Member-only story
The Publishing Landscape Is Always Changing
An opinion piece focused on Australian and NZ publishing that applies in other places, too
For those of you keeping a finger on the pulse of ANZ publishing, you may have heard the most recent news about Text Publishing being bought by Penguin RandomHouse in Australia. Although the news was released officially, most authors would have found out via social media, but I imagine those published by Text would have been told earlier in an email (that’s what usually happens).
For NZ authors, you may think this news isn’t really relevant, but it’s the kind of thing that does reverberate across the ‘ditch’, not least because Text had a specifically NZ manuscript prize, too.
But it doesn’t stop there. In the past six months, two other significant independent publishers have also been sold. Affirm Press (who are highly regarded for their picture book publishing, among other things) were bought by Simon & Schuster, and Pantera Press were sold to Hardie-Grant. Pantera were originally known for adult fiction and gradually expanded until they had quite a big program of books that included MG and YA.
I doubt any of these publishers would have turned down a really great NZ manuscript, unless it was so clearly ‘Kiwi’ that it would have been deemed…
