As many of you know I am involved with the project Australian Women Writers and am responsible for herding the reviews by those reading non fiction, short fiction and poetry.

For a long time, Elizabeth Lhuede who started the project has wanted to experiment with video. Of course I was keen on helping out with this.

We are now starting a series of video interviews with Australian female writers. They are held informally over a Skype call and are edited and uploaded fortnightly. We hope to get better at this as we go but we also have audio and text only versions of the interviews for those who aren’t keen on the videos.

So I put out a call on Twitter for Australian female authors who wanted to be interviewed and got a lot of responses but also a lot of queries. Please retweet if needed:

Are you an Australian female #writer or a fan of one? @AusWomenWriters & I want to interview you/your writing heroine. Holler back. #aww2015

— Marisa Wikramanayake (@mwikramanayake) April 6, 2015

Here are the facts in a nutshell:

The goal:

The goal has always been the same: to ensure that women’s writing in Australia gets promoted more and becomes more visible within the country and internationally. 

We also want our authors to have something that if they choose to, they can use to promote themselves. And if they have fans, that the fans can get excited over.

Who do we interview?

You should:

1. be Australian and of any heritage whatsoever (we really aren’t bothered so long as you are a citizen/permanent resident)
2. have published or performed work that the audience can then go check out, in any genre, including non fiction and in any form including slam poetry, plays, essays, sort and flash fiction. Essentially this means a link to view/read work or to buy it.
3. be female or female identifying including cis, trans and those who are gender non conforming/genderfluid and occasionally consider themselves to be female identifying.
4. have a great webcam and be willing to be filmed and then subjected to my hopefully not too amateurish editing skills.
5. have a great landscape shot of yourself for the video thumbnail and the blog post.

What do you need to do next?

If you are keen you need to send me an email with the following:

1. A bit about yourself and what you write/perform etc
2. A copy of your latest work (pdf preferably) or links to it
3. An idea of when you are free to be interviewed and, if you are releasing/launching work at a set date in the future then the date of the release/launch and if you want your interview to go out at the same time. So that’s two dates: RECORDING DATE & RELEASE DATE. See below for release dates for videos.
4. Your landscape image of yourself so that I can at least do a review and set up part of the blog post beforehand.
5. Contact details so I can send you questions beforehand, Twitter and FB accounts so I can tag you and ask your fans to submit questions and your Skype details.

Upcoming release dates for videos:

Videos come out fortnightly on a Saturday on the Australian Women Writers website and our Youtube channel unless I fall into the pit of doom known as life. As much as possible I try to record way ahead of time.  Please check dates below if you have work coming out that you want the interview to coincide with and try to get the one closest to or right after your launch date.

Date                                       Taken?

28 March 2015                  Yes; Robin Bower

11 April 2015                      Yes

25 April 2015                      Yes

9 May 2015

23 May 2015

6 June 2015

20 June 2015

4 July 2015

18 July 2015

1 August 2015

15 August 2015

29 August 2015

12 September 2015

26 September 2015

10 October 2015

24 October 2015

7 November 2015

21 November 2015

5 December 2015

19 December 2015

I am not a writer but I am a fan so what can I do to be involved?

You can:

1. Nominate an author to be interviewed and if you want take on the role of chief nagging officer to get them to agree.
2. You can, once they agree, suggest questions and spread the word.
3. You can spread the word once the interview video is released.
4. You can join the Australian Women Writers challenge and read and review work by your author for the project, be it via Goodreads or your blog or a publication.
5. You can convince everyone you know to buy the author’s work(s).
6. If you are involved in mainstream media, you can build on our work by showcasing the author.
7. You can nominate them for all sorts of prizes and top best ___ lists and so on.

As always thank you to the writers who agree to be involved and thank you to the AWW team who are fantastically supportive. 🙂