The Official Matthew Reilly Homepage

For those of you looking for a hugely talented Australian author, may I recommend SYRUP by Maxx Barry. The author's name is actually just Max - the double-'x' on the cover is a cheeky reference to the book's subject matter: rampant over-the-top marketing. In a word, this book is awesome. It is super-fast, laugh-out-loud funny, and brilliantly satirical. The reason Max isn't as well-known as he should be in Australia is because he got his break in the US. After being rejected by all the Australian publishers (sound familiar?), Max got an agent in America and sold SYRUP to Penguin-Putnam, who then...get this ...sold the book back to their Australian affiliate! Read it. You won't be disappointed.

I'm off to the Sydney Writers Festival this coming week. I've been asked to do a reading from my work. Yes, I know, it sounds like an 18th century parlour game, but I figured I'd make it interesting. So...I thought I'd read a snippet from AREA 7, as a kind of sneak preview!

Got an email from a reader in Ireland this week. Seems that his copy of TEMPLE was somewhat unique: it had an entire 26-page section from a Wilbur Smith novel in it. Now, although I'd love to be compared with Wilbur Smith, I don't actually want to BE Wilbur Smith! Must have been a mix-up at the printers! That Irish reader is getting a new book sent to him right now.

I appeared on the top-rating morning radio show in Sydney this past week, and spoke with an announcer named Alan Jones. There is a big lesson here for aspiring authors: do every speaking engagement you can. You see, the reason I was invited to appear on that radio show was because I had done a speech the week before at the International Women's Organisation (I actually did that speech for free, as a favour for a friend's mum). At the IWO speech was a lovely lady named Nancy 'Bird' Walton, Australia's greatest female aviator (and a dead-set legend), and after hearing me speak about self-publishing CONTEST and the subsequent international sales of my books, she said, 'I'm going to write a letter to Alan Jones about you. He'd really like you.' Five days later, a researcher from the radio show called me and said that Alan would like to talk to me on air about my books. We went to air a few days later. Do every engagement you can. You never know where it will lead (another small anecdote: after I appeared on the modest but top-quality TV show, AUSTRALIAN STORY, Cleo Magazine called my publisher and asked if I would be in their 'Most Eligible Bachelors' issue! It seems the editors of Cleo Magazine watch Australian Story.) Like I said, you never know where one thing will lead. So do everything.

Hey, to put it simply: being an author these days is more than just writing the book. It now encompasses selling the book. This means getting out there and selling yourself. The days of the publicity-shy author saying to their publisher, 'I wrote the book, now you sell it' are long gone. Only a few (big-selling) authors can say this now and get away with it.

Finally, a short word on a term that I really dislike: 'POPULAR FICTION.' In fact, it is one of the few things in the publishing industry that really makes me angry.

The term 'popular fiction' (which is often used in relation to my novels) must have been coined by some really bitter author who wrote some serious book which just didn't sell. The only way to justify this failure was to say that the book was too good, that the masses were just too stupid to appreciate it. And so the term 'popular fiction' was used to describe, in a negative sense, those books that do succeed-to degrade books that have mass appeal, and thus justify the failures of those who write material that, frankly, the greater public doesn't want to read. It is the mediocre asserting some kind of superiority over the successful (by insulting the intelligence of the general public!).

As someone who reads ALL kinds of books (from Grisham to Ondaatje to the noted biographer A. Scott Berg), I find it a terrible shame that this distinction exists. We have a broadsheet newspaper here in Sydney that has pretensions of literary credibility, and every year it puts out a 'Best Young Australian Novelists' list, and every year they dismiss the so-called 'popular fiction' authors and decry the state of publishing generally. Ultimately, it seems, this newspaper's judges are impressed by authors who use similes ('I am like the raven...') and personification ('the cliffs reach for the sky, yearning, outstretched...'), as if that is the only form of writing worthy of praise. It is okay to have an opinion on what is good-that is everyone's right-it is another thing entirely to say that your opinion is the only correct one.

There is no shame in reading for enjoyment. After all, that's what 90% of the population do.

Take care, and hopefully next week I'll have a few tales from the Writers Festival.

P.S. Indoor cricket: what can I say, another win (this time by nearly 100 runs). Maybe we should move up a division...See you next week!