Mike Murphy's writing diary: Notes from Perth Writers Festival (1)

Sunday, 21 February 2016

Notes from Perth Writers Festival (1)

Four days of networking, connection and obtaining information. I can't write it up at length so I'll just give dot points. I'm breaking it up into separate posts or it would be too much at once.

Inkerman and Blunt is a publisher in Melbourne - head is Donna Ward. Interested in quirky stuff and is publishing a set of pocket-sized novellas to read on trains etc. Not taking any more submissions this year but worth keeping on the radar.
Quotes from Fran Bryson, travel writer and former agent: "You've got to write the crap out" and "Read the acknowledgements in books in your genre for names of agents and editors".
Shona Husk began writing fantasy romance novellas as a way to get started. Now writing book length and published in US. Going into e-publishing.
Claire Boston found her publisher through a pitch panel at a Romance Writers Festival
According to successful Simon and Schuster romance writer Michelle Diener only 1% of submissions to traditional publishers get contracts. She is turning to e-publishing. She says a handful of upper class New Yorkers who dominate the big publishers have been deciding what people read. That is changing with e-publishing and there is an explosion of new voices and new ideas.
NOTE THIS ONE - Diener says it is NOT TRUE e-book sales are dropping and people are turning back to print. Those stats are based on the top five big publishers. Their e-sales are dropping and their print sales are high by comparison. If Indie e-sales are included, total e-sales are still increasing and total print sales are dropping.
Echo Publishing is based in Melbourne. Angela Meyer is commissioning editor. Recent publication Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic about a deaf detective.
Viskic defined editing processes: "Structural edit means I don't understand the plot; Line edit means I don't understand the sentence; Copy edit means I don't understand how you spelt your name wrong."
Viskic met Meyer through writers group on twitter.

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Authors I like

Anna Jacobs

A mentor in my early writing days and still one of my favourite authors. Her sagas about family life in Lancashire are among my favourites but she is a prolific writer and it's all good.

Michael Robotham

Michael urged me to keep writing when I was in a depressed period after another publisher's knock-back. He is basically why I kept writing and turned to self-publishing. I've read all his books and I'm always waiting eagerly for the next one.

Dave Warner

I only recently discovered Dave as a writer after having had his Dave Warner and The Suburbs album since it was on vinyl. It's interesting having another writer who sets his stories in Western Australia.

Dick Francis

I've read all his books at least twice and sometime more often. He's the writer I always return to when I need to feel totally in my comfort zone. Good stories, tight plots, easy writing style. I'd love to know if it really was his wife Mary who wrote them. His son Felix is doing a great job of keeping the family business going.

Leslie Thomas

Ever since Virgin Soldiers I've been hooked on Leslie Thomas and his Dangerous Davies series are among my all-time favourites.

I am because I write

I come across a lot of people who would like to be writers and I often wonder why. For me there has been no question. Since a very young age I have been a writer. Certainly not a famous or even successful one but while other people were doctors or teachers or sportspeople, the thing I did best and was most comfortable doing was writing. For some reason I had a natural flair for it and that raw talent was honed when I became a journalist and learned that what bubbled out of my head was not what was needed. I had to to be able to write to order. One of my earliest lessons came from Bob Duffield, a reporter who took the story of the closure of Perth's Roe Street brothels and wrote different versions of it for convervative, sensationalist, religious and sociological publications. I learned that writing was a craft to be learned, and I have spent many years learning not only the craft of writing, but of story-telling, which is an art in itself. Whether it's a poem, a short story, a novel, my family history, one of my blogs or web sites, I will always be writing something. It's simply who I am and what I do.