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Mark Rubbo
Mark Rubbo is managing director of Readings. He is a past president of the Australian Booksellers Association and was founding chair of the Melbourne Writers Festival. In 2006 he was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia.
The Australian Bookseller & Publisher serves as the trade magazine for the Australian publishing and bookselling industry. It derives a substantial amount of its revenue from the advertisements that publishers place in it.
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Editorial boards of magazines are seldom noticed, except when a magazine is in trouble. For the past three years ABR’s board chairman was Brian Johns. Last May Brian resigned. It was a resignation he had been signalling for some time; he believed that it was time for him to go.
As a member of the board, I was saddened to see Brian go. ABR had been very important to him, and its success and surv ... (read more)
Round about May each year the American Booksellers Association hold their annual conference and trade fair. It is a huge affair when the American publishing industry plonks itself well and truly into the capitalist heart. Over a thousand publishers display their wares in huge airconditioned barns.
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I had thought, and still do, that the phenomenon of publishing a book in paperback only was a good thing, especially for fiction. As a bookseller, I observed the paperback achieve sales three and four times what they would have been if the book was hardback. It should be good for the author too, I thought. The lower royalty payment per book would have been more than compensated for by the higher s ... (read more)
The Australian Bookseller & Publisher serves as the trade magazine for the Australian publishing and bookselling industry. It derives a substantial amount of its revenue from the advertisements that publishers place in it.
Some publishers have accused the magazine of being too bland, too afraid to be critical or to tackle the real issues that are important to the industry. The editor, Michael ... (read more)
As managing direction of the English publishing house, Chatto & Windus, expatriate Australian Carmen Callil has been described as the bête noire of Australian publishing. She had been invited to Australia for Writers Week at the Adelaide Festival. She left slightly annoyed and hurt that she had been cast in a predatory role when her interest in Australian writing stemmed from her own sense of ... (read more)
Many Australian publishers question the ability of overseas publishers to market and distribute a London published book by an Australian writer in Australia. The emotional and commercial commitment to a book by a distributor, they argue, is not the same as that of a publisher. An Australian publisher also has a better perception of the market and the quantities required. In the case of the market ... (read more)
At a seminar on the arts and the economy held recently in Melbourne, Laurie Muller, general manager of the University of Queensland Press, attacked what he described as the myth of the Australian publishing industry. According to Muller, the market size for serious Australian books is so small (one to three thousand) that publishers can barely recoup their development costs, let alone make any pro ... (read more)