Having lived overseas for so long, I’m still catching up with how the world of writing works here in Australia, and that explains why the Australian Book Industry Awards slipped under my radar last month. But now that I’ve become aware of them, I noticed something especially interesting to me – that Scribe Publications won the gong for 2008 Small Publisher of the Year.
Curiously, I’d never heard of Scribe until several of the writers I listened to at the Perth Writers Festival mentioned that their Australian publisher was Scribe, and when I did my research I discovered that Scribe is exactly the same age as me! They’re based in Melbourne and publish around 70 books a year, both non-fiction (often about Australia) and novels – including “imported” titles that are published here under the Scribe imprint.
Anyway, all this has one point behind it: I don’t know enough about the Australian publishing industry, but I should. One clearly important part of becoming a fiction writer is becoming a published fiction writer, and what I do know is I’ll need much more than luck to do that. So I’m putting myself on notice that I must start to pay more attention to the Australian publishing scene.
