For this month’s First Friday Club, our Program Officer Ashley Kalagian-Blunt spoke to Joel Naoum of Critical Mass, a consulting business for authors and publishers.

Evi-O’s lush, boldly inspired designs can be found on books like Nam Le’s short story collection The Boat, chef George Calombaris’ recipe book Greek, and the tea connoisseur’s favourite T2: The Book.

‘Friends and family just don’t get it like other writers do.’

Our final First Friday Club guest speaker for the year was Lou Johnson, co-founder of The Author People and former Managing Director of Simon & Schuster Australia. With an extensive 25-year career in the national and international publishing industry, Lou has witnessed and played a role in its shifting landscape. Lou moved through various sales […]

Earlier this month our First Friday Club guest was Matthew Gain, Head of Operations for Audible Australia and New Zealand. At Audible, Matthew combines his vast experience of brand and content creation with his love of storytelling. Matthew believes in the power of the voice to bring stories and characters to life. His favourite audio […]

This month’s First Friday Club was host to a lively discussion between our Executive Director, Jane McCredie, and Jill Eddington and lina Kastoumis from the Australia Council for the Arts. Jill is the Director of Literature and lina works as a Grants Officer in the Artists Services section. With the next round of Australia Council […]

For the month of August, our First Friday Club guest was Walter Mason, a travel writer, blogger and creativity teacher. Walter has written two travel novels, Destination Saigon (2010) and Destination Cambodia (2013) and also combines his passion for eastern spirituality with his writing process.  Walter’s career within the writing industry is an extremely active […]

One afternoon session of The Kids & YA Festival saw four YA authors come together to discuss their passion for young adult literature, the experiences that have enriched their story telling, and their contributions to the YA community. The panellists came from a variety of backgrounds. Both Steph Bowe and Will Kostakis began their writing […]

For the month of July our First Friday Club guest was Brendan Fredericks, a publicist and author manager who has his own freelance publicist and literary agency BFPR. In the past Brendan has worked for Hachette Australia and Bloomsbury Publishing. He has been working with authors and promoting their works since 2006 and has worked […]