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P17 Issue 12 – Release and Competition Shortlists

November 27, 2015

Earlier this week, page seventeen had its Issue 12 celebration as part of Busybird’s Open Mic Night. We had a full house and a lot of fun.

Firstly, thank you to everyone who attended and helped us give a hurrah to the latest issue of our little periodical. You can view the highlights of the presentations and some of the P17 authors reading their work at the Busybird YouTube channel: click here for the P17 content, and have a look around at the other videos while you’re there.

The digital edition is available now at Amazon: click here to check it out.

In the meantime, we have announcements to make: the competition shortlists! For anyone who wasn’t at the launch, you’ll find below the full list of winners and shortlisted entrants. All these entries are features in P17 #12. Let’s join together in congratulating everyone here, and toasting everyone who entered the competitions.

* * *

Short Story

Winner

‘Rooms without doors’ by Willa Hogarth

Runner-Up

‘Louis’ by Edie Mitsuda

Shortlisted

‘Cold currents’ by Susi Fox

‘Ships of the desert’ by Carmel Lillis

‘Macalister’ by Paul Mill

* * *

Poetry

Winner

‘Alice and Edward’ by Janine McGinness-Whyte

Runner-Up

‘The glass reverie’ by Virginia Danahay

Shortlisted

‘Oral sex’ by Judith A Green

‘Ironing’ by Jenny Macaulay

‘In defence of the bodhran’ by Leonie Needham

‘Beginning with a given line’ by Rodney Williams

* * *

Cover Image

‘Natural Connection’ by Martin Nitschke

* * *

Congratulations again to everyone. And as for everyone reading this, what are you waiting for? Issue 12 is out! Check out what made these stories and poems so good!

Beau Hillier | Editor, page seventeen

Chronology

November 5, 2015

Writing memoir presents us with different challenges to writing fiction. Even though the story’s there in its entirety – after all, we’ve lived it – a lot of people ask, Where should I begin?

A common format of biographies is they open at a pivotal point in the subject’s life – either a great success or failure. That pinnacle is then used to slide back to the beginning, as if through a funnel of time. Some might even go further, and explore their parents’ ancestry. This might be useful grounding, e.g. showing parents who are immigrants and fought great odds to come to a new country or, conversely, parents who are everymen, and rooted in the community.

Usually, though, the best place is to start at your birth and, from there, follow the arc of your life. Whilst this would seem logical, it’s amazing how often authors are stumped, or how often they might flit back, forth, sideways, and all over the place. This is fine if there’s a structure to the haphazardness which makes sense to the reader, like the picture that appears as you put together a jigsaw but, otherwise, the best course can be a straight line.

If you are going to observe the chronology of your life, try to refrain from interjecting your present-day self. For example, you might write something like this:

When I turned 10, Mum and Dad let me run down to the corner store by myself so I could buy an ice cream.

This is fine. We’re inside the narrator’s head as a ten-year old. But then, often in memoir, something like this occurs:

I remember the old store owner, Mr Georgiou, had a big nose …

The moment you qualify events with ‘I remember’, you’re injecting your present-day self. It’s your present-day self who says, ‘I remember’. The ten-year old has no cause to be saying ‘I remember’. They’re living events as they occur. They should, in fact write something like:

Mr Georgiou, the old store owner, had a big nose …

It might seem pedantic to avoid writing ‘I remember’ (or alternatives, such as ‘I recall’, ‘I recollect’, etc.) but it jolts the reader from the unfolding narrative and alerts them that they’re not (as occurs in this case) reading a ten-year old’s perspective, but somebody from that ten-year’s old future who’s recounting what occurred. Once you have your reader hooked, you don’t want to lose them – not even for an instant.

Something else to avoid is having your present-day self insert present-day commentary that, again, will jar the reader from the narrative’s suspension of disbelief. For example:

Mr Georgiou, the old store owner, had a big nose and a scar across his face that made me think he was a pirate. I know now that he’d been the victim of an assault, but back then it used to scare me, and after making my purchase, I’d run straight home.

We really don’t need present-day self’s observations (‘I know now’), and they only hurt us from staying invested in the ten-year old’s wide-eyed perspective of the world.

Stay in the moment of your narrative. E.g.

Mr Georgiou, the old store owner, had a big nose and a scar across his face that made me think he was a pirate. As soon as I timidly handed over my money, I’d run straight home.

If you’re ten in the story, then only reveal to us what was privy to that ten-year old. Maintain the chronology. At some point in this child’s life, they learn about this scar, and it’s going to be a transformative revelation, so why ruin when that occurs with this premature pronouncement? Let’s see that happen – in due chronology.

Write your story down in a straight line – from beginning to end. It really is that simple. Once you have it all out on the page, then you can mould it as you see fit – flesh it out where required, insert new material that you’ve belatedly recalled, and trim away the excess. Now that you have it all down on the page, you might even see ways you can play with the structure.

But the key is getting it down on the page.

And sometimes, the easiest way – observing chronology – is the best.

P17 Issue 12 Launch and Mic Night

October 29, 2015

Once again we’re ready to unleash another issue of page seventeen upon the public. Are you excited? You should be excited. It’s another heady mix of prose and poetry from talented new writers alongside established veterans of writing. It’s got mystery, intrigue, alcoholism, teapots. What’s not to get excited about?

So here we have it: an open invitation to the page seventeen launch and mic night, hosted by Busybird Publishing.

Date: Wednesday 18 November

Time: 7.00pm

Place: Busybird Publishing, 2/118 Para Rd, Montmorency VIC 3094

Finger food and drinks will be provided. We’re celebrating the twelfth issue of page seventeen with a mic night featuring both Issue 12 contributors and local authors. We’ll also be announcing the winners of the 2015 competitions, and unveiling our cover image (if you’ll remember, that was a competition as well).

Please consider this an open invitation, to you and anyone you’d like to bring along. Let’s fill the room. Let’s celebrate both the new writers with their first publication and the established writers giving us another great pearl to read.

Beau Hillier | Editor, page seventeen

Book Writing Boot Camp

October 15, 2015

How many times have you heard someone say that they’re going to write a book? Or how long have YOU been saying that you’re going to do it? We talk to so many people here at Busybird Publishing who tell us this, then end the conversation with, ‘One day I’ll finish it’ or ‘I don’t know how to end it’ and the most common, ‘I don’t have the time’.

Most of these excuses are just because humans are prone to procrastinate. There are many reasons for this procrastination. They range from laziness, fear of failure, fear of success, laziness, having no plan, lack of passion, and laziness.

Our aim at Busybird is to help people get past these excuses and actually achieve something that they can be proud of. Writing and publishing a book is a huge achievement that is very doable, given the right tools. It doesn’t matter what you are trying to create. You might have a whole lot of poems in a drawer somewhere, you might have been jotting down bits and pieces for a fantasy novel, or you might want to share a passion for collecting teapots. There are any number of ways to tell a story but sometimes guidance is required to put it into a cohesive structure and to create a timeline so that the project doesn’t go on for ten years.

This is why we have created our Book Writing Boot Camp program. This is an intensive one-day event that will help you map out your idea, plan the writing (you want your story to be worth reading), plan the publishing (for self-publishing or submitting to publishers) and market the finished book.

Here’s a list of dates when Boot Camp will be held:

There will be no excuses after this. Get your hiking boots on!

Blaise van Hecke
– The Book Chick

Buyer Beware

October 8, 2015

Something we experience frequently here are talking to authors who’ve self-published through a ‘partnership publisher’, but come away frustrated, and sometimes even in tears.

Okay, so the question is, what’s a partnership publisher?

A partnership publisher will charge an author a certain amount of money, and offer certain services, e.g. editing, layout, cover design. On top of that, some partnership publishers will upsell services, e.g. marketing. Unfortunately, a number of these partnership publishers are unscrupulous and offer no transparency.

To understand transparency, you have to understand your publishing options.

If you submit to a traditional publisher – e.g. Penguin, Allen & Unwin, Text – and they accept you, you incur no costs. They take all the financial risk upon themselves, will assign you an editor, layout your book, design your cover, and market it however they see fit. In return, you might receive an advance (a sum of money up front), and then royalties from each book sold – usually about 10 or 12 percent. Arguably, the boon in being accepted by a traditional publisher is the validation of being accepted, and the branding of having that publisher’s emblem on your book – usually a mark of quality.

Now what’s happened with some partnership publishers is they’re preying on naïve authors and claiming to operate on a model similar to traditional publishers. Usually, this is done when they ‘assess’ your book, and deem it worthy of publication. They make out this is similar (if not the same) as submitting to and getting accepted by a traditional publisher. The one difference is you pay for the assessment. Then they’ll flatter you, ‘accept’ you, and then talk about sharing costs to bring your book out into the world. Whether they contribute to costs is anybody’s guess, but it’s likely they don’t.

Think of this business model: you pay an exorbitant amount (usually ranging in the thousands). The partnership publisher then uses a portion of that money to subcontract professionals (e.g. an editor, a designer) at a flat – and often low – rate to work on your book, and they keep the rest. You then pay for the printing. The partnership publisher has no material investment in your book. It’s doubtful they care much about your book outside of the money it’s making them. The subcontractors will care, because this is their livelihood and they’ll want to do the best job possible. The partnership publisher, though?

If you’re paying to bring your book out into the world, then you’re self-publishing. Don’t let any partnership publisher convince you otherwise. It’s great to be told that you’ve been accepted, it’s validating, it’s flattering, and as a writer, it’s about the most blissful feeling you could experience, but you know what? These people would accept gibberish. That’s not to denigrate your writing. It’s just how they operate. They’re not interested in quality, they’re not interested in contributing to the literary community, they’re not interested in sharing your story with the masses and trying develop a readership for you. They only want your money. That’s it. If they did earn royalties through your book, that’s a bonus (for them). But even that’s double-edged. Likely they’ve made some insane claim on your royalties (e.g. 50 percent – and let’s not forget, they’ve invested nothing in its production, other than being a medium who subcontracts the help).

With these klaxons sounding, you’re probably thinking that these partnership publishers are disreputable, and they operate from the shadows. They don’t. They’re right in the open and seem upstanding. They advertise on a national (and sometimes international) scale in reputable magazines, feed off your inexperience, thrive off your insecurity, and exploit your ego. This makes them sound insidious. And some of them are. I cannot say this enough: they only want your money.

There’s nothing wrong with self-publishing. It had a stigma twenty or so years ago, because people were releasing anything, and at the time, self-published books looked self-published – the paper stock was wrong, the layout was clumsy, and the binding (looked) like it had been stuck together with a glue-gun in somebody’s garage. But the publishing industry and all the services contained therein have become cheap and accessible. You can release a book now that is physically indistinguishable from books being released by multimillion-dollar traditional publishers, and it’s inexpensive.

Just be aware who you go to if you self-publish. We hear so many of these horror stories – people giving up so much money, giving up their life savings, and getting little in return. It’s why we try to nurture authors who come to us. So find somebody reputable, who cares about your book, and cares about helping you try to make it the best book that it can possibly be. Find somebody who won’t make claims on your royalties and try to retain ownership over your work for their own benefit.

Don’t be blinded by those who’ll tell you what you want to hear, and obligate yourself to deals that’ll ruin you financially – especially if you’re banking on income from your book. Not a lot of writers make money from writing. Sorry. That’s just reality, wherever you publish. You might. It happens. But it’s rare. So don’t go all-in, and especially don’t go all in because you’re being told what you want to be told.

There’s a lot of good people out there.

Do your research and find them.