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Why I Care
October 27, 2022
I am very young, and I will admit that I do not know very much. But I do know there is nothing of more paramount importance or more significant power than the Truth. It is what every single Spiritual Teacher and Sage of every tradition from every period from every part of the world has taught to those who would hear them. There is no freedom without Truth.
The Truth is often difficult to accept, especially in this world where Truth is so often muddled and scattered. It is inherently belligerent, for it is at constant war with deception. Deception is easy. It requires no conscience, no thought, no will, no spirit to take in; it is painless perception. Truth is exactly the opposite; it is difficult, complex, and often a painful reality. Truth can tear down our entire world and break us perhaps beyond repair, even though it is just alignment of perception to reality. That is why Art is so important.
An Artist uses lies to tell the Truth, and therefore destroys the ability of deception to deceive. The paintings of the Greats are merely assortments of refractions of light in various patterns that our eyes perceive to be an image. The compositions of music that could not go unrecognised today are just sounds of different pitch and tone played in different orders by various machines. The written works of the greats are simply sentences of letters which can be digested to mean exactly what the words are on their own.
If deception did not exist, we would never find any value, but simply observe the colours as colours, the sounds as sounds, and the letters as letters. But what we find in that final creation is the humanity of it all. Because within the lies, we eventually find what is True and that causes so much less pain and terror compared to outright Truth. Art can go to both ends of the coin, telling an Artist the Truth within his lies, or telling observers the Truth within the lies of an Artist.
False art exists, however, and it can be more dangerous than outright lies. False Art can bury Truths even further than simple lies can, because it can take on the perceived value of a real piece of Art that defeats deception rather than spreads it. Deception portrays lies as Truth, but Art portrays Truth using lies. We believe the lies, and we find the Truth.
I believe that writing is of particular importance. The world is the most well-read and literate it has ever been. It is reading constantly, whether it be pages of textbooks, words on a screen, signs, subtitles, or anything else. Almost everyone will agree, however, that we live in a deeply troubled society. I say this is because the world has deceived itself into a false form of reality that says our lives are never more than what they seem. That we are not of much value. With so many people reading so much, and facing mountains of deception to climb before they find Truth, why can’t the writings of Artists be used to help them on the journey?
Perhaps I favour writing because I have always had an affinity for language. I have been fluent and/or able to get by with native speakers at some point in my life in eight different languages and have always found ease getting into a workflow with writing, as well as understanding complex works from a young age.
But there are other mediums of Art that will help find Truth; The painter can create images that words cannot describe; musical sounds have been shown to have practically otherworldly properties (such as healing illnesses of the mind); photography, filmmaking, theatre, dance, sculpting, ceramics and all sorts of other things can open the minds, hearts, and souls of those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
All hands were made to tell stories, whether it be our own, the stories of others, or the stories of those who never were. I will tell mine by writing. I care about writing because I care about Art. I care about Art because I care about freedom, and the Truth will set us all free.
-Saif Toukan
Busybird Work Experience Student
Why You Should Launch Your Book
August 26, 2022It might not seem an important part of the publishing process to launch your book. If you haven’t thought about doing it please make sure that you add it to your promotional calendar. Not only should you do it to celebrate the book being published but it’s also an opportunity to start the selling and promotion of it after all the ‘talk’ about it in the lead up to its release.
Many years ago I was working with a client to publish her collection of short stories. She worked hard to prepare her writing for layout and drew images to go with the stories. Her dedication to making the product as good as she could was inspiring and I could see the excitement build as we got closer to the publication date and she set a day to launch.
A couple of weeks prior to the launch date, she called me to tell me that she was thinking of not having a launch. I was confused because I knew how excited she was about it and asked her why.
‘The ladies in my writing group think it’s vain,’ she said.
I was astounded. This was coming from other writers who should’ve been excited for her. I wondered if it was jealousy.
‘How about you call it afternoon tea?’ I suggested. I was sad that she would not go through with celebrating her hard work and a bit annoyed that her ‘friends’ were not supporting and encouraging her.
The launch did end up going ahead on a wintery Saturday afternoon in a library. There were about eighty friends and family gathered together to drink wine, nibble on biscuits and cheese and to buy a copy of ‘the book’. The highlight for me was to see the author sitting at the signing table behind a large stack of books writing messages to her book buyers on the title page of each book. Her smile was large and infectious. Lots of books were sold and she was happy that she decided to launch it.
Writing and publishing a book is a lot of work. Completing it should be celebrated and the joy should be shared with friends. And people want to support you in this (maybe even the jealous ones).
The launch is also a chance to sell some books to replenish the coffers after investing in the publishing. Even if you only sell 20 books, that’ll make you feel like you’ve started the process. If you’ve managed to get good numbers to your launch, it’s not uncommon to sell 50–60 books.
The launch itself is a great platform to promote the book. In the lead up to it, your promotion can talk about the launch when pitching to media outlets. In your book marketing plan, it’s a good idea to go hard on pitching to media at two to three weeks prior to the launch and a week or so afterwards. The aim is to try to get media to attend the launch but this is pretty hard to do unless you have a fabulous pitch or you have celebrity status. If you know someone with celebrity status who can attend the launch, that might help.
Not having media at the launch isn’t a fail though. You may get your story picked up by the local paper or radio and that’s a start. Any media is good. It also helps you to refine the pitch, which is the number one promotion tool.
You can contact media yourself but if you feel that all this launch/media stuff is beyond you, there are great book publicists (who have the right contacts) who can do the work for you. I’d only suggest this if you have big plans for your book and you’re willing to invest the money.
Regardless of how far reaching you want your book to be, launching should be on the agenda. It doesn’t have to be a huge swanky affair. It can simply be afternoon tea at the library. Celebrate your achievement.
In my next blog, I’ll talk about how to launch your book. In the meantime, if you need help with writing, publishing or promoting your book, check out our events at Busybird Publishing.
Finding My Way
June 23, 2022I have never been so naïve to believe that I can do anything that I want.
In fact, I have never even believed that I can do anything that I set my mind to.
Were either of these things true, I wouldn’t be half as stressed by schoolwork, wouldn’t cripplingly suffer from impostor’s syndrome any time I attempt to complete said work, wouldn’t scrap the work within two minutes because it isn’t flawless on the first attempt, and I wouldn’t be unsuccessful in any of my endeavours rather than just a few of them.
Hence, when I am told to write about what I want to do in ‘the future’, I am impossibly lost. Frankly, I have forever believed that such a concept as ‘the future’ is too distant and too obscure to be important to the present.
What I was naïve to believe is that the future stays distant; it does not. Let’s just say, that awakening was rude.
From an early age I have been in touch with creativity: reading, drawing, writing, imagining. I once utilised them as an escape.
As I aged, however, I subconsciously recalibrated those loves to recognise the beauty of the ‘How’.
How is that book so emotionally impactful?
How is that artwork created to convey tone and message?
How is this prose connoting broader messages?
How does art, in any form, inevitably reflect concepts of the world around us?
I like that I ask questions. It makes me an analytical person and somebody who likes to investigate with a fine-tooth comb, whether it be art or media or ideas or people or societies.
But upon realising that my ‘future’ is rapidly approaching, I am facing it in search for how my analysis will help me. Or, more appropriately, how it can help me.
When I began to ask ‘how’, I said that I wanted to work within ‘Art’. There was a period when I wanted to draw, there was a period when I wanted to graphic designer. But I reminded myself that I cannot do everything.
Some things are for specific people; I could call myself an artist all I wanted and I could watch as many YouTube tutorials as I possibly could, but never could I ever learn how to draw hands. I realised that within the visual art spectrum, I neither had the spark nor the skill to get it perfectly accurate or perfectly inaccurate. My pieces always looked like an attempt at one or the other.
So I turned to my other crutches – reading and writing – and it is there, in that corner of ‘Art’, that I began to think I could find myself. I can see myself in this elusive world known as ‘The Publishing Industry’ not only because I can see the possibilities of my analysis, but because I can see the possibilities of my contribution to art that begs to be analysed, investigated and appreciated for its facets.
Ultimately, I don’t know where I want to end up within such a gargantuan industry – writer or editor or designer (probably not that one) or agent or marketer or something in between at a publishing house or magazine company or news corporation – but I know that I want to be able to implement nuance in our written language, which ever so needs it.
Harrison Abbott
Busybird Work Experience Student
Savage Ironies
June 14, 2022Blaise was a big believer in book launches. She saw them as a celebration of all the hard work an author’s put into their book.
At Blaise’s funeral, her mother, acclaimed author and artist Lin Van Hek, spoke about how she and Blaise had picked something out for Blaise to read at Lin’s funeral, assuming the natural order that a parent would precede their child in passing. Lin spoke about how it was a ‘savage irony’ that she was now reading that piece for Blaise’s funeral.
One of Blaise’s literary cornerstones was her novel, The Colours of Ash. She had been working on it for about twenty years, juggling it and the other responsibilities in her life.
In the last ten years, she also wrote and published three other books: the publishing guide, The Book Book: 12 Steps to Successful Publishing, and the two memoirs, The Road to Tralfamadore is Bathed in River Water (about her early life, growing up on a hippy commune in the 1970s), and 50 Days for Fifty Years (about walking the Camino de Santiago as a bucket-list item).
But I’d like to believe that her novel (and fiction) was her great love. She was a voracious reader – she’d read anything, but predominantly fiction. And the book was the literary love that she kept returning to, kept working on to get right.
She messaged me early in January to tell me she was planning to finally publish The Colours of Ash.
After she passed, her husband Kev, his friend/bookkeeper Kate, and I were going through Blaise’s work diary trying to get a sense of what else she’d planned for Busybird this year and found she’d tentatively pencilled in 15th May as a possible launch.
It’s another savage irony that she’d worked so long on this novel (over one/third of her life) and that she encouraged authors to throw book launches, to celebrate their book’s arrival into the world, and now we’ll have to launch her book without her.
But she’d finished with the actual manuscript, and was preparing to go to layout – that’s when the text is dumped into design software and formatted for printing. She’d also asked her son, talented artist Jack Howlett, to paint an image for the cover. It’s an image, I understand, she loved, as it perfectly represented what she had in her head.
She gave her husband, Kev, and myself just enough information that in the wake of her death, we were able to piece together what we needed to do finish The Colours of Ash.
That’s what we’ve done in the last couple of months. We hope we realised Blaise’s own vision as closely as possible to what she would’ve wanted.
The Colours of Ash will be launched tomorrow.
Here are the details:
When
7.00pm
Wednesday
15th June
Where
Busybird Publishing
2/118 Para Road
Montmorency 3094
We hope to see you all there.
Les Zigomanis.
Notes from an Intern
February 4, 2022
Before starting at Busybird I had a rather small view of the publishing world and what work really went into creating the amazing books that line my shelves. I thought all the hard work for books came from authors who had to write and create the novel, drawing readers in and building a story from their own imaginations. Whereas publishers basically printed books; job done, book sold. How wrong I was.
Reading through the list of intern tasks, I was shocked to see how much was required to get a book into the world, and how much I’d have to learn. All these small things that are easily overlooked; things like registering an ISBN, inputting information for printing, choosing the paper a book is printed on, deciding on the right font (so many choices), and the constant adjusting of covers to make them perfect. But throughout this internship I have been able to experience all these small things that complete a published book. I have also learnt some things I never even knew had to go into publishing, like registering books with the National Library.
Coming into the internship, I was looking forward to editing people’s work, since that has always been a dream of mine, getting paid to read books. And I was not disappointed. I have been able to read some amazing stories from local authors, and, hopefully, I have been able to help make them the best they can be.
However, it hasn’t always run so smoothly. With COVID lockdowns preventing us from coming into the studio, interning from home was a must. While this meant being able to get a lot of editing and reading experience, which I loved, it wasn’t the same as being in the studio learning things properly and having Oscar sit at my feet or bring me a stick from his walks. Thankfully, Zoom was around so we could still learn things, although nothing is ever the same online.
Hearing that I could come in after lockdown was amazing, having only been in for a couple of days before having to work from home, but it was also a bit of an information overload. All these things that I had only seen Blaise do on her computer over Zoom were suddenly real and I was doing them, ahh! But playing around with them a couple of times, especially playing around with layout on InDesign, gave me some more confidence and continued to make me realise how much work publishing is, not just printing books at all.
Overall, interning with Busybird and learning from Blaise and Kev has been an eye-opening experience and one that has cemented my love for editing and grown my appreciation for all books. It has been an amazing experience to be a part of the process in creating the objects that have filled my bookshelves, imagination, and spare time my entire life.
Claire Hone
Outgoing Publishing Intern