His letter will be quoted from like a Monty Python sketch in the world of book retail for years to come.

Well done Mr Rimmer, immortality is thine!

Aug 10: Today Chris Burgess, the general manager of Leading Edge Books, has sent out his own letter of financial demands to Australian publishers and distributors.

For entertainment value, I think Rimmer’s letter is hard to beat. I particularly liked the offer of a 10 minute meeting (in Melbourne!) to discuss “in more detail”. Instead of “best regards”, he may as well have finished with “Feel free to @#*% off”.

There’s also an excellent thread on Making Light.

Not too sure there’s going to be too many more communiques from Mr Rimmer in the future, but surely there’s a place for him in the house on BB08?

OMGWTFFROTFLMAOLOTRROTK!!!

I’ve only just realised that the A&R rep responsible for sending out the letter is called Rimmer!

What a masterful rude letter, and how very instructive to read for anyone upthread who thinks this is all about ‘forcing’ a retailer to make uneconomic decisions through regulation. It’s all about a big company making very poor, out-of-touch and arrogant decisions that will bite it on the arse before long. Meanwhile holding back locally published work and reducing the choice available to its customers.

I recall in the last couple of years a Patrick White manuscript being offered to publishers by a journo and rejected. The Brilliance wasn’t recognised!!!

Few people actually bother to think this one through from the publisher’s perspective.

This is why I prefer to avoid the term.

Of course there are always niche writing jobs: my first paid position was in fact as a casual/part-time writer for a private investigator. There are quite a number of technical writing jobs out there at the moment, and in my current work (officially, a transcriber/audio typist) I currently seem to be doing one or two small writing tasks (I’m not kidding myself, though – it’s never going to feature heavily in my resume when I leave that job). So writing positions certainly do exist within the purview of private business, and could only be expected to grow, given the growing importance of the ‘information economy’.

I’m being equivocal about your response, CDB, because I don’t really have all that much direct familiarity with the mainstream of the Aussie literature industry. I do know that many writers claim to ‘write for themselves’; many others, under the influence of postmodernism and earlier movements, write less for a wide audience than for a small coterie of friends that may understand them. But it’s rhetorically a bit unfair to attribute all this to the grant system, or to overestimate what it means for Aussie literature as a whole.

I do think the rise of home computers, blogging, home publishing and niche publishing do augur well for publishing and writing as a whole into the future, and to me it seems natural and desirable that the influence of public servants (through grants, restrictions on the publishing market, etc) should be wound back in favour of these new voices.