Diana Giese reports on the activities of two local publishers How do the independent publishers fare in a time when huge carnivorous corporations dominate a global literary landscape? Here are two stories. Husband and wife Michael Duffy and Alex Snellgrove are the driving force behind a Sydney company begun six years ago. When they were approached by John Birmingham, ‘who had lived with 89 people and kept notes on all of them’, none of them knew that He Died with a Felafel in His Hand would become an international cult hit and be made into a recording, a play and a film. This anatomy of the perils and pleasures of sharing a house had not even been written. But, ‘betting on our taste’, Duffy and Snellgrove took a personal loan and gamely printed 8000 copies. They were done quite cheaply, with a type-only, laser-printed cover. Bookshops round Australia were underwhelmed, ordering only 800. No-one would review it, even though evocative dirty socks were sent out in sealed bags. Duffy cried on their agent’s shoulder. In desperation, he offered copies on consignment to Ariel, the bookshop between Darlinghurst and Paddington, epicentre of the shared house market. ‘All of a sudden, it took off,’ he says. ‘After that, all the bookshops were ringing us every second day.’ Birmingham followed up with The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco, described by The Guardian as ‘a very entertaining freak show … an epic of squalor and degradation’. In the Olympic year, the author also wanted to try his hand at something a little more demanding. He asked Duffy and Snellgrove if they would subsidise his writing time for what became the Sydney exposé, Leviathan. ‘Big publishers are always on the alert for whatever talent pokes its head up,’ says Duffy. Random House supported Birmingham for two years while he researched and wrote the book. But Birmingham also still publishes with Duffy and Snellgrove. Wherever he goes, ‘he is approached by young men who have read He Died with a Felafel in His Hand but want to know more.’ With Dirk Flinthart, Birmingham produced How to Be a Man (‘Easy-to-follow instructions’: How to impress a woman, How to spot a cheap suit, How to land a jumbo—and how to vacuum and which wok to buy). There are also some separate Pocket Guides to Sex and Getting Wasted. All are selling briskly. Clearly, part of the burgeoning self-help market belongs to young men who want ‘to achieve unimagined heights of sophistication, expertise and personal magnetism’. Birmingham’s books have been ‘a huge help’ in keeping Duffy and Snellgrove buoyant. So has the work of Peter Robb, whose Midnight in Sicilyis nothing less than a portrait of Italy, ‘a country in deep trouble’, and the links between the Mafia and politics. It combines memoir with history, and essays on food and art. It became a bestseller in Australia, and was sold to prestigious international imprints, Harvill in Britain, and Faber and Faber in the United States. Of Robb’s M, a biography of Caravaggio, the National Gallery’s Brian Kennedy was unequivocal. ‘This is a major book about one of the very great painters of European art. It will be reviewed all over the world.’ He was right. It is now being read in Italian, Spanish and German, thanks to a network of overseas agents. ‘We need one big book every couple of years,’ says Duffy. He’s also aware that ‘readers like books about people they’ve heard of and places they’ve been to,’ so plans, as a Sydney-based publisher, to focus on the city’s culture and history. Building on a poetry list that includes Les Murray and Robert Gray, Duffy and Snellgrove is planning Sydney Poems—‘a beautifully produced hardback that can be a gift for friends or sent overseas’. The firm will publish extracts from the Sydney Gazette, the colony’s first newspaper, 200 years after it first appeared in 1803. It will also publish a literary guide to Sydney. Duffy and Snellgrove has produced 130 books in its short existence, trying everything from crime fiction to children’s stories. ‘We want to contribute to popular taste—and we’re betting our taste against other publishers,’ says Duffy. He also notes the increasing role played by fashion in publishing. A thousand unsolicited manuscripts pour in each year (‘the creative writing schools have a lot to answer for’), but this is how they found Rosalie Ham’s novel The Dressmaker, ‘a gothic novel of love, hate and haute couture’. ‘She has a fresh voice and a story that grows out of character,’ says Duffy. ‘We knew straight away it was a book we wanted to publish.’ The book has sold well, and eight film companies were interested in it. They chose the one which didn’t want to change the ending. This sort of discovery is what makes publishing exciting and stimulating, says Alex Snellgrove. She loves the personal involvement of choosing good work, working with friends such as David and Gerda Foster and, with her graphic design background, making the books look wonderful. Duffy and Snellgrove want to keep this hands-on relationship, and stay small, publishing no more than 20 books a year. More would mean they have no time to enjoy what they’re doing. Now ‘we have freedom to do things the way we want,’ she says. ‘We commission and edit. Everything else we coordinate. The publisher’s role is to know what will sell, and the editor’s is to know what’s good,’ says Duffy. They also have excellent relations with Australia’s fine network of independent booksellers. Their interest and enthusiasm has to some extent offset the effect of the GST, which has cut book sales by as much as 40 per cent, according to Duffy. Some 70–80 per cent of their books sell through independents. But they are also prepared to ally with publishing’s big players. In a mutually fulfilling relationship, Pan Macmillan’s 26 full-time sales reps market Duffy and Snellgrove books around Australia.
Brandl and Schlesinger was also started by a husband-and-wife team. Veronica Sumegi came to Australia from Hungary when she was three. Her parents were determined to flee as far as possible from the wars, camps and totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe. Andras Berkes was a journalist and magazine editor in Budapest, then, after the fall of Communism, editor-in-chief of Hungary’s first private publisher. When he, too, migrated to Australia, they set up their company together in 1994, just before they married. ‘We felt there was an undiscovered Hungarian literature to be accessed by Australian readers,’ says Sumegi. They noted the success in other English-speaking countries of translations of writers such as Milan Kundera. They made contact with one of Hungary’s top translators, who suggested some local bestsellers. Then they published Istvan Orkeny’s One Minute Stories, little black comedies. They took on Peter Esterhazy, whose books are so popular at home that people line up round the block to get copies on the day of publication. Esterhazy’s books are translated into many languages. Of The Book of Hrabal, which Brandl and Schlesinger produced with attractive drawings by Adam Rish, The New York Times Literary Supplement wrote: ‘Underneath Esterhazy’s verbal wizardry, impudent humour and smart-aleck antics is a stinging indictment of Hungary’s recently deposed [Communist] regime.’ This didn’t, however, translate to an Australian success. ‘His work is multilayered, ironic, convoluted,’ says Sumegi. ‘It’s difficult to get this sort of book into the Australian psyche.’ Poor sales mean they are unlikely to persevere with Hungarian books. ‘We’ll put more emphasis instead on books about Asia.’ A good example of this is The Eastern Slope Chronicle, the new book by Ouyang Yu. It’s an epic journey with his Chinese Australian protagonist back to the years of the Cultural Revolution, and to the events preceding the 1989 Beijing Massacre. Brandl and Schlesinger’s most successful book to date also has an Asian theme. Lau Siew Mei’s Playing Madame Mao has enjoyed success, like several other of their titles, in literary awards. It was shortlisted for the 2001 NSW Premier’s Literary Award and the 1999 Queensland Premier’s prize. Born in Singapore, Lau came to Australia in 1994. Her stories have been published in literary journals in Britain and the United States, as well as Australia, and broadcast on the BBC. Playing Madame Mao is her first novel. ‘In this brilliant fictional hall of mirrors, she gives us the many faces of the Chinese diaspora,’ wrote The Bulletin. Such work cries out for international promotion, and Lau has travelled to writers’ festivals in Hong Kong and Singapore. She also took up an Asialink residency in Malaysia. The book has been sold to the British, and did well in Greece. Brandl and Schlesinger has an extensive network of overseas agents and contacts, and every year takes a stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Veronica Sumegi understands that what an Australian independent publisher can contribute to the Asian market is tiny. A bestseller for one of the huge Japanese publishers might mean six million readers. Instead, Brandl and Schlesinger has tried to target audiences. Sumegi discovered, for instance, that the Vietnamese Australian community has the highest literacy rate of any migrant group in the country. She was approached to do a book in Vietnamese for them, in collaboration with the Australia Council. They chose Pham Thi Hoai’s Thuc Don Chu Nhat (Sunday Menu). Born in 1960, and ‘hailed as one of the brightest stars in Vietnamese literature’, Pham grew up in North Vietnam, went to study in Germany, then returned home to live in Hanoi. Her book is a collection of short stories, banned in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the book foundered in Australia. ‘The problem is actually distributing titles in sufficient numbers within ethnic communities,’ says Sumegi. Bookshops, even those in the Sydney and Melbourne heartlands of Vietnamese settlement, were reluctant to take it because it was not in English. Instead, Brandl and Schlesinger tried to get it into the local video shops, newsagents, dry-cleaners and groceries who also sell Vietnamese books. This proved difficult, since most of the shop owners did not speak English. Brandl and Schlesinger finally gave away the many remaining copies to a Vietnamese-language newspaper, to reach the community through them. The firm has also tried publishing in the Greek Australian community, whose third generation has a large proportion of educated professionals. Nikos Athanasou’s Hybrids explores the inner world of those negotiating two cultures. The Greek Liar is about a man’s return to Sydney after a long absence, and his attempts to build a relationship ‘with those whose aims and values he once rejected’. The Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church in Australia, Stylianos S. Charkianakis, has joined Brandl and Schlesinger’s impressive poetry list, publishing a selection of poems written over the last 30 years. The book is presented bilingually, with translation by Vrasidas Karalis. Poetry is a core area for the company, and their list is a Who’s Who of Australian poets: Rosemary Dobson, John Forbes, Fay Zwicky, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Rhyll McMaster, John Tranter, Gig Ryan, Robert Adamson, Peter Skrzynecki, John Foulcher, Adam Aitken and Timoshenko Aslanides. They receive more than 50 poetry manuscripts a year. ‘It’s very difficult to refuse good manuscripts,’ says Sumegi. Major bookshops are, however, not keen on poetry. ‘They will take, at best, one copy of each book,’ says Sumegi. Instead, the poets themselves have to promote and sell their own work. Brandl and Schlesinger gives them complimentary and discount copies to sell at readings and writers’ festivals. Recognising that ‘the culture of successful publishing is now mass- market books … self-help, better sex, New Age—people looking for answers’, Sumegi knows Brandl and Schlesinger will have to broaden its scope to survive. If they cannot compete, they want to maintain their distinctive identity. She says: ‘I think there are still enough people out there who are interested in better-quality literary works. Not everyone wants a culture of blandness. We should be able to cater to a diversity of interests and views, rather than pandering to the middle ground.’ She remains critical of the multinationals whose publishing programs take the line: ‘Let’s not annoy people. Let’s do things that we know will sell.’ Rather, it’s up to them to share the risks that the independents currently shoulder, she thinks. It’s hard to see many taking on the tough, edgy, pioneering publishing which Brandl and Schlesinger, and Duffy and Snellgrove have led. Perhaps what is really needed are more supportive and generous readers for the independents. DIANA GIESE has worked in publishing in Sydney and London, and interviewed Australian movers and shakers from the major imprints, including Penguin, Random House and Allen & Unwin, for the Library’s Oral History Collection |
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