There are three certainties about Australian fiction today: fewer books are being published, sales are falling and shelf-lives are shorter. Is the literary novel dying down under? Rosemary Neill investigates. “I think they’re killing literature,” he says of the bigger publishing houses. Why? Partly, he charges, because “everything is about the bottom line. It’s absolutely massive.”
Author and academic Mark Davis recently conducted research that shows the number of home-grown literary novels produced by Australia’s mainstream publishers has almost halved since the mid-1990s.
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