Rather than being out-of-touch, contemporary publishing professionals are more across the market than ever before: what’s selling, what’s likely to sell, what the trends are, what the zeitgeist was on Wednesday, and whether it will be more zeit-y or geist-y on Friday.

We're now about 40 years into the period where literary prizes have become the dominant means of literary taste-making, and they are basically terrible at it. Does anyone really believe that the winner of a major prize in a given year is the best book?

I began university in 1996, attending what could be considered an ‘elite’ US institution. It was not Ivy League, but it was regularly listed among the top thirty universities in the country. The fee for one year was just over $33,000, including room and board. My family had been comfortably middle class for most of my childhood, but my father had quit his job and taken another at much lower pay while I was in high school. I was only able to attend the university because I received direct scholarships, alongside a complex array of government-subsidised loans and grants.

Based purely on output, you would expect small presses to account for at least half of all longlisted, shortlisted, and winning titles for the Miles Franklin. Some might want to argue that the discrepancy is due to the fact that larger publishers are more selective and thus publish works of higher quality. Setting aside the obviously elitist presumptions of such a claim, material circumstances would suggest the opposite.

Invoking literary nationalism, the ASA petition argues that removing ‘PIRs on books will allow the mass importation of lower-royalty and royalty-free editions of Australian authors’ books into the Australian marketplace’ and suggests that keeping PIRs are necessary to ‘protect Australian stories’. While I support national culture and understand the utility of protectionism in a time of globalised financialisation, the rhetoric here – which maintains an uncomfortable proximity to the right-wing language of border policing (‘Protect Australian stories!’) – should give writers on the left pause.

This – or so it seems to me – is the style of the essay which is both sincere and hyperbolic, which says what it means and in doing so goes too far, aims for a specific target and ends up attacking everything around it. Rather than resolving these contradictions, the essay seeks to exploit them for a variety of effects.

With the rise of services like Smashwords, Lulu, Xlibris, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and countless others, the practice of digital self-publishing has received considerable attention in the mainstream media, buoyed by stories of writers such as Amanda Hocking (a self-described author of ‘young adult paranormal romance’) who made almost US$2 million selling 900,000 self-published ebooks.1 While there’s a long history of self-published print books that have become bestsellers – Australian action-thrillers by Matthew Reilly, for example – digital delivery of books lowers the barriers that have traditionally hampered self-publishing.