Australian author Bri Lee on earning income from Substack

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Australian author Bri Lee on earning income from Substack

24 October 2022

On the subject of Substack, Sydney based Australian writer Bri Lee is another author who has turned to Substack. Asking subscribers for money can be a thorny matter, especially as readers have no compulsion to pay: Substack remains free for anyone to access.

But it comes down to the individual reader. They like a writer’s work, and wish to support them. As simple as that. No one is being forced to do anything.

People who do pay will often be paying to ‘support you and your work’ rather than necessarily paying because they perceive the value of what they get in their inbox is equal to the dollar figure you charge. When I launched the paid section in January 2021 I explicitly told people that I wanted to keep the vast majority of the content freely available, and that anyone who did pay was essentially subsidising the access of the non-paying subscribers.

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Bri Lee, trends, writing

Authors with profile can earn money publishing on Substack

24 October 2022

British author Tim Lott writes about starting a Substack page, and how the publishing platform can help writers generate income from their work. In Lott’s case it’s so far, so good:

What do my subscribers get in return for signing up? Anything I want to give them. I have total freedom. There are no editors or advertisers telling me what to do. Independence isn’t without its downsides. You have to learn to sell yourself, you have to understand how online media works and you have to be self-disciplined and dedicated. No editors, no agents, no marketing department. You’re on your own. But we novelists know how to be on our own. Now we have the chance to be multi-media publishers as well.

Profile is key here. Anyone with sufficient followers on the platform of their choosing can make money. While there are plenty of people doing well on Instagram or TikTok, they are what I call visual mediums. But they’re not the best for writing, especially long form writing, as they do not function so well as blogging platforms. Substack then may be the solution writers are looking for.

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Tim Lott, trends, writing

Australian genre fiction authors look overseas for publishers

22 October 2022

If you’re an Australian author, don’t bother submitting manuscripts for anything other than literary fiction to local publishers. Nothing else will be accepted. That seems to be the message from a number of prominent Australian writers, including Stephanie Laurens and Shelley Parker-Chan, who say they had to find overseas publishers for their works of genre fiction.

The local publishing landscape is dominated by trade houses that concentrate on contemporary or literary fiction: books that are often character-driven, serious and contemplative. But these novels are not the most popular. A 2021 survey of Australian readers found crime and mystery was their favourite genre, followed by science fiction and fantasy, then contemporary and literary fiction.

But according to Jo MacKay, the head of local publishing at HQ Books, a division of HarperCollins, the Australian book market is saturated by the likes of fantasy fiction. It may be popular, but no one is buying it, if that makes any sense. And while Australian authors undoubtedly greatly benefit from exposure to markets such as those in America, there are strings attached.

For instance, Laurens reported having to be content with a cover design her publisher thought would be conducive to sales, rather than an option she would have preferred.

Dates announced for the 2023 Melbourne Writers Festival

22 October 2022

The 2023 Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) will take place from Thursday 4 May 2022 until Sunday 7 May. Mark it on your calender. The 2023 event will be held a few months earlier than the 2022 which ran during September.

Update: the decision by MWF organisers to move the event to early May 2023 has upset the convenors of a number of other literary events taking place at, or around, the same time. Most noteably organisers of the nearby Bendigo Writers Festival are particularly concerned, as their event takes place at exactly the same time.

It seems to me the MWF move could have been better thought out. To say the least.

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events, literature, Melbourne, writing

Tom Keneally, Katrina Nannestad win 2022 ARA Historical Novel Prize

22 October 2022

Sydney based Australian author Tom Keneally has won the adult category of the 2022 ARA Historical Novel Prize with his novel Corporal Hitler’s Pistol. Katrina Nannestad meanwhile, who resides in central Victoria, was named winner of the children and young adult category with Rabbit, Soldier, Angel, Thief.

Keneally has graciously shared his prize money with this year’s other award longlisted authors. Keneally was forthright in his decision. Speaking as an eighty-seven year old he said, he’d rather see other writers benefit from the prize money instead of him spending it on incontinence pads.

Why aren’t Australian books being nominated for the Booker Prize?

19 October 2022

It’s been six years since the work of an Australian author was nominated for the Booker Prize. Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan was the last recipient in 2014, with his book The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Since then only South African born Australian author J.M. Coetzee has made the cut, being named on the longlist for the 2016 Prize with The Schooldays of Jesus.

But 2014 was also the year changes were made to the Prize’s eligibility requirements, allowing any English language title to be nominated, essentially opening up the award to American writers. Since then it seems Australian books have struggled to gain traction.

The Booker was once confined to authors from the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe — an empire rule that looked increasingly silly, leading to a change in 2014 to allow all novels written in English, so long as they were published by UK and Irish publishing houses. Much fuss was made about the decision to let Americans in (including by Carey), but it is undeniable that since then, they have made up roughly a quarter of every longlist and won three times; at this year’s prize, which was won by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka on Monday, six of the 13 nominees were American. These authors are most often living, working and published in the US — seemingly an easier path into the UK than the long road from Australia.

Shehan Karunatilaka wins 2022 Booker Prize with The Seven Moons of Maali Almeid

18 October 2022

After much speculation as who would win the 2022 Booker Prize, and whether there was even any point in speculating in the first place, Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka has been named winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeid.

Of the winning title, the Booker judges said:

Any one of the six shortlisted books would have been a worthy winner. What the judges particularly admired and enjoyed in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was the ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques. This is a metaphysical thriller, an afterlife noir that dissolves the boundaries not just of different genres, but of life and death, body and spirit, east and west. It is an entirely serious philosophical romp that takes the reader to ‘the world’s dark heart’ — the murderous horrors of civil war Sri Lanka. And once there, the reader also discovers the tenderness and beauty, the love and loyalty, and the pursuit of an ideal that justify every human life.

The 2022 Richell Prize shortlist for unpublished writers

13 October 2022

The 2022 Richell Prize shortlist — which is open to unpublished Australian writers of adult fiction and adult narrative non-fiction — was announced on Tuesday 10 October 2022. This year six writers were selected from a field of some seven hundred aspirants.

Zainab’s Not Home, by Hajer Al-awsi
When Trees Fall Without Warning, by Susannah Begbie
Wake, by Kate Harris
Place Setting, by Eva Lomski
The Little Ones, by Anne Myers
The Medusa, by Lisa Nan Joo

In addition to a cash prize, the winner — who will be named on Thursday 3 November 2022 — will receive twelve months mentoring with a publisher at Hachette Australia, and may possibly see their manuscript published.

Watchmen co-creator Alan Moore takes up prose writing

11 October 2022

British comic book writer Alan Moore, whose credits include the Watchmen series of stories, and work in the Batman and Superman universes, is swapping graphic novels for prose writing.

Speaking with Guardian writer Sam Leith, Moore makes some blunt observations regarding superhero comics, and the part that a thirst for such comic books among adults, rather than children, has contributed to the current state of the world.

I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare. I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s — to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional — when things like Watchmen were first appearing. There were an awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up’. I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.

It’s well worth reading the full article.

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Alan Moore, graphic novels, literature

Psalms For The End Of The World by Cole Haddon

10 October 2022

Psalms For The End Of The World, written by Australian-American author Cole Haddon, and published by Hachette Australia, is a novel aptly titled for the times. For more than one reason.

The first, and most obvious, is the end-of-days gloom permeating global affairs presently. The other, of all things, relates to the winners of the 2022 Nobel Prize for physics. That’s because for the overt references to the end of the world, Psalms For The End Of The World also includes — among other things — physics and quantum entanglement in the mix:

It’s 1962 and physics student Grace Pulansky believes she has met the man of her dreams, Robert Jones, while serving up slices of pecan pie at the local diner. But then the FBI shows up, with their fedoras and off-the-rack business suits, and accuses him of being a bomb-planting mass-murderer.

Finding herself on the run with Jones across America’s Southwest, the discoveries awaiting Gracie will undermine everything she knows about the universe. Her story will reveal how scores of lives — an identity-swapping rock star, a mourning lover in ancient China, Nazi hunters in pursuit of a terrible secret, a crazed artist in pre-revolutionary France, an astronaut struggling with a turbulent interplanetary future, and many more — are interconnected across space and time by love, grief, and quantum entanglement.

With a timeline spanning centuries, and incorporating the stories of multiple characters, Psalms For The End Of The World seems to have something for everyone, be they fans of crime, science fiction, fantasy, or historical fiction.

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