The profit generated by Australian books exceeds that of imported titles, yet on the books pages of our newspapers, the reviews are overwhelmingly of foreign titles—why? Alae Taule’alo surveyed Australia’s leading newspaper literary editors for some answers.
The Australian book market is a small one and the market for Australian fiction is smaller still, and apparently diminishing. Australian nonfiction may hold its own, but the position of local content remains complex, and with the industry coming increasingly under the sway of globalised market forces it’s set to get more complex still.
The literary media plays a vital and obvious role in promoting and supporting the local book industry and, as my survey of Australian newspaper literary editors reveals, it’s generally specialist book or trade magazines and broadsheet newspapers such as the Age or the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) that stress their commitment to Australian content. Locally relevant editorial always commands an audience, of course, but there remains a subtle difference between the importance Claire Sutherland at the Herald-Sun places on books ‘about Melbourne’ and the importance Peter Rose from Australian Book Review attaches to Australian content.
Jason Steger at the Age is a prime example of the editor as guardian or advocate. When he states his commitment to Australian writing he casts his lot with the local industry. It’s an admirable, if rose-hued position. But is Australian writing really being served by an Arthurian round table of committed literary editors? Are the majority of book-page editors as supportive in fact as they are in theory? What is their role in supporting local writing?
Market share vs media coverage
Statistics gathered by Bookseller+Publisher’s sister publication Media Extra for 2005 revealed that over 70% of books reviewed across the board in Australian literary media were from overseas sources, leaving less than 30% per cent local content, of which less than 10% was fiction and less than four percent children’s literature.
The book publisher’s desire for media exposure is theoretically insatiable, but it’s all too easy to dismiss a local house’s claim that its market share far outweighs the coverage it receives in the printed media. Are Australian books more in demand than their media exposure would indicate?
The most recent figures indicate that the profit generated from Australian-originated titles exceeds that of imported ones. ABS statistics for the 2003-04 period indicate a difference of about $200 million between aggregate sales of Australian and imported books. The Australian market is buoyed primarily by educational, professional and reference markets, where it’s perhaps unsurprising that local titles outstrip imported ones. Of the remnant, Australian nonfiction generated around $310 million¾a 75% greater profit margin than that generated by overseas nonfiction¾but sales of Australian children’s books and fiction were both exceeded by those of overseas titles, coming in at $116 million and $75 million respectively. The difference between the sales of foreign and local children’s books was relatively slim; for Australian fiction it was significantly larger, and overall Australian fiction constitutes less than 10% of the market.
The Australian literary media may reflect the relatively marginalised place of Australian fiction, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect the overall market share of local titles. This disparity between the market and media coverage is an unsettling one and the reasons for it are many and complex.
In part it’s because in Australia the printed media carries the primary burden of distributing book news to the public. ‘What Australia is missing is mainstream TV coverage of books in book-club format,’ says Jenny Lee, editor and co-ordinator of the Publishing and Communications program at Melbourne University. ‘In the UK and the US, there are very popular shows (Oprah, Richard & Judy) that include book clubs in their mix. There’s nothing like it here.’
The books pages of Australian newspapers are ‘constrained by being cast in the mould of the genteel literary review … essentially based on a 19th-century/early 20th-century conception of a limited reading public,’ according to Lee. ‘There’s a lot of scope for commentary about books that could break out of this mould and get real discussion going about the far more diverse ways in which people are interacting with books now.’
It’s a view shared in part by Rosemary Sorenson at the Courier-Mail, who is similarly critical of the ‘fusty’ approach of many book editors in the literary media. A change in critical tack might conceivably throw open the scope of books pages to different genres, sharing the load of nonfiction and history with publications like Australian Financial Review (although AFR is infamous for carrying syndicated reviews of overseas books without even checking for the details of their local edition). It might also bring more Australian writing and history to the fore and make the critical process more participatory. It’s certainly worthwhile to question how many mainstream publications take the trouble to survey readers about their buying patterns and what they think of the literary pages.
The effects
Most newspaper literary editors surveyed denied that they have an editorial policy about the type of books they review. This is understandable in part. Literary editors are always faced with the prospect of shaping the sheer volume of published books into something coherent and meaningful, while at the same time remaining conscious of space constraints, market concerns and what their audience actually wants to read. Indeed, Malcolm Knox, then the literary editor of SMH, told an audience this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week that despite having almost a million readers each week he was under constant pressure to justify the existence of the paper’s books pages at all—and to include more ‘celebrity’ author content and less ‘wordy, worthy’ reviews.
Taking all this into account, one must still ask how book editors’ editorial policies, spoken or unspoken, actually affect what people read and how they perceive their local industry. Murray Waldren from the Australian, usually articulate, gives an rather opaque response to the question of editorial preference by remarking ‘Quality is the key; but our approach is open-eyed, not close-minded.’ Editors such as Steger or SMH’s Catherine Keenan play a similarly close hand, though their expressions of support for local writing are warmer.
Conventional trade wisdom has it that reviews don’t have a huge affect on sales. The same might be said of invisibility in the media. Many local titles are perhaps too specialised or in some other way unsuitable for mainstream coverage. They’ll still sell, so long as there’s a captive audience for locally relevant technical and educational material. But reviews have different relevance for different demographics. The tabloid-reading book buyer might well ignore reviews altogether, particularly if they are also the market that purchases most of their books at discount department stores. But can the same can be said of the broadsheet-reading, ‘AB’-demographic book buyer, who may frequently purchase books as a gift and buy them from a dedicated bookstore? It seems more might be done to increase the visibility of Australian titles to the demographic most likely to purchase them and that books pages might function more appropriately as reflections of the real industry rather than just guardians of culture or arbiters of taste.
Newspaper literary editors aren’t publicists and their responsibility is to their reader rather than just the fortunes of the local industry. But as so many feel pressed to express their support for the local industry, a number of things might be done to open up the current format of Australia’s leading books pages. A combination of cultural insecurity plus an outmoded format for literary coverage has resulted in Australian content becoming something of a silent majority that is all but ignored by the mainstream literary press. Perhaps a more efficient communication loop between readers and the newspapers and magazines themselves, might be the best means of fixing at least half the problem.
Alae Taule’alo conducted his research into newspaper literary editors at Thorpe-Bowker as part of his studies for the Postgraduate Diploma in Editing and Publishing at the University of Melbourne. His interviews with literary editors are being published each week in WBN Media Extra, available online (to MX subscribers) at http://www.booksellerandpublisher.com.au.
Published in Book+Seller in August 2008
Alae Taule'alo 