Last week the independent Melbourne-based publisher Text Publishing issued a press release with the subject line: “Exciting news!” It was an upbeat announcement that it was joining Penguin Random House (PRH), the largest trade publisher on the planet.
Text’s publisher Michael Heyward was eager to assure onlookers that nothing would change. “We have agreed,” he said, “on a charter of independence that will allow Text to retain full publishing control as we continue our work of acquiring, editing, curating, designing, marketing, publicising and selling rights in our books.”
Julie Burland, CEO of PRH Australia, described the two companies as “long-standing partners” and declared her admiration for Text’s legacy. “We believe that PRH is uniquely positioned to preserve and honour that legacy with integrity, passion and vision,” she said.
Text retains editorial independence, PRH runs the books — the difference being that “financial reporting now is going to be inside PRH”, Heyward told former Age/SMH books editor Jason Steger — and gets to bask in the reflected glory of Text’s reputation.
Business as usual, it seems. Except this is the third acquisition of an Australian independent publisher in six months: Affirm Press was snapped up by global behemoth Simon & Schuster in August 2024, as was Pantera Press by a larger local independent, Hardie Grant, in September.
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The press releases announcing the Affirm and Pantera deals were identical to Text’s in their characterisation of corporate publishing acquisition as all mutual benefit and no loss to, well, anyone. But as I wrote at the time of those acquisitions, “the absorption of two lively presses into larger entities makes observers skittish, especially those, like me, who tend to view the values of literature as fundamentally incompatible with the corporate imperative to deliver shareholder value”.
Under the leadership of Michael Heyward and Penny Hueston, Text has made an extraordinary contribution to Australian culture precisely by defending and advancing the values of literature. Their list is strikingly eclectic, in that it features authors working in a range of genres at every stage of their careers.
Text is known for its commitment to supporting authors for the long haul rather than taking punts on buzzy debuts and then moving on. Its international acquisitions are consistently interesting, and the Text Classics list — which has connected formerly out-of-print Australian books with new generations of readers — has been of inestimable public service. Even with a charter of independence, it’s asking a lot to believe that all these books, especially the Text Classics, would get the go-ahead in a sales-driven environment.
Independent publishing is a gruelling, low-margin business, and it has become more difficult as production and distribution costs continue to rise. Predatory pricing by Amazon is shrinking publishing margins around the world, and in Australia, we have the Big W discount effect to contend with too. Morale is low and no-one is being paid enough. If there’s any exciting news in the announcement of the PRH deal, it’s that Text isn’t being wound up altogether. No-one could begrudge Heyward and Hueston doing this deal after decades of hard work, or wonder why they did so.
Even so, it’s grim to stand by as another piece of Australian cultural infrastructure gets dismantled. The PRH acquisition of Text leaves Australian publishing further concentrated in the hands of a few multinational companies, eroding competition.
This is bad news for Australia’s underpaid, stressed-out publishing workers. (I’m not making a symbolic point: Hardie Grant announced a restructure and redundancies earlier this month). It represents another narrowing of possibilities for Australia’s underpaid, stressed-out authors, and for their agents. There are simply fewer doors to knock on, as the several literary agents who spoke to Kelly Burke this week attested.
The feeling is that multinational publishers are inhospitable to editorial risk-taking. There’s plenty of scepticism too about whether Text will be able to safeguard its independence in the future. As Alice Grundy wrote of the Text acquisition, contra the business-as-usual rhetoric of the press releases, “history shows that mergers often result in the dissolution of the smaller imprint”.
For those of us who care about Australian books and national literature unbeholden to market ideas of value, the transformation of an Australian independent publisher into a Big Five imprint represents a net loss. No-one believes these acquisitions will open up a space for new independent publishers to emerge — current economic conditions are utterly hostile to creative enterprises, especially small ones. If an apparently thriving firm like Text with a 30-year track record (and the backing of Maureen and Tony Wheeler) needs to join PRH, what hope is there for even the pluckiest start-up?
As readers, we can pledge all we like to buy more books published by small presses and independent publishers, but the structural precarity of Australian independent publishing requires government intervention.
When Revive was announced in January 2023, many in the sector rejoiced that a federal government was bothering to pay attention to the arts after a decade of indifference. But the pace of change has been slow — too slow — and there has been scant new funding. When Writing Australia, the new federal body charged with implementing the national cultural policy in relation to literature, finally launches on July 1, the future of Australian independent publishing should be high on its agenda.
Is this all doomerism? Last week another corporate press release was issued from the head office of Bertelsmann, the German parent company of Penguin Random House. It announced a different deal: a “strategic collaboration” between Bertelsmann and OpenAI that seeks to “expand and accelerate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the media, services, and education sectors”.
“We are aware,” said Rolf Hellermann, the CFO of Bertelsmann, “that AI has enormous potential to drive innovation, efficiency, and creativity in all parts of our company.” PRH last year made headlines when it signed a statement condemning the unauthorised use of copyright materials to train generative AI models. The use of AI and machine learning models within the business is another matter altogether.
Michael Heyward might have negotiated “full publishing control” of Text, but the business he has built is now subject to decisions made for the hundreds of imprints published by PRH and for the vast array of media and education sector assets owned by Bertelsmann. This is the new corporate environment in which Text’s charter of independence will be interpreted.
We can all hope, along with Heyward, that his team retains the editorial autonomy that has underwritten Text’s success and brought many fine books into being. But it’s fanciful to imagine that an independent publisher can follow its own rules after being acquired by a multinational company. Text Publishing, with its marvellous backlist, is now an extremely small subsidiary of a gigantic corporation that trades in content, not literature.
Disclosure: Text Publishing was founded by Eric Beecher, currently chairman of Private Media, which owns Crikey.
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