Feeling down down under
An article on The Australian’s website is full of dour news and even more dour predictions for Australia’s literary fiction authors. The prognosis: bottom-line driven multinational publishing houses, a waning interest in literary fiction, the short shelf-life for most books in the country’s big-box chain stores, and the ruthless accounting made possible by the introduction of Book Sense sales-tracking figures are all conspiring to make the publishing of quality literary fiction seem like a dying pastime. Most gloomy of those quoted in the article is author and academic Mark Davis, whose research shows that the number of literary novels published by Australia’s big houses has dropped by 50% in the last decade. “The project of the 1960s to the late ‘90s, in which publishers competed for prestige, of constructing a national literary canon, has otherwise ended,” Davis says. “It’s reasonably safe to predict that the activities of reading, studying, writing and publishing literary fiction will increasingly become - if they aren’t already - the preserve of a rump of ‘true believers’.” (Thanks to Bookninja.com for the link.)
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Read the article on The Australian site
