In the past few months, the Brascoe Publishing partnership has come to an end. What this means is that, while we still exist, the business is undergoing restructure and isn’t taking new clients for the foreseeable future.

The business will be shut down for a period of six weeks commencing Monday 8 March 2010, and current projects will continue after that time.

However, we are not taking new clients on until further notice.

For further information please contact Leticia on 0421 925 382.

The thing we love about Twitter is that it’s networking at it’s finest: sharing ideas and notions, meeting new people, and coming up with new and collaborative ideas. That’s why we’re so excited to be in on the ground with @AusLiterature and @odysseybooks for the very first instances of ‘tweet an Australian author’.

This event, when we’ve collectively got the details ironed out, will enable readers from all over the world to connect with the Aussie author of the day via Twitter, to chat and answer questions and field discussion. It’s a fantastic way of talking about issues informally. Using a tweet chat by following a specific hashtag, the experience is very much like sitting in a room and watching a conversation happening between a few people. It’s a far more “realistic” experience than an open chat room.

The lovely people at AustLiterature will be chairing the initiative and will also be archiving the results of each tweetchat session on their website.

It’s a fantastic opportunity, and we’re really excited to be part of this new wave of connecting writers with readers. More details soon.

eBooks are a relatively contentious subject. Some believe that they will spell the end of real books. Others believe that they help book sales. Still others think that if eBooks are to be popular, there needs to be a rethink on price.

In a report in the Summer 2008/09 Bookseller & Publisher about the Frankfurt Book Fair, it was noted that Brazilian author Paolo Coelho is one of the true pioneers of digital publishing. Coelho had made the decision to distribute his Portuguese-language books free from his website because he didn’t own the rights to his English-language titles. In a subsequent move, his English-language books were made available digitally, on the condition that they only be read on-screen and not printed. Since doing this, the author has experienced increased sales of his printed works.

The B&P noted:

Since ‘freeing’ his work online, Coelho has seen increased sales of his printed books, with two titles — The Alchemist and The Witch of Portobello — hitting the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously for the first time. ‘On the internet, we are not only communicating much more widely and freely, but we are reading more and we are writing more: this helps the written word, it doesn’t harm it,’ he said. ‘People will read the first chapter [of an e-book] and then realise they can’t take the computer on the subway so they will go and buy the book.’

Of course, this says nothing at all about eBook readers.

From the same issue of B&P was an article about the fact that people ignore eBooks at their peril. The article cited the case of Lonely Planet signing a deal with Nokia to sell its city guides on mobile phones — a more up-to-date way of getting information. It discussed Dymocks’ eBook download pilot in the seller’s Sydney store, Angus & Robertson’s Espresso Book Machine in Melbourne, and the fact that eBook readers themselves are presently a long way from where they first began in terms of friendliness, handling, aesthetics and user experience. It also pointed out the fact that while Apple doesn’t currently have an eBook reader, it is unlikely to be far away — and people who ignore the capacities of iPods to function as eBook readers do so at their peril.

But the problem that many publishers are still pricing eBooks outside of what people are comfortable with. As a publisher myself, I know that (often) fully half the production cost of a book is in its manufacturing. This is especially the case for short runs and for books manufactured entirely out of 100% recycled materials. While publishers are, often reluctantly, producing eBooks, they often sell them at the same cost as they do their manufactured books.

This seems to me to be incredibly odd. Publishers will tell you that they still need to cover editing, legal costs, typesetting, design, and so on. But what they conveniently ignore are the costs associated with manufacturing and distribution – both of which are effectively negated when you produce an eBook. I also read somewhere else recently (I wish I could remember where!) that eBook purchasers will refuse to buy an eBook that costs them more than $9.99.

Being curious about this, I posed the question to our network on Twitter. One response, from Lisa Dempster at Vignette Press agreed:

lisadempster@brascoebooks I agree. I wouldn’t buy an ebook for more than $10 unless it was a very specialist title (i.e. reference/textbook).

Some people argue that in pricing eBooks similarly to printed books, publishers are trying to push eBooks out of the realm of the ‘possible’. It is an industry that has built itself on print and manufactured items. But if done well, then eBooks can be enormously complementary to manufactured books – it just requires some left-of-field, creative thinking. Look at Coelho above: his sales have increased in proportion to his freebies.

It doesn’t mean that publishers must give their books away. But what it does mean is that by ignoring this technology, and by not being savvy about how they use the technology and why, that publishers will find themselves in trouble. It could, perhaps, be a generational thing: those of us who are young enough to have grown up with technology may well lead the charge in finding useful ways of producing eBooks that appeal, and of pricing them so that they are competitive.

What’s your take on eBooks? We don’t believe that they will ever replace the printed work, but we do believe that to take full advantage of them we need to be able to price them appropriately. How much would you pay for an eBook? And, more importantly, if you could read an eBook on your iPod, would you do it more often?

We may be a small publisher, but we are starting to have an impact: we were approached recently for comment on a hot issue by Australia’s Bookseller & Publisher magazine.

The magazine, which is the country’s core book-selling and publishing industry journal, is running a feature on the highly contentious issue of age-banding (otherwise known as age-ranging) in one of their early 2009 issues – I think in March. We previously covered the debate here at the Brascoe Blog.

If you’re not familiar with the notion, age-banding involves publishers noting on the covers of books the ‘recommended age’ that the books are targeted at. It sounds fairly innocuous, but in the UK where the idea was mooted, a great deal of people have opposed it; not least the authors, many of whom are having their books age-banded without their knowledge.

Hopefully the Bookseller & Publisher will cover the debate firmly, fairly, and with enough depth to give its readers a good sense of all of the arguments for and against the notion. Brascoe is quoted as being on the “against” team – so it will be interesting to see who is presented as being on the other team.

For more information on how you could obtain a copy of the magazine, head over to the Bookseller & Publisher’s website.

We have recently added a page to Facebook, which is where we post news, integrate these blogs, and (hopefully) will get some comments and discussion going.

If you want to join us or become a fan of us, head over to our Facebook page. We’ll see you there!

As a bit of an internet addict, I find myself randomly surfing through all the great stuff on the web and seeing what I can see. Recently I came across Brindabella Baby, which is a small business in Canberra that promotes environmentally sustainable alternatives to little kids’ products available in regular shops. This is awesome, but even better – they prefer to stock products made by work-at-home parents or sweatshop-free commercial manufacturers. Any small business that does this sort of thing gets my vote!

** CAUTION! **
This blog post contains a word that many consider to be offensive. If the ‘f’ word offends you, please skip over this blog entry and on to something less controversial. Thanks!

Being writers, editors and publishers, you might expect that we would be naturally fascinated by words. And you would be absolutely right.

Our word fascination was titillated recently by seeing the documentary Fuck. Rather than a simple, juvenile look at this supposedly terrible word, the film provides an in-depth examination of it. The documentary attempts to trace the origins of the word fuck, but, perhaps most importantly, it considers both sides of the argument for censorship – as it applies to arts and media, to public ‘decency’ and the notion of freedom of speech. All of it is terribly interesting – if very US-centric.

The element of the film that I personally enjoyed the most was the explanation of the grammatical uses of the word. The word fuck is one of the most versatile words in the English language. As anybody who has ever used the word knows, it can be a transitive verb, an adjective, an adverb, an adverb enhancing an adjective, a noun; it can replace a part of a word; and it can replace nearly every word in a sentence without destroying the sense of the language.

So, too, the situations that the word can describe or convey are incredibly broad: dismay, anger, trouble, aggression, difficulty, inquiry, dismissal, and more.

For word geeks like us, the technicalities and intricacies of the grammar behind the use of this oh-so-offensive word, presented in the documentary, were excellently put. The other parts of the doco – about censorship, parenting, free speech, famous uses of the word, and how many times it occurs in other films, were interesting; but it was the depth of the linguistics that really pushed our buttons.

If you are not one to be offended by the word, or if you are a bit of a word geek yourself, you can’t not see this film. It was released in 2005, and distributed by 21st Century Pictures in Australia in 2006.

One day last week, fairly early on, we decided that it was time we upgraded our blog. For months we’d been receiving annoying pop-ups telling us that WordPress was unhappy, that it would bounce with joy once we had upgraded.

Not feeling particularly like going through the rigmarole of FTP-ing all our data across and then updating the engine and seeing if it worked, the ‘it’s not there if I ignore it’ mentality was thriving. We had done so well. Until we read that perhaps we were getting so many spam links because the version we had was flawed quite fatally in this respect.

We rolled up our sleeves, cleared the desk, drank plenty of water and kept our energy levels up by eating things that weren’t good for us; then heaved a huge breath and dived into the task. We disabled plugins left and right, flung ourselves through the upgrade documentation, set everything to download, and fizzed around in paroxysms of being geekily overwhelmed. Then we went for a cuppa.

Back into it ages later, scurried through the documentation, upgraded the engine, reinstalled our backup, enabled all the plugins and it was great! We celebrated! We drank champagne, smoked expensive cigars, orated at length on the fact that WordPress upgrade is not so difficult after all, patted all concerned on the back, cleaned up and left it alone.

Little did we know that one of the plugins now no longer worked, that bruised and bloodied Brascoe Blog user wannabes all over the world were trying to register on our blog to leave a comment, while fighting in close hand-to-hand combat with our Captcha, and usually losing the fight. On hearing of these battles, we managed to overpower the captcha and bring it down. Dusting our hands off with satisfaction, we walked away… to the tune of lonely, mournful cries:

‘Ohhhh,’ they wailed. ‘… am I supposed to be getting a blank white screen?’ The air was thick with the sounds of disappointment.

Happily, we believe we have now solved the problem. We’re not going to celebrate this time; we think that doing so last time may have jinxed it prematurely.

So, if you are one of the many who might have tried to register and, disappointed, walked away, please have another go. And if it still doesn’t work, you can let us know by emailing us at info[at]brascoebooks.com.au

This isn’t strictly books and publishing and writing related, but I’m sure that won’t matter. We recently hooked up with a blog-swap, a notion that intrigues me – and is designed to ‘drive traffic’ to your site; something that all businesses need, realistically.

The way it works is that you go through the businesses on the list, find one that tickles your fancy, blog about ‘em and then someone else on the list will do the same for you. At least, that’s the theory. What if nobody blogs about you? Surely their business needs to be relevant to yours for it to work properly?

Out of all the other businesses on the swap list, there was only one that took my fancy. Not because it’s relevant (none of them were), but because it is based on green, chemical-free products: Joliv, a home and beauty products small business (of all things) on the central coast of NSW. I believe they recently won an award for their work. They have some cool stuff on their site, and the Joliv blog is full of interesting little tid-bits, if mainly for the girls.

It’s great to see other businesses powering along on the natural and organic line. Gradually I’m seeing more of them, and I think it’s brilliant.

So – we’ll sit back and see if this blog-swap thing will do anything for our blog traffic. I’m a wee bit sceptical (can you tell?) but you never know. Anything’s worth a go, right?