Focus on Bill Congreve

[Alisa Krasnostein]

I have the great honour of welcoming Bill Congreve to the Forums this fortnight.

Bill is a Sydney-based writer, editor, book reviewer and independent publisher. He has a BA in Communications and has received a William J. Atheling award for genre criticism and a Peter McNamara Convenor’s Award. He has edited a number of short story collections, including Intimate Armageddons (Australia’s first modern, original horror anthology), Passing Strange, Bonescribes (with Robert Hood) and Southern Blood. He has acted as a judge for the Aurealis Award on five occasions. He has published over forty short stories in a range of magazines and anthologies including Faerie Reel, Tenebres, Event Horizon, Terror Australis, Aurealis, Bloodsongs, and Cross-Town Traffic. His vampire stories have been collected in Epiphanies of Blood. He has been Aurealis magazine’s book reviewer for the last fifteen years, a position he has just resigned. Recent titles from his independent publishing company, MirrorDanse Books, include Rynosseros, by Terry Dowling, Written in Blood, by Chris Lawson, Immaterial: Ghost Stories, by Robert Hood, A Tour Guide in Utopia by Lucy Sussex, Confessions of a Pod Person, by Chuck McKenzie, and The Year’s Best Australian SF & Fantasy, Volumes One and Two, which he co-edited with Michelle Marquardt.

He currently works as a technical writer, editor and desktop publisher in the emergency services sector in NSW.

Welcome Bill!

My very first question is will there be a Volume 3 for your Year's Best Collection?

[kathryn]

My very first question is will there be a Volume 3 for your Year's Best Collection?

Doh! That was going to be my question

But I'll add to it - how do you go about sourcing all the Australian fiction published each year and how certain are you that you get it all?

[tansyrr]

Hi Bill!

Mirrordanse tends to publish well-established names from the Aus spec fic scene. Which Australian authors would you love to publish, but haven't yet?

Cheers,
Tansy

[mirrordanse]

Hello everybody, it's good to be here. And now I've got to apologise as I'll be away over Easter and won't have access to things electronic. Also, this answer is going to be a little short as I've got to head off to work...

Yes, there will be a new Year's Best. We're aiming for publication about August.

As for where we find the stories? We just have to keep our eyes open. We watch bookshops, read all the magazines, talk to people at conventions, email authors and ask them to submit anything they've published. Basically it's a matter of keeping eyes and ears open.

I know there are stories we miss, but hopefully not to many. Any Year's Best can only ever be the best of what the editors have read. We try to make that representative. And now that we've established ourselves, it is also up to interested authors to submit. We can't read what we don't know about.

My apologies once again, I'll be back after Easter!

Regz
Bill

[mirrordanse]

Hello Tansy,

Back again. Once again, sorry for the multi-day interruption. Hope everyone enjoyed Swancon. Me? I spent my time mowing the grass, chasing birds away from the chestnut tree, digging up blackberry, planning the foundations for the water tank, digging rocks and agapanthas out of the garden, cutting firewood, and doing Year's best reading.

Firstly, MirrorDanse doesn't just publish name authors. I'll modify that, we don't always publish those with established publishing credits at book length. We have published the first books of Sean Williams, Leanne Frahm, Chris Lawson, Ben Peek, Chris Mowbray, and the second book for Chuck Mckenzie. Ben and Chris's was a chapbook novella, so perhaps that doesn't count. But it does illustrate a point. Unfortunately Chris hasn't published anything for a few years, but Ben is one of the major new talents on the Australian scene. In the same vein, a book I recently would love to have been able to publish was Kaaron Warren's The Grinding House.

Outside of that, we also publish special projects for more established writers. Hence the Egan collection, two titles for Terry Dowling, Robert Hood's Immaterial and Lucy Sussex's recent collection. Another recent title that shows the kind of thing MirrorDanse would love to publish is Simon Brown's Troy. That went to Ticonderoga.

So MirrorDanse will continue to look for good work from new writers. I'm not sure we're going to do the kind of print runs we have in the past. There are tax implications for holding an inventory that can now be affordably managed with print on demand, so that might be the direction MirrorDanse takes with first projects for new authors.

I would love to be able to break into mass market novel publishing, but a small independent like MirrorDanse can't compete with the likes of Harper Collins on epic fantasy, and I'm not sure we would want to, and it looks like the major publishers are moving into SF publishing in Australia, so there's another niche market gone. (Though give me half a chance and we'll do it.)

My gut feeling is that there are more good ideas out there for books than there are people who can publish them, but these days I don't discuss specific projects in advance.

Regz
Bill

[Gillian]

Bill

Wha decided you to move into publishing?

You mentioned POD - what other things have changed about it in the time you've had Mirrordanse?

Gillian (who was slowed down even more for Passover than you were for Easter)

[Cat Sparks]

Hi Bill,

Do you write much these days? I'm presuming not, as you have so much other stuff going on. Do you miss writing? Will you be coming back to fiction writing at some point?

[benpeek]

Ben and Chris's was a chapbook novella, so perhaps that doesn't count. But it does illustrate a point. Unfortunately Chris hasn't published anything for a few years, but Ben is one of the major new talents on the Australian scene.

chris was frightened away by the awesome success that came our way

anyhow, thanks for the kind words, bill, as always.

as long as i've known you you have always had an eye out for new authors. it's been a while since i've seen you, tho, and i don't know if you still run the writing group--but is that still an interest for you?

b

[GaryK]

Hi Bill,

Covering Conjure last year opened my eyes to just how much is going on in Australian specfic.

It surprises me that the community doesn't have a bigger profile in mainstream media.

Are small press publishers content to sell books just to the specfic community rather than a mainstream audience?

Is it that they don't have the time/resources to market to a mainstream audience?

Are small press publishers locked out of mainstream book shops?

Or is it just that small press publishers approach mainstream media but are largely ignored? (I know the sf scene isn't totally ignored by mainstream media -- ie Jason Nahrung's reviews in the Courier-Mail, and Terry Dowling's column in The Weekend Australian).

[Paulmnz]

Hi Bill.

As a publisher you must see a lot of really bad manuscripts. What would be your top five points of advice for anyone seeking publication for the first time?

[mirrordanse]

Wha decided you to move into publishing?

You mentioned POD - what other things have changed about it in the time you've had Mirrordanse?

Hi Gillian,

A number of things prompted the move to publishing. Firstly was the desire to publish as well as to write. Involved in that was a need to give something back -- I’d had so much pleasure from reading and writing spec fic that I also wanted to contribute in some way. I’d been heavily involved in reviewing for a few years, chiefly for Ron Clarke’s The Mentor fanzine. A number of those reviews had been less than praising of both local writing and publishing efforts, and I also didn’t just want to drag the field down. Because of the reviews I perhaps had more to give back. And there was an element of fairness there as well. Others should have the same opportunity to assess the things I was doing.

Also, these were very early days for spec fic publishing in Australia. There was very little mainstream work, almost everything was small press. But the small press was just beginning to become professional. There was the groundwork laid out by Paul Collins a decade or so earlier, and Peter McNamara was just starting with Aphelion. There was the opportunity to be a part of something new and exciting. That was (I just had to look it up!) 1991.

So, a whole pile of reasons.

And how has it changed since 1991? Back then, desktop publishing software was new. When i was writing for student magazines in the mid 1980s, typesetting machines were big lumbersome typewriter looking things. Suddenly, software did it. And if you kept the layout simple, did a good job of it.

Printing was all either offset or photocopying, the digital revolution hadn't happened yet. If you wanted colour, you could do one, two, three or full colour. I'm sure some who read this will remember the early issues of Aurealis and the covers they had. (I even remember a review in Locus describing how bad the cover artist, some 17 year old kid by the name of Shaun Tan, was.) Now you can do full colour in short print run digital printing, or do a thing called digital offset, and get full colour covers in short print runs. Print on demand didn't exist in those days. Deciding on print runs was a matter of deciding whether photocopying, collating, guilotining and binding several hundred copies was cheaper than more traditional offset printing. From memory, the breakeven was about 400-500 copies with the printer we used. Above that number, and offset was cheaper.

The first book was Intimate Armageddons, laidout by Robert Hood, and jointly published by myself and Five Islands Press. Rob then egged me on to start MirrorDanse, partly because Five Islands wasn't really that interested.

Hope that helps.

Regz
Bill

[mirrordanse]

Hi Bill,

Do you write much these days? I'm presuming not, as you have so much other stuff going on. Do you miss writing? Will you be coming back to fiction writing at some point?

Hi Cat,

I'm looking forward to writing again. And I do miss it. These chunks of narrative keep appearing and I don't have time to do anything about them. To make some time, I've just given up reviewing, and various other distractions in the private life have been resolved. Positively!

I used to manage 3 or 4 stories a year in amongst the other stuff, now I'm down to about half of one. Ambition is to finish a novel this year, and do at least a couple of new stories.

Anyhow, have at least one new story appearing in a couple of months.

Regz
Bill

[mirrordanse]

as long as i've known you you have always had an eye out for new authors. it's been a while since i've seen you, tho, and i don't know if you still run the writing group--but is that still an interest for you?
[/quote]
Hi Ben,

Are you going to review the Ditmar shortlist? He says, one shit stirrer to another.

As for the Infinitas group, I found I wasn't having time to read the material the way the others deserved, and there were personality clashes within the group that resulted in a number of people leaving. Also, the focus of the group was shifting towards critiquing fantasy novels, which I'm not that interested in, but which the writers have every right to want.

I found I didn't have either the energy or the interest to do it well, and to remain the moderator I would have had to become some kind of tyrant, so I left them to figure it out on their own, which they seem to have done. I do miss it at times. It's a very different group now to what it was.

I'm still on the chat group thing though, and throw in an occasional comment. I suspect a couple of current members may be reading this, and several old boys and girls are, so if anybody else has any comments on the Infinitas Writers Group?

Regz
Bill

[bluetyson]

Hi Bill.

More Year's Best? Good news!

So, how do you manage to pull them off (I have both), and are they going ok?

[bluetyson]

What did you mean by major publishers doing SF in Australia? From here, or overseas?