If we are going to worship the book as an object, then let us worship it as it really is. Let us turn the pages gently, enjoy the bend of a vertical grain as it deserves to and see the book as one object among many where the labour of the writer meets the labour of the printer and publisher.

The first thing to mention is that printing is important. Really important. More important than you’re thinking. At their best, printers are an integrated section of the book publishing industry, staffed by highly skilled professionals passionate and understanding of what it is exactly they’re doing on a cultural level.

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.

Thinking about books, reading, and publishing as post-digital helps to contextualise the growing popularity of audiobooks, while avoiding narratives that emphasise the ‘death’ of the book.

I’m a huge fan of Rooney’s work. But the things I love about her books are not the universal, the relate-able, the newsworthy. It is the way she brings her unique voice, worldview, political ideology and lived experience to the page.

Among the various portentous ‘deaths’ that seem to be befalling contemporary culture – the death of the ‘manly man’, the death of ‘Australian values’, the death of the personal essay – is the lesser-known apparent death of the editor. In a 2008 long-read for Essays in Criticism, Harvard University’s J Stephen Murphy lamented the slow demise of my long-beloved profession, largely as a result of the changes to the publishing landscape wrought by new media and their ostensible democratisation of writing and literature.

There’s a difference between campaigns and campaign tactics: one is a war, and the other a weapon. Their inability to generate an equal amount of protest on both Avid Reader and Allen & Unwin’s Facebook pages shows that MRAs are incapable of campaigns, and will always be outnumbered by the people fighting back.

There’s a bigger and more fundamental question that is usually elided when debates like this pop up. Maybe it’s easier for me, as someone whose current stake in Australian literature is largely limited to that of a reader’s (and, I suspect, as one of the few civilians who has read two of the three shortlisted Miles Franklin novels mentioned by McAvan in her opening paragraph), to put this question into words: ‘Why does no one care about Australian books?’

Under the aegis of Natalie Kestecher and Claudia Taranto, I wrote, voiced and co-produced four short monologues for PocketDocs, three of which might never see the light of day now that this brilliant, diverse, challenging, moving show has been poleaxed. As a freelancer writing for PocketDocs I received a level of support and creative freedom unrivalled by any Australian publication I have had the privilege of writing for.

The particular role of the cartoonist in the 21st century remains difficult to gauge. Whenever (and wherever) the official apparatus of censorship is removed, the debate around civility perhaps becomes even more central. This said, in a globally-connected world, cartoonists are still very much looking for their function.

In order to do this we need to look at what it takes to be a writer, and admit that some writers advantage from a ridiculous amount of privilege, while upholding several myths around being a writer – myths that help us all pretend that the writing world has an open-door policy, even as it shuts the majority of people out.

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.

Yet in Wood’s novel we get the feeling that her dystopian future is not so far away, that the brutality that is levelled at the women in the book is right around the corner. So when I finished reading Wood’s novel, I was relieved and grateful that it had won The Stella. And I wondered if a book like this would have won a prestigious national prize in Australia before Stella was established.

Last week’s announcement that Fairfax newsrooms are to suffer cuts of ‘the equivalent of 120 full-time employees’ is terrible news not only for those Fairfax journalists and other newsroom staff who will be made redundant and have to struggle to find work in a shrinking and intensely competitive pool of job opportunities. It’s also bad news for the survivors of the cull, who will face the unenviable prospect of producing news with fewer colleagues, making a traditionally high-pressure job even more stressful. And it’s very unwelcome news for the general public.

Last month I received a legal letter accusing me of defamation. Someone who was very close to me for many years – but now is not – had read a piece of short fiction I had published and decided a minor character was about them. Like every writer ever born, I have gleaned sentences, character traits and events, and I’ve hodgepodged it all together to try and convey an emotional truth. It’s what we do, right? Never once had I considered defamation.