Speakeasy

Recognising excellence in journalism across all mediums, the 52nd Walkley Awards were announced last night at a ceremony at the Royal Hall of Industries in Sydney.

The Australian journalist Hedley Thomas scooped the prestigious ‘Gold Award’ (considered the pinnacle of journalistic achievement) for his article entitled ‘Dr Haneef’, and Gerard Noonan walked away with ‘Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism’

The awards were started in 1958 by Ampol Petroleum founder Sir William Gaston Walkley, in appreciation of the media’s support for his oil exploration efforts

Congratulations to all the winners! For a full list click here. 

Ok, so it’s not even December yet but we came across this on Boing Boing today and felt like sharing some festive spirit!

It’s from a gorgeous photographic site called IJM and we have to agree that it’s the perfect bookish alternative to a Christmas Tree!

Today sees a series of late afternoon rallies in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, reports Arts Hub Australia, as screenwriters across the country show solidarity with their compatriots in America. The rallies, organised by the Australian Writers’ Guild (AWG), are part of an International Day of Solidarity which also sees events in New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, Great Britain, Mexico and France.

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has been on strike for the past month lobbying for payment when their work is used in new media forms like the internet. With a booming online industry the writers argue that studios draw significant revenue from this stream and they should be duly compensated. The studios return argument is that this entire sector is still too experimental to be able to formalise any kind of payment structure.

The strike has caused chaos and the knock on effect has left US production houses and studios in disarray, many being financially compromised and facing an uncertain future.

For more information see the AWG website.

Over at the Book Covers blog, they’ve done a roundup of some of the most interesting bookshelves we’ve ever seen, like this one from Dutch designers Sloom & Slordig:

We here at AWM are also fond of the Bookinist (combination chair, bookshelf and lamp), and the fairly awesome batcave-style hidden passageway bookshelf. If you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, should you judge someone’s taste in books by their bookshelves?

We came across this great blog called The Rejecter this week whilst browsing through Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog.

With the byline ‘I don’t hate you. I just hate your query letter’ this blog is written by an agent’s assistant at a US literary agency - the person responsible for filtering those query letters into a (very small) pile of ‘Maybes’ which she passes onto her boss for consideration. A bit like Miss Snark or Agent Sydney, The Rejecter offers advice and general musings about publishing and (would-be) authors from agent fees and advances to genre fiction and contracts and everything inbetween.

We’re adding it to the Speakeasy blog roll and recommend you check it out! 

As the digital revolution rolls ever onwards, Amazon has launched a new e-book reader called the ‘Kindle’ (so-named becuase of their desire to kindle the love of reading).

Launched this week in America and retailing at US$399 the 290g device with a 6inch screen can store up to 200 books and download an individual volume in under a minute. With no backlighting it’s easy on the eye and, instead of books on a continuous scroll, you have to ‘turn’ the pages as you would a conventional book.

Not all publishers have signed up to the Kindle (bestsellers sell from a discounted $9.99 which many publishers are objecting to), but Amazon are determined not to stop until they have millions of books available. The device also allows access to online encyclopedia Wikipedia as well as 11 daily newspapers, available from 75c a day.

For more information, read this article from Times Online.

Kindle seems to have unleashed no end of debate - and not everyone is in favour. Read this blog at The Guardian, this post at Boing Boing or this one also from Boing Boing…

Don’t forget, tomorrow is our 1st birthday celebration online forum-fest with events kicking off at 10am (AEST)! If you are a paid-up subscriber to AWM online, make sure you have clicked through to the forum pages and registered a unique forum login, giving you full access to the event.

The line-up:

10-11am: Ron Serdiuk, publisher at Pulp Fiction Press

12-1pm: Best-selling author Nick Earls whose novels include Joel And Cat Set The Story Straight (a collaboration with Rebecca Sparrow), Bachelor Kisses and Zigzag Street.

1.30-2.30pm: Fantasy novelist and Chair of the South Australian Writers Centre Sean Williams, the man behind such works as Books of the Cataclysm, The Resurrected Man and many of the Star Wars series.

3-4pm: Literary Agents Pippa Masson and Tara Wynne from Australia’s oldest and largest literary agency, Curtis Brown.

6.30-7.30pm: Graham Nunn, award-winning poet, Artistic Director of Queensland Poetry Festival and founding publisher at Small Change Press.

(*All times given in AEST, remember to adjust if you need to!)

Just as we posted Wednesday’s blog about the future of publishing and bookshops, up steps Dymocks announcing an exicting move into digital books. The initiative will offer customers a choice of over 120,000 digital e-book titles, as well as more than 30,000 audiobook titles. The e-books will initially be available in Adobe, Microsoft and Mobipocket formats. The audio range will be offered in partnership with US audio book retailer Audible and will be downloadable to devices like iPods, some mobile phones and GPS devices, or burned to CD or streamed through customers’ computers.

To begin with the books will be available to members of its Booklover loyalty programme who will be able to download from the Dymocks website. Digital kiosks are also being set up in store to allow customers to browse available titles - but the whole process will evolve over time. Dymocks’ CEO Don Grover believes this is a publishing world first putting the company one step ahead of its national and international counterparts: ‘We’re going to crawl before we walk, before we run… [but] a lot of big US chains are saying they’re going to do it but they haven’t … and now we’ve done it here in Australia.’

We came across this great blog on if:book this week about a blog on Buzz, Balls and Hype the week before - it’s so interesting, we thought we’d blog it too!

In short: Picture the book industry in 10, 20 or 30 years time and what do you see? Thriller writer Barry Eisler sees a world where massive chain bookstores have printing machines ‘churning out paperbacks from a limitless digital backlist’. The days of the conventional publisher - or even agent - are numbered. Authors are the brand, agents are the brokers.

It’s a different concept to that often touted that the future for the publishing industry is online, and one that has already sparked much debate (see the comments attached to both blog pages).

Let us know what you think - how do you see the publishing industry shaping up in the years, and decades, to come…?

Jiang Rong has been awarded the inaugural Man Asian Literary Award for his controversial novel Wolf Totem. The award ceremony was held in Hong Kong on 10 November with an internationally acclaimed panel of authors selecting Rong from the five shortlisted novels:

Jose Dalisay Jr., Soledad’s Sister
Reeti Gadekar, Families at Home
Nu Nu Yi Inwa, Smile As They Bow
Jiang Rong, Wolf Totem
Xu Xi, Habit of a Foreign Sky 

The Man Asian Award was established to recognise the best of new Asian literature and bring it to the attention of the world literary community. Works submitted for consideration must not yet have been published in English, although they may have been published in other languages.

Written under a pseudonym (the author’s chequered history includes a spell  in prison after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989), Wolf Totem  is a tale of environmental destruction, spiritual freedom and the threat modernity poses to the nomadic way of life. It will be published in English next year.