When the bun-fight is over...

Well there is still plenty of debate happening online about the role of publishers these days. You could check out this post over at ex-agent, current-author, Nathan Bransford's blog about how publisher's are perceived. Lots of interesting comments follow. Then there is this from author Anthony Horowitz which is funny in places but also, ultimately, not the full picture IMHO (thanks to Maureen Crisp for alerting me to this one). I'm not anti-publisher. I'm not anti-e-book. What I want is the best possible opportunity to connect with potential readers. I want fair recompense for my efforts. I have no idea how all this is going to shake out but in the meantime I will continue to write, in the hope that I can still get my stories to any interested readers, and get paid for it, when the bun-fight is over.

Finalists for the NZ Post Children's Book Awards were announced this week (you can see the list here). I wasn't on either the picture book or YA lists and had to scurry off and hide under a dark duvet to lick my wounds and some chocolate for a while. But I am back now. My thoughts? I was surprised. There are some wonderful books on the lists. There are some wonderful books not on the list (so many I thought were sure-fire inclusions are absent). Congratulations to all those shortlisted and good luck for the announcement of the winners in May.

In happier news my new picture book Made with Love, illustrated by Gabriella Klepatski, published by Duck Creek Press, and out in bookshops April, got a lovely review in the Canvas Magazine from the Weekend Herald today. Yay!!

Wow, 2012, you've gone and marketed yourself in all the wrong ways...

Apparently someone has predicted the death of publishing as we know it to happen in 2012 (here via Beattie's Blog). Maybe they went and saw that John Cusack movie, the one where cataclysm's etc...as predicted by the Mayan calendar or some such, are going to destroy Earth. Wow 2012, you've gone and marketed yourself in all the wrong ways. All I could think when I read this was 'crap' -all my writing dreams founded on my love of the writing generations who'd gone before me - Tolkien, Lewis, Wilder, Hinton, and Le Guin - are based on a publishing model that is dying out. If only I'd started ten years earlier. Or been born in another time. If the minimum print run is no longer sustainable in competition with digital formats and publishers must transform or perish what will happen to the quality of the content. If everyone can do their own thing who will judge what is suitable/quality/acceptable/readable and how will readers be able to sift though everything available? I prefer not to be the only arbiter of the quality of my own work. Writers will surely still be required if novels (or whatever monika they come to be known by) are still read in whatever format but will they survive financially considering the majority barely scrape by now. I'm luckily not dependent on my royalties (I'd be the corpse in the corner if I was) but I know other great writers who are, who must be prudent and frugal now. I cannot deny that I wish things were different. I was born to be a writer. It is stamped on every gene in my body. I like the way books and writing careers used to be produced. As Gandalf says to Frodo when he laments the burden he is charged with, we cannot choose the times we live in, we can only do our best with what we have been given. I'll keep writing because I'm co-dependent with it, because the air I breathe is that sweet, slightly dusty stuff trapped between the pages, because my last thought before I fall asleep at night is about writing, as is the first thought when I wake up in the morning. Maybe I'll light a candle to St Jude.