The following article appeared in The Spectator:
ROSS FITZGERALD, WEDNESDAY 6TH MAY 2009
A Ripple In The Vast, Soundless Mud
One Sydney novelist is proposing a subscription model to alleviate our perpetual publishing crisis, says Ross Fitzgerald.
They say there’s a publishing crisis in Australia, but that’s nothing new. Publishing has always been in crisis in Australia because, for a start, the population has never been large enough to fully support a local industry: not for quality literary titles, anyway. The book trade has always been dominated by imports, initially from British companies, then American, now joined by German- and French-based multinationals.
Writers in Australia are often a desperate bunch, struggling for a slice of a relatively small pie. Truth to tell, most authors fail to make much impact. As Vance Palmer once said: ‘Writing a book in Australia is like throwing a rock into vast, soundless mud.’ Read more >
The following article appeared
in The Sydney Morning Herald:
SUSAN WYNDHAM, SATURDAY 1ST AUGUST 2009
Books for baby boomers
Michael Wilding stirred debate with an opinion piece in the Herald ("Australians deserve access to cheaper books", July 17), which argued that book prices are inflated by high-overhead, debt-laden multinational publishers.
"Corporate publishing cannot make any money on those small print runs of a thousand copies on which the literary tradition is built," he wrote. Agree with him or not, the retired academic, author-editor of 40 books and former Wild & Woolley publisher has put his money and his mouth into a new venture called Press On. Read more >
