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. …