Jordan and Melissa are tea-drinking book lovers who each have a Masters degree in Publishing. Together, they run Bookcase Australia, a quarterly book box which seeks to share new releases from great Australian writers and enhance the reading experience by sending related items from Australian small businesses and sole traders.
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For a few months now, I have been in contact with a variety of people in the Australian writing industry, getting their different takes on this crazy world of books that we know and love.

​Beginning later today, and continuing once a week, I will be posting a series of interviews that I have had with people including:

• A school librarian 
• A NSW high school teacher 
• The Managing Editor of a small press
• The representative for international children's books at a large publishing house
• A professional book buyer
• An accounts assistant in publishing
• A debut MG/YA author
• An established Middle Grade author
• An established Young Adult author
• The curators of a quarterly book box
• A book blogger and reviewer
• A podcaster
• And more!

Check out my twitter to stay up to date with these interviews as they are posted, and if you work in an area of the industry you think needs to be covered, please get in touch! 
xox Gabi

Here's the thing about blogging: I find it I have to work up some motivation to do it. Why do something I don't really enjoy? Because I think it's necessary. Mr Salesman explains why in this post.  The real question is why don't I enjoy blogging? I love writing. I'm opinionated (my husband would say too opinionated). I could stand on a soapbox for hours. I could (and do) spend hours and hours on the internet just talking about stuff. When thinking about this, I realised that most of those hours are spent on forums, with a few on Facebook and twitter. The key here is talking to people. I don't enjoy blogging because I don't know who I'm sharing my opinions with or what they think about the matter. I'm inspired to blog when I read someone else's thoughts on a matter and want to share my own.

"Successful" blog posts get page views for two main reasons:
1) They use concise, clear language to say something that many people nod their head at and share with others.
2) They comment on something that is currently at the forefront of people's minds and contribute to a global conversation.

You may notice that this particular blog does neither of those things, but I'm going to write it anyway. This is a plug for twitter. 

I used to scoff at twitter. I thought it was for the kind of people who update their Facebook status every 20 minutes and piss off all their friends. Then I joined twitter and quickly came to realise that a tweet is not a status update. That "followers" are not "friends". Tweets are conversation and 99% of my followers are people I've never met in real life. I don't know the names of their kids. And they don't know the names of mine (because, privacy yo).


Twitter helps with successful blog reason #1 by providing an avenue for people who don't know you to share what you have to say. It helps with successful blog reason #2 by showing you what people are thinking about and where the global conversation is. So, really, today I should have been posting about feminism because this week Julien Blanc got kicked out of my country, some X Factor judge released a song with misogynistic lyrics and Time magazine suggested we ban the word feminism. Sorry about that.

Long story short: if you have a blog, get on twitter. They go hand in hand.