Australian publishing is fukt because it’s run by deadshits, dolts, and drongos.

Black Inc, AI, and OzLit: anything's better than crawling!

Being an Australian writer is a bit like being one of those buskers who paints themselves silver and pretends to be a robot, only you’ve spray painted nothing below the waist and aren’t wearing any pants. I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that being an Australian writer is an indignity. You are better off panhandling at traffic lights wearing a cardboard sign draped around your neck that says “WARNING: public masturbator and eldest daughter” if you are chasing after anything kinda resembling respect. To describe yourself as an ‘Australian writer’ is to embrace a level of low-humming cringe that should have you exiled to the outskirts of society, like a radioactive leper who insists on performing spoken-word poetry at friends’ weddings. 

To paraphrase the great bush poet Henry Lawson re being an Australian writer: “shit’s fukt, cunt.” 

Or, to quote a far greater poet, Brad Neely, from his seminal opus, Wizard People, Dear Reader, where he spins a piece of lyricism that perfectly encapsulates the Australian writer’s internal dialogue:

“Do you like flying motorcycles?”

“Anything’s better than crawling.”

In embarking on a career of self-perpetuating cuckdom, the Australian writer agrees to debase themselves for a readership whose clawing lowness is only outdone by the snake-belly-slither of our pay. We are here to sell 48 books to lorazepam zonked wine mums at a writer’s festival hosted by ABC RN’s least fireable Whitlam-era sex-pest, and we should be grateful for the privilege. We are here to sink four years into a master’s degree where an author of detective fiction written to stock the waiting rooms at family courts across the nation sits in judgement of what classifies as ‘interesting’ prose. We are here to get retweeted by a 21yo polycule furry with  an axe to grind who is cancelling us for not doing a proper tribute to “The Crystals” before watching our little cousin’s longplay of Sonic Frontiers. We are here to write books for a nation of gambling-app addicts and middle-class middle-aged middle-management email-job G Flip aficionados, and if they don’t leave us at least ten three star reviews on goodreads with insights like “don’t like books with stairs in them,” we should bite down on our Giramondo issued Gerald Murnane branded (I am imagining an ecstasy pill that looks like Gerald Murnane, ngl) back molar cyanide capsule. 

It is, undoubtedly, an ignoble life. 

they used to put this in hotel rooms like it was the St. James Bible

No wonder our industry spits on us. The Big Dogs (see Gen-X/boomer types who still wax lyrical about appearing in the studio audience at a D-Generation taping) who run this biz are two decades into an ether-huffing binge that’s left them dizzy and listless. With few exceptions, Australian publishing is not in the business of publishing books. No, I’ll be more generous: Australian publishing simply isn’t in the business of publishing literature. Instead, they’ve settled on a sorta pastiche of content slop, ranging from bestish selling memoirs of ABC comedians keen to stretch out three incidents of high-school bullying (where they were clearly the instigator) into a forty thousand word Guardian article, 43 y/o young adult authors using the magic of multiverses and time jumps and kink-positive dragons to correct the politics of an imagined Grindr hookup, essay anthologies on micro-aggressions ft. writers who don’t actually exist, and sloggish autofictive tomes dedicated to exploring the complex intricacies of intergenerational trauma burdening Aboriginal Australians, written, deftly, by white women living in lofts in London who have not engaged with any countrymen who did not attend their elite lady’s college in over two decades.

We want Stan Original Fiction, if you can’t provide, kindly fuck off. 

This is the oeuvre of the major publishers, anyway. At least our embattled independent small presses struggle on, proudly publishing peoples’ doctoral theses for a dwindling audience of freaks (hi) who have to wake up every day and convince themselves they are not merely hobbyists on par with stamp collectors, Gunpla enthusiasts, and Tazo historians.   

It’s good stuff, is what I’m saying. And being good, it sells. Is the average annual earnings of an Australian author $18k a year? (a number I honestly think is a bit inflated, but nvm that). Sure, ok, yes, it most certainly is. But that’s 18k you can spend on rent while losing four months of your life to a grant that reads like the ramblings of the Unabomber, a grant that will be soundly rejected as soon as the board gets a whiff of the word ‘book’.

The system works baby, don’t question it. Just be grateful you know who Pip Adams even is, you ungrateful dickhead, ok? Exchange your Clout Points at the NYWF Handjob Bar and move on, yeah? Yeah.

a book about a twink who works the glory hole at parliament house

So it goes, that our comrades at Black Inc have hit their writers with a contract amendment asking them to consent to their work being used to train some unnamed third-party AI. Black Inc has given them until Wednesday (today, if I edit this) to say yay or nay to what it promises will be a 50/50 profit split. 

What a bargain, eh? To think that there’s an AI out there that knows who Mungo MaCallum is makes me genuinely hard. 

Oh yes, OzLit is gurning for the slop. And why not? The industry is already halfway there. The content to slop transition is as seamless as it is painless for those pulling the big wet lever. Just ask Guardian Australia, who recently inked a deal with OpenAI. Who better than Australia’s media and publishing industries — so synonymous with being on the ball re all things cool and profitable — to dive into the AI bubble, a bubble which, unlike others, they’ve assured us will never, ever, pop. Ever. 

This is the inevitable endpoint of an industry’s decade long bushwack into the deepest jungles of midwittery and Doogueian drivel. We already churn out a lot of books with little to no authorial voice or intent, so it’s just sensible business for publishers to, eventually, cut the author out of the process entirely, saving themselves at least three grand on the back end. 

We are haggling over what remains of a beached whale’s long rotten carcass (read Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs btw, one of the best Aussie books this decade). The Australian writer is a serf both within and without the OzLit serfdom, it’s only fitting that the land barons who run the joint treat us with about the same amount of respect as they do the people who serve them canipes at their back-patting industry ceremonies. It’s a misunderstanding of the very concept of labour that has left those up top baffled, presumably, by authors pushing back against AI. Publishing is a business run/managed by people who’ve never really worked. The money they offer up is all the proof you need to know that they do not conceive of writing as a trade. They don’t appreciate that all of it — from the daydreaming, to the research, to the sitting at the desk and sweating out the thing — is hard yakka. And why would they, when next to none of them have been anywhere near it in their lives? For them, it’s always been a matter of prompts and responses, where nothing is sacrosanct, and the output and profit margins are to be min-maxed like an Elden Ring build.

Authors are to be no-scoped for failing to comprehend publisher’s invisible wonk-brained machinations, their remains dumped in the lime pits out back with the unpublished Toad Rage prequels. 

apparently the prequel was about fucking Paul Jennings’ wife???

WELL THEN, I hear you say, MX. SMUGGY PANTS! WHAT’S YOUR SOLUTION?

And to you I answer: uh, well, I was just kicked off twitter for saying someone should sh**t Elon M*sk, so y’know, maybe my preferred solutions are not optimally suited for ye olde social media/substack. Short of a revolution, or a UBI, I think our only real hope is a clearing out of the detritus. As in all things in Australia, people under the age of 40 have effectively been kept out of the decision making side of Australian publishing. An increasingly academically minded independent press has understandably alienated any readers who would be curious enough to dip into something outre or wild (or Australian), much in the same way an increasingly slop-heavy and monopolised (RIP Text!) mainstream press has numbed millions (ok, thousands) of readers with books that are closer to reruns of Vera and Enough Rope than they are to capital L ‘Literature.’ It would be great if one of us wild cards (I think there’s maybe 8 or 9 of us) could bag a billion dollars somehow (don’t…suggest…assassination…again…) and start a rejuvenated mid-sized publishing house, keen to take risks and entertain in equal measure, but short of me buying an air-to-blimp RPG off Temu, I can’t see that happening any time soon. 

I am aware that I have written something like three versions of this article in the past year or two. I am also aware that I am closer to going Bickle-mode than anyone else in OzLit. I guess I can’t help but be frustrated. The dolts call the shots, and it gives me the willies. Call me basic, but I believe Good Writing is a profitable business model. I just wish those in charge agreed with me. 

p.s. my debut novel Nock Loose is out July 1 via Fremantle Press, available in all good bookstores, but you can’t pre-order it yet for reasons kinda beyond my comprehension, sorry.