Economic analysis of literary publishing in Australia

This Australia Council-commissioned research report is a study of the economics of the Australian literary publishing sector.

The Australia Council is the Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body. A priority area for the Australia Council is arts marketing and audience development to create a higher level of demand from arts consumers and to develop new audiences and readership. In turn, it is intended to help authors earn a living wage from their work.

To enable literary publishers and other literary organisations to distribute and market writing more effectively in Australia and increase the income of writers, it is imperative to gain a better understanding of the structure of the literary publishing industry and the potential readership for literary genres.

While there are reports into the nature of Australian publishing in general and the ABS provides statistics on the Australian publishing industry, there is very little specific data or information relating to literary publishing.

About this study

As defined by the study brief, this work is focussed on the Australian literary publishing industry. It is not concerned with mass-market publishing and non-literary genres.

The scope of the work is to analyse:

• the nature and structure of Australian literary publishing in terms of numbers of publishers, geographic distribution, size, ownership and corporate governance, profit-making status, etc
• the operations of the sector in terms of number of publications by genre, authors published, financial status, marketing budgets, total expenditures, etc
• formats and media including electronic and paper-based publishing
• genres published by the category of publisher
• the publication of authors in different stages of their careers (first-time authors, experienced authors, etc)
• marketing policies and practices
• barriers and constraints faced by the industry in the publishing, distribution, commissioning, selling and reading of titles
• on-demand publishing
• case study anecdotes from publishers.

The study analysed these issues through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research.

Much of the material was gathered from a postal survey and face-to-face interviews with publishers. The period for the research was the calendar year 2006.