In her essay entitled ‘Our Future Thinkers’ (July 2006) Drusilla Modjeska has several things to say about the state of book publishing in Australia. Much of her comment was naturally coloured by personal experience and apparently by the views of a select number of industry insiders; but a theme that came through more than once had to do with the way in which book editors work and the way in which their work is viewed and more importantly costed by book publishers.
I don’t imagine for one minute that Drusilla intended to impugn the excellent work done by many talented book editors who work diligently and expertly, often in the ‘background’. It may be that HarperCollins costs the editorial work against each title, as she says. It may also be true that by doing so HarperCollins is not able to ‘use one book to subsidise another’ but I doubt it, as that is essentially the way every trade publisher operates, with around 20% of the list carrying the other 80%.
What I do know is that Penguin does not and has never (in more than 40 years of publishing Australian books) costed the in-house editing of a book against an individual title. The reason for this is that we believe each book should have ‘the editorial attention it deserves’.
Penguin employs some 21 book editors, many of whom have been with the company for many years. The work they do is largely invisible, as it should be, but whether it takes weeks or even months, our editors are encouraged not to allow the book to go to the printer until in their view, and in the view of the author, it is as ready as it is going to be.
I took away from this essay the sense of a rather unsavoury ‘elitist’ stance – a suggestion that only a select few really care about our culture and the rest are just in it for the money (what money?). More specifically that ergo ‘small publishers are good’ and ‘big publishers are bad’. Reflecting on this and looking back at more than ten years of involvement in producing Australian books, one of Penguin’s senior designers said to me the other day: ‘If you had sat where I've been sitting for the past ten years, and witnessed the tears, the anger, the rage, the sweat-broken sleep - the passion and commitment of our editors would never be questioned again...
There was also an unfortunate and misleading moment of ‘cringe’ when Drusilla wrote: ‘There is always the hope – the fantasy - that one might be picked up (notice the passive voice) by a UK and/or US publisher…’
If that attitude was ever true, it certainly isn’t these days. Australian publishers are well-known and well represented overseas, and there are few deserving titles that do not succeed in overseas markets. I accept that the US is a special case, as ‘if it didn’t take place in New York, then it probably didn’t happen’; but nevertheless, last year Penguin Australia earned over $4m dollars for its authors in additional royalty income, most of it from overseas, and other Australian publishers have similar success stories.
Whilst I’m not going so far as to offer to publish ‘difficult books for difficult people’, I look at Penguin’s forthcoming fiction (by the likes of Kate Legge, Kate Veitch, Robert Drewe, Sonya Hartnett and Brenda Walker) and our array of non-fiction with pride, and I tire of the implication that no good books are being published (or edited, or nurtured or sold overseas) by the ‘larger publishers’. If we’re going to have a debate about the nurturing of ideas in Australia, all well and good, but perhaps it’s time to find some new whipping boys and girls.
