The world’s largest general book publisher has acquired one of Australia’s leading independent publishers, the Text Publishing Company.
Penguin Random House announced the acquisition on Wednesday, with the chief executive of its Australian operations, Julie Burland, saying the move consolidated the publishing house’s longstanding relationship, where its Australian arm distributes and sells all of Text’s titles in the Australian and New Zealand markets.
Text will continue to sell its books further afield through a network of international agents.
Based in Melbourne, Text was co-founded more than three decades ago by Diana Gribble and Eric Beecher. After moving through the hands of Fairfax Media and UK publishing house Canongate Books in the early 2000s under the co-ownership of Michael Heyward and Penny Hueston, Text became wholly Australian-owned when the Lonely Planet founders, Tony and Maureen Wheeler, bought into the company in 2011.
Heyward said Text had survived through five different ownership structures in its 35-year existence and would maintain its independence.
“What we’ve agreed is that Text will continue to retain creative control of all of its key publishing processes – acquisition of books, editing of books, curation of the list, publicity, marketing, design, production, export and rights,” he told Guardian Australia.
“I’ve spent more than three decades building this business, and I’m not about to do something which will jeopardise that.
“While PRH is now the owner of the business, we will continue to do what we’ve always done … we will run our own show.”
Heyward declined to disclose how much PRH paid for the acquisition.
The longstanding exclusive distribution deal Text has with PRH in Australia and New Zealand would continue, he said, and told Guardian Australia there were no planned redundancies at Text’s Melbourne office.
Helen Garner, Garry Disher, Michelle de Kretser, Tim Flannery, Kate Grenville and Peter Singer are just some of the prominent Australian authors who have been published by Text.
The publisher’s titles have been shortlisted for the Nobel, the Booker and the Pulitzer overseas, and have won the Miles Franklin and the Stella prizes in Australia.
The PRH acquisition marks the second takeover of an independent Australian publisher by a multinational in less than six months.
In August, Simon & Schuster acquired another Melbourne-based independent publishing house, Affirm Press. About 20 months earlier, the US Department of Justice blocked a US$2.18bn merger between Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, when the department ruled that such a merger of two giant publishing companies would lessen competition and adversely affect writers’ incomes. The merger was abandoned.
In September 2024, Sydney publisher Pantera Press was acquired by Hardie Grant – two independent Australian publishing houses of a similar size.
According to Nielsen BookScan, the Australian book market in 2024 was down 3% in value and 1.2% in volume from 2023, with cookbooks, self-help books, biographies and novels by American authors dominating the top 10 bestsellers. Only one Australian author, Liane Moriarty, made it on to the list, for her latest novel, Here One Moment.
“Australian literary fiction is doing it really hard,” one industry insider told Guardian Australia.
“The narrative we’re hearing from Text and PRH has the same positive spin we heard from Simon & Schuster and Affirm,” they said, noting that several staff exits followed “within a few months”.
“Publishers taken over by multinationals restructure, they reshape. They don’t want to duplicate the marketing support, the publishing support, the editing. Inevitably, people will go.”
Patrizia Di Biase-Dyson, the chief executive of the Australian Publishers Association, of which PRH’s Burland is the president, disagreed.
“Michael Heyward has issued a statement that has said there’s a charter of independence,” Di Biase-Dyson said.
“There’s obviously an agreement between the two firms that there will be independence of editing and publishing, publicity and marketing.”
