Australia is publishing books too quickly – and everyone is losing out

A Sydney author – I’ll call her Rebecca – vowed never to write another book after the deranging experience of publishing her first. She’s using a pseudonym because one day she might change her mind; the notoriously small Australian publishing industry does not tend to look with favour on authors who complain.When Rebecca was proofing her debut – a work of nonfiction published by one of the big five – she discovered that a pivotal chapter had been cut. “I thought it was a mistake, that it had somehow been left out of the papers they’d sent,” she says. “Turns out they’d deliberately excised it and thought I wouldn’t notice.”The proposed cover art for the book, which was set in one country, featured an animal native to another – and when the book went to a copy editor, the questions Rebecca got back were “absolutely out of touch”. References to hunting were queried on the basis they might offend vegetarians. Big mistakes slipped through the first print run and needed to be corrected in the second, including the name of a major character, which changed suddenly halfway through. “I’d assumed the publisher would take care of these things,” Rebecca says. “It felt like they were trying to shove me out the door and get the book out.”Her story is alarming but not uncommon in Australia’s publishing industry, which on the whole seems hellbent on getting books to market as quickly as possible. Some authors, like Rebecca, get stuck in a production schedule that makes no sense to them. “There was always the next deadline looming,” she says. “I felt like they were trying to pressure me to just roll with it.”Other books get on the fast track to take advantage of Christmas sales or the news cycle – but not many go to market faster than The Mushroom Tapes did last year. Erin Patterson was found guilty of murder in July – the same month it was announced that Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein were working on a book about the trial. Just four months later, The Mushroom Tapes was published. As with many nonfiction books that are chasing a news cycle, the authors probably spent more time touring the book than they did writing it.Media attention was lavished on The Mushroom Tapes, which remained on prominent display in bookshops months after release – but most authors aren’t so lucky, struggling to make their books visible in a crowded market.Alan Sheardown of Perth’s New Edition Books acknowledges that the problem of an overcrowded market is not a new one. “If anything, I’m being shown slightly fewer books than I used to … but I’m always shown more books than I could possibly stock. I have to make decisions about what I want to support, and what I think can sell.”Prize listings, BookTok and reviews help him sort through the boxes that arrive, and he and his staff read as many as they can but it’s impossible to keep up with them all. His impression is that it’s harder for “new and unusual voices” to break through because of the enormous economic pressures bearing not just on Australian writers but everyone working in the local book industry.‘The industry is being asked to do more with less, and to do it more quickly.’ Photograph: ePhotocorp/Getty Images/iStockphotoThose pressures are multifaceted. While the establishment of Writing Australia offered overdue support to a chronically underfunded industry, printing costs continue to rise even as book prices remain largely the same; it’s no wonder we’ve lost so many independent publishers. We’ve lost a lot of independent bookshops too, which can’t compete with the prices of Amazon and big-box discount stores. Prominent figures in the industry, including Richard Flanagan, have been calling for government intervention in the form of the price-fixing measures that are common in Europe.In an industry under strain, product tends to be prioritised over process. I’ve been working as a critic and editor in Australia for more than 20 years and the story I hear from people who work in the industry is that they are being asked to do more with less, and to do it more quickly.NielsenIQ BookData provided to the Guardian in December recorded more than 9,400 Australian print books scheduled for publication in 2024 – that number includes spiral bound-books, self-published books, textbooks and foreign imports rereleased with an Australian ISBN. What it doesn’t include are self-published ebooks, an area of huge growth. According to Nielsen, that 2024 number was actually down 7% on the average over the last 10 years – but there’s something close to consensus in the industry that we are still publishing more books than we should, and pushing them out so quickly that the quality of Australian literature is being eroded.Talk to authors, talk to prize judges, talk to critics and to editors and you hear versions of the same story: wonderful books are being written and published in Australia but many more go to market too early. What might have been excellent books are marred by shoddy copy editing, flat-out errors, cursory proofreading – and, in some cases, an obvious lack of revision.“I felt sorry for my editor,” Rebecca says. “She was clearly stressed out and dealing with the expectations of her managers.”Alice Grundy, the managing editor of the Australia Institute Press and scholar of Australian publishing, says the experience of Rebecca and her editor is not unusual. She has tuned into complaints about publishing timelines over the past two decades and observes that the desire for rapid turnaround of books results in a “collapsed timeframe” for every aspect of production. Grundy’s research also found that complaints about pressured timing and shoddy production standards are perennial features of Australian publishing.Publishers and underpaid editorial staff are under pressure to have books ready to go on a tight schedule – and often publicists are tasked with promoting several titles a month. They can’t give the same amount of attention to every book, which means many authors have the disappointing experience of spending years working on a book that, once published, almost immediately slides out of view. Grundy says it doesn’t make sense “to squash book publishing into the same timelines as other media”. She questions why publishers are rushing print deadlines when “arguably the point of a book is that it takes time to make and to read”.The researchers Julienne van Loon, Bronwyn Coate and Millicent Weber have tracked what they call the “life cycle” of several Australian books, trying to figure out how new releases accrue different kinds of value. On their findings, Van Loon writes that new titles usually get three months on bookshop shelves: “If the title doesn’t shift within that window, it disappears – usually returned or remaindered – in some cases never to be seen again.” And yet the research team found that nationally significant books including Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains (2018) and Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014) took much longer to gain traction than the three allotted months. It takes time for culturally valuable books to connect with readers: “There is a lot that we don’t know yet, and may never understand, about the complex and layered ways in which local books contribute to our cultural, social, educational and individual vitality.”Another local author – I’ll call him Lee – is still smarting from the experience of promoting his book, which was published in 2025 by an independent press. He’d been sent the publicity copy while it was still in production and vetoed it. “I thought it was written by AI,” he says. “It completely mischaracterised my novel and made it sound like it was written for an audience of children.” He rewrote the copy with the publisher but the early version was sent out, defining the reception of his book. “It totally undercut my ability to talk about the book on my own terms. It was just embarrassing.”‘The reality is that there are shorter publishing and publicity schedules for each book,’ says author Jennifer Mills.Jennifer Mills is the author of the Miles Franklin-longlisted novel The Airways and its follow-up, Salvage. “For me the process of writing is an investigation of ideas and it can’t be done quickly,” she says.It takes Mills, who is also the incoming chair of the Australian Society of Authors, three to six years to write a book; she treats it as the equivalent of a part-time job.“Writers are never paid for our labour,” Mills says. “We’re paid instead for the product, and the reality is that there are shorter publishing and publicity schedules for each book.”She points to the important role of independent bookshops including New Edition in fostering a community of readers for Australian books. Especially as the space for reviews of new books shrinks, “authors are really reliant on community, on word of mouth recommendation and the authentic enthusiasm of independent booksellers who hand-sell books to readers”.Research commissioned by Creative Australia in 2022 found that the average Australian author earns just $18,200 a year from their writing. Advances and royalties are an important component of that income – and yet royalties are out of reach for authors until they earn out their advances, and that’s only possible if the books sell. This in turn heightens the expectation that writers take part in promoting their books, often without payment – which not all authors are comfortable doing.While some large publishers flood the market in the hopes that at least one title sells well enough to cover the costs of rest, small publishers, driven by different publishing values, are finding alternatives.Emily Riches is the publisher of Aniko Press, one of many independent newcomers to the Australian scene. In 2025 it published its first book, The Slip, a collection of short stories by the Melbourne writer Miriam Webster.“You feel a little drowned out,” Riches says, “and you want to make a mark with the book that you’ve put so much time and effort and belief into.”Riches worked with Webster for three years on the collection, gathering the stories and editing them. “When I was doing this, I didn’t have any other books lined up,” she says. “I did it all from scratch.”Riches doesn’t see any value in rushing the next Aniko Press book to market. Ultimately, she says, “we want to publish good books, and take care with the process. You want to see your book being read widely, but really you want to see it being read by people who will care about it.”Pink Shorts Press co-founders Margot Lloyd and Emily Hart. Photograph: Bri HammondMargot Lloyd and Emily Hart are the founders of Pink Shorts Press, a new small publisher based in Adelaide. They take a similar approach to Aniko Press, asking readers to trust their instincts. They have republished two novels by the groundbreaking Adelaide writer Barbara Hanrahan, as well as an eclectic and short list of South Australian writers. “Publishing is not a data-rich industry,” Lloyd says. “You’d think we would have clear ideas about what books connect with which readers, but we don’t.”If column space, sold-out events and bookshop displays are anything to go by, the authors and publishers of The Mushroom Tapes were abundantly rewarded for getting the newsworthy book out so fast. But the future of Australian literature cannot lie with books that are written and published so quickly; it’s not sustainable for authors or for publishers.Getting books into the hands of readers who actually want to read them requires a more nuanced approach. If the price of speed is quality, the risk is that readers – overwhelmed by choice and by hype, disappointed by books hurried to market and distracted by other media – will just stop caring.