added courteously.

So it goes. Still, we should all spare a thought for the bookshops, with Amazon looming over them.

I confess I’ve been slow to catch on to the cybernetic thread. I still write by hand, for God’s sake! So Google Books strikes me as a sort of cosmic cyclone – completely indifferent to copyright, or even whether the work concerned may still be in print – flooding the ether with literally millions of scanned books. Exciting stuff. Scary. It’s telling that the class action by American writers, resulting in a US$45 million payout, yielded the princely offer of $60 per book – scarcely worth the bother of adding one’s name to the list of authors seeking redress. If ever anything heralded the use-by date of copyright, this must be it. The long-term effect on print publishing remains to be seen, but the future is upon us, tooth and claw. I – even I – felt the need to rouse myself and adjust accordingly.

Then there is the recent push by our own book trade to have tariffs removed, putting Australia ‘on the same footing as the rest of the world’. ‘Cheaper books’ is a blatantly corporatist slogan. What on earth is the point of books being cheaper if the quality of the contents becomes a side issue? Who cares how little the public has to pay for what may be more-or-less crap? In any case, books are already cheap. People will pay as much for a single meal – without the complaint that the same food would be 15 per cent cheaper in New York!

It is interesting that publishers (mainly independent local subsidiaries of transnational firms, of course), for the most part, oppose the booksellers on the question. But, again, the argument strikes me as hollow. If publishers care so much about our distinctively Australian voice, how come so few seem anxious to keep the mainstays of our literature in print? I mean, where are the collected editions of (to mention only the dead) Lawson, Furphy, Baynton, Richardson, Stead, Johnston, Wright and White? All highly promote-able! At risk of sounding grumpy, it’s less likely that the removal of tariffs will compromise our Australian voice than it will the publishers’ profit margin. As John Ralston Saul has warned, ‘creativity frightens the administrative mind’.

Since the 1970s we have witnessed the rise and then the demise of Australian Literature studies. Incredible to think that a short time ago Aust Lit was thriving in our universities. It’s now largely a thing of the past. Coincidentally, for many young people, the broader perspectives of history and even geography are also now in the realm of the Mysteries.

With most of us addicted to our screens, we have become a society of self-watchers. The young – and not so young – are invited to live in an existential present, where we talk about ourselves on Facebook: at random and to anybody. By talk, I mean write. That’s the really interesting side: communication is largely by the written word – as never before in human history – as texts on mobiles, emails and blogs. A hypothetical shutdown of the internet (not completely out of the question) would cause more than just havoc, it would bring about the collapse of our social structures and even throw into question who we are. I say ‘not completely out of the question’ because the internet is still based on the impenetrably complex protocols, vast codes of numbers, set up by the US military during the Cold War. If these protocols were withdrawn the worldwide system would go down instantaneously.

Google Books is only a beginning. The vast collections of the British Library and the US Library of Congress are being digitised, apparently regardless of such niceties as intellectual property. Which brings me back to the financial survival of writers. Of course, the financial survival of publishers may also be in question. But these are separate issues from the survival of the book itself, because who believes that new technologies ever replace the old in a single coup? Generally, the two exist side by side while finding their niche in changed circumstances. I’m sure the book is no exception. The book is not dead, and may, perhaps, never die.

History to the rescue! I’m reassured by pondering the advent of photography in the nineteenth century. At the time, the art of painting, thought then to have been superseded, was widely expected to face annihilation. Quite the contrary. Artists set about branching out into areas unavailable to the camera, most dramatically with Impressionism and then Cubism. What suffered, and suffered terminally, was popular portraiture (typically, the miniature).

The point is that art does adapt, being the longest-lasting form of human expression – doubtless because we are a questing species. We want to know, indeed, need to know. When I was a sixteen-year-old kid in Brisbane, just out of school and trying to educate myself at the Queensland Public Library, I came across a book by Jacob Bronowski claiming that art and science form the deepest of our interpretations of ourselves and the universe around us. It seems obvious now, but then it struck me as remarkable: the idea that even the buildings and townscapes which help form us – down to the shape of the rooms we live in – are derived from proportions that began as artworks in the ancient world.

Amusing examples come to mind. Antonio Vivaldi, after being almost completely forgotten for two hundred years, has been revived and brought to an audience of millions through the medium of recordings – a technology he could not have imagined even in the wildest fit of optimism. The Four Seasons, virtually unknown after his death in 1741 till it was rediscovered in the mid-twentieth century, is now among the most recognised and popular pieces in the classical repertoire.

Literature is no different. I’ve just finished rereading the ancestor of all heroic tales, The Epic of Gilgamesh.Iliad or the Bible. Well, whatever. Gilgamesh still speaks to us. Discovered in 1844, in what is now Iraq, and deciphered in 1857, famous – thanks to media (including the book) inconceivable when it was incised on clay tablets in ancient Assyria – and translated into languages (including English) that did not evolve till several millennia after it was written. Lasting stuff: a case of quality insights and powerful writing. The translator reminds us it is the oldest story in the world, dating from a thousand years before the

Art continually proves independent of power and money – pieces produced in poverty, collective works of genius like the great cathedrals and temples, anonymous masterworks and refined creations that survive the monstrous tyrannies under which they were commissioned. Meanwhile the vast tide of trash that passes for art simply collapses to nothing. The clutter and tinsel fall away, without the least help from anybody. Lovely.

One thing for certain: in this new age of the internet, art will still be needed, still be made, and will embody the living spirit of our times to speak to future generations. Cynics may scoff at the idea of posterity but, underneath the bluff, they must know they are pissing in the wind. Perhaps what they mean is they just don’t care. But I don’t believe that, either. The existential present won’t shield anybody. The desire to be remembered goes deep, personally and collectively: the hope that we will leave our mark.

I like to think of those painters a hundred years ago who adjusted to photography by finding richer imaginative resources. Perhaps this is the clearest example of what I mean about the future of the book, which may come to depend on the seriousness of the content. Dipping into Aubrey’s Brief Lives recently I was struck by the editor’s comment that in the seventeenth century all books were axiomatically serious. So, fellow-writers, take heart! Literature is tough. What better assurance could we have than Such is Life? Joseph Furphy’s masterpiece (the first in Australian literature) survived well-intentioned massacre at the hands of its editor, A G Stephens – some 400 pages cut – followed by commercial failure when it was eventually published in 1903. The fact that this great novel remains a commercial failure does nothing to tarnish its brilliance or vitality. Furphy’s day will come.

By contrast, successful contemporaries like Nat Gould, with 130 horse-racing novels to his credit, and enjoying a large popular readership here and in England, is all but forgotten, his novels unreadably dated and his reputation gone without trace. As Jean Cocteau put it, ‘there is a kind of success worse than failure’.

Time to pose the question at the heart of these digressions: how will literature be written (or music performed, etc.) if copyright is bypassed and the creator can no longer earn a living from sales? Who among us will manage to keep going? And does this herald another era of the wealthy hobbyist?

Let’s hope not. Though the future is already upon us, the arts survive, as new means of dissemination appear. Even film can be made in the backyard now with a miniature digital camera. Essentially the argument about copyright is an argument about volume. Newspapers are undergoing a parallel crisis. Some, including a few major American broadsheets, already find themselves engulfed. The internet is accused (futilely) of stealing their readership. But it’s not the readership, exactly, but the financial rug that is being pulled out from under them. Locally, News Limited seems to be handling the change rather better than Fairfax, having adjusted its financial base by minimising the reliance on classified advertisements.

Similarly, the challenge for publishers is to reposition the book.

The market is neither fixed nor autonomous. Nor infallible. Public taste can be educated – the negative of this was proved by the extremely successful dumbing down of television – and there is no reason why we shouldn’t reverse the process by getting smarter. And change is in the air. The present prime minister is not a visionary like Paul Keating, but neither is he a fool. The cycle began to turn once we saw the back of Howard. And change is even more dramatic in America. Suddenly Obama has put human values, not to mention sophistication, back on the agenda, reshaping national self-awareness and repositioning his country. This is something else.

Perhaps the Thatcherite decades of blind faith in the market are finally passing. The global financial crisis, with an estimated quarter of the world’s wealth being ‘wiped off’ (whatever this means) in a period of six months, would suggest that it is. The helplessness of financial experts to prevent the recession or to know, really, what to do or how to mitigate its worsening ramifications might be comic if the fallout were not so devastating for the population.

For many writers (in fact, I’d want to say for most), the market is not the defining factor. The writers I know, anyway, are more interested in how deeply they can communicate than in how much they earn. Perhaps the inevitable future is that we must each find our way and fight for the survival of our work as best we may. So, at last, I arrive back where I began. Two-up Publishing now offers my novel The Lonely Traveller by Night online. Behind this venture is a talented young writer and editor, enthusiastically committed to finding new readers for books he values. His intention is to gradually build a list by invitation. And with the software in place (and the mind-bending technicalities mastered) it seems a simple enough process.

The complete text is up and running and can be read or downloaded for free. Or, with a click on the appropriate button, printed books, beautifully designed and bound, can be ordered. The key to Print on Demand is that the publisher outlays very little capital and carries no stock. The book can stay on the net indefinitely, or be taken off at a moment’s notice.

Of course, when the cycle returns and traditional publishing houses – many of them already developing a fresh focus – settle down to ride the wave of the new technologies, it might just be that literary works, whether fiction or non-fiction, will emerge as the survivors, the genres most tenaciously appropriate to the technology of the book.

Rodney Hall’s most recent novel Love without Hope was published by Picador. Two-up Publishing can be found on the net at www.twouppublishing. com
© Rodney Hall
Overland 196-spring 2009, pp. 21–25

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