Book Publishing in Australia: A Living Legacy

Description

Publishing is an industry steeped in rules and conventions, controlled by laws and contractual agreements, and heavily invested in practices of careful production and reproduction. But it is also currently undergoing drastic change. Digital technologies have reshaped the practices of writing, editing, typesetting, printing, distributing and buying books. And as political movements like #metoo ripple through the creative industries, the social implications of legacy processes of cultural production and valuation are being re-evaluated. This collection of essays draws together contributions from established and emerging scholars and industry practitioners to explore contemporary Australian publishing's relationship to the past. How does knowledge transfer occur within and between presses? How do gender and race shape participation in the industry? How do book reviews affect award outcomes? And how can scholars, librarians and publishers work together to improve and future-proof the industry?

Aaron Mannion is associate publisher at Vignette Press. He has edited and co-edited a range of publications, including the post graduate magazine Plane Tree, the creative writing anthologies Muse and Nth Degree, the reviews section of the peer-reviewed journal Traffic and Vignette Press's Geek Mook. He is currently fiction editor at Antic. Aaron read English Literature at the University of Cambridge and is currently completing a PhD at the University of Melbourne. He is deputy chair of the Small Press Network and co-convener of the Independent Publishing Conference's academic day. His work has been published in Wet Ink, The Sleepers Almanac, Island and elsewhere. He's been shortlisted for the 2011 Wet Ink Short Story Prize and for the Penguin Manuscript Award in 2009 and 2011. Dr Millicent Weber is a Lecturer in English at the ANU. Her books include the monograph Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and essay collections Book Publishing in Australia: A Living Legacy (Monash University Publishing, 2019), and Publishing Means Business: Australian Perspectives (Monash University Publishing, 2017).