Current issues in broadcasting and publishing

Abstract

I think I'm meant to respond to a lot of what Peter has said with regard to parallel importation. Let me start by pointing out the areas where I would agree with Peter. I do think that there are large sectors of the current publishing and bookselling industries in Australia which need to have a look at their practices, particularly with regard to booksellers. Booksellers at the moment are complaining about the lack of an open market, but in fact, in the main (and there are some very good booksellers out there - I'm talking about a general sort of thing) I think they're actually very poor at building up sales of different books. They're guided very strongly by what publishers put to them as their best list. This may well be something which ought to be followed through, as what we tend to get in bookstores is very much a reflection of overseas lists. If you want to get a good vampire novel, can I recommend 'The Opposite of Life', which is a book set in Melbourne, written by a young Melbourne author and published by a very small press called Pulp Fiction Press, which is actually based in a bookshop in Brisbane. Due to the very small ability of this press to be able to even get any traction in this sort of area, sales of this book have been mediocre and it's hardly recognised at all. A good bookseller can get behind a book like this, actually start promoting it, and get readers reading it, even just by mentioning it, as I'm doing now, and saying that this book is a damn good book; read it. Surely that's a job that booksellers should be doing. By and large, I think many of them are actually not doing that and they're relying too much upon what the marketing departments of publishing houses are putting forward to them. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. The publishers, of course, have a lot of investment in the books they're putting forward, but they have the largest investment, of course, in their top-selling titles. Those authors who are down the bottom end of the scale - the new and emerging authors, the authors who are writing for small presses and so on - have a much harder time, and they're the sorts of authors that in Australia are particularly important.