Is Australia Publishing Too Many Books? Or Not Enough Literature?
Australia's Big 5 are in the content business, and that bubble will burst.
There’s been movement in OzLit, for the word has got around, that the publishing industry has got away from itself and, maybe, the nation at large. We are puking out too many books, and guess what? No bugger’s reading them. Or at least that is the vibe, with 22,000 Australian books being released every year, maybe 10 of which someone with their finger on the pulse could name on any given day, with 1 or 2 of those having a lifespan beyond the soul-crushing 6-12 month hype-cycle of a new release, if they’re lucky.
Everyone from ArtsHub to KYD to Guardian Australia is asking this simple question: is Australia publishing too many books? And the resounding answer seems to be “I dunno, maybe? Probably?” and “hell yeah baby, can’t stop/won’t stop!”
The real question is: what do you consider a book?
If a book is just 50k words, give or take, bound together and sold at a semi-reasonable mark up, then yes, I’d say Australia is drowning in the bastards.
Australian publishing (specifically ‘The Big 5’ — Penguin Random House, Hachette, Allen & Unwin, HarperCollins and Pan Macmillan — collectively own 70% of Australia’s book publishing industry ) is first and foremost, to quote the great Dan Hogan, a giftware industry (this does apply to some indies, also), and as such exists to produce a slew of junk like The Kushroom Vapes (Helen Garner’s diary about her year running a weed shop with her useless hubby), Old Curly: The Upside of Downer Syndrome (Alexander Downer’s guide to becoming a lobbyist for the weapons industry), Dreams of Hugs: Some Conversations (Stan Grant book about befriending IDF war criminals), and Mr. Fart’s Poly-Inclusive Journey (a possibly AI generated court-ordered picture book allegedly authored by Hamish and/or Andy etc).
Such works are The Big 5’s bread and butter.
If you’re wondering about adult fiction, don’t worry, we have thousands of variants on the crime genre, I mean, everything from hard-nosed outback noirs like Loose Gravel (yellow font title, picture of country road), to Bitumen Bitch (red font title with cream outline, cartoon woman in head scarf lowering cat-eye sunglasses, possibly winking), to Squeaky Cleaners: A Manson Mansion Mystery (cover quote that reads “a cozy yuletide caper!”).
There is something for everyone, and if you don’t like murder (weird!?!), there are currently 500 knock-offs of Heated Rivalry (AFL, NRL, lawn bowls — the possibilities are endless!) coming down the chute.
Truly, a beggar’s banquet!
Yeah/nah, It’s clear to anyone who isn’t living in a permanent haze of the two midday chardonnays + a benzo lunch that the problem isn’t just that we are producing too many books, but rather, that we are producing too many of the same books. Originality and uniqueness are treated as dangerous foreign entities by The Big 5, and so we get an eternal series of riffs on the 10 or so (it’s closer to 6) types of books that the money boys who manage this pyramid scheme have deemed acceptable.
Mainstream Australian publishing works on the same logic/business model as digital media in the 2010s, only with a less popular/accessible product that, by its very nature, necessitates loss and waste. They are not in the business of art and/or information, really, but content — with the hopes being that 1 out of the 100 books they put on shelves in a 1 month span will pay for the others to be pulped. The grift is in the glut, with the dispiriting smothering effect being largely intentional. Walking into a bookstore and strolling the Australian releases produces a similarly dysphoric wooziness to numbly scrolling 9Gag back in 2008, or filling out endless BuzzFeed quizzes (‘What Annabel Crabb Recipe Are You!?) in your dead-end office job.
The Age of Peak Content of course cannibalised itself and combusted, leaving us in the ruins of the mass misinformation age and the heavy fatigue that comes with it. But Australian publishing is boldly asking…what if it didn’t? Couldn’t? Never would? while following the exact same trajectory that digital media did, only, daringly, with more overhead.
So yeah, there could be too many books. That’s kinda the point, but.
And yet, there definitely isn’t enough literature.
The thing about Aus publishing’s content Akira Blob is that it blots out the light coming from some of the best writers working anywhere in the world today. The industry’s aversion to art, formal experimentation, innovation, originality, and imagination means that a generation of brilliant Australian writers have been overlooked, shunned, and pushed aside to make way for quick-to-market, predictable, forgettable, fast-spoiling slop. There are seriously exciting things happening in OzLit right now (just listen to any guest interview on The Battler ffs!), but you wouldn’t know it if you were not a hobbyist (which is what literary Australian literature is now: a hobby for hobbyists) because the poop factory is drowning it out with a million desperate attempts to create the next Craig Silvey (not like that).
It is grim as all get out, but it doesn’t have to be. True Writers may have to take to the woods, but there we can form little bandit camps and act as highwaymen on Australian publishing’s bitumen road (oh how they love the bitumen roads!) of mediocrity. Look to SickLeave, Pink Shorts Press, Puncher & Wattmann, Giramondo and others to see what is possible. There is no point in playing fair within a rigged system, and there is even less of one compromising your artistic vision for the near-sightedness of duds, so we might as well carve out a niche for something actually new and exciting whenever and if-ever we get the chance. The current model is unsustainable, and there’s only so many indie pubs the Top 5 can gobble up before they choke on a bone and cark it.
The reason most Australians aren’t buying Australian books is because we are boring them shitless. Capital has that effect on art and audience alike. There is an appetite for the wild, the weird, the wooly, and the wack. I’ve done what I can to prove this, with some success. Whether that’s a lesson the industry wants to learn is another question entirely.