Going over to the other side: the new breed of author-publisher

Abstract

It's a challenging time in the publishing industry, for authors as much as publishers. Industry changes have greatly impacted creators as much as traditional publishers' profit margins. But challenges can also bring unexpected possibilities, and one of the most interesting is the rise of the author-directed small press. This development comes to us against a background of remarkable growth in small press publishing generally. In 2008, Nathan Hollier (commenting on a report on small Australian publishers conducted _the previous year by Kate Freeth on behalf of SPUNC) indicated that only 122 publishers had been identified as 'small and independent'. The report surveyed 46 of these publishers. Eight years later, Jan Zwar's working paper Disruption and Innovation in the Australian Book Industry, which surveyed Australian publishers as part of Macquarie University's three-year study of the Australian book industry, included statistics from Thorpe-Bowker. These statistics showed that 251 Australian publishers had released between 6-20 titles in 2014-figures which could be taken to indicate the approximate number of small publishers currently in operation. Add to this figure some of the 1,156 publishers who released 2-5 books in that year and the figure is substantially higher.