Give us a break, Louise!

How can we foster a population with wide-ranging intellectual and creative curiosity? asks the blurb for Kevin Rudd's 2020 Summit. Don't bother to ask book publishers, for starters.

My good friend Louise Adler is the only publisher invited to the Summit and therefore has the great responsiblity of representing the interests of the entire $1.4 billion Australian book publishing industry on her own.

'I am going to Canberra to argue for more money for artists, for more support for the making of more Australian stories, a tax break for Australian book publishers, for the adoption of the French method of cultural protectionism, with a small levy on all movie tickets,' she wrote in The Age.

One can only hope her lone voice isn't drowned out by the 887 others at the Summit, including a healthy number of representatives from the film industry, theatre, TV and music.

No wonder the Australian Publishers Association is forking out a handsome sum on a new report from PR company Australian Public Affairs with the express purpose of raising the industry's profile with the Rudd Government. A pity it won't be published until after the party's over.

Bibliotherapy - the use of books to help people, especially children, better cope with their problems - goes back to the 1930s. It's easy to be cyncial about it, however, especially if you're a publisher being beseiged with proposals for books with titles like Johnny Has a Goitre, Why Spot Must Die, Meredith Has Lost Her Savings in the Sub-Prime Crisis or Mummy's Having Liposuction. Actually, that last title is almost real. My Beautiful Mommy, a tale of a little girl whose mummy has a tummy tuck and nose job, has recently been released in (where else?) the US by Big Tent Books. At last, a book to help little kiddies get over their mum's cosmetic surgery. Author Gabriela Acosta says she wrote it for her son: 'I didn't want him to think [the surgery] was because I was hurting. It was to make me feel good,' she told US magazine Newsweek. Well, it doesn't make me feel any better, Ms Acosta! Why these vanity processes are deemed necessary at all when you can buy a perfectly good foundation garment from Myer is beyond me.

Apostrophe catastrophe

Sydney shopper and blogger seunjinbing took this rather telling photograph recently at A&R's new bargain book store in George Street, Sydney. Sadly, there don't appear to be any copies of Eats, Shoots and Leaves in stock. To adapt those Government AIDS awareness ads from the 1980s: 'always use a proofreader, my dears, always.'

A Strange encounter ...

His new colleagues at Paperchain Bookshop in Canberra must have been mightily impressed by bookseller Shane Strange's reputation. A regular customer of Shane's previous employer, Riverbend Books of Brisbane, had also recently moved to Canberra. They popped into Paperchain recently and asked for Shane by name. How nice to see a familiar face. The customer? None other than our new prime minister!

How NOT to market your business?

The marketing guru Dave Patton was so annoyed that a new edition of his book How to Market Your Business was being discounted heavily by Amazon.co.uk that he wrote asking the online bookseller to stop stocking his book.

'If they’d read my book, they would know that you only discount to shift unsold volumes not new editions—this is the sixth —and certainly not on publication date,' Patton told the UK Booskeller. 'With a cover price of £12.99 they are selling it at just £8.57, so they’re giving away more than £4 a book. It’s madness.'

The madness looks set to continue. I note that, for the very first time, there were more discounted books sold in the UK than non-discounted books last year.

Poet's pay day

One week poet John Tranter is scooping a handsome $25,000 in the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and the very next his partner, Lyn Tranter of Australian Literary Management, is advertising for a personal assistant in the Weekly Book Newsletter. A reader asks: are the two events in any way related?

Edgar gets award for picking winners

Some may have been a bit surprised that someone working in television should win this year's Dromkeen Medal for contribution to Australian children's literature. Patricia Edgar is a special case, of course. Her work for the Australian Children's Television Foundation, which included commissioning series such as Winners, Kaboodle, Touch the Sun and Round the Twist, not only gave work to a lot of Australian writers, but also sold a lot of books too. At her acceptance speech for the medal on 29 February, Edgar recalled McPhee Gribble's insistence that the scriptwriters on Winners also wrote the book tie-ins, which went on to sell a staggering 200,000 copies. This gave one young scriptwriter a chance to write his first book. His name? Morris Gleitzmann.