Should We Be Publishing Fewer Books in Australia?
With growing calls to address the viability of local literature, we asked people across the book industry their thoughts on the pace of Australian publishing.
Last year, Upswell publisher Terri-ann White made a proposition: to improve the quality and sustainability of Australian literature, what we need is fewer books on the market. With a recent Guardian article by Catriona Menzies-Pike continuing the conversation about the pace of local publishing, we asked publishers, agents, booksellers and writers to add their voices to the conversation.
Rachel Bin Salleh – publisher, Magabala Books
The currency of life is time. It is only with time that our nature is revealed. Time is the fabric of the storytelling journey. We have an ancient need to connect. To be told stories, to tell them, to grow, to nourish. This truth resonates in our spirit. Growing stories, writing, illustrating and connecting takes time. Writing takes time.
This industry produces, creates and publishes books for a variety of reasons. As a First Nations publisher at a First Nations publishing house the breadth of storytelling is the beating heart of what we do. The unspoken truths, myths, Laws, ways of being are what sustains us—all of us. It is through our authors, illustrators and creative humanity that we can sustain storytelling in all its forms. Connection is one, if not the most important reason, people read books.
At what point did we (in this industry) forget that time is needed? In the publishing industry, time is not your friend. It’s all about quick turnaround and the selling and never about how we got there. Our deadlines dictate that everything was due last week. Increasingly we are ignoring time. We’re producing books for sale at an exponential rate and yet growth doesn’t equal impact. We are producing at an unsustainable rate, in an unrealistic timeframe, for an industry that has been ignored for too long and looks to be slowly dying.
Australian publishing needs unprecedented levels of investment from government. We collectively need to support Australian content, publishing houses, investment in onshore printers, paper, freight, distribution, bookshops, tax incentives and especially growing readers, literacy and engagement. To ignore this country’s oldest storytelling form, or the gift of imagination from books, to ignore writing, reading and the richness of diversity of voices, is to the detriment of our society and our humanity.
Books and reading are at the heart of our society and literacy is one of the cornerstones of our ‘economy’. Without the time taken to grow our stories, we do not have a fully functioning economy or society (whatever that means these days). It is time to do right by valuing these cultural gifts.
Meredith Curnow – publisher, Penguin Australia
At Penguin, we have guidelines around how many books each publisher in the adult team publishes and how many we publish as a group annually. That is twelve each, and no more than a hundred across the team. Sometimes books aren’t ready and they move back in the schedule, particularly in my experience, non-fiction. In 2025 I published only ten books. There are limits, too, for our brilliant team of in-house editors. These rulings are to ensure we can commit full resources, from end to end of the business, to each and every book and author.
Writers are often surprised at how long it takes from manuscript delivery to publication day. To allay these concerns, we aim to provide comprehensive schedules (sometimes overwhelming schedules) setting out stages, the number of times the manuscript will be returned to them, all the different readers who are working to ensure the manuscript achieves its best version, when our teams will start to sell it into retailers, and the rest. If those dates won’t work we adjust. The author has to be our guide, and we must make sure they are comfortable speaking up.
I think the number of books I publish each year—ideally that is six fiction and six non-fiction titles (not sure if it ever works out that way)—each of them years in the writing and production, is manageable. For me, for Penguin and for the market. Encouraging people to read widely, helping them find the stories and formats that are right for them, ensuring people see the value in books—financially (five coffees, one cinema experience, etc), culturally, psychically, emotionally—seems to me to be the priority for all of us to take on, individually and collectively.
Declan Fry – author, Fantasy Ransom (upcoming); critic and poet
What incenses me is Australia’s colonial insistence on selling itself to the US for data. Art cannot be reduced to data. But governments and tech barons hungry for resources and monetary extraction prize emptiness and data is a perfectly empty vessel. Questions like creativity, inspiration or art are just tawdry to tech fantasists.
I want to be excited by Australian books. It happens! I was stunned by reading Patrick White. Garner. Philip Hammial is a god; that dude deserves way more attention. I love books like Jump Cuts and Working Hot. I want to see books do their own thing. I appreciate a book is always doing its own thing; but getting the book that does its own thing published is another story. We all know tales about how difficult publication can be, whether it’s Alexis Wright’s struggle to publish Carpentaria or writers like Nietzsche and Charlotte Brontë struggling to find publishers.
I’ve been very lucky to find the loveliest agent imaginable and a wonderful publisher in Upswell. I’m really lucky and I just count my blessings, honestly. My hopes for my own book? I reconcile myself to the fact I have no control. The great passion for me is in the writing. No one can take that element away. It belongs solely to me, the author, and to the work. Once Fantasy Ransom is out in the world, it then belongs to others. But I hope—no; I believe—everyone should read it and have passionate, even violent opinions about it. If they don’t, then I’ve failed. I will have to write another book and try and get it right the next time.
Joel Naoum – publishing director, Letterwing (Hachette Australia)
Should we be publishing fewer books? Yes. And every publisher has agreed with this for as long as anyone remembers. There’s an old story about a finance director who asked a room full of publishers, ‘Why don’t you just publish the books that sell?’ We laugh because it’s the whole job. Fewer, better books has been the stated aim of every house I’ve worked in. Saying it is easy. Knowing which books to let go of is not.
It’s always been a balancing act. Publish fewer books without taking chances on new voices and there’s no next generation of Australian authors. Take chances on everything and nobody gets the support they deserve. A sustainable industry needs discipline and risk at the same time, and a publisher’s real work is holding those two things together without dropping either.
Letterwing, a dedicated publishing imprint for Hachette’s Australian titles, is our answer to a different problem: invisibility. Australian publishers already do an enormous amount of work finding, developing and backing local authors and stories, and most of it happens where readers never see it. We built the imprint to put a name and a face on work we were already doing. Fewer books, better books and we’re going to be louder about the ones we believe in. Make the invisible visible.
Adam Ouston – author, Mine; publisher, Evercreech Editions
We are, in many ways, the most privileged readers in history when it comes to books. We have access to more or less everything that’s been published since Gutenberg’s printing of the 42-line Bible. We can as easily acquire Rabelais as we can Robinson Crusoe or Rowling. I love that. My work fuses together just about everything I can get my hands on, so in this respect I’m spoiled.
The question itself is very broad, and the answer changes depending on who you are. If you’re thinking about literary excellence (whatever that might mean), then shoving something out the door half-baked is a problem. But that also means writers need to be extra vigilant with whatever leaves their desks. Nothing new there. If you’re a bookseller, the turnover of titles is high, but you’re always going to have things that stand out and stick around. If you’re a publisher, you’re banking on several of your gambles coming up trumps. Nothing new there, either. If you’re a first-time writer: there’s probably never been a better time to have your work published. As a publisher myself, my goal is not commercial, it’s cultural. I’ve published one book and will probably do another one when the time is right. I want to elevate writers and good writing and hope they reach readers who appreciate good writing. There has probably never been a better time for doing that, either, because the glut of books just means a huge amount of it is subpar.
In short, I’m not sure it’s a problem. Yes, too many books are published, but you can find gold in there if you dig. Nothing’s changed there, either.
Mark Rubbo – chairman, Readings Books
The traditional ways readers found out about new books—newspaper reviews, feature articles, radio interviews—are becoming less effective as the media landscape becomes more and more fragmented and alternative channels emerge. I feel that there was a time when Australian readers were keen to read stories that reflected their own experiences; it doesn’t feel like that so much anymore, although many more Australian voices are being published and many of those voices struggle to find audiences. I read a lot of Australian fiction and most of it is good, some of it is very good but it’s competing with writers around the world.
Booksellers play a crucial role in championing Australian fiction but there isn’t any recognition of our support for that role. They could do a lot more but often they are struggling to stay afloat. The Australian Booksellers Association recently received funding from Writing Australia to support bookshops with their events programs; this is a good start. However, if one looks at government support given to French booksellers, this is almost insignificant. Booksellers need to be able to compete technologically with the likes of Amazon; they need to have access to efficient sustainable supply chains and back-end systems to support them. Why can’t Australian booksellers sell their customers eBooks for example? We need a diversity of publishers and of bookshops to sustain our culture and to find creative ways to support them; I’m sure that any author would prefer that their income comes from royalties, from the fact that people are buying and reading their books.
David Ryding – director, Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature Office
I’d be nervous about any model that restricts the number and diversity of voices in a sector which already struggles to reflect the full range of what makes up Australia in the 21st century. Framing the problem as one of too much volume also risks missing the real issue, that the infrastructure that supports the sector is unbalanced and under-resourced.
Looking at our UNESCO network, China imposes an explicit government quota on book output, but it’s a censorship mechanism, not a quantity control. France uses fixed book pricing laws and public subsidy to protect a large, diverse output as a cultural good. Iceland shows another model altogether with roughly one in ten Icelanders publishing a book in their lifetime, and that volume is treated as a source of national pride, not a problem to be solved. This resonates with me.
The response shouldn’t be that Australia should publish less. It’s that we should be investing in the structures, funding, distribution and readership development that let the volume we already have actually thrive and celebrating every book we publish, and the sector, as a national pride.
Marina Sano and Jing Xuan Teo, Amplify Bookstore
At Amplify, we only stock books by BIPOC authors and can safely say that while there is an overwhelming quantity of new publishing being shown to us, the proportion of what is by local BIPOC authors remains a sad, meagre percentage. Yet, some of our personal favourites and bestselling titles in-store are by such local authors (Fierceland, Immortal Dark, When Sleeping Women Wake, The Rot). The vast majority of the quality of what we see coming through is exceptional. It’s considered, it’s personal and, perhaps because of the hurdle of selling more ‘niche’ stories, more likely to be coming from small presses who generally publish less and with more care.
But even on the events circuit, with so few peers to choose from, we also hear of fatigue of repeatedly being set on the same panels with the exact same people. To us, a healthier bookselling and publishing ecosystem will see these authors with more support from in-house, an output that generates and supports more industry peers, and a broader, more representative view of our population demographics rather than the largely monocultural output that currently exists.
Barry Scott – founder and publisher, Transit Lounge
Can we ever have too much art, culture or books? I don’t think so. Yet Australian publishing can sometimes feel like putting a message in a bottle and hoping it washes up somewhere receptive: with reviewers, booksellers and, ideally, readers. As a publisher, the books you love most are sometimes ignored, dismissed or deemed unsellable by stores. But to ignore original, adventurous voices defeats the purpose of spending so much time developing, producing and trying to get books read. Those surprising writers can be found in genre fiction as well as literary fiction.
As an independent publisher, I am constantly rejecting manuscripts, many of which I know could become strong books with more editing or development. Perhaps those books might once have found a place when our world was smaller. I hate to think of great writers being lost or giving up. A published writer once told me that ‘anything good gets published’. I am sure that is not the case. The wider industry has pivoted towards BookScan figures and sales trends, especially as production costs have risen, and good authors whose last book did not sell are often moved on.
I agree that too many similar books are published at once, and even the covers can feel tiringly bland. We also remain overly preoccupied with international stars and New York Times bestseller lists (still!). The real question is: how do we grow our industry and foster readers, especially when sales can be low? We have the talent, editors, designers, booksellers, festivals and awards. Government arts support for independent publishers, arts media, rights sales, libraries, writers’ centres and prioritising local books may seem old-fashioned, even parochial, but they have never been more essential.
Martin Shaw – literary agent, Shaw Literary
I don’t find this question very illuminating in itself (what would a notional ‘good’ quantity actually be?), and I personally haven’t encountered the alleged ‘rush jobs’ in the publishing process with my authors—in fact invariably the diametric opposite! However, I think it does make you reflect on the ever-worsening health of Australia’s literary ecosystem. Another round of consolidation has just taken place, for instance, and fewer publishing professionals is a loss to the industry, whatever way you look at it.
The number of active independent presses too can now be pretty much counted on one hand, striking a blow for the left-field, the not immediately commercially oriented, and the author who would rather save themselves (and us!) the embarrassment of contorting themselves into some sort of Instagram ‘hipness’ to try and drum up a sale.
At the end of the day then I have to believe the worthy will still shine, ‘glut’ or not? After all, there are still a good number of really committed Oz publishers (and dare I say agents!) out there—but the current scenario does remain unideal for sure. Last I heard though, Writing Australia was going to fix a whole lot of this (eg, support for both authors and publishers that the market just can’t provide), so I’m going to continue to watch that space!
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