Simon Drake – Writer

The more fragile a situation, the less people want to discuss it. The more obscenely pointless a situation, the more people will rejoice in it.
That is one of my simple observations of society and relates to my exploits in shopping Generous Enemies to Australian publishers and agents between 1999 and 2003. There are an abundance of crappy books on the market but very few that deal with a real and upcoming conflict: history shows that conflict eventually happens and hippy notions of ‘oh no it won’t happen here’ goes up in puffs of smoke.
The truth is, I could never rely on the Australian publishing industry to even touch Generous Enemies because it touches a tricky subject: So what do you do when global over-crowding and geo-politcal unrest spills into Australia? Is it politically incorrect to discuss future genocide in Australia in the context of a possible war? The Australian arts scene is weak; it is mostly funded by the government (who call the shots, left or right, by who gets grant the precious money), or controlled by US and UK publishing houses (who are usually owned by international fund managers or share holders) and the bottom line is profit (I’ve got nothing against profit, it’s better to live with capitalism than run into the (s)mothering arms of socialism) but profit in publishing equals appeal to the masses, give them the easy stuff, don’t try anything too risky. There is a small Australian publishing industry but it doesn’t take too many risks, so for books about future wars the multinationals supply the usual stuff: Post-Cold War thrillers, Terrorism stuff, Mafia/Gangster pulp. It’s mostly set in the country of origin: U-S of A.
Australians seem content but many of them don’t know what other books they could read, because they’ve never been out of Australia, and into another nation’s book shop, or understood another language. The online world bridges gaps, but if you’re the author, you’re the one who builds that bridge. If you write a book with a niche market, you have to find that niche market.
I left Australia and have been living in Europe (UK and German) and I’ve found a North American publisher for my science fiction works. Writing in a ‘download culture’ is difficult but exciting. But for Generous Enemies, an action-thrilled novel based in Australia, the market was always going to be Australia, and so that I could control the marketing approach, I decided to self-publish, because like it or not in life, if you want to get something done, you do it yourself.
It took me over 10 years to write Generous Enemies, and I hope you enjoy it. Write reviews! I need them!
And remember, ‘freedom of speech’ sounds great, but if you’ve really got something to say, it isn’t always easy.

Simon Drake

Tags: australia invaded, australian publishing, australian writers, censor, chinese invasion of australia, freedom of speech, john marsden, Tomorrow series. Tomorrow when the war began

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Articles, Fiction, Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.