Sophie Cunningham of the "Meanjin" blog and Estelle of "3000 Books" were both at the Aireys Inlet Festival of Words and seemed to have a good time. Sophie's central thought about the festival rings true: "...I sold a lot of copies of my book and was struck, once again, about how much more effective these small festivals are at selling books, and by how many of the audience had read the authors appearing over the weekend, in preparation for hearing them."
The Melbourne Writers' Festival blog has kicked off with intros by Estelle of "3000 Books", Frenchelbow, Louise (Festival Administrator), Nina (Development Manager), Helenka (Festival Manager), and Jane (Volunteer Co-ordinator). I wonder what the difference is between a Manager and an Administrator.
This isn't Australian but Australian writers certainly need to know about it, and rejoice at the news. [Thanks to Lee Goldberg for the link.]
I normally follow a whole raft of weblogs - Australian and international - using the RSS reader Bloglines. Somehow or other, over the past month, Justine Larbalestier's weblog has stopped appearing, so I've missed a lot of the discussions about her latest book and the problems associated with the US edition cover. In a nutshell, Larbalestier's novel Liar features a protagonist "Micah [who] is black with nappy hair which she wears natural and short." The proposed US cover featured a white girl with long straight hair. The author was rather annoyed with that decision and said so loudly. Now it appears that the US publishers have relented and Larbalestier is very pleased with the result.
