It is not easy to generalise about publishing. It has always been a mixed bag. It is perhaps useful, though, to bear in mind its history and the kinds of structures Australian publishing has inherited, in spite of all the changes that have occurred in the last ten or twelve years.

The publishing of Australian books written by Australian authors, edited and designed here for an Australian audience and an increasing overseas one, is still largely carried out by companies with a head office somewhere else. These companies were set up mainly in the postwar period to distribute English and American books into this market because there was a demand for them here, and also because head office often had to have Australian sales to make their costings work. Australia was an important profit centre – but these companies were subsidiaries, reporting to overseas boards, often staffed at a senior level from overseas, and repatriating profits to the parent company. Most of these subsidiaries published some Australian authors here. They usually had an editor or two on the staff to look after their local lists and they have been producing important books here for a long time. But most were not very entrepreneurial about it – for quite understandable reasons.

There were of course exceptions but they were almost always Australian-owned. Angus & Robertson had an honourable tradition of developing local authors over almost a century. F.W. Cheshire and some of the university presses did a good job too. They had a strong editorial thrust which produced the books that kept them in business; they responded to local demand for Australian books for the new courses in Australian literature and history, and they were quick to respond to the growing interest in what made this place unlike anywhere else in the world.

Then of course in the late 1960s and early 1960s, we had a period of takeovers and amalgamations. The Literature Board rose in the east, in Gough Whitlam we had a prime minister who declared he wanted to ensure that every child had a lamp and a desk, and there was a feeling abroad in the land that we should give ourselves more Australian books to read too. Small publishers surfaced all over the place. A new generation of Australian writers emerged who were selling in large quantities. The big companies responded quickly by increasing their local publishing programs, and for that they needed more editors and even sometimes people called publishers.

But the status of editors didn’t change very much. They were in the main women, they tended to have arts degrees and nice voices, they were rarely trained on the job, they were usually poorly paid. In spite of' this they did remarkably well with a lot of support from authors and their own self-help organisations. Others like me got out, tired of not really having the support to develop their own lists, hampered by not being in charge of their own budgets, embarrassed at not being able to sign their own contracts – some of which were still signed in the United Kingdom. They weren’t expected to wheel and deal in the marketplace here or overseas. The managing directors, with their accounting backgrounds, tended to be the ones who attended northern hemisphere book fairs, and the only agent on the local scene was a subsidiary of an international company.

As a result, our senior editors in Australia tended not to achieve the corporate clout that attaches to their colleagues in the rest of the western world. There was not the recognition by management that what they did was vital to attracting and, more important, keeping authors – who would often find themselves dealing with a different editor each time they presented a new book. Authors moved around a lot. They usually longed to be published in London. Editors moved around even more.

There was great insecurity in editorial departments which often faced drastic cutbacks for reasons determined in other lands. Financial management would decide that they were no longer going to publish trade books, or that first novels were not on because they were unprofitable, or print runs all had to be of a certain size. Stock holding formulas meant that books went in and out of print at a great rate. All of this was happening in publishing companies around the world but it came at a time in Australia when the role of the editor was not yet firmly established.

None of this was very conducive to developing a strong editorial tradition within a publishing house  – or good relations between publisher and author. There were often excellent relations between authors and editors but management was usually seen as short sighted to say the least. The latest ASA recommended contract reflects this situation. The publishing company is the enemy and the author must be on his or her guard.

As a refugee in the mid-1970s from publishing houses that were subsidiaries of somewhere else, I sympathise with the position editors and authors find themselves in in many companies even at the present time. There is still surprisingly little recognition by management of the extraordinarily complex role good editors play in the development of books that will last. There is almost no recognition of the need to develop editors so they are responsible for their own lists with all the management and entrepreneurial skills such responsibilities entail. Editors don’t get around much – even within this country. Very occasionally, as a kind of fringe benefit, an editor is allowed overseas, but rarely to buy rights, rarely to clinch deals, usually as a handmaiden to some bloke in a pinstripe suit.

This is slowly changing. Editors’ associations, having failed to convince management, are themselves setting up specialist postgraduate training courses that will raise their profile and improve their skills. Publishers – or many of them –  are starting to recognise that frontlist development has been at the expense of backlists, and that there are important literary properties that may take a long time to make them a lot of money but in the long run can, and in any case provide a milieu or a framework of ideas that feeds the culture as a whole – and leads to intangible benefits in all kinds of ways.

I believe it is important for publishers’ editors to be intimately involved in the full publishing process – and by that I mean working closely with authors and designers to develop new ways of making their books read by as wide an audience as possible. It is no longer enough for publishing companies to accept and reject manuscripts, make sure spelling and punctuation are impeccable, the proofs are properly read, and the rights well managed. Editors working with authors can play a role in helping shape books so their readership is assured.

Every work of the imagination needs a different approach if it is to truly flourish for its audience – and I am course not only referring to fiction and poetry. There aren’t any rules for good editing at this level. Much of it is gut feeling that grows from a sense of place and an understanding of the individual writer in that place.

I think we need to know much more about those mysteries called writing and reading – how the imaginings of one person become words that are shaped on a page in order to enter the mind of another and take flight. The writers’ place in the interior landscape is what writing is all about. A recognition of it is central to an understanding of the work. It can be cramped by the wrong kinds of editing – or enhanced by editing that gets behind the words.

I can’t emphasise enough how important I believe it is for our authors to be edited and published in the first instance where they come from and spend their days, If they are truly cosmopolitan and split their year between New York and Adelaide, it doesn’t matter very much. If however they are writing from within a place that informs their work – the writing will flourish better if it’s grown here first.

The publication of books – the releasing of texts – is a strange kind of a process at this level. It’s a bit like the movement of air through the countryside. You can’t see it but you can feel it on your skin.

The vast majority of books written and produced everywhere still assume that the reader is prepared to wrestle with the text to get to the author’s intention. Books look very little different from the way they looked when they were catering for a readership with few other sources of information or packaged entertainment. They still in appearance assume a high level of formal education Content is still usually arranged according to conventions established in the nineteenth century. Type is arranged on the pay as if linotype were still the technology. Arrangements of language in sentences and paragraphs, in captions and contents pages, footnotes and indexes are the same as they always were.

With an increasing understanding of process, the editor’s role is coming under intense scrutiny. There is no doubt that certain kinds of editing traditions, well-intentioned as they are, can be seen as intolerable interference by some authors. All editing traditions, after all, stem from a particular view of culture. Some are straitjackets into which our Aboriginal writers and authors for whom English is a second language shouldn’t be excepted to fit. We have to develop new ways of working with authors who don’t want to comply with our rules.

I find the success of The Bone People very satisfying. As is now well known, Keri Hulme refused editing, and refused in the first instance conventional publishing. In any orthodox assessment of that book it needs editing in parts – but it works wonderfully because it makes its own sound about the world in an entirely new way – or in a very old way that is only starting to make an impact on publishing and editing mores.

We published, a couple of years ago, a book by Mornington Islander Elsie Roughsey, which came to us in a manuscript that had its roots in an oral tradition. It had no paragraphs, no chapters, was repetitive and seemingly rambling, and written in Aboriginal English which is not easy to read but it was a wonderful thing that we wanted people to read through their ears somehow. 

All kinds of considerations were brought to bear on this book. Elsie had worked closely with linguists who were vigilant about not distorting her words as they were turned from handwritten notebooks to a typescript. Elsie was quite happy to have her work edited but we wanted to do the minimum – in order to create a readership. We didn’t want to produce an archival record or a book that would be only half-read. We wanted people to hear what we’d heard and be able to read on the printed page the things Elsie had recorded on the island about the transition from traditional to mission based life in the twenties and thirties.

Well it worked I think. I held my breath expecting a lot of flak but it’s been well received – well reviewed by experts, is now an HSC book in some States – and we are having more Aboriginal writers prepared to speak to us and send us things in a climate where a lot of those writers fear the straitjackets of white publishing processes.

I think the way writers write is changing but we don’t think enough about the implications. The great nineteenth-century novels were written and rewritten by hand, of course, and presented to the publisher who was usually a printer or bookseller in what was truly a manuscript. The act of the imagination flowed through a pen and was carefully crafted by hand onto a sheet of paper.

I would like to know more about the kinds of intellectual processes involved now when writers are more and more writing into word processors and rewriting and restructuring on screens. I would like to know more about how the reader receives and filters written information in a world where sounds and images bombard them.

Writers and readers know in their bones that what they do together – by getting inside each other’s heads – is the best thing of all. And I think we are going to have to know more about it in order to spread the word.

There are a lot of words written and published and sold that don’t do a very good job. There are a lot of books that fail to communicate, that lose readers or don’t reach out into that audience we know is there. People who don’t read much, or young people coming at reading for pleasure for perhaps the first time, people who are persuaded to buy a book because it’s been thrust upon them by a big hype or a kindly aunt – who find that book lacking in some way – are unlikely to come back for more.

So the editorial process in its widest sense – helping what writers have to say get inside the heads of readers at the end of the twentieth century – can be part, of the creative process. It has to be better understood. Its rules have to be rewritten, and its restrictions examined. It is a process that needs to be allowed to flourish and that means convincing the management of publishing houses, authors’ organisations, and some writers who are understandably suspicious that it is important.

Editors and authors need to be able to work closely with designers and typographers to give each book the kind of individual team work it deserves. Nobody tries to make a film by segregating the writer and the actors in a separate department away from the people who make the cameras roll and direct the action. But there are still many publishers who allow a book to be edited by someone who doesn’t get to talk very much to the author, someone who may even be based in another land, before the manuscript, meticulously marked up according to house rules, is sent downstairs to the design department or across town to a graphic designer – with a sad little editor’s brief attached explaining what the book is ‘about’. And the book comes out in a format determined by costing formulas, set in arrangements of type on the page determined by habit and the typesetter, and wearing a cover the editor only sees very late in the piece. The author may get a look at the book only when his or her six advance copies arrive in the mail.

Management doesn’t know best about how a book should read, nor do designers or editors – or authors for that matter. But they all would have much more to contribute to the process of creating a readership if the structures of publishing were to be altered somewhat, and the whole weird business better understood.