Simon Groth's Blog, page 12
April 3, 2011
Here it is
It's been a long time coming, but Here Today is now available in both print and digital.
The novel was shortlisted in the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards in the emerging Queensland author category.
Astrid Reinhart is a stand-in therapist seriously out of her depth. Martin Finn, a successful novelist whose stroke has left him with the rare 'locked-in syndrome', wants Astrid to help him write his story — one letter at a time. Featuring stories published literary journals, Meanjin, Overland, and Island, Here Today is an affecting and sometime comic reflection on life with an unexpected twist in its tail. Like the stories of its characters, Here Today is a novel that demands to be heard.
Download the novel for your preferred ereader for free or order a print copy for US$17.95 plus postage.
February 28, 2011
New novel available soon
For some time now, I have been working on making download-ready editions of my first novel Here Today. Like the short story collection Saccades, it will be available in multiple formats simultaneously. All digital editions will be free to download and share, published under a Creative Commons licence. The print edition (of which I have a test copy I'm mildly in love with) will be sold at near cost. I've tried many different models of digital publishing over the years and I've found this to be the one that works best for readers. No shopping cart, no credit cards, just instant fiction. For all those who have downloaded Saccades in such a fashion, I hope you have enjoyed it.
Saccades was really my test case for this novel. The idea was to iron out any kinks and make Here Today as seamless a process as possible. It hasn't worked out that way. Actually, Here Today has been an incredibly long and arduous process. Where the attitude behind Saccades had a suck-it-and-see approach with cheerful abandon, Here Today has been bogged down in the arduous process of making sure everything is right. I've been through about eighteen versions of the cover and obsessed over every instance of italics in the text. And that's just for the print version. All those ebook editions need a patient hand, especially now I know much more about ereaders and their various eccentricities.
I'll post more (much more) about Here Today when it's released at the end of this month.
As my daughter used to say, 'I'm very exciting!'
February 13, 2011
Off the Record Now Available in Digital
After much technical jiggery-pokery, Off The Record is now available in digital form, including the Kindle store for all you kindlers out there. The book is also coming soon to Apple iBookstore and Google eBooks.
In time it will also be available from all major vendors, including Baker & Taylor, B&N, Borders, Bowker, Ebooks.com, Ebrary, Follett Digital Resources, Kobo, Lightning Source (Ingram), Netlibrary, Overdrive, Sony, and Tecknoquest.
The ebook for Off the Record will be available to customers worldwide, so if you have had any trouble finding yourself a print copy (you obviously haven't tried here), now is your chance to pick yourself up copy in fully recyclable pixels.
December 25, 2010
Essence of book
Originally published at futureofthebook.org.au , where this post has been fermenting for quite a while, perhaps like a good stinky cheese.
In discussions around digital and print publishing, can we all agree to finally stop referring to the smell of print books?
Seriously. Just get over it. If the smell of books was that intoxicating, we'd dispense with reading altogether and just wander libraries, running our noses along the shelves. Bookshops would bottle the 'Essence of Book' and pump it out from their entrance, like cinemas do with popcorn. Connoisseurs would bore each other with detailed analyses of variations by region or era:
Honestly, the 1963 Penguins carry a little more cinnamon and a far less wet dog than their 1974 counterparts…
Books have many amazing qualities as an incredibly efficient and proven technology for storing ideas, knowledge, and stories. They are not a vehicle for transporting odour, although some of them may do so inadvertently. The greatest smell in the world won't save you from poorly written tripe.
Referring to the smell of books was once an emotional tug, designed to appeal to bibliophiles anxious that their preferred medium might be vanishing. Now it's just a lazy cliche. I'm wondering if we need to create a digital publishing version of Godwin's Law.
So either stop banging on about it or create your own bottled Essence of Book™. My cut is 10%.
December 22, 2010
A sad old ereader
Originally published at futureofthebook.org.au.
On the weekend, I visited a big suburban technology shop. On a display table that mostly featured those squinty little netbooks was a single solitary iRiver. The only ereader in the shop not locked up behind glass, it was nevertheless tethered to the table. Its stark white casing and white-ish screen provided stark contrast to the shiny black plastic objects that surrounded it.
I was interested in investigating the device further, since it's one I was yet to try out.
As I got closer to it, though, I noticed the first scuff marks down each side of it and the oily fingerprints that plastered the screen. Keep in mind, it doesn't have a touch screen. I guess that's understandable; it was on display in a busy shop and people are now conditioned to think a device that looks like that should have a touch screen (though you think think they'd at least wipe their fingers on their clothes first). More of a worry though was the fact that the screen displayed little more than a few half-rendered words and some random horizontal lines. Okay, maybe it just needed a restart.
I picked it up (avoiding the gunk on the screen) and pressed a few buttons.
Nothing. The half text and lines remained. I pressed a few more buttons, I turned it over, wondering if there was a reset switch I wasn't aware of.
Meanwhile, my son called to me from another part of the shop. A car racing game was set up complete with steering wheel, pedals, and a bucket seat. I replaced the ereader and joined him.
December 21, 2010
The end of books c.1894
Originally posted at futureofthebook.org.au .
Either the books must go or they must swallow us up. I calculate that, take the whole world over, from eighty to one hundred thousand books appear every year; at an average of a thousand copies, this makes more than a hundred millions of books, the majority of which contain only the wildest extravagances or the most chimerical follies, and propagate only prejudice and error. Our social condition forces us to hear many stupid things every day. A few more or less do not amount to very great suffering in the end; but what happiness not to be obliged to read them, and to be able at last to close our eyes upon the annihilation of printed things!
The words belong to 'humorist' John Pool, as quoted by Octave Uzanne in the August 1894 edition of Scibner's Magazine.
I may yet quote more from this fabulous article that bemoans the death of writing and literature at the hands of the phonograph and the kinetograph.
Original is here if you want to treat yourself to some amazing 19th century writing and illustration.
December 20, 2010
Welcome readers, don't alienate them
Since November, I have taken up a post as manager of if:book Australia. This post was originally published at futureofthebook.org.au.
Relax. The book is not under any serious immediate threat. True, an increasingly urgent discussion around the future of books and publishing needs to take place, but not at the expense of maturity and reason. The topic of discussion? Some readers have shown a distinct preference for electronic texts, others stick with paper, and yet others are shifting between the two. This is an exciting development. Though readers, markets, and even genres are diversifying furiously, more than anything, people are reading.
The worst thing any industry in such a situation could do is alienate its audience.
Unfortunately, I suspect this may be the unintentional result of John Pott's piece published at Meanjin's web site, available here online.
And if the newspaper is not long for this mediasphere, then the book must also be under threat. Why should the plant-matter codex survive, when its successor—environmentally friendly, convenient, opening to a vast digital immaterial library—is already here?
Putting aside the assumption that where newspapers go, so must books (aren't books much older than newspapers?), you would be forgiven for wondering where the author is coming from. Is he being serious or smarmy?
What accounts for the zeal of this contemporary narrative, in which the book is so disrespectfully hurried to its own doomsday? Much of this enthusiasm emanates from corporate PR and the blogs of amateur IT cheerleaders: it is the language of boosterism, which celebrates only the path that leads to the new and away from the old.
Right. It's smarmy, then. Grab a generalisation and start sweeping.
Hi-fi is another casualty: nobody, apart from a few old-timers, cares much about audio quality. The digital audio file is inferior in sound quality to the CD, which was inferior to the vinyl record. Music is heard through cheap 'lossy' ear buds that reduce even further the listening experience; we have taken great steps backwards in acoustic quality.
Woah, steady on there. Digital sound recording artificially cuts the top and bottom end of sound outside the range of human hearing. This is commonly cited as a difference in the feel of of the recording, rather than anything you can actually hear. On the flip side, digital technologies eliminate the surface noise of their analogue counterpart (vinyl records). For most people, this is a fair trade off. The difference is there, but if this really was a 'great step backwards' in sound quality, digital recording would never have taken off in the first place. To characterise the music industry's move to digital as a wholesale exercise in cheating listeners of sound quality doesn't just miss the point, but, I suspect, actively misrepresents it. And how does this apply to publishing? Does 'sound quality' equate to 'editorial quality'?
Be warned when grand statements about recent developments in music are applied automatically to publishing. Sure the recording industry is in all kinds of trouble, but 'publishing' and 'recording' are very different places. There are plenty of similarities (and lessons to be learned) from both music and film, but predicting the path of digital publishing using some other industry as a template is lazy.
For one thing, it conveniently forgets the fact that book publishing has been earmarked for catastrophe since home cassette taping was the scourge of CD sales. In fact some recent digging has found the books were being dismissed with the advent of the gramophone (more of that in later posts).
Despite its frequent demise, publishing has taken a resolutely different path to other recently digitised industries. CD-to-mp3 is not the same shift as book-to-ebook. This is not a VHS versus Beta winner-takes-all format war. Sure, Jeff Bezos is predicting the end of the book (or something), but then he would, wouldn't he?* Reality is much more complicated than regurgitated PR.
Book sales are falling and ebook sales are rising, but the two are not as closely related as one might assume. This article ignores the larger complexities at play in favour of an overly simplified demonisation of some new-fangled thingo.
Incidentally, the fact that a typo crept into the article (the unfortunate 'hind quarters' of copyright) tends to undermine its academic authority. What was that about sound quality versus editorial quality?
It's nice to know some people are fired up because of a deep and abiding love for their books, but a passionate defense of the printed word on a page adds nothing to the discussion. It merely perpetuates the myth that the book is under threat.
* Actually, Steve Jobs came closer when he declared 'people don't read any more'. This was in 2008, before Apple released the iPad and the iBookstore, and in the context of badmouthing the Kindle.
"It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore," he said. "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."
November 4, 2010
Book, launch, media, new, digital
It's been a busy few weeks and there is little sign of things slowing down any time soon, so allow me to wallow in that desultory refuge of the most vile corporate hacks: the dot point.
Off the Record: 25 Years of Music Street Press is available now in all good bookstores. Check the web site for details on where to get it online or walk into your favourite independent bookshop and demand it on the shelves in great quantity.
We are holding an official book launch with John Wilsteed of the Go-Betweens as the official book launch launcher. It's at Avid Reader in West End on Wednesday 10 November at 6:00pm. It's free to attend, but you'll need to book with Avid Reader.
We had a great discussion with Richard Fidler on ABC Brisbane last week. You can listen to it here.
A new novel exists in a rough-as-bags 20,000 word draft. I can guarantee it will include a Hofner bass, a car named Cedric, and a C90 mix tape.
I'm about to get even more insufferable on the topic of digital publishing because I have just taken up a new post as the manager of if:book Australia.
September 10, 2010
New story published: Polysomnogram
The kind editors at Poor Mojo's Almanac(k) have once again confirmed their taste and style, choosing to publish my story Polysomnogram in their august electronic pages.
A polysomnogram is a test performed on people with suspected sleeping disorders; in this case narcolepsy.
Polysomnogram is an exploration of the ideas and techniques I would use for my second novel, None of the Other Flies Follow My Crooked Lines. Juggling work and a young family, I found my writing hours relegated to the hours of eleven and three. I suspect stories about sleep disorders were a natural consequence.
Whenever I told people I was working on a story whose main character has narcolepsy, people often assumed I was writing a comedy. Although the story has what I hope are amusing moments, Ryan's narcolepsy is never played for laughs, though it is a handy device to rely on when your scene runs out of steam and you need a quick transition to the next.
So? What are you waiting for?
Read Polysomnogram (should be a permanent link).
September 1, 2010
Masterclass at Brisbane Writers Festival
I'll be lending my digital head to the Australian Writers Marketplace Industry Masterclass at this year's Brisbane Writers Festival.
This industry seminar will introduce you to agents, publishers and writers and take you on a journey from manuscript development to published author promotion. It will cover the role of agents in a writer's life, the publishing process, including developming and submitting your work, and new pathways to publication, and you'll learn the tricks of promoting your book and yourself and the importance of both. This seminar is for emerging writers and those who are just plain curious about books and publishing. Walk away with tools and insider knowledge to help you navigate a pathway in the marketplace.
$100 from QTIX (price includes a copy of the new edition of The Australian Writer's Marketplace valued at $49.95). Friday 3rd September 10am to 3pm. Queensland Art Gallery Lecture Theatre (opposite the watermall).
