I HAVE LOST faith in the cultural stakes of how we ‘do’ writing and reading. Publishing, as the midwife-enabler connecting these two acts, is implicated here. If aspiring writers had a greater understanding of the economic base for making books they may not have as frenzied a desire to join the throng.

Two declarations: first, I’m sick of being in that creepy, shiny world of creative industries rather than occupying an artistic world where language and story rule. Publishing is a proper industry anyway, albeit an old-fashioned and wasteful one slowly attempting to clean up its act. 

This neoliberal reframing of the arts into ‘creative industries’ first took hold in the UK with Tony Blair and his attempt to make the country’s image less frumpy and more innovative: New Labour lumped disparate industries together under the guise of creating a so-called ‘enterprise economy’. This ethos has continued with gusto in the twenty-first century, with artistic development corralled into corporate spaces while creative professionals are expected to perform their roles with sharpened governance, purpose and glad-handing to prove more is achieved by following a new regime of accountability. (This accountability may include matters of sustainability, longevity, support, perhaps even a case study or two of censoring themes and content, the subtlety of shaping agendas.) Aligning creativity and economics – huh, what an innovation! It’s great to have the strategy people and money people around the board table, but artists think too.

It may be the case that we all had more fun at artists’ parties when the drinks and canapés weren’t as fancy, when the robustness of purpose, negotiation and talk was a little more unbridled, perhaps even anarchic, but mostly productive. When artistic expression was not hitched to the wagon of market efficiency.

My second declaration won’t win me any friends: the cultural/creative industry of creative-writing postgraduate degrees in Australian universities has queered the pitch and, from its inception at the end of last century, slowly created an unfortunate orthodoxy of form and intent, a bundle of unrealisable ambition that carries as a side project a lexicon of entitlement: the graduate student having a clearer run to publication. 

I am calling this out with the same confidence university leaders back in the 1990s showed when they identified this new area of growth as a good little earner: I am a former teacher of creative writing in universities, and an external examiner of higher degrees over decades. In 2004, I was given a brilliant opportunity to establish a new fiction list at Perth’s UWA Publishing (I became its director in 2006), a university-based publishing house that had not previously involved itself in creative writing. My first steps were to write to key contacts at every Australian university with a writing program. I knew from my attendance at conferences that very few of the manuscripts completed in master’s and PhD programs were being taken up by publishers, and thought I could do my bit to cut down on the waste – and hopefully find some great examples of original writing. I’m happy to say that the first book released under the UWA Publishing imprint in 2005 was the novel Cusp by Josephine Wilson, who went on to win the Miles Franklin Award in 2017 for her acclaimed second novel Extinctions.

Why am I so disappointed with the idea of building creative writers in universities, then? In large part my problem is with diversity and range. I am writing as the publisher and founder of Upswell, a not-for-profit imprint that’s four years old. I’m surprised Upswell is described so often as ‘ambitious’, which got me thinking about the impact over the last couple of decades of the creative-industries mandate on publishing – an industry that now shares the homogeneity we see in university creative output.

I understand that well-made, conventional novels are appealing to many readers and are certainly the strongest route to building a career as a writer. But I’m always looking for ambition in work produced in an English or humanities school. If you spend years working on a novel and its exegesis and don’t talk to scholars – as well as your mentors and supervisors – across humanities and social sciences, or interrogate the library collections, I reckon you have short-changed yourself. 

MY VIEW AT the end of 2024, a very difficult year in publishing, was that much of this mature industry is in some form of freefall, and it is always the ambitious that suffer. The pride and shame of players in the publishing business keep us silent, and it is difficult to mount evidence of an industry-wide decline: stats are hard to get from the regulators and clear commercial figures are impossible to extract from publishers (for obvious reasons of commercial-in-confidence). We also don’t have the media space for discussing the realities of publishing trends and the intense competition of the market. (There is some good research occurring in scholarly spaces, but much of it is not easily accessible to non-academic readers.) From the outside, things may appear peachy. But in mid 2017, when Catriona Menzies-Pike published a piece of mine in the Sydney Review of Books about the state of play in Australian publishing (‘The Marketing Was Crap’), I was busy for at least three weeks responding to the robust correspondence I received: by and large agreeing with my key points but also asking why publishing is so opaque and hard to understand. 

Today’s onslaught of available content (not just in books and writing) and the concurrent impossibility of wading through it all to select the new or the significant or the simple exploding pleasure of language (remember that?) is likely part of where the current malaise began, and not just for me. So much is on trend these days, with great swathes of the population all reading the same book simultaneously, and so much of this is generated by the star-making machinery of billion-dollar multinational publishing houses with gigantic marketing budgets. (Remember the colouring-in book trend for adults? I wish I could forget it.) 

These publishers are the tastemakers, shaping and influencing reader selections. Their marketing-driven approach overstates, often incoherently, the brilliance of a book by an award-winning author, with suitably gushing endorsements all over the cover to get the purchaser over the line – alongside a blurb chock-a-block with superlatives. Merchants of Culture, a terrific book by John B Thompson that I have treasured since its publication by Polity in 2010, describes the trend that began around the end of the last millennium whereby a smaller number of books account for a larger share of a publisher’s revenue because of the ‘perverse incentive within the large publishing corporations to pay more for books rather than less…the more you pay, the bigger the book’. (Thompson also offers the cautionary note that a big book ‘is not a bestseller; it is merely a hoped-for bestseller’.)

Since 2017, social media – and its ability to serve up a full-throttled assault each day based on my algorithms – has further exploded and become a more dangerous place. (Yes, I know I sound hypocritical for saying this and continuing to post daily as the publisher of Upswell, but I do have bills to pay.) As I am writing this, I am enduring the best books of 2024 circus, an online spectacle that elicits a range of responses from publishers and authors alike: despair at not getting a listing or crowing to whomever is listening (or scrolling) when they make one or more lists. No wonder, too, that such lists are dominated by US and UK titles, same as it ever was…and they’re then followed by the most anticipated books for the new year,enabling the media to be proud of their enormous contribution to the princely art of book publishing. Social media is now a huge part of this trendsetting, bestseller-making marketing machine.

What often surprises me is the homogeneity of these round-ups, a consequence of the narrowing of mass-market publishing now that books have entered the category of fast-moving consumer goods in both marketing and distribution terms. If you don’t believe me, you should look at the market share of book sales into discount department stores/supermarkets and online megastores, and the astonishing discounts these retailers offer customers. 

The last thing I want to be thought of here is as a nostalgic fool, but I remember when I was a young woman running a bookshop filled with literature and books projecting better, fairer worlds. I kept abreast of what publishing was making into trends, and I was also trying to write fiction. I fell in love with both new and old voices as heroic small presses did their good work of supporting writers and rescuing those who had been forgotten across an entire century – usually women. That period, starting for me in the 1980s, was as rich as you’d find – not simply being captured by the new. Visiting bookshops these days (with some exceptions from risk-taking proprietors) is a bruising encounter with the narrowing of tropes in fiction and the (entirely understandable) turn to escapism in the different types of genre novels and celebrity confessions. 

Every regular reader, I am sure, has at least one anecdote of the unstoppable hand-selling bookshop worker who turned you onto a new writer and upended your life (in a good way!). Bookshops attend to the symbolic value of books through prestige, prizes and intellectual acclaim, and that thread hopefully remains in enough of them in this age of the wall of foiled bestsellers. I am only in this business because I am passionate about writing and what can happen when a book-length project finds its way into the right hands or earns itself a champion, but I despair most days at the hard heads and dead hands of readers who stay in the same lane: the only one they know. 

THESE CIRCUMSTANCES CAN be as bruising for writers as they are for readers. When the great gates of exclusion were opened a decade or so ago to writers previously overlooked (young women, people of colour, LGBTQI+ people, people with disabilities, among others), I became concerned as a reader about whether their publishers were supporting them through what were often traumatic testimonies. It was the post-publication period I was worried about, particularly if the book hadn’t realised its potential in sales or coverage. This was a risky space for all, but mainly the author, usually first-time and with a book that laid bare their own trauma in a confessional mode and may not have been the first manuscript they took to the publisher. I know of authors who entered such publishing agreements because they yearned for an ongoing career, but when a first bruising ‘failure’ in sales results foreshortened everything, it diminished their confidence in the wake of cooling interest. 

All that yearning and all those expectations. Many new writers still hold on to a dream that they can give up their day job, but this is a fantasy that cannot work in a nation with a population of twenty-seven million. The slide in annual total revenue from book sales that is evident in the years since our COVID-19 readathon is estimated to continue for (at least) the next five years and is only propped up, if I may say, by the fact that educational books (primary, secondary, tertiary) represent 41 per cent of total annual sales. That sales revenue is close to $2 billion: sixty-nine million books sold, with around 22,000 new Australian titles released each year and the average retail selling price a mere $18.69.

There are 3,700 people employed in publishing – a small industry, really – according to the surveys (via the Australian Publishers Association). Those interested people following current trends here and worldwide will know that mergers and acquisitions in the sector are a regular news item and, ultimately, make it harder for independent houses to maintain a presence in a boisterous market where it can be easier for bookshops to follow the dominant players and probably get some added benefits for doing so. Who knows how this market will fare a year on and how many Australian voices will be included. Right now, the unspoken reality is that advances to authors are spiralling downwards along with sales and, obviously, royalty payments. Fewer and fewer writers reach what they expected in financial and career-building stakes, even those making new books fairly and squarely in the mainstream.

In Thompson’s book, he discusses the arrival in the late 1980s of new-wave agents with chutzpah who lifted the bar on advances and took book sales to auction for the first time. In my reckoning, this was the moment celebrity publishing really hit its stride: when people other than film stars and musicians became ‘celebrities’, sometimes on a fairly flimsy basis. It certainly set a benchmark for the creation of unrealistic expectations for writers and engendered a sense of failure for first-time authors receiving a small advance. I am sure it also incited envy when manuscripts didn’t incite a bidding war.

In the new etiquette of social media, each book apparently needs its own framework and journey, while authors, debut or veteran, are expected to muck in and do their own marketing and ‘brand building’ in the online marketplace. That’s what it looks like, anyway, to this observer. I am supposedly an insider but am perpetually perplexed by the fame stakes involved in becoming an author these days, as well as the claim that authors have viable careers. The journey to publication is documented with posts about a finished manuscript, the inevitable rejection, the joy of the signed contract, the unboxing…and on it goes. Advice sought and given, diagrammatic and often hardcore in its declarations and honesty. I want to be published, more than anything, ever. Questions posed about the best way to plot and how to keep plot points from getting out of hand. 

But writing takes time, and slow-cooked books are usually richer than quick ones written in response to a trend. Not that long ago, the rule of thumb was to seek publication for your first book after an apprenticeship spent writing shorter works for journals and magazines, which enabled confidence to build gently; to aim to begin approaching publishers in your mid thirties. For me, this was assisted by a writing group who knew my work and not by an external fee-for-service mentor coming cold to a manuscript. (As a publisher I always caution against bringing in a third party, as anything can happen and not necessarily in the positive.)

And how does criticism remain robust and meaningful when media attention to books and ideas has reduced profoundly, as we have seen in past years? How many books editors remain in Australian newspapers and magazines, controlling the traffic of too many new releases every month? I’ve seen the horror videos of hundreds of books banked up in editorial offices, sucking the oxygen out of the rooms and, I’m sure, stripping the will to live from those who commission reviews and plead with managers for more resources and column inches. Australia Post continues to do very well from book-sector traffic when publishers hustling for an almost impossible-to-land review spend a fortune in freight costs every week (and we still don’t have a special book post rate, as do other nations that support cultural work). Each of these stages, however, can be seen as provisional, sometimes hardly worth the costs and effort involved.

For me, the disconnect between the romance and loftiness of writing and the market efficiencies of a commercial industry, whether the publisher is a billion-dollar multinational or a tiny, bones-of-bum independent and not-for-profit, is awkward and painful to participate in. Writing doesn’t need to be published to have value but, on the flipside, much writing doesn’t warrant being published.

EVERY TIME I hand over a book fresh from the press to its author for the first time (now on more than 500 occasions and many of them in a virtual ceremony), I am overcome by the fierce and dedicated work that went into making it, and usually the pride I feel at being part of its creation as a trusted collaborator. I carry all my hopes that it’ll reach readers and be admired – which is how a book comes to life. But I cannot, alongside my trusty colleagues in independent publishing, put any bets on it becoming an instant, or even a long-term, success. The sales results from the first months are exciting if you are lucky, but they can still be obliterated by bookshop returns of unsold copies. Precious bookshop shelves are too valuable in today’s corporatised mass market to hold slow-moving books for too long. These days the lifespan of a book is around six weeks, and when those big commercial novelists who used to release two books per year now have six a year, there is little oxygen left for the rest, especially those by first-timers. The seemingly never-ending series model can keep a reader in chains for decades.

It is clear the long, slow burn to write a book, and for it to be discovered by readers, is more in keeping with what we know of literature: both its writing and its reading. We need new methods to get books of substance into the hands of readers.

Let us slow things down on all fronts, if we can.

Image courtesy of 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay