INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING CONFERENCE 2015 INDUSTRY RESEARCH DAY

INDUSTRY RESEARCH DAY TIME 8:15am 8:45am

ARRIVALS, COFFEE AND TEA WELCOME Aaron Mannion and Beth Driscoll

9:00am AUSTRALIAN BOOKS AT HOME AND AWAY

Beth Driscoll, ‘Bestsellers between Australia and Canada’ Lucy Sussex and Meg Tasker, ‘The Hansom Cab as Independent Publishing Phenomenon’ Susan Hawthorne, ‘Opportunities and Challenges of Small Press Publishing in the Global Market’ Tracy O’Shaughnessy and Brigid Magner, ‘Winner Takes All: Travails of the Australian Mid-List Author’ 10:45am 11:15am

MORNING TEA GLOBAL READERSHIPS, LOCAL BOOKS Millicent Weber, ‘The Literary Festival as Economic and Cultural Project: A Creative Industries Perspective’ Rose Donohoe, ‘Relics of the Analogue Age? The Book Clubs of Generation Y’ Michelle Goldsmith, ‘Exploring Speculative Fiction Readerships and Author-Reader Interactions in the Post-Digital Era’

12:45pm

LUNCH

1:45pm

AGAINST THE FLOW: SOME DOUBTS ABOUT LITERARY TRANSNATIONALISM Featuring: Ivor Indyk

2:45pm

LITERARY INSTITUTIONS: THEIR HISTORIES AND FUTURES Nathan Hollier, ‘The University Press in Australia - Which Way Forward?’ Emmett Stinson, ‘Australian Literary Journals, the Cultural Cringe, and World Literary Space’ Jocelyn Hargrave, ‘Transtextual Editorial Margins: The Evolution of Editorial Practice in Nineteenth-Century Australia’ Sybil Nolan and Matthew Ricketson, ‘Book Reviews in the Saturday Newspapers: An Update’

4:30pm

AFTERNOON TEA

5:00pm COMMUNITY BEYOND GEOGRAPHY

Jan Zwar, ‘The Fragmentation of Book Promotion Channels: Publishers and Authors Respond to New Challenges’ Justin Clemens and Paul Ashton, ‘Absolutely Unsustainable Innovation’ 6:30pm

CLOSE

THURSDAY 19TH NOVEMBER BESTSELLERS BETWEEN CANADA AND AUSTRALIA Publishing is a global industry, in which a range of economic and cultural forces affect whether books travel beyond their national markets and how they are received by readers in new territories. Knowledge of how these forces operate is valuable for publishers seeking to negotiate global markets and for researchers of contemporary books and reading. This paper draws on research conducted by Beth Driscoll (University of Melbourne) and DeNel Rehberg Sedo (Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada) into the movement of titles between Canada and Australia, two second-tier markets with similarly structured publishing industries, adjacent to powerful literary centres. Previous work on world literary space has addressed ‘national literatures’ and their varying levels of symbolic capital (eg Casanova 2004). In contrast, our work focuses on bestselling books, a category with understudied transnational cultural impacts. Our research identifies books first published in Australia that have become Canadian top 100 bestsellers and books first published in Canada that have become Australian top 100 bestsellers between 2004 and 2014. This paper presents analysis of five of these titles, each of which has an early association with an independent publisher: The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton, The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and Life of Pi by Yann Martel. For each, we present a publication history that traces the industrial processes by which the book has moved transnationally, and an analysis of its reception by media organisations and Canadian or Australian readers online. Our early findings suggest that transnational success is often mediated by multinational media entities and can sometimes “wash’’ titles of their national character, rendering them global products. Beth Driscoll Beth Driscoll joined the Publishing and Communications program at the University of Melbourne in 2013. Her monograph, The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan), was published in 2014 and is based on her doctoral research into contemporary forms of middlebrow literary culture including Oprah’s Book Club, the Man Booker Prize and literary festivals. Beth’s current research investigates the ways contemporary readers respond to books (both online and offline), genre fiction writing and publishing communities, and the effects of digital technology on literary culture.

THE HANSOM CAB AS INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING PHENOMENON In nineteenth-century Australasia, though overseas publishing dominated, there was also a thriving independent scene, with figures such as George Robertson (of Melbourne) and Cole of the Book Arcade. Although the market was small, it was very keen: even in the 1860s the appetite for books in Melbourne was described as huge. This paper will examine a major independent Australian publishing phenomenon, and its consequences: Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, semi-self published in 1886, to great local and then even greater international success. Hume had been rejected by colonial and British publishers, but with his friend Frederick Trischler raised the money for a print run of 5000, large for the Australian market. It sold out rapidly. When Trischler took the book to Britain, with the independent Hansom Cab Publishing Co., it became a blockbuster. This paper will look at how the book changed fortunes, and sparked a series of successful independent books in Melbourne: Hume’s Professor Brankel’s Secret; and follow-up detective novels published by Kemp & Boyce, printers of the Hansom Cab. They were not as successful as the Hansom Cab, but still sold out large print runs. Yet the overseas publication of the novel would eventually ruin Kemp & Boyce. From the Hansom Cab Publishing Co. would emerge Trischler & Co., a short-lived but briefly very successful publishing company, independent, and in London. Lucy Sussex Lucy Sussex was born in New Zealand in 1957. She has degrees in English and Librarianship from Monash University, and is a freelance researcher, editor and writer. She has published widely, writing anything from literary criticism to horror and detective stories. In addition she is a literary archaeologist, rediscovering and republishing the nineteenth-century Australian crime writers Mary Fortune and Ellen Davitt. Her short story, `My Lady Tongue’ won a Ditmar (Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award) in 1988. In 1994 she was a judge for the international Tiptree award, which honours speculative fiction exploring notions of gender. Her first adult novel, The Scarlet Rider, is about biography, Victorian detective fiction, voodoo and a ghost. Meg Tasker

INDUSTRY RESEARCH DAY Associate Professor Meg Tasker (Federation University Australia, Ballarat) works in Victorian and Australian Studies. Her Struggle and Storm (MUP, 2001) was the first critical biography of Francis W.L. Adams (1862-1893), a significant figure in Australian literary and cultural history. Since then, a number of papers on ‘Unbecoming Australians’ have explored the careers of late colonial Australasian writers in London at the turn of the twentieth century (Louise Mack, Henry Lawson, Arthur Maquarie, William Pember Reeves and Amber Reeves). She currently serves as Editor of the online refereed Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies.

OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES OF SMALL PRESS PUBLISHING IN THE GLOBAL MARKET Spinifex Press, established in March 1991, began exporting internationally in May 1991 and a few months later sold translation rights on one of our first four titles. This paper explores how international selling and marketing has changed in the last 25 years. It includes discussion of selling territorial rights versus exporting books; how globalisation has affected independent publishing; the problems of metadata when you co-publish books; whether one can sell poetry internationally; and the advent of digital books and marketing. Susan Hawthorne Dr Susan Hawthorne has worked in the book industry for more than thirty years and she is Publisher and Cofounder with Renate Klein of Spinifex Press. The author of Bibliodiversity: A Manifesto for Independent Publishing (2014) her book is being published in nineteen countries. She is the English Language Co-ordinator of the International Alliance of Independent Publishing based in Paris. She has taught Publishing Studies and Creative Writing over many years and is Adjunct Professor in the Writing Program at James Cook University. In 2015 she received the George Robertson Award for Service to the Publishing Industry.

WINNER TAKES ALL: TRAVAILS OF THE AUSTRALIAN MIDLIST AUTHOR This paper considers the role of the contemporary mid-list author within the Australian publishing industry. The mid-list author inhabits a liminal position, neither at the bottom nor

the top, remaining comparatively under-examined within the publishing economy. In a market saturated by big-name and celebrity authors, lesser known mid-list authors have to compete in an environment where publishers have smaller budgets, smaller print runs and less resources.Yet mid-list authors are often the ‘bread and butter’ of many publishing houses, being known quantities who continue to deliver and sell steadily, albeit in smaller numbers. Using case studies and through interviews with literary agents, Nielsen BookScan analysis and google analytics, this paper will build a picture of the ‘typical’ mid-list author, examining their career trajectories to discern common patterns in areas such as advances, marketing and publicity reach, and sales figures. How sustainable is the mid-list author in the current marketplace and what new strategies could be adopted to support mid-list authors so that they remain a viable part of the publishing ecosystem. Brigid Magner Dr Brigid Magner is a lecturer in Literary Studies and leader of the essay node within the Non Fiction Lab research group in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University. Her PhD research was on trans-Tasman literary culture. Brigid has subsequently published articles in a variety of magazines and journals on topics related to criminality, authorship, bestsellers and literary tourism.

THE LITERARY FESTIVAL AS ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL PROJECT: A CREATIVE INDUSTRIES PERSPECTIVE Literary festivals have a variety of functions. They celebrate excellence and diversity in writing, promote and distribute literary culture, introduce readers to new writers and tourists to new towns. The rhetoric that surrounds literary festivals reflects this, emphasising their ability to showcase talented writers, support the local publishing industry, and encourage tourism through a programme of events designed to facilitate cultural engagement, participation, diversity, and community development. This paper suggests an association between this representation and promotion of literary festivals and creative industries discourse. In making this comparison, this paper draws on idealist expressions of creative industries projects, such as Richard Florida’s (2002) influential assertions about the centrality of creativity to a successful contemporary economy, but also mobilises more critical perspectives that question the viability and universal

THURSDAY 19TH NOVEMBER application of these ideas, as well as their tendency to homogenise very different cultural, creative and professional spaces. Using several Australia- and UK-based literary festivals as examples, this paper explores how books and literary culture are used to further economic and cultural projects in different national contexts. Finally, looking at the networks that connect these different metropolitan and regional literary festivals with one another - such as the UNESCO Cities of Literature network, the International Organisation of Booktowns, and the Word Alliance - this paper suggests some of the ways we might situate literary festivals within geographic, economic and cultural interpretations of the ‘literary field’. Millicent Weber Millicent Weber is a PhD candidate in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, Melbourne. Her research forms part of the Australian Research Council Discovery project ‘Performing Authorship in the Digital Literary Sphere’, and investigates audience experience at literary festivals, and the relationships between literary festivals and the communities in which they are embedded.

RELICS OF THE ANALOGUE AGE? THE BOOK CLUBS OF GENERATION Y Focusing on women in their twenties, this thesis considers women’s motivations for joining book clubs, and the role book clubs play in their lives. Considering their prevalence, book clubs are an under-researched phenomenon. Elizabeth Long’s seminal book on the subject, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life, centres largely on women over the age of 40, while this is the first paper to focus purely on Generation Y. Qualitative data from semi-structured interviews are used to support the argument that book clubs are appealing to young women for their sense of ritual, strengthening of bonds and for fulfilling a complicated mix of social, cultural and feminist aspirations. Five Gen Y book clubs across the city of Melbourne were used in the study, including a Baby Boomer club as a comparison. In considering both the celebrity book club and online book clubs, this thesis finds that face-to-face book clubs offer members a sense of belonging difficult to imitate. This appeals to the respondents in this study, who are busy,

without children and career-oriented. While historically, book clubs were viewed as a complement or even supplement for women’s education, the women in this study view book clubs as a complement to their lives at large, a way to better understand themselves and a chance to slow down. Digital natives, they combine various technologies to aid their reading and discussion. Participants generally enjoy their meetings and can foresee themselves belonging to book clubs as their lives change, well into the future. Rose Donohoe Rose Donohoe holds a Masters in Publishing and Editing from Monash University and both a Bachelor in Media Communications and a Diploma in Languages (Italian) from the University of Melbourne. She currently works as a journalist at the Melbourne-based national news website The New Daily and has worked in Amsterdam for the music magazine Subbacultcha. Her interests include publishing and the changing ways we absorb information.

EXPLORING SPECULATIVE FICTION READERSHIPS AND AUTHOR-READER INTERACTIONS IN THE POST-DIGITAL ERA This paper examines the results of a survey of 395 speculative fiction readers and authors, exploring how the author/reader relationship and the role of the author in book promotion have evolved in response to technological changes. It sought to explore reader preferences and various factors that may influence the buying choices of speculative fiction readers, either explicitly or implicitly. While initially distributed via social media primarily to the researcher’s personal contacts, which came largely from within the Australian speculative fiction writer community, ultimately responses to the survey came from 25 different countries around the world, demonstrating the global nature of genre fandom, the importance of overseas markets for Australian-written speculative fiction and the disintegration of geological barriers to reader-author interaction as well as those between geologically separate communities of readers. Responses to the survey yielded an array of both qualitative and quantitative data casting light on the expectations that modern speculative fiction readers have of authors, how they can be addressed and their possible implications. The survey’s findings are also interesting in relation to ongoing discussion in the speculative fiction field regarding issues

INDUSTRY RESEARCH DAY of diversity and representation, the role of gender, author persona and politics in English-language speculative fiction fandom and the relationship between these various factors.

This paper examines contemporary Australian literary journals, such as The Lifted Brow, Island, and The Canary Press, in relation to A.A. Phillips’ conception of the “cultural cringe” and Pascale Cassanova’s notion of a “world literary Michelle Goldsmith space.” It argues that Phillips’ “cultural cringe” is often Michelle Goldsmith is an editor and speculative fiction incorrectly depicted as a simple aversion to locally produced author who resides in Melbourne, Australia. She has a BSc culture. Instead, I will argue that Phillips presents the cultural (majoring in Zoology/Evolutionary Biology) and is currently cringe as an unconscious anxiety that can manifest in a completing a Masters in Publishing and Communications. variety of contradictory forms; from Phillips’ perspective, Her thesis explores author and reader relationships within ardent literary nationalism can also be a result of the cringe, the speculative fiction field, with a particular focus on readers’ which actually consists of making needless comparisons expectations of authors and the influence of factors such between local and international works. As I will argue, this as an author’s gender, politics and interactions with fans more nuanced account of the cringe can actually be read on readers’ book buying choices. Her fiction has appeared as a way of understanding Australia’s participation in what in various publications both within Australia and overseas, Cassanova has called the world literary space, which is in both English and in translation, and been reprinted in mediated national subfields. I will then argue that recent a number of venues including The Year’s Best Australian editions of some literary journals suggest a new Australian Fantasy and Horror (Ticonderoga). She was shortlisted for a relationship to the world literary space that responds to Ditmar award for Best New Talent in 2014 and 2015. Michelle the cultural cringe, not by denying its existence, but rather also works as a writer and editor for a number of technical in a studied avoidance of the “needless comparisons” to and engineering focused magazines. A list of her published international works that have traditionally haunted Australian fiction and other miscellany can be found on her website literature. and she can be found on Twitter as @Vilutheril. Emmett Stinson Dr Emmett Stinson, of the University of Newcastle’s (UON) School of Humanities and Social Science, is an author, literary critic and lecturer whose years of personal THE UNIVERSITY PRESS IN AUSTRALIA - WHICH WAY experience of the publishing landscape in Australia and FORWARD? the United States is informing his research into literary This paper discusses the current state of play for university production. His essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in presses in Australia, taking account of analyses and various literary journals and his book of short stories, Known recommendations emerging from the recent Book Industry Unknowns, was short listed for the Steele Rudd Award in Strategy Group (2010-11) and Book Industry Collaborative 2011. Council (2012-13), canvassing business model options, and putting a case for particular central criteria for evaluating the practical and social contribution of these presses to their universities and the wider Australian society. TRANSTEXTUAL EDITORIAL MARGINS: THE EVOLUTION Nathan Hollier OF EDITORIAL PRACTICE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY Dr Nathan Hollier is Director of Monash University AUSTRALIA Publishing, Chair of the Board of the OL Society Ltd, In her article ‘Books without borders’, Sydney Shep publishers of Overland, and was a member of the Book discusses how New Zealand’s identity is a ‘discursive Industry Collaborative Council and founding Chair of the construction’ from ‘a multiplicity of places, peoples, products, Small Press Network (formerly SPUNC Inc.). practices and histories’. This discursive construction provides awareness of the ‘artificiality of [...] geographical boundaries’ and insight into specific nations’ ‘entangled history’. This manifests not just ‘diffusion and influence’ but also ‘interaction, adaptability and mutual dependencies’. AUSTRALIAN LITERARY JOURNALS, THE CULTURAL This paper resides in a new-historicist, intertextual middle CRINGE, AND WORLD LITERARY SPACE

THURSDAY 19TH NOVEMBER ground by concentrating on the inherently human editorial practices that define and govern the interactions and mutual dependencies between texts, both national and transnational. Such discussion combines into a conceptual framework of transtextuality. Simply put, Australia’s identity has been constructed similarly to that identified by Shep: our print culture commenced with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, carrying an old wooden screw press, used type, some paper and ink. Acknowledging this multiplicity of creation informs analyses of content that resides within and beyond the margins of the page. That is, just as Australia’s book history derives from England, so too does its editorial practice. The editorial standards provided in Caleb Stower’s Printer’s Grammar, which was published in London in 1808 and built on the editorial legacies of Joseph Moxon and John Smith who printed their own influential manuals in 1683 and 1755 respectively, were commonplace in nineteenth-century England and undoubtedly informed the editorial decisions and presentation of Australia’s first book-publishing ventures in the early 1800s by George Howe, Australia’s first printer. This paper will therefore examine the evolution of editorial practice in nineteenth-century Australia through a comparative analysis of Howe’s early publications, such as the NSW Pocket Almanack (1806), with Caleb Stower’s Printer’s Grammar. Jocelyn Hargrave Jocelyn Hargrave is a third-year PhD candidate and recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award in the Literary and Cultural Studies Program at Monash University. Her PhD thesis, entitled ‘Style matters: the influence of editorial style on the publishing of English’, is investigating the evolution of editorial practice in Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and its impact on the publishing of content. Her first article based on her doctoral research, ‘Joseph Moxon: a re-fashioned appraisal’, has been published in the September 2015 issue of the journal Script & Print. Prior to this, she worked in educational publishing for sixteen years, fourteen of which as an editor.

BOOK REVIEWS IN THE SATURDAY NEWSPAPERS: AN UPDATE Since 2012, the authors have been counting and comparing book reviews in Fairfax’s major papers, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Canberra Times. Here they update

their research to mid-November 2015, revealing a significant increase in review sharing year on year, across a fouryear sample. They also analyse how Fairfax deploys book reviews from the three papers in the digital space it ‘owns’, arguing that the company’s approach only amplifies the effects of its now-proven tendency in recent years to spread fewer reviews ever further. Sybil Nolan Sybil Nolan is an editor and historian who lectures in publishing and communications. She worked in publishing for more than 10 years, including as commissioning editor at Melbourne University Publishing from 2003 to 2007, and before that spent 15 years working in daily journalism on newspapers including the Age, Melbourne. Her PhD thesis was entitled ‘The Age and the Young Menzies: A Chapter in Victorian Liberalism’. She now researches in publishing, print culture and Australian political and media history. Matthew Ricketson Matthew Ricketson is an academic and journalist. Appointed in 2009 as the inaugural professor of journalism at the University of Canberra, he was Media and Communications editor for The Age before that, from mid-2006 to early 2009. He ran the Journalism program at RMIT for 11 years and has worked on staff at The Australian, Time Australia magazine and The Sunday Herald, among other publications. He is the author of three books and editor of two. He is a chief investigator on two Australian Research Council projects investigating the impact of mass redundancies on Australian newsrooms and the reinvention of journalism and is president of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia.

THE FRAGMENTATION OF BOOK PROMOTION CHANNELS: PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS RESPOND TO NEW CHALLENGES Book publishers and authors are contending with a dramatically different environment for promoting their works. The media landscape has totally fragmented in the last ten years. The way people consume media and news and information has changed. Then there is the rise of social media. The other rise is in referral sites, particular through online booksellers - be they Amazon or Better Reading or Goodreads - and then the rise of bloggers. Jim Demetriou, Sales & Marketing Director, Allen and

INDUSTRY RESEARCH DAY Unwin This paper draws on research interviews conducted with Australian small, medium and large publishers in 2015 to analyse ways that book publishers are changing their promotion strategies. Bricks and mortar bookstores are still vital for hand-selling important new works by Australian authors, however, publishers’ promotional strategies also take into account the influence of book bloggers and Youtube reviewers whose followings transcend national boundaries. Likewise, a transnational perspective in evident among many Australian publishers as they commit to building Australian lists domestically and also explore the international sales potential of prospective Australian titles. This paper draws a portrait of an industry in which publishers and authors are deeply committed to the cultural sustainability of an Australian book industry, and for whom the international dimensions of the imagined worlds of their books’ settings and themes, the dispersed location of their readerships, and the cultural reach of works inevitably extend beyond national boundaries. This is reflected in publishers’ and authors’ promotional activities. The paper argues that this transcending of national boundaries is something to be celebrated (and has deep historical precedents in Australia). There are considerable challenges faced by the Australian book industry and ignoring or downplaying these international dimensions is counter-productive to the sustainability of national and local publishing success. Jan Zwar Dr Zwar is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in Cultural Economics and an Adjunct Lecturer in Marketing at Macquarie University. Her research interests include: • the contemporary Australian book industry and changes in the marketing and consumption of books by authors, publishers and readers; • the economics and marketing of cultural goods and services; • cultural diversity; • consumer behaviour; • literature, especially narrative non-fiction; and • cross-disciplinary collaboration.

ABSOLUTELY UNSUSTAINABLE INNOVATION In the early 2000s, it became apparent that an entire suite of new technologies - Web 2.0, social media sites,

print-on-demand, changes in global distribution networks - were beginning to be integrated into the everyday lives of work and leisure. For example, large numbers of people were beginning to search out and purchase books first and foremost online. With this in mind, we realized that there was a global interest in high-end philosophy books which previously had local, limited or disciplinary appeal (closed networks), and which could now be marketed and sold online across the world, by tapping into some of the unheralded potentials of new technologies. Hence the establishment of re.press in 2006, which sought to make available difficult philosophical texts to a new global audience, perhaps the first publishing house to do so. Re.press has now published dozens of influential works of contemporary philosophy, by such international luminaries as Alain Badiou, Graham Harman, Reza Negarestani and in such emergent fields as object oriented ontology. The big problem remains the economics. This paper discusses some of the issues with unsustainable innovation that have emerged in our experience with re.press. Justin Clemens Justin Clemens gained his PhD from the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively on psychoanalysis, contemporary European philosophy, and contemporary Australian art and literature. His recent books include Lacan Deleuze Badiou (Edinburgh UP 2014), with A.J. Bartlett and Jon Roffe; Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy (Edinburgh UP 2013); and Minimal Domination (Surpllus 2011). He was founding Secretary of the Lacan Circle of Melbourne (20042009), and was the art critic for the Australian magazine The Monthly (2004-2009). In addition to his scholarly work, he is well-known nationally as a commentator on Australian art and literature, and his essays and reviews have appeared in The Age, The Australian, The Monthly, Meanjin, Overland, Arena Magazine, TEXT, Un Magazine, Discipline, The Sydney Review of Books, and many others. Paul Ashton Paul Ashton is a coordinator of the Bachelor of Arts at Victoria University. He is a co-founder and editorial director of the independent open access publishing house re.press, the founding co-editor of the open access peer-reviewed journal Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy and is co-founder and steering group member of Open Humanities Press. Paul is also a member of the advisory committee of Monash University Press.