It's not easy being a trade publisher in Australia these days. The outside world has caught up with us: trade is terrible, e-books are still either a promise or a threat, and there remain large uncertainties about the domestic and international economies. There's no doubt that the ending of government stimulus payments and the raising of interest rates have dented consumer confidence, to the point that retailing in general is now in the worst state that many proprietors and employees can remember.
Some booksellers are already going broke, and many others are suffering severe declines in turnover and profitability. This, in turn, is putting increasing pressure on publishers to reduce costs and avoid risks. Since trade publishing is, by definition, a highly uncertain entrepreneurial activity, this is easier said than done.
Of course, wages can be frozen, staff can be cut back or not replaced, some internal tasks can be outsourced, lists can be pruned, and advances to authors can be reduced. Overseas, the large multinational houses have gone through this process several times over the last few years, and there's still no end in sight to it. But this is self-evidently a holding operation -- a recipe for survival or for accommodating decline -- and not a plan for growth.
As an independent observer, you might retort that the world would be better off if fewer books were published -- especially bad or mediocre books. This is true. To a publisher, though, such action only makes practical sense if it's the competition that cuts back. With backlist titles disappearing from most bookshops, publishers are more dependent than ever before on each month's new releases to generate income. With this comes an increasing premium on publishing frontlist titles that will be instant commercial successes.
Corporate owners of book chains and publishing houses tend to have a very instrumental attitude to these imperatives -- they want to know why bookshops hold stock that doesn't sell, or why publishers don't just publish bestsellers. I've even known accountants to be astonished that a whole industry can be based on publishers bankrolling authors, lending their books to booksellers, paying for retail prominence, and then accepting the return of unsold books.
Even for independent booksellers and publishers, this paradigm feels under threat. To put it most simply, if the industry cannot provide a living to its participants, it will have to change radically.
I haven't talked about my own company's performance or prospects so far. Let me just say that we are suffering from the ailments I've described above, but that we remain profitable and are doing relatively well in the circumstances. A couple of months ago, our bookselling and publishing peers adjudged us the Small Publisher of the Year for the third time in the five years since the award's inception. Several of our books have won or been shortlisted for major domestic and overseas awards (most notably, The Twin, a translated Dutch novel by Gerbrand Bakker, which won the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and The World Beneath, by Cate Kennedy, which has just been shortlisted for The Age's Book of the Year Award, after having won the People's Choice Award in the 2010 NSW Premier's literary awards).
Commercially, we've been extremely lucky to have a continuing, record-breaking bestseller (The Brain that Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge). As well -- if you'll pardon the advertisement -- our high level of efficiency and our talented staff, our investment in excellent books, and the emergence of our superb fiction list has protected us from the worst of the trade's woes.
Our list has never looked stronger, and the quality has never been better. Even so, in the last month we've suffered from the heaviest returns we've had in our history (due mainly to a dysfunctional group of booksellers that has been wreaking havoc on the industry). And I don't want to hide the fact that it is dispiriting to see good books not selling much, and to see -- after all our hard work -- how difficult it has become to generate a decent income on a month-by-month basis.
I've been in the industry for over thirty years, and I've never known it as tough as this -- and I've picked up similar vibes from my bookselling and publishing peers. This year's Christmas is going to be more important than usual for the whole industry.
Henry Rosenbloom