"Worthwhile Culture?" -- sure, but tell me what it is first

The Coalition for Greater Profits, urr, sorry, Cheaper Books in the form of bookseller Dymocks has come up with a marvellous suggestion in the last stages of the debate regarding the restrictions on the parallel importation of books.
Dymocks has put forward the concept of a 1% levy on publishers' sales to raise $15 million to fund new Australian writing grants. Sounds great! Authors should be enthusiastic about this. But wait for it -- there's a rider.
Dymocks proposes these grants be for 'culturally worthwhile books'. There's a rub and a half! A Pom could argue that there won't be any books funded under such a scheme, since there's nothing worthwhile in Aussie culture. Myself, I'd argue that such a definition would cover books such as "Brutal British Governors of Australian States", "Knitting patterns my Nonna taught me", "Plaster and metal ceiling panels, bosses and straps for Federation houses", "Aboriginal languages of New South Wales with CD-ROM", "The history of Cornish immigrants to South Australia", "Netball for boys", "450 recipes for roo: How to eat and save our national emblem", "Up on a Hill: A history of St Patrick's, Goulburn", "Best Australian Bush Ballads", a manga series featuring my favourite villain Killer Koala, "The Banksias: Botanical illustrations of the complete species (in five volumes)", "Australian automobiles 1924-2000", "Tiwi football", "Diseases of Australian livestock and native animals (with online resources)", "My first writing book (with teaching materials)", "Alitji in the Dreamtime -- Alice in Wonderland in Pitjantjara and English", "Fishtails in the Dust: stories and poems by Central Australian writers", "Australia's corporate crooks" and "Jeff Thompson's favourite fast balls".
The trouble for Dymocks is that most of these titles (or similar versions) have in fact been published by the Australian publishing industry at one time or another. That's the great strength of the industry, that it can and does produce such culturally worthwhile and relevant titles -- and its a strength Dymocks ignores in its pursuit of greater profits.
You'll notice I haven't included many fiction titles in my list of culturally worthwhile books. Would fantasy, romance, crime, or science fiction cut it as 'culturally worthwhile'? Would The Book Thief and Tales from Outer Suburbia (just awarded major prizes in Germany) make the grade? The Book Thief isn't even about Australia.
The Literature Board of the Australia Council offers about $4 million in grants (including the ASA managed Emerging Writers and Illustrators initiative) to writers and publishers for work in development or of marginal viability for a publisher.
What does Dymocks propose in addition that would be culturally worthwhile? They give no clues except that phrase 'culturally worthwhile books' but I'd hazard a guess they mean books such as those some of our stuffier and more remote (at least from Australian culture) critics (mostly in Melbourne) consider "literature", whatever that is. These books may be supremely worthy in the confines of Carlton, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that such books are perpetually in search of an audience. Would providing further funds for their publication help them find such an audience? Surely, that is the problem that must be addressed.
But Dymocks is drumming here to obscure their own shortcomings. There is no shortage of books being published in Australia that can be considered 'culturally worthwhile'. They come not only from the largest of our publishers but also from the smallest. It is the smallest publishers though who have the greatest problem in putting their wares before potential readers and Dymocks and its practices are largely to blame.
If Dymocks was serious in its pursuit of 'worthwhile culture', the company would do better by guaranteeing that it will stock all the books of Australia's small publishers and make them available Australia-wide without charging them for shelf space (which happens for many titles from major publishers -- those books don't get up the front of the shop without a price being paid) and actually contributing some promotional funds to assist in bringing them to the attention of readers. In doing this Dymocks would actually be performing a service and a function that a customer expects of a bookshop.
In today's climate, one of the problems that small publishers such as those in the Small Publishers Underground Networking Community (SPUNC) face is marketing and distribution. Dymocks is well-placed to assist these publishers. But it does not do so. Why? Dymocks is only after the cream, the short tail, of the publishing market. It stocks best-sellers from the largest publishers and "special orders" those of our smaller publishers.
Try buying Fishtails in the Dust or Tiwi Football (both real books) in Dymocks George Street or one of the Melbourne stores. Yes, the special order desk will be able to find it in Books in Print, but there'll be a special order surcharge and it isn't in stock etc., etc. Same for Aboriginal Languages of NSW (another real book, though it doesn't come with a CD-ROM) and my own book Music from another Country, which is stocked by independent bookshops but special ordered by Dymocks, so I know Dymocks customers are asking for it, but, hey, let's not have Dymocks give their own customers what they want, eh -- after all, there's all those Stephanie Meyer books over by the door in piles ...

One thing we should read into Dymock's statement though is their valuation of the Australian publishing industry at $1.5 billion. The publishers value it at about $2 billion, which, if you add in the educational sector (mostly unknown to Dymocks) is about right. Dymocks wants to endanger that amount of value-added business in Australia to enhance its own profits. Doesn't sound right does it.
Certainly doesn't sound 'culturally worthwhile'.

Parallel Importation of Books into Australia: States and Territories say "no change"

In a communique from its sixth meeting in Brisbane on 29 May, 2009, the Council for the Australian Federation (CAF), which comprises all State Premiers and Territory Chief Ministers and is currently chaired by the Honourable Anna Bligh MP, Premier of Queensland, announced it had discussed the Productivity Commission’s consideration of existing parallel importation restrictions in relation to books. CAF reiterated that the States and Territories do not support any changes to the present arrangements. Removal of current regulation would damage Australia’s culture and creative industries and have adverse effects on employment for very little benefit. States and Territories agree the Productivity Commission’s report should be discussed at the next COAG meeting.
Chaired by the Premier of Queensland, the meeting was attended by Premiers from Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania and the Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). The Premier of Western Australia joined the meeting by telephone. The Chief Minister of the Northern Territory was an apology. Treasurers also attended the meeting from Victoria, South Australia and Queensland.

Why don’t we care about our literature?

Following is the text of a speech I gave to the South Australian Writers Centre on 27 November, 2008. Many people have asked that I provide a public copy.

Recently the mass media has been full of Baz Luhrmann’s new movie Australia. The spin doctors were working over time. I hope the movie does well. Our film industry needs it to do so.
But one of the unfortunate side-effects of the spin that accompanies the marketing of movies is that there is a perception movies have more significance and public appeal than books. In Australia, this certainly isn’t so. Even if Australia does very well at the box office, the vast number of movies we shall watch are produced in the United States. The box office will total about $1 billion – an awful lot of that will have been spent on spin, on attempts to get you and me into movie theatres or to buy DVDs to watch often very lacklustre films.
In August, figures from Nielsen Bookscan revealed that trade sales for books in Australia were worth $1, 250 million for the previous year. This represented sales of 63 million books, an increase of 7.5 per cent on the previous year.
Nielsen Bookscan data doesn't break out Australian books, but ABS data shows that Australian fiction, non-fiction and children's books (excluding educational titles) had average sales of $438.5 million each year over the period 2000-04. This is a major contribution to the Australian creative industries economy and of course a significant proportion of the sales of books in Australia. It’s also a helluva lot more money than Australian movies made.
Not only that, but five of the top 10 Bookscan bestsellers in the 2007-08 period were Australian. One, 4 Ingredients, sold over 600,000 copies. Another was Underbelly.
Unhappily, only one Australian film, Happy Feet, was in the to 50 films for the same period. So why, I ask, did Baz Luhrmann receive a 40% tax incentive to make Australia while the Australian book industry was rewarded with yet another parallel importation enquiry?
We are being punished for being successful and for standing on our own feet. The funding for Australian literature is pretty paltry. In 2003-05, the Australian Government allocated only $27.6 million to Literature and print media. This included funding for lending rights of around $17 million and amounts offered by the Australia Council. This amount is dwarfed by the enormous sums that flow to major performing arts and opera, arts forms that often fail at a cost recovery basis and offer none of the economic returns that can be seen with literature.
Australian literature is making an enormous contribution to our creative industries economy and this is largely unrecognised. This should not be so.
Let's face the fact that, as a post-colonial country, Australia is still strongly influenced by the central points of English-language culture. From about 1850, those points have been the United Kingdom and the United States.
It is sensible that our schools teach using cultural materials emanating from the United Kingdom and the United States. It is also sensible for them to use cultural materials from Australia's Indigneous cultures as well as the many other cultures from which the children in our schools come. This is all representative of where we have come from and what we are, a bit of a mongrel mix.
However, the most unifying and central themes for educating young Australians come directly from Australian culture, that unholy mess that has evolved here since this timeless land has been named "Australia". Our literature exemplifies and demonstrates those themes best because there is more of it than other forms of narrative. Unfortunately, there are simply not enough Australian films and television programs to fill out a curriculum. That's not so for poetry, novels, non-fiction, biography and so on. There's plenty there.
Now let me get a little personal. My book Perfect Timing is about to be published in a Vietnamese translation. It will sell for 20,000 Dong, about A$1.45. I’ll receive 5% of that price on each copy, a princely seven cents, so I’m not about to retire.
But what this makes clear is that books are much cheaper in Vietnam than Australia. I could buy 15 copies of my Vietnamese edition for the price of an average Australian paperback.
So, why is the book cheaper? The paper and print quality will be lower than the Australian edition for one. Another is there’ll be several more thousand copies printed in Vietnam than were ever printed in Australia, but the book will still be a tiny blip in a market of over 80 million readers. And those readers are much poorer than readers in Australia. To them, spending 20,000 Dong on a book is a luxury purchase.
This simply makes it clear that the price of books is relative from one country to another. The return to me from sales in Vietnam will be small financially, but large in the sense that I will have many more readers. I’m assisting with a tiny bit of cultural exchange as well. These are immeasureable benefits with no financial value.
But they’d still be there if I was lucky enough to sell US rights to my book, although the financial implications would be very different. I’d actually make some money – again, not enough to retire on, but enough perhaps for a new computer or new car.
As an author, I can trade my rights in different markets for different reasons. Trading of rights is the commercial basis for life as an author. We can sell Australian publishing rights, rights for translation into Vietnamese or rights to an American edition. This is intrinsic to our continued livelihood. Quite a few authors have different publishers in different markets. Australia, in line with most major book markets in the world, including the United States and United Kingdom, is currently a “closed “ market. Books can only be published here by the entity who holds the rights to the Australian territory. These rights are saleable parts of the bundle of rights that make up an author’s copyright. For example, popular author Jodi Picoult is published by Allen & Unwin in Australia, but by Hachette in the UK and Atria in the USA.
However, there are moves afoot to take some of these rights away from us. The moves are being led by booksellers, particularly Dymocks
Dymocks wants an open market. They wants to take away the right of Australian authors to transact their rights in different markets. Their argument is driven by the profit motive of course. Dymocks claims the wholesale price of books is cheaper in the United States through competition. And there is undoubtedly more competition in the US in the book industry than there is in Australia. The US book market is more than 10 times the size of Australia. Dymocks also claims books are expensive in Australia because the Australian publishing industry is artificially protected from competition.
But the US is by no means an open market. Nor should it be. Both the United States and Australia are separate copyright territories, and books are licensed into each territory by their rightsholders. Few Australian books receive much attention in the US. The Australian market is far more competitive than the US market because Australian books have to compete with those from the US and the UK. Under our law as it currently stands, all books published outside Australia must be made available in Australia within 30 days of their publication, or the rightsholder loses their exclusive licence to publish the book in Australia.
Dymocks is pushing hard to destroy Australia as a distinct publishing territory. In their argument, they ignore the fact that the US and UK are closed markets. They also ignore the fact that book prices in open market territories such as New Zealand and Singapore are equal to or greater than those in so-called closed markets.
Their fallacious argument is designed merely to increase Dymock’s profit margins, not to make books cheaper. Dymocks could make book prices cheaper in their stores overnight, if that was their real interest. How? Dymocks receives a minimum 40% discount on the Recommended Retail Price (RRP) on books it buys from publishers so they have nearly half the price of the book to play with in -- and often more when they negotiate bigger discounts. We don’t know how much of the 40% of the price of a book is Dymocks profit And it’s not as if bookselling is a risky business. Their purchases from publishers are on a sale or return basis. What they haven’t moved off the floor after six weeks gets sent back to the publisher for credit.
In contrast, life is bit tougher for the publisher, and much more so for the poor author. When a book is sold by Dymocks, the publisher gets about 12% (at least ABS statistics from 2004, the most recently available, show that) and the author generally receives 10%.
What’s clear is as authors we need to stand up and be counted – counted as a successful industry, counted for what we add to our culture and counted as opposing any changes to our current system. I urge you all to make your voices heard to the Productivity Commission. Detail are on the ASA website – www.asauthors.org

Remuneration in Australian Publishing

It comes as no surprise that publishers are the main beneficiaries from the publishing industry in terms of receiving the greatest financial benefits. However, up until 2002-03, the returns from publishing were not significantly different from returns from cash investment. Between 2001-02 and 2002-03, the operating profit before tax for book publishing businesses increased from $50.2 million to $88.4 million. The profit margin increased from 3.3% in 2001-02 to 5.6% in 2002-03.
In 2003-04, however, this situation changed dramatically. Overall operating profit for that period was $152.1 million or 9.7%. The profit margin for the 20 largest book publishers was 4.4% in 2002-03 but rose to 9.7% in 2003-04. Other book publishers had a profit margin of 10.2% in 2002-03 and 12.7% in 2003-04, which is a very healthy return by any standard.

Salary scales for publishers
At the end of June 2004, there were 5,300 people employed in book publishing. In 2003-04, 3,547 (67%) of these 5,300 employees were employed by the 20 largest publishers. In 2003-04, wages and salaries paid by publishers came to $266.1 million, which represented 19% of publishers total expenses compared to the 6.5% paid as royalties or fees (down from 10.9% the previous years). In 2003-04, royalty payments and fees paid by publishers fell 11% or $11.7 million from $102.6 million to $90.9 million.
In 2002-03, the average salary of full-time publishing employees was $46,554. In 2003-04, this had risen $52,300, an increase of 9% over the previous year. However, only 3972 of these employees were full-time. Therefore, many people working in the publishing industry earn much more. Senior sales and publishing managers may well receive $150,000 to $200,000, or even more with bonus payments and fringe benefits. Sales representatives will have salaries from $50,000. Administrative staff members have salaries starting from $40,000.

Salary scales for editors
Publishers use the term “editor’ with some looseness. “Acquisitions” or “Commissioning” editors may be publishers, and receive payment as such. The term editor here refers to those people who work on a manuscript and shepherd it through the production process. and are covered under the Book Industry Award. Under this award, trainee editors commence on a salary (at the time this was prepared) of $30,600 and the highest grade receives nearly $51,000 plus 9% superannuation. In practice, many publishers pay above these rates and offer fringe benefits.
The freelance rate for book editors currently appears to vary between $45 and $75 per hour. How many freelancers can be assured of this rate however depends on their desperation and the publisher’s powers of persuasion.

Payment scales for indexers
The Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers (ANZSI) recommends a base rate of $55.00 (excluding GST) an hour for its members. The same comment as above applies regarding how many indexers can be assured of this rate.

Remuneration to authors
Authors survive on royalties, payments for subsidiary rights, lending rights payments and payments for statutory reprographic rights (administered by Copyright Agency Limited [CAL]). Even so, the Throsby and Hollister report Don’t give up your day job indicates that in the period 2000-01 writers had a mean arts income of $26,400 and a median arts income of $11,700.
In 2001-02, the proportion of sales of Australian titles of $853.8 million paid as royalties and fees to creators was 10.9%, or $93.06 million. In 2002-03, the proportion of sales of Australian titles of $877 million paid as royalties and fees to creators was 11.7%, or $102.6 million. This amount dropped in 2003-04 to $90.9 million, only 6.5%.

Authors income throughout the world

What is an author worth? What he or she is paid, ultimately. And unfortunately that is often out of all proportion to the work an author must do to create a work.
In Australia, the best data on what an author is worth come from the work of David Throsby and Virginia Hollister for the Australia Council. The 2003 edition of their book Don’t give up your day job states that in 2000-01 the median earned creative income of writers was $4,800, the total arts income was $11,700 and the total income was $35,000. Throsby and Hollister acknowledge that income for writers can come from various sources. The Australian Society of Aithors (ASA) has long championed a range of income possibilities for writers. Payments from royalties from the sale of the published book are the main income stream from a publishing contract, but the exploitation of subsidiary rights such as serialisation, film and other adaptation rights can be quite valuable both on publication and afterwards. As the age of book increases, its potential to earn royalties usually decreases, which is why the ASA has been the driving force for the creation of payments for lending rights and from copying, both of which extend earnings to the author from the exploitation of their work.
Throsby and Hollister took all these income streams into account when assessing authors’ incomes, as well as other types of income coming from public appearances, reading and activities related to authorial activity. This means that the Australian figures on authors’ incomes are relatively comprehensive. For example, Throsby and Hollister found that 42% of writers earned less than $10,000 from their creative and arts-related work, while 18% earned $50,000 or more. When income from all work was considered, this figure dropped to 13% of writers earning less then $10,000 and rose to 35% of writers earning $50,000 or more.
The same isn’t always true of data from the rest of the world so when we compare authors’ income internationally we have to be conscious that what is being measured isn’t always the same thing. Nevertheless, international comparisons are a useful means of assessing the success of Australian authors as income-earning writers.
Let’s consider our South Pacific neighbours first. Using the services of Research International, the New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA) recently surveyed 355 mid-career and established writers regarding income (New Zealand Author, Oct/Nov 2007) and discovered that “ just 17 per cent of New Zealand writers survive solely on their writing income”.
The New Zealand figures also showed that the mean total of a writer’s income from all sources (but excluding full-time work) was NZ$15,383 (A$12,768). The minimum wage in New Zealand is NZ$23,400 (A$19,422).
The NZSA found that
• 77 per cent of mid-career authors earn less than NZ$10,000 from writing;
• only 9 per cent of established authors earn over NZ$50,000
• only 30 per cent of mid-career and established authors have received a grant in the last four years; and
• 34 per cent of authors say they couldn’t afford to write without the help of family of friend.
As to other income streams, New Zealand authors have not yet achieved some of the successful additional income sources available to Australian authors through the ongoing work of the ASA. As an example, set up in 1973, the New Zealand Authors' Fund acts a bit like Public Lending Right as it compensates New Zealand authors for the loss of income through holdings of their books in New Zealand libraries. Authors may register with the Fund if they are eligible to receive royalties for their books and if more than 50 copies are held in New Zealand libraries. The Fund was meant to allow authors to pursue their writing full-time. The survey showed only 9 per cent of writing related income came from the fund. An overwhelming majority – 78 per cent – of the authors surveyed stated that if the Fund offered more they would be better able to make writing their career, even though over 1400 authors benefit from the Fund.
Tings are a bit more positive in Europe. There, the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), based in the UK, commissioned a comparative study of authors’ earnings from Bournemouth University. They sent out 25,000 questionnaires to ALCS members and two professional bodies in Germany (Verband Deutscher Schriftsletter [Association of German Writers], and Verband der Drehbuchautoren [Association of Scriptwriters]). The survey defined three categories: professional authors, who allocate more than 50% of their time to writing; main-income authors, who earn more than 50% of their income from writing; and audio-visual authors, who work mainly in television, film, radio and the internet. Another category of academics/teachers covered other writers in the educational sector. In the United Kingdom because ALCS is a collecting society which administers some educational licences, the academic/teacher category was larger as a proportion of authors. The German sample, drawn from members of professional writers organisations, saw a much smaller proportion of academics/teachers.

Table 1: Mean and median income for author groups (pounds sterling: one pound equals $A2.26)
Main-income authors Professional Audiovisual Academics/teachers Total
Australia* NA NA NA NA 100%
Mean NA NA NA NA $46,100
Median NA NA NA NA $35,000
UK†* 33% 46% 8% 32% 100%
Mean $A93,080 $A64,048 $A86,131 $A12,434 $A37,360
Median $A51,980 $A28,117 $A33,900 $A3625 $9,040
Germany† 63% 90% 19% 4% 100%
Mean $A42,951 $A31,364 $68,686 $A4,857 $A30,200
Median $A31,188 $A18,713 $A46,782 $A4,678 $A18,713
New Zealand NA NA NA NA 100%
Mean $A12,768
Median NA
*Data from Throsby/Hollister, 2003. Period is 2000-1. Figures are total income.
†Authors could be in more than one category.

For the United Kingdom, writing was shown to be a very risky profession with median earning less than one-quarter of the typical wage of a UK employee. And there is is significant inequality within the profession. The top 10% of UK authors earn more than 50% of the total income. Moreover, when the ALCS 2004-05 figures were benchmarked against the figures collected by the UK Society of Authors in 2000 they appeared to indicate that the earning of a typical UK author were deteriorating in real terms. The median (‘typical’) earning in 2000 were A$14,313. In 2004-05, the same earnings were A$9040.
As we don’t have similar Australian figures, we can only posit that the situation is similar in Australia. From anecdotal reports, it does seem to be so.

Reading is bad!

We like think we understand our readers. We believe we know what readers really want. That’s why we believe we’re the experts in story-telling. And why shouldn’t we? We write wonderfully inventive stories that explore every street, every sewer even, of human experience.
Of late, though, the post-modern novel, elliptical, issues-driven, appears to have has fallen foul of readers. There is one view that this all started with 9-11. The market for fiction dried up as the Twin Towers fell.
That’s not really the case. Fiction is still selling. It’s just that readers aren’t looking for any reality in their fiction. They are looking for escape. Fair enough, given the War on Terror, and Darfur, and tsunamis.
But wasn’t it ever so? Don’t we read because we want to escape?
I suffered severe asthma for the first ten years of my life. When I was five and six my grandmother read me Rudyard Kipling’s Just so stories. I learned how the elephant got its trunk. It was all nonsense. I knew that. But it was an escape from the rattle in my chest and the effort required to breathe.
Later, when I could read myself, I’d go to the local library and borrow writers such Ivan Southall, Colin Thiele and Rosemary Sutcliffe. On a cold winter’s day I could sit beside a fire and travel wherever they took me, my wheezing lungs forgotten.
But I also went to the movies. The Saturday matinee was one of the highlights of my week. Later, when my family finally bought a television, I learned how to follow different stories. Superman and My Favourite Martian were perfect relaxation after a day’s school.
For me, neither films nor television dominated. In my home, reading was encouraged, even rewarded. My parents read books, talked about what they read and put no limits on me or my siblings with regard to what we could read. We were never told a book was too old for us. So my siblings and I all grew up enjoying reading and accepting it as a pleasurable activity. We looked for new stories, new writers, and shared our discoveries with each other. I avidly read my way through my sister’s Georgette Heyer collection as well as my father’s library copies of Jon Cleary and Morris West and my mother’s Ngaio Marsh paperbacks. I never had a problem finding a book to read. It was more “which one now”?
Today, we face a reading problem. Many children do not grow up with the exposure to books I had. As a result, educational authorities in Australia have identified a problem in schools. Reading rates remain high for the first couple of years, then drop off alarmingly. This is particularly so for boys. By Year 9, boys are refusing to read books. A similar pattern has been identified in the United States where a recent study, the “Kids and Family Reading Report”, funded by publisher Scholastic, has been reported recently in Publishers Weekly. This study reveals that, while children like to read books, they read significantly less after the age of eight. While 44% of children aged 5 to 8 years of age were high frequency readers (that is, they read a book every day) the proportion fell to only 16% for children aged 15 to 17. Further reports from the National Endowment for the Arts spport this evidence.
The study found one reason for the drop-off was the poor role models parents set as readers. Only 21% of parents were frequent readers themselves. There was no passive encouragement of reading.
But the study also uncovered the fact that the major reason children don’t read more is because they can’t find books they like to read. While the study said parents should be doing more to recommend books to their children, I had another view. Don’t recommend books. Tell children books are bad! Read a book and you’ll go blind! Make books evil. That’s a sure-fire way to sex them up and start children reading. Of course, some good stories would be useful as well. But it’s the sexiness of the activity that’s more important. That draws attention
Think about movies. Movies seem huge. Movies make money. But remember that the total Australian box office revenue for movie is 50% less than the total sales revenue for books -- and Australian movies are much, much less successful in revnue terms than Australian books! Yet movies continue to have a sexiness that the average author can only dream about.
V for Vendetta and X men are action movies with some spectacular special effects but they are pretty simple stories when subjected to any critical analysis. Does this mean they are bad? Not at all. Simply, to non-reading children they are sexier than books. They are bad! Parents disapprove of the violence and hints of sexuality.
No more shocking than a glimpse of stocking, movies like these ooze adolescent hormones and teenage rebellion in a way I see only manga comics doing in print form and. Nevertheless, mangas are the one thing teenage boys do read. Why? Because they are bad!
I’m not saying we should all be writing mangas. I am saying we should be looking at how we can “sex up” reading so that non-reading children will reach for a book as easily as they do a movie or a DVD. For this missing audience, we need to be giving reading a bad reputation.
I think many of us writing for those missing readerships know that. The people who don’t know are publishers. But what would they know? After all, if publishers really knew how to publish for readers why did J.K. Rowling fail in her first dozen approaches to publishers? The truth is no publisher recognised readers were crying out for a child Wizard. Nor did they know readers wanted a book that offered a curious and spurious take on Christianity in the form of the Da Vinci Code.
Both Harry Potter and Dan Brown were sleepers, books that caught their publishers by surprise. It was readers who took them up because they were good, competent stories and good escapist fun. Readers enjoyed them. They were plot-driven narratives, page turners, real stories. Readers spread their strengths by word of mouth. Readers sexed them up. Readers made them bad.
In 2005 at the ASA’s forum on Indigenous literacy Wendy Cowey spoke of her work with the Accelerated Literacy Program from Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory. This program seeks to engage reluctant readers in remote communities and develop their reading skills. Wendy spoke of how she and her fellow researchers first thought their reluctant readers didn’t read because of a paucity of culturally specific material. But this was not the case. It was exposure to reading material that was important. Good stories were even more important. Wendy spoke delightedly about one young girl who had successfully moved from almost zero literacy to a level commensurate with her eleven years of age. The girl had read a whole book by herself. The girl wanted to buy a copy so she could have it with her for the rest of her life, it was such a good story. For her, it was the best.
The book was The lion, the witch and the wardrobe, a story about as far away from the girl’s remote Northern Territory community as you can get. Reading it allowed the girl to escape to a land of the Lion for a while. Now that’s bad!

Australian Author: Moron or Oxymoron?

I have a confession to make. I am not an Australian. More correctly, I am a naturalised Australian, not one native-born. The sordid truth of my origins is that I was born on a South Sea island and raised as an Englishman. The island was the North Island of Aotearoa. The English bit came from the books I read as a young child. The Just So Stories by Kipling and Captain W.E John’s Biggles were favourite. My Englishness was reinforced by the texts I studied at primary school and the culture I absorbed in the suburbs of a staid Auckland. At school we sang “God Save the Queen” and saluted the flag each day. My father drove a Standard Vanguard. We had a Corgi because the Queen had one and we didn’t think twice about our place in the world.
Then, when I was almost 10, I came to Australia. Australia was not England and definitely not New Zealand. Australia was another country. Mine. It was a very strange feeling to realise one was home when you had arrived at a place to which you had never been before. Perhaps it was something in the books I was reading. Cerainly, the literature I started to read almost as soon as I set foot on Australian soil had much to do with transforming me form an Englishman to an Australia. Ivan Southall’s Ash Road was one of the first books to show me the towns, cities, people and empty landscapes of this magnificent continent. The different, dry air of Australia floated out of its pages. This air had miraculously cured the chronic asthma of my New Zealand childhood. Ironically, my asthma had made me a voracious reader. I read above my age. Soon I was reading Tom Keneally’s Bring Larks and Heroes and Three Cheers for the Paraclete. Through them, I learned more about our convict past and religious divisions than history lessons could ever teach me.
As I grew older, I studied the works of Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright, Randolph Stow, Bruce Dawe and even the dreaded Patrick White without question. Why wouldn’t we want to know the words of these great writers? Studied along with Yeats and Eliot, Wright shone because she spoke to us with a language and imagery that was our own dialect. I’m quite happy to slouch towards Bethlehem, but I’d like to do so beside my heavy shouldered team of bullocks.
Then Paddy gave us my personal favourite of his works, The Vivisector, and Tom gave us The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, both written in the same dialect, albeit with their own accents, Paddy’s ironic and patrician, and Tom’s passionate and forgiving. A year after Jimmy Blacksmith was published I was at university studying Australian literature. I was fortunate to have Thea Astley to guide me in this subject. Thea made us read Ralph Rashleigh and The Pea Pickers, tore Frank Hardy’s structure apart and made us appreciate that good writing was good writing no matter where it came from and some of the best was from Australia, and Thea herself was one of the best. Years later, I read Drylands wet-eyed at the beauty in every sentence and the luminosity of the complete book.
Admittedly, university and I are now many years apart. A lot of books have been published since those days when Thea taught me Australian literature with no doubt in her mind that it was something worth teaching. Many of those books are what I would consider “Australian literature”. But apparently that phrase now is academically on the nose.
Why? Cultural theorists regard it as too specific, or too amorphous. In the post-modern world of textual studies, the word “literature” is a dirty one anyway. Now, literature is replaced by “communications and culture”. It is understandable that the academy should study more widely than the worlds of books and writing, but surely this does not mean literature, especially the stories that nourish our culture, should be totally ignored?
Over the past 30 years, the Australian publishing industry has developed into Australia’s most profitable and self-sufficient creative industry. It has done so on the basis that Australians wanted to read books about themselves. These books have been novels, but they have also been histories, biographies and cookery books. Bert Facey’s A Fortunate Life, Sally Morgan’s My Place, Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion and Margaret Fulton’s Cookbook are as much a part of our culture as any Miles Franklin Award winning novel. They are worthy of the attention of academia, too.
But books like these don’t appear to be under threat at present. It is the stories of our imagination which have difficulty, first, in finding a publisher, and, second, in finding a readership. Many first novels struggle to sell 600 or 700 copies. Such sales make publication very marginal and few publishers want to take the risk without some support. The Literature Board of the Australia Council assists with funding to defray production costs, but it is still up to the publisher to market the book, distribute it to bookshops and promote it to the industry. Some small publishers like Giramondo have done this well. Others have been much less successful. And less fiction is being sold. The 236 or so publishers identified by the ABS published 1347 works of fiction 2002-03 and 1367 in 2003-04. But sales dropped to from $43.92M in 2002-03 to $38.44M in 2003-04.
The window of opportunity for first-time novelists is very small given the small sales of first novels and their brief shelf life. They are soon out of print and forgotten. They rarely make reading lists for schools or universities, let alone get reviews.
This has a flow-on effect for our culture. As Josie Emery of the Literature Board of the Australia Council wrote in the December 2006 issue of Australian Author “literature is the mother of the narrative arts”. Without literature, we would not have films, television and other forms of story telling. Australia’s film industry is in crisis at present. Most of it exists as a form of cheap labour for Hollywood. A film like Happy Feet, as good as it may be, can’t really be claimed to be part of Australian culture. Its director, George Miller, noted as much recently when he announced his desire to make another Mad Max movie (very much part of Australian culture) when funding made it possible. He has since argued about the funding given his "Wolverine" project.
However, without literary narratives being read and absorbed much as I did with Ash Road so many years ago, we risk losing our special cultural identity, the one that took me in its embrace when I came here as a 10 year old.
And as for that South Sea island I left, well, it is now a bilingual nation very proud of its Maori and pakeha heritages and with a wonderful literature of its own. For evidence, read Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, which was the 2007 South East Asia and South Pacific winner of Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2007 and winner of the 2008 Kiriyama Prize.
But why has the country where I have made my home turned its back on its own stories?

Parts of this article first appeared in the April 2007 issue of Australian Author. Copyright © 2008 Jeremy Fisher/Australian Society of Authors.

Australian publishing and decreasing opportunities for authors

There are some worrying trends in the sales of books in Australia. Sales of books declined by 19% after the introduction of the goods and sales tax (GST) in 2000, but GST cannot be regarded as the only as sales also fluctuated downwards by 20 million or 15% in 1997-98. They surged back in 2001-02, but operating profit for publishers continued to decline, particularly for the top 20, and sales again declined in 2002-03. The value of sales, however, has increased year by year, except in 2000-01 when GST was introduced, until 2003-04. The proportion of Australian books making up these sales has also increased to 64% in 2002-03, a proportion much the same for consumer books as education books (the figure is about 1% lower for educational books), but the figure dropped in 2003-04 to 60%. Sales of educational books also declined and sales of Australian fiction plummeted.
There are some in the publishing industry who look at these figures with alarm and argue that publishing is in decline, under threat from electronic competition from DVDs and computer games. But it should be remembered that the number of books published in Australia plummeted 20% in 1981, with consequent loss of sales, and the market recovered, even under the threat of videos. Books have shown remarkable resilience, even as the level of readership appears to be decreasing. What is remarkable is that readership levels maintain a relatively high standing despite the increased demands on leisure time provided by electronic alternatives.
Even so, there is plenty to be concerned about regarding the publishing of books relevant to Australia’s literary culture. The sale of Australian-originated books declined by $50 million in 2003-04 after healthy increases in previous years. The industry has only been subject to this degree of analysis since 2000, but the ABS does not propose to continue to survey the industry in such detail any longer, so this snapshot, inconclusive as it is, may be the only information retrievable on the state of Australian-originated publishing. The Australian Publishers’ Association, whose membership is dominated by large, overseas-owned corporations, interprets this information differently in the September 2005 APA Update. The APA records “the news is pretty good” and so it is for overseas-owned publishers. Profitability increased in 2003-04, a result of lower costs, even though sales dropped $18 million on those in 2002-03 and the hardest hit part of the market was Australian-produced books.
The publishing of Australian originated fiction publishing appears to have reached a peak of $125.2 million in 2001-02 when the category outsold imported fiction ($102.5 million) and is declining. Only $73.1 million in sales of Australian fiction were achieved in 2003-04 compared to $116.6 million for imported fiction. Generally, figures show mass market paperbacks have the highest sales value compared to trade paperbacks and hardbacks. Because the unit price of mass market paperbacks is much lower, however, the return to an author per copy is much less, assuming that all authors receive a royalty of 10% of recommended retail price (and publishers like Penguin are trying to drive the royalty rate even lower).
The decline in sales of Australian-originated books is reflected in the fact that royalties and fees paid by publishers in 2003-04 declined 11% on the previous year.
Sales of the nonfiction category, which covers cookbooks, self-help, and a diverse range of other subjects, is increasing. This is supported by data from Nielsen Bookscan which shows that nonfiction titles make up 53% of the market for books while fiction makes up 28% and children’s book make up 18%. ABS data show non-fiction books, both Australian and imported, were worth 59% of general content sales in 2003-04.
Sales of Australian originated childrens’ books increased in 2003-04, but this market segment is still dominated by imported books.
Of concern to all authors is the fact that the average selling price of Australian titles dropped from $11.36 to $9.10 (a 20% decrease) between 2002-03 and 2003-04. For royalties calculated on the selling price, this represents a drop in income for authors. In contrast, the average salary of a publishing company employee rose 9% to $52,300. Editors also had an award increase.
The market share of imported books is also a threat to Australian authors. The increase in non-fiction is not compensating for the drop in sales of fiction.
While the number of new titles in 2003-04 is marginally greater than the previous year, these titles appear on the face of the sales information to have lost market share.
More information is available in my publication Current Publishing Practice.

Australian Publishing: Don't forget the authors

Australian publishing industry exports have increased markedly in the past few years. In 2003-4, the export of Australian books, titles and rights was worth more than $195 million.
This fact alone makes the publishing industry Australia's leading creative industry. But, like almost all creative industries, it is the creators themselves who are least likely to benefit from the success of the industry.
Some Australian authors certainly do well, but publishers do better. It is important for authors that publishers makes profits so they can pay royalties, but surely it ought to be as important to publishers to ensure authors share in their success.
Apparently not.
Publishers like to place clauses in their contract that reduce royalties for reprints of 1000 copies or less, even though they will have made back their investment on the first print run. Another trick is to reduce royalties rates for other than the initial version of the work, say a mas-market edition, again flying in the face of publishing economics in that further editions maximise the earning for the publisher. That's the way publishing works, after all. And I say that with over 30 years experience in the Australian publishing industry as a publisher.
In the success of the Australian publishing industry, there seems to be some darkness for authors.
But we have to remember our past and learn from it and seek opportunities where we can.
The years 1940 and 1941 were dark indeed for Australia. Japanese forces moved steadily southwards, Darwin was bombed, the Brisbane line was drawn.
But in this darkness a benefit emerged for Australian writers. The Australian government, needing to maintain capital reserves, imposed an embargo on American imports, including books and paper. Suddenly, Australian writers were being sought to produce detective fiction, Westerns and other novelettes published to meet public demand. Writers no longer had to hawk their wares to London publishers. One of the writers who found his detective books being published locally was Alan Yates (“Carter Brown”), who later became a member of the ASA’s Committee of Management at its second meeting in September 1963.
Jon Cleary, who is still an ASA member, began to be published in Australia in the early forties, along with other early ASA members such as Morris West. The restrictions on imported books remained until 1959. A book bounty was introduced in 1969 to encourage printing in Australia, but by that time a pattern of reading Australian writers had been established.
Still, Australians’ literary diet today is spiced with writers in English from India, Canada, the UK, the US, and occasionally New Zealand, as well as Australia. Unfortunately, that means the competition for Australian writers in their own market is actually greater than that for American writers in theirs.
Australian writers are further disadvantaged by the fact that most of the 20 largest book publishers in Australia are divisions of multinational corporations whose accountants are based in New York, Paris, London or Berlin. The corporate eye is on return on investment, not, as in the days of Brian Johns at Penguin, the development of a thriving Australian publishing industry. A new author now is required to be instantly successful, able to sell the same number of books as an author who has crafted a reputation over a significant period of time. Authors whose books fail to meet these sales expectations are brutally dispensed with.
But sometimes we can spend too much time lamenting what’s wrong, and miss opportunities to improve our situation. Again, we can turn to history for guidance.
In 1905, the United States was in a similar situation to that which it is in today in that it had a Republican President (Theodore Roosevelt) who intervened in foreign countries (Panama) for American benefit.
Australia was quietly developing its newly won nationhood. Secure within their newly-federated island country, the citizens throughout Australia were placing plaques in churches and town halls to commemorate those who had served in the Boer Wars. Ten years later, the same people were counting more war dead, a count that would continue until late in 1918. Hugo (Jim) Throssell, husband of Katharine Susannah Prichard (a member of the ASA from 1964), was one of the lucky survivors of World War I, but survival did not ensure happiness. In 1933, he took his own life while his wife was travelling overseas.
Well before this, towards the end of 1905, Miles Franklin began planning a trip to London, of two minds about the success of My Brilliant Career. It had sold well, but most royalties were on “colonial sales” (copies sold in Australia) and earned only half the rate of those sold in the UK.
Nearly 60 years later, colonial rates was one of the issues that led to the formation of the ASA in 1963. The first Australian writer to have this anachronism removed from her contracts was Dymphna Cusack, an inaugural member of the Council of the ASA. The first issue of Broadside, the ASA’s first newsletter, reported that at least six British publishers had agreed to negotiate colonial rights, and, thanks to the ASA’s work, these unfair royalties have disappeared.
Regardless of the political situation in Australia or internationally, regardless of the waxing and waning of literary fashion, the ASA continues to stand for increased returns for writers and to argue for more channels of remuneration. There will always be some sad circumstance for us to lament—that is perhaps why some of us write—but nothing should stand in the way of writers achieving the right to maintain a living.
The ASA has achieved a great amount over the past 40 years. It also won Public Lending Right and achieved success with Educational Lending Right. The ASA was also instrumental in the establishment of the Copyright Agency Ltd (CAL), which now provides another income stream for writers, especially those in the education sector, for the photocopying of their work. It has also established minimum standards for book contracts.
But despite all this work there is still much to be done. In my office I have in front of me a contract from a publisher that asks the author to assign copyright to the publisher, which would spell the end to any additional remuneration -- such as a CAL payment -- for the author. As well, the contract offers a flat fee upfront and royalties only after the sale of 3200 copies, which may have an impact on the author’s right to Educational Lending Right (ELR).
These are issues of core interest to writers. The everyday task of improving the ability of writers to be able to make a living remains central to the ASA.
The publishing industry might be successful but the fight for authors to make a living from their writing continues.
Some of this material has previously appeared in Australian Author. Copyright © 2007 Australian Society of Authors/Jeremy Fisher

Arts Funding: Creators second fiddle

Arts commentator Marcus Westbury had an interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald of 18 October 2007 (the link to it is above).
His article made me think about how we fund creativity in Australia. Like Marcus says, we actually give more to "cover bands" than we do to original artists.
Let me give you some facts. When we start comparing contributions from different creators to Australia’s cultural life and development we can see creators, and authors in particular, are undervalued. We can see this through government funding.
In Australia, the Australia Council for the Arts funds artists and creators with grants and operational money. For instance, the Major Performing Arts Board of the Australia Council dispensed $78,182,476 to the performing arts in the period 2005-06.
Opera does especially well from Major Performing Arts Board funding. Opera Australia and the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra received over $14.5 million dollars between them.
If you like opera, that’s terrific! If you don’t, you might wonder why anyone would spend $14.5 million on an artform that engages with very few people, either as performers and audiences. It’s not as if the funding supports Australian composers and librettists writing operas. The works performed in Opera Australia’s October 2006 season were from the composers Gilbert and Sullivan, Verdi, Janacek, and Handel. Dead European composers.
Of course the Major Performing Arts Board’s funding of opera also supports Australian singers and musicians and that is undeniably a good thing. The funds made available to Opera Australia provide living wages for musicians and singers, in fact around 1300 of them.
There is no way I would take funding away from these dedicated performers. Yet I can’t help but dwell on the fact that in the same period Opera Australia and the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra received their $14.5 million, the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts dispensed a mere $4,526,308 in grants and funding to writers and organisations supporting writers. While this included seven fellowships of $40,000 and one Emeritus Fellowship of $50,000, it wasn’t exactly employment for authors. The allocation of funding in this way forces me to ask why is it that singers and musicians can receive a living wage from government funding yet the same is not true for authors. What I can’t understand is what makes the performance of a Verdi or Handel opera worth more than the writing of a book. That’s the logical conclusion you must reach regarding the funding of arts in Australia. Through the allocation of money in this way, the performance of opera works by dead European composers is valued more than the authorship of original Australian books.
This sounds like a whinge, but my argument is based on sound free-market facts. Despite its reputation as an artform appreciated by the high and mighty, opera is not a popular artform. In fact, very few people at all go to opera performances – only 294,000 in 2004. That’s a little more than 0.01% of the Australian population. It isn’t what I’d call successful market penetration by a vibrant, living cultural form.
And does opera make money? Not at all. It is highly subsidised. It doesn’t even make money on the recordings or televised broadcasts of performances.
Australian literature on the other hand earns around $100 million a year in Australian sales, even when it is claimed to be “in decline”. Why? Because Australians continue to read Australian books in significant numbers. According to BookData figures released through Books Alive, 35,230,246 trade books were sold in Australia in the first nine months of 2006 (that’s about 1.75 books for every Australian). Over 65% of those books are produced in Australia by Australians. That’s much greater economic success and market penetration than opera can claim. At the same time the ABS reports that there were 556,000 Australians who were involved in writing. That’s almost double the number of punters who rock up to the Opera House to sip champagne between arias.
So why is it then that 1300 performers and musicians can be paid a living wage and yet so few authors receive such compensation? Because we are not assessing government support for the arts in free market terms, that’s why. Why do we have this aberration in government policy? Surely not because MPs and Ministers like to hang out at “first” nights of an artform that reached its use-by date in the nineteenth century?
Regrettably, that may be exactly the reason, given the massive corporate sponsorship for opera from the likes of Exxon Mobil, IBM, Australia Post, Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank. But with this sort of corporate support, why does opera need government funding at all? If corporate Australia is so desperate to see another soprano warbling Wagner while mingling with Ministers, surely they can pay totally for the privilege.
Of course the soprano should still be paid a living wage. I’m not belittling the artistry involved in performing opera. I’m simply trying to value it in terms of its place in Australian culture.
I believe a strong argument can be mounted that only art forms that lead to the creation of new Australian works should be funded by the taxpayer.
All opera can claim in recent years is the creation of the Lindy Chamberlain opera and Batavia neither of which were mainstream successes as, say, Kate Grenville’s book The Secret River has been. On this basis, opera would be a big loser.
If opera’s funding was assessed according to this criterion, it would probably be about equal to its market size and its cultural significance; this is, not very much. The funding for literature on the other hand would be altered considerably, and more authors would be able to be paid a living wage.
So why isn’t literature getting this sort of funding? Is the truth that, as a nation, we believe dead European composers are more deserving of the money we allocate for the arts than living Australian authors? Are we still accepting a cultural cringe where we cannot accept living Australian creators are as good as if not better than dead European ones?
Or is our arts funding simply fundamentally flawed because it doesn’t follow free market principles?
Whatever, we undervalue authors.
Much of this material appeared in Australian Author, December 2006. Copyright © 2006 Australian Society of Authors/Jeremy Fisher.

Public Lending Right: World wide view

The conference in Paris. The first sesssion featured reports from all participants.

It was very worthwhile to take part in the recent 7th International Conference on Public Lending Right (PLR) in Paris from 6 to 8 September.
In Australia, we tend to take this right for granted, but in fact it is in place in only about 27 countries. The USA is not one of them.
European countries lead the way, and new countries admitted to membership of the EU have an obligation to introduce PLR as part of their membership of the EU.
Some of the Scandinavian countries have an issue with the EU since their PLR systems, like Australia's, aims to encourage their national literatures. The EU expects all of its members to pay PLR for all authors whose works are held in librraries. This has meant that some countries are now paying PLR to US authors, despite the fact the PLR does not exist in the USA.
At the same time, Australian authors are eligible for payment as well. The ASA is looking at acting as a central source for the collection of European PLR payments for Australian authors whose works are held in European libraries. I followed up this matter with the Authors Licensed Collecting Society (ALCS) in London after the PLR conference.
At present, there are no plans for Australia to pay PLR for any authors except those who are citizens of or resident in Australia.

The Australian Book Market: A brief economic outline

What research there is on the Australian book industry has been conducted comparatively recently. From 2000-2004, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) assessed the industry as part of the Book Industry Assistance Package given by the current Federal Government as compensation for the imposition of the GST on books. Data in this blog entry comes from the ABS.

The net sales value of the book market in Australia was $1,560.6 million in 2003-04, a slight decline from $1,578.6 million in 2002-03. In 2003-04, there were 234 businesses identified as book publishers and a further 10 identified as major contributors. In 2002-03, the overall operating profit (income, less expenses of $1,487.7 million and a reduction in inventories of $2.5 million) for the industry was $88.4 million (5.6%), but, even with a decrease in net sales value, 2003-04 proved a better year than the previous one with the overall operating profit rising to $152.1 million (9.7%) as expenses were lower at $1,404.4 million and reduction in inventories was $4.2 million. In 2003-04, 133 of 244 publishers were involved mainly in publishing books of general content while 111 were involved mainly with publishing educational books (including professional and reference books).

Just on 60% of the books sold in Australia originate in Australia accounting for sales in 2003-04 of $811.9 million. This is a vast change from 1960, when 75% of the books sold in Australia were imported, and 1980, when 63% of the books sold in Australia were imported.

However, the change in ownership of publishers has been insidiously the other way. Very few Australian companies feature on the list of the Top 20 publishers. However, it is interesting to note that the structure of the industry hasn’t changed much in over 20 years. In 1982, there were 200 active publishers in Australia, compared with 234 in 2003-04. In 1982, no publishers had a turnover of more than $40 million, and only 20% had a turnover of more than $2 million. The majority had a turnover of less than $1 million. This pattern was pretty much unaltered in 2003-04. While there are no publicly available figures on the turnover of most Australian publishing companies because they don't have to report to Australian authorities or are privately owned, it is possible to gauge their size through their reported activities and the annual reports of their overseas owners. As well the ABS has reported (the only year it has done so) that in 2000-01, the 20 largest book publishers in terms of income earned an average of $52 million each, while the remaining book publishers earned an average of $2 million. Overall the 228 businesses involved in book publishing in that year earned an average of $6 million each.

These facts need to be placed in a global context. For example, the international operations of Harcourt Education (purchased by Pearson in 2007), which include Australia, had an operating profit of A$69.6 million for the six months ended June 2004, the 2004 world-wide revenue for McGraw-Hill in 2004 was A$3,050 million with an operating profit of A$432 million, and the 2003 world-wide revenue for Random House (part of privately owned, German Bertelsmann) was A$2,940 million. In other words, the Australian market is a very small part of global publishing, and the global activities of some of the larger publishers operating in Australia are larger than the entire Australian market.

Closer examination of the Australian market reveals that 77% ($1,198.3 million) of the 2003-04 total income for publishers and other major contributors was generated by the 20 largest (in terms of income) book publishers. These 20 publishers were equally as significant in sales, selling 78% ($1,057.8 million) of the value of total book sales and 76% (97.7 million) of all books sold, but their profit margin was lower than that for the overall industry at 9.5% in 2003-04 while it was 12.7% for the other publishers. Mind you, that's not a bad return!

Educational Publishing in Australia: what's it worth?

There is no comprehensive analysis of sales in the educational market. Statistics have not been collected since 2004 as the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) no longer received funding to do so.

Currently, the education sector represents the largest publishing segment. It was worth $547.8 million in 2002-03, with $342.5 million of that resulting from Australian published material, but had dropped to $526.1 million in 2003-04. Of the 2003-04 sales, books produced in Australia were worth $343.4 million or 65% of educational sales. Most of these were for school use, the largest proportion of imported titles being used in tertiary education, though the number of imported titles being used in schools is growing and is a worrying trend for both culture and income for educational writers.

The decline in sales of educational books reflects international patterns and perhaps the influence of internet in education. Copyright Agency Ltd (CAL) is reporting a greater rate of copying of material available on the internet. Its market size had increased year by year since 2000 but plummeted to $498.8 million in 2003-04 (Table). There were 4615 new Australian educational titles published in 2002-03 and 4610 in 2003-04.

Table: Income from sales in the educational publishing market in Australia 2000-2004
Period Australian Education (m) Imported Education (m) Total (m)
2000-01 $295.9 $178.4 $474.3
2001-02 $310.2 $209 $519.2
2002-03 $328.4 $205.3 $533.7
2003-04 $313.2 $185.6 $498.8

Source: ABS

What books sell well in Australia and who publishes them?

Publicly available Australian data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) do not allow much elaboration on the subject areas being published. The ABS data is only broken down by fiction, childrens, non-fiction and educational. Bookscan information is more specific, but only available to subscribers. Non-fiction outsells fiction. Australian fiction makes up around 10% of the market in revenue terms.
The Australian Publishers Association (APA) compiles a list of bestsellers each year in the categories of adult hardbacks; adult trade paperbacks; adult mass-market paperbacks; children’s hardbacks; and children’s paperbacks. Only sales at retail outlets at standard publisher discounts and where the author gets a full royalty are included.
Books by Australian authors sell well. The APA survey in the year up to 30 March 2004 showed the adult hardback Brother Fish by Bryce Courtenay (Pearson/Penguin) sold more than 250,000 copies at an RRP of $49.95, topping that category; the adult trade paperback The Reef by Di Morrissey sold over 105,000 copies at an RRP of $30, topping that category; and the mass market adult paperback Friends to the End by Bradley Trevor Grieve sold more 50,000 copies at a RRP of $14.95, coming in at No. 11 in that category well behind Dan Brown whose books filled the first four positions in this category.
In a year when a new Harry Potter book is published (such as 2007), that book dominates the sales charts. In 2006, Kate Grenville's The Secret River (Text) sold well, helped by its inclusion in the Books Alive campaign. A big seller in 2005-06 was Li Cunxin's Mao's Last Dancer (Pearson/Viking).
In 2003-04, publishers and other major contributors based in New South Wales or Victoria accounted for 94% of total book sales (51% NSW; 43% in Victoria).

How many books can you read?

Publishing News in London reports Nielsen statistics that the number of titles published in the United Kingdom in 2006 increased by 4.1% to over 115,000. This was still below a high of over 130,000 in 2005. The number of publishers in the UK (defined as companies registering their first ISBN prefix) increased to 2801. Nielsen estimates that there over 258,000 titles were published in the English language in 2006.
Think about that next time your publisher rejects your manuscript!
Click on the title to this blog entry to go to the original source.