Susan Midalia is an author, freelance editor, mentor and workshop facilitator with a new novel, Everyday Madness, out this month. In this article she shares what she’s learned from her publication experiences. If you’re a writer yourself, make sure you read her tips at the end of the article.
Hi, I’m Emma Young. My debut novel, The Last Bookshop, is about Cait Copper, owner of the last bookshop in the city centre and the last independent store remaining on the city’s most exclusive strip. Cait thought she’d reached happily ever after when she opened Book Fiend, but the city’s changing. Costs are rising, profits are dropping and global brands are circling her prime location. After one final disaster, Cait’s got to make a tough call: go down – or stand up and fight?
Last year was a great year for Helen Milroy. Her work was shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Book Awards, the Readings Children’s Book Prize and the Speech Pathology Australia Book of the Year Awards, while reviewers called her picture book Backyard Birds vibrant, bright, beautiful, wonderful, colourful and bold. In 2021 the First Nations author and illustrator returns to the backyard with her new picture book, Backyard Bugs. She shared some more details with us in the interview below.
‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,’ George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch, ‘it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’
What happens when you put two podcasters into one studio? You get podcast mashup audio magic! In this episode host Rebecca Higgie celebrates the release of her debut novel, The History of Mischief, while Dani Vee celebrates the three-year anniversary of her tiny podcast with big ideas.
What a month it’s been! Congratulations to our Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards winners and shortlisted authors: Fiona Burrows, Amanda Curtin, Rafeif Ismail, Kathryn Lefroy, Caitlin Maling, Meg McKinlay, Helen Milroy, Holden Sheppard and Ellen van Neerven. We are so proud of you all.
Kelly Canby’s new book, Littlelight, is already on the reprint list after COVID-19 led Fremantle Press to let our booksellers get the book earlier than its release date. In this e-interview, Kelly tells us more about the book and shares some recent news.
You may have noticed we’ve got a picture at the bottom of our newsletter that lets you know we’re a not-for-profit publishing house. So what is not-for-profit publishing?
A.J. Betts had the idea for Hive eight years before she commenced writing it and 13 years before it was released. In between, she published three books, won an Emmy Award and did a PhD in the topic of wonder. A.J. said the idea for Hive came to her while she was on the Graham Farmer Freeway in Perth: ‘The traffic was really slow and I noticed the drip in the tunnel and I thought, that’s weird … In what situation would a drip be a problem or a danger?’