Abstract
This article details the independent, small press and community publishing in Australia that is occurring outside the two major metropolitan publishing centres of Sydney and Melbourne. Guided by Mary Graham's articulation of the significance of place (2007) and drawing on a dataset constructed from the AustLit database from 2013 to 2023, we identify a high quantity of varied publishing activity in Australia's regions. The result is a comprehensive picture of writing and publishing that covers publishing location, form, and genre. Our findings illustrate that each state and territory has its own profile of activity: while there are some broad trends that characterise publishing across the continent (such as the popularity of children's picture book publishing) there are also differences, such as the high proportion of poetry published in South Australia and the relatively high number of reference works published in First Nations languages in the Northern Territory. Our research thus offers new understandings of regional and community publishing and demonstrates the central role of place and community as a driving force of writing and publishing.
Keywords
Introduction
From Miles Franklin winners to Australia's successful global exports in genre fiction, Australian literature (as broadly defined by the AustLit database to include all forms of storytelling) is written about in journals, talked about at festivals, taught in schools and universities, and remains an enduring focus of Australia's multi-billion-dollar publishing industry. But how complete is our understanding of Australian literature? With the exception of Indigenous literature, the accepted picture of Australian literature is framed by the two most urban locations in the country, with most prize winners and bestsellers emerging from the traditional publishing hubs of Sydney (where the ‘big 5’ publishers hold offices) and Melbourne (where the large independents such as Text, Scribe, and Affirm have historically resided). While writing this article, Text became an imprint of Penguin Random House and Affirm was acquired by Simon and Schuster Australia, reinforcing Sydney/Melbourne dominance and the challenges associated with independent publishing. However, while the populations of Sydney and Melbourne between them account for over 10 million Australians, there are another 16 million living across the rest of the continent, an area that covers more than 7 million square kilometres of diverse landscapes and histories. And while the volume of literature emerging from regional Australia is not as high as the Sydney/Melbourne output per city or town, volume of publishing output alone does not equate to cultural significance or importance. Regional publishing activity is part of the national literary culture, and can also be highly meaningful in terms of preserving histories, providing an outlet for creativity and self-expression, contributing economically through tourism and book sales, and fostering regional distinctiveness and pride through shared observation and collaboration.
There is a long history of book publishing in regional communities, and advances in digital technologies have made publishing tools even more accessible to individuals and communities living in regional and remote locations. As a result, Australian literature is being published in greater quantity and diversity. To date, a full picture of this output has been almost entirely invisible and, therefore, the complete story of Australian literature is significantly untold. This article, based on 11 years (2013–2023) of data collected by AustLit: the Australian literature database, is a first step in mapping where and what kind of Australian books are being written and published beyond Sydney and Melbourne. This article asks three fact-finding research questions. How much independent and small-press publishing is taking place in regional Australia? Which areas of regional Australia are marked by the most independent and small-press publishing activity? And what are the preferred genres for independent and small-press publishing in regional Australia? Our findings, in brief, are that the volume of regional publishing is large; activity follows population patterns but there is lively activity everywhere in Australia; and that while regions differ, picture books, romance, fantasy and poetry are all well represented across Australia. In this article, we outline a conceptual framework that draws on both publishing studies and Indigenous epistemologies and explain our scope, methodology and methods before presenting detailed data in relation to the three research questions above, assessing the significance of our findings for understanding place, publishing, and what constitutes Australian literature.
Understanding place and publishing through quantitative data
Our interest in regional Australian publishing arose from the independent, co-op, community, and micropress publishing that we had observed in prior research and professional practice, and that we hypothesised was widespread in non-urban areas outside of traditional publishing centres. As such, we needed to design a conceptual framework that could encompass existing publishing studies theory and theory about place, particularly regional place. Publishing studies approaches seek to understand the ways that books are created and circulated, with an emphasis on the material processes, personnel, and industrial imperatives of big publishing (Sinykin, 2023; Squires, 2007; Thompson, 2012). The impact of digital technology and platforms on publishing processes and logics, in particular, has been the subject of recent writing, including Murray (2018), Parnell and Driscoll (2021), and Wilkins et al. (2022). Some theorists have sought to understand the materiality of publishing studies via smaller publishers in order to account for regional distinctiveness (Childress, 2015; Fuller, 2004; Pearce, 2010). A still-influential theorist is Pascale Casanova whose World Republic of Letters (2004) links place in publishing to power. Casanova's conceptualisation of power offers a model of centre and periphery, where an author or publisher's proximity to the centre (e.g. London or New York) denotes greater power than those on the periphery or the margins (e.g. other global publishing capitals such as Sydney and Toronto). Once we shift our attention to regional Australian publishing, we begin to explore the margins of the marginal. How might we theorise these publishing places in a way that is distinctive to the Australian context and recognises the value of their contributions?
We turned to Kombumerri scholar Mary Graham's articulation of Indigenous epistemologies that suggests all culture arises from land and relationality (1999). Graham questions the stubborn universalism of Western methods of inquiry, and argues instead that place precedes inquiry, not the other way around (2007). Attention to place provides nuanced perspectives not available in so-called ‘“objective”, scientific description’ (2007: 6), and can account for the emplaced experience of people in relation to one another. Pairrebenne Trawlwoolway scholar Lauren Tynan agrees, suggesting that approaching research through the lens of relationality guards against the Enlightenment impulse to define and categorise, and thus segment, but to create instead ‘stronger relationality’ (2021: 601). Our research is concerned, then, with conceptualising regional publishing in its context of place and community. To achieve this aim, we seek to understand the breadth of literary activity that is happening in small cities, regional towns and remote communities across the continent.
Numeric data about publishing output offers opportunity to observe broad publishing trends that can help us produce new understandings about publishing and place in Australia (Bode, 2008). The AustLit database is Australia's most comprehensive bibliographical resource about national literary and narrative cultures. AustLit also hosts BlackWords, a unique and vast record of over 27,000 works by more than 7000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers, storytellers, and organisations. Book historians and publishing studies scholars utilise quantitative methods to observe longitudinal cultural trends, counting volume of books published (Bode, 2010, using the AustLit database), historical sales records (Weedon, 2020), winners of prizes (Dane, 2020) and more. In this way, scholars mirror the publishing industry, relying on quantitative data to recognise patterns and assess performance (see, e.g. Squires, 2017 on how this can interrupt prejudices within the industry). Analysis of quantitative data can offer insights and complicate dominant discursive narratives (Bode, 2010), but it needs to be done with awareness of the limitations of the method, including the quality of data (Weedon, 2020).
Combining a quantitative approach with our conceptual framework suggests a tension between the use of quantitative data in research and the Indigenous epistemologies that guide our research. In seeking to establish a more comprehensive picture of publishing activity across Australia, the inclusion of books written and published by First Nations Australians is essential. However, the collection and use of quantitative data about First Nations peoples has historically been rooted in racism and used in ways that Maggie Walter (2018: 258) terms BADDR: ‘Blaming, Aggregate, Decontextualised, Deficit and Restricted’. Indigenous data sovereignty points to the importance of establishing new standards on how data are collected, who has access to it, and how it is used, both in terms of the kind of knowledge it is considered to be (objective, definitive) and how it is used as a rationale for action (Anderson et al., 2025; Gabel, 2025; Walter, 2018; Walter and Andersen, 2016; Walter and Suina, 2023). This has been particularly addressed in the context of health and population statistics where Walter (2018) defines the crux of the Indigenous data paradox: there is a large amount of data about First Nations people but very little data that is produced for and by First Nations people. Our research design limits possible tension and seeks to avoid ‘BADDR’ data through our emphasis on generative activities of writing and publishing that demonstrate agency and creativity, and our use of AustLit's BlackWords subset which has been designed through Indigenous governance and Indigenous technical input.
Important work on Indigenous data sovereignty (IDSov) and Indigenous data governance (IDGov) in relation to cultural collections including libraries and bibliographic data is underway (Commonwealth of Australia, 2024; Murphy, 2023). Decision-making by, and key involvement of, Indigenous Australians in AustLit's dataset BlackWords demonstrates a central tenet of IDSov and IDGov. Originally built from an Australian Research Council funding programme designed to promote collaborative research infrastructure, AustLit has survived periods of significant instability which has inevitably impacted BlackWords. Despite this, its host University has ensured continuity of Indigenous expertise through governance arrangements and the employment of Indigenous researchers or indexers at different times. A persistent figure in the custodianship of BlackWords since its 2007 establishment is Wiradyuri novelist and academic Professor Anita Heiss; co-author Wakka Wakka and Gooreng Gooreng scholar Sandra Phillips has been on its advisory group; and other leading sector colleagues have made investments in its success most notably the late Birri Gubba and Munanjali novelist and activist Sam Watson, leading Professor of Indigenous Education Ngugi/Wakka Wakka woman Tracy Bunda, First Nations Australian Writers Network Yiman, Wakaman, and Bidjara Chair Yvette Holt, Gamilaroi and Anaiwan writer and arts consultant Cathy Craigie, and more recently Birri Gubba and Kangalu lyricist Teila Watson, a multi-talented artist who performs as Ancestress. The strength of this Indigenous oversight and inputs to BlackWords can be discerned through its inclusion of First Nation status data, the diversity of types of writing and stories included, and not least its assertive name.
The shifting funding fortunes of AustLit has at times left it largely dependent on subscription income to survive and this has limited community access. The State Library of Queensland has sought to ameliorate that undesirable outcome by making AustLit, including BlackWords, available to library users across Queensland through its extensive public libraries network. Indigenous champions of BlackWords also continue to socialise the importance of its holdings to Indigenous community and colleagues. In 2025, AustLit was inscribed in UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register for its support of Australia's literary heritage enabling discoverability of the strength and diversity of Australian literature.
In their call for Indigenous data sovereignty, Walter (2018) and Prehn et al. (2024) highlight the paucity of sovereign data about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lifeworlds. Books written by First Nations people in regional Australia contribute to a public communication of First Nations lifeworlds. It is with this understanding of the role of community publishing that we approach the quantitative data used in this study. By refusing a pan-Indigeneity through specifying First Nations status of the writers and storytellers whose works are indexed, BlackWords not only commits to Walter's ‘lifeworlds’ through a disaggregation of the creator data but also upholds Elder Scholar Mary Graham's precept of place before inquiry that is essential to this research's theoretical framework. Understanding the place that creators derive from and the place that they continue to assert as relevant to their identity and work is central to IDSov and IDGov. These Indigenous peoples and the BlackWords community assert that who they are and where they come from is integral to what they create, what they do, and how they should be understood.
The relational dimension of AustLit and BlackWords is consistent with the relational design of our research into Australian community publishing. This project seeks to understand the relationship between place and publishing in Australia. In utilising the records in BlackWords that are generative and authorised by Indigenous peoples, researchers can begin to explore the relationship between place and publishing in Australia. These data are used to ground and deepen our understanding of communities and publishing in regional Australia and First Nations books are a significant part of this picture. Not all data presented in this article relates to Indigenous authors or books about Indigenous knowledges and experiences, but some of our data does, and all of it requires a thoughtful approach. We aim to understand how digital technologies support regional publishing, how regional publishing ecosystems provide new perspectives on traditional publishing, and how the answer to these questions may be related to the future of the book.
Scope and methodology
This article is a survey of independent and small press publishing in regional Australia from 2013 to 2023. To establish the scope for this survey, we defined regional publishing as publishing that occurs outside Sydney and Melbourne. This means that major cities, such as Brisbane (population 2.8 million) or Adelaide (population 1.5 million), are included in our sample. Typically, these major cities do not meet a broadly accepted definition of ‘regional’, however, publishing in these places operates on a far smaller scale than in the publishing centres of Sydney and Melbourne. It is important to emphasise that not all regional publishing occurs in the same way and with the same resources. The independent publishing environment in Brisbane, for example, is different to the independent publishing environment in Bundaberg (population 99,200), with varying writing and publishing supports and infrastructure. Moreover, the publishing location listed in the AustLit record is not necessarily the location where a book was written. The location of publication may be the same as the location of authorship (something that is evident with self-published titles) but there are many cases where location of authorship and location of publication differ. This research aims to capture regional independent publishing activity and, in doing so, establishes the foundation for further research that examines the nuances of the regions in greater detail.
To generate a full picture of the independent and small-press publishing in regional Australia, we accessed records from the AustLit Database, a repository of Australian literature records that document publication and biographical details of Australian authors. In his quantitative exploration of contemporary Australian literary fiction, Emmett Stinson (2016) detailed the opportunities and the limitations of the AustLit database as a record of activity. Focusing on the distinction between genre and literary fiction, Stinson notes that literary fiction is visible in the database only through its absence of any specific genre classification (Stinson, 2016: 25). As we will detail in the following sections, we have followed this method to understand the proportion of genre fiction titles among the novels and novellas independently published in regional Australia. More broadly, Stinson's elucidation of AustLit's taxonomic methods highlights the potential risks of relying on the database to produce a data set that is free from category error. Despite these risks, we have taken the AustLit data as the most accurate sample of Australian publishing available.
We searched the database using the parameters of state/territory for works published between 2013 and 2023, excluding works published in Sydney and Melbourne. We gathered data on publication title, author, publication date, form and genre. To establish a comprehensive account of the books published outside Sydney and Melbourne during this time, the research team made use of the ‘not’ function to narrow down the results to exclude advertisements, films, television, podcasts, radio plays, newspapers, periodicals and websites. Once this dataset was established, we worked through the dataset to manually exclude search results that were clearly not within the scope of the research; for example: works within a container work (in this instance the container work was counted but the essays or chapters inside it were not, even though they often do have their own entry in the AustLit database), producing a dataset of independently published books and books published by small presses outside Australia's publishing centres.
The AustLit database offers a range of classifications for both form and genre. While this detail facilitates the development of a diverse record of Australian writing, it can limit the analytical utility of these data. To produce a dataset that would offer meaningful insights into the nature of small and independent publishing in Australia, in some instances we grouped locations, forms and genres. Publication location data that was entered into the AustLit database was grouped by the researchers into Local Government Areas, and similar forms were combined: for example, autobiography, biography and correspondence were gathered to form a life writing classification in the dataset.
The resulting dataset, with over 13,700 records, illuminates the vitality of publishing activity occurring in Australia outside the major centres of Sydney and Melbourne. The following section details the findings from an analysis of this dataset.
Mapping regional Australian publishing activity
Independent publishing activity in regional Australia typically maps onto the Australian population, with the most activity found in the most populous areas. Figure 1, which maps books that have been independently published outside of Sydney and Melbourne from 2013 to 2023, illustrates this pattern, with the most activity (represented by the size of the dot on the map) typically occurring in state and territory capitals, followed by major regional centres. However, while the majority of activity occurs in major population centres, it is evident from Figure 1 that small and independent publishing is happening all across Australia. Queensland and Western Australia present a particularly interesting picture, with a lot of publishing occurring in geographically remote locations such as Bundaberg in Queensland and Broome in Western Australia. In contrast to Queensland and Western Australia, South Australia has very little regional variation in their publishing activity, with the vast amount of publishing occurring in and around Adelaide.
Map of Australian independent publishing activity.
Figure 1 illustrates that there is a desire across all of Australia to write and publish books, and that writing and publishing books is not just something that primarily occurs in Sydney and Melbourne. The volume of publishing activity correlates with the size of the circle, with the dots in the center of the state or territory representing AustLit entries where the state or territory was listed as the location. In the following section, we explore each state and territory in more detail, demonstrating the similarities and differences between regions.
Table 1 details the number of books published in each state or territory, showing its relationship to the population of the region.
Number of publications and approximate population for each state/territory, 2013–2023.
ACT: Australian capital territory; NSW: New South Wales; NT: Northern Territory; QLD: Queensland; SA: South Australia; TAS: Tasmania; VIC: Victoria; WA: Western Australia.
*Excludes Melbourne and Sydney populations and publications.
The highest amount of publishing activity in the sample occurs in Queensland, followed by Western Australia and South Australia. Australian capital territory (ACT) has the smallest ratio between number of publications and population, indicating a significant proportion of independent publishers among the population of the ACT.
New South Wales
Having removed publications from Sydney from the data set, we can see in Figure 2 that there is significant regional variation among the top publishing locations in New South Wales (NSW). This indicates that, outside of Sydney, there is a small amount of activity happening in a lot of places. Further, as demonstrated in Table 2, while publishing activity is typically found in places with high population numbers, activity is spread out among these places.
Top 10 publishing locations, New South Wales. 1
Top 10 locations by publishing volume in NSW.
There is a relationship between the publishing activity and population of the area, however, it is not the case that the largest population area has the highest publishing activity, followed by the second largest population area with the second largest publishing activity, and so on. The most publishing activity in regional NSW occurs in Newcastle (population ∼168,000), but this represents under 10% (161 books from 2013 to 2023) of the state's overall regional publishing activity. Independent writers and publishers in Armidale, a city of around 23,000 people in the NSW Northern Tablelands, published 117 books over the sample period, accounting for around 7% of the state's total output over the period. Lake Macquarie and the Central Coast Regions have much higher populations than both Newcastle and Armidale (∼213,000 and ∼346,000, respectively) but publish fewer books. Therefore, while population is a factor in the amount of publishing that is likely to be happening in any given place, it is not the only factor. More research is required to uncover what these other factors might be, however, what is clear from these data is that there is significant interest in writing and publishing in NSW and regionally across Australia. The vibrance of regional publishing can be illustrated by a brief description of the publishing activity in Armidale, NSW.
Armidale, a rural university town on Anaiwan Country set high in the tablelands of the New England region about halfway between Sydney and Brisbane, has a lively independent publishing community. Armidale is home to Christmas Press and Little Pink Dog Books who specialise in children's fiction, Lacuna Publishing, and the Anaiwan Language Revival project. Since publishing co-founder Callum Clayton-Dixon's award winning 2019 title Surviving New England: a history of Aboriginal resistance and resilience through the first forty years of the colonial apocalypse, the Anaiwan Language Revival project has transformed into the Newara Aboriginal Corporation achieving independent land buyback for language and culture revival. Newara epitomises Aboriginal ‘lifeworld’ strengthening through publishing. The New England Writers Centre, located in Armidale, has been supporting and showcasing the writers and illustrators in the Northern Tablelands region for more than 20 years, with workshops, events, prizes and professional development opportunities.
Northern territory
Data from the Northern Territory similarly demonstrates that a high population and high publishing activity, while related, do not neatly correlate. As illustrated in Figure 3, for the period 2013–2023, the majority of books (41 or 33%) published in the Northern Territory were published in Alice Springs, followed by the Territory's capital city Darwin (38 or 27%). Darwin, with a population of around 140,000, is more than five times larger than Alice Springs (population ∼26,000). This pattern continues across the Territory (see Table 3); 21 of the books published in the Northern Territory during the sample period were published in Batchelor (population ∼350), 12 of the books were published in Jilkminggan (population ∼250) and five were published in Katherine (population ∼10,000).
Top-seven publishing locations, Northern Territory.
Top seven publishing locations by volume in the Northern Terrirory
The relatively high proportion of publishing activity in Batchelor and Jilkminggan can, in part, be explained by exploring the books that were published in these places. Twenty of the 21 books published in Batchelor from 2013 to 2023 were children's books, First Nations stories, and reference works, all published by Batchelor Institute Press, the publishing arm of the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education (BIITE). The Press primarily publishes teaching and learning resources for First Nations students living and studying in remote communities. For many of these students, English is not their first language and many of the books published by Batchelor Institute Press have been developed by community Elders and educators who have expertise in distance learning and English as an Additional Language education.
Di Wurru Wurru-Jaru Aboriginal Corporation is an Aboriginal language centre based in Jilkminggan, 140 km southeast of Katherine in the Northern Territory. Di Wurru Wurru-Jaru Aboriginal Corporation published all the books from Jilkminggan in the 2013–2020 sample, which comprise language resources and reference works about flora and fauna native to Mangarrayi Country. These concentrated pockets of publishing activity, in remote locations such as Batchelor and Jilkminggan, highlight the way that independent book publishing, occurring on a micro scale, can serve small populations. This publishing activity meets needs and supports Aboriginal lifeworlds that would be considered niche for larger publishing companies, but that are nevertheless vital for these communities and cultures.
Queensland
Just over half (1967) of the books published in Queensland between 2013 and 2023 were published in the capital city of Brisbane (see Figure 4). Brisbane is home to the leading small publisher, University of Queensland Press, and other independent publishers as well as a number of prolific self-published authors. The other half of the state's publishing activity is split across 48 other local government areas. As detailed in Table 4, the three highest of these are either in Greater Brisbane (Redland, with 284 titles) or the region of South East Queensland: Gold Coast (417) and Sunshine Coast (291). Among Australia's states and territories, the pattern of publishing activity in Queensland most neatly follows population numbers, with activity in the north of the state most common in Townsville and Cairns, the two most populous cities in the region.
Top-10 publishing locations, Queensland.
Top 10 publishing locations by volume in Queensland.
Looking more closely at one of Queensland's self-publishing authors, Elizabeth Rimmington, can illuminate the kind of writing that is happening in the state, and the relationship between place and publishing. Rimmington is an independent author based in Gympie in Queensland's South East. In the 2013–2023 sample period, Rimmington wrote and published four novels: Shadow of the Northern Orchid (2019), Shadows on the Goldfield (2020), Burdekin Heartbeats (2020) and Rhylla's Secret (2021). On her website, Rimmington describes the way that her previous careers in nursing and as a taxi driver have given her ‘A storehouse of memories from which to plunder and develop story characters’ (Rimmington, 2025). Rimmington's historical fiction draws inspiration from the local area, as well as the northern regions of her childhood, and is among several works of fiction that are published independently and by small publishers in Gympie.
Tasmania
The majority of independently published titles (80%) published in Tasmania throughout the sample period were published in Tasmania's capital city, Hobart. However, as detailed in Figure 5, among the remaining 20%, there is significant regional variation in publishing locations, and a lot of small towns and cities saw multiple titles published over the sample period. While the second highest activity occurs in the second most populous city (Launceston with 41 books), again the level of activity does not exactly map onto high population areas (see Table 5).
Top-10 publishing locations, Tasmania.
Top 10 publishing locations by volume in Tasmania.
Like the Northern Territory, there are a number of remote places with small populations where a single author or publisher is responsible for the entire town's publishing output over the sample period. For example, Campbell Town (population ∼1000) is home to Kelly Ethan, author of cozy paranormal mysteries such as 2019's The Pernicious Pixie and the Choked Word and 2020's The Killer Knight and the Murderous Chairleg. Ethan's six novels and novellas represent Campbell Town's entire publishing output as recorded by AustLit for the 2019–2023 period. Similarly, Queenstown's fantasy novelist Cameron Wayne Smith, author of Silvaste's Spear (2016), Amulet of Aesterus (2016), Necrosanguin (2016) and Boulderclaws (2017) wrote and published all the books that came from his local area (population ∼1800) over the sample period. This pattern indicates small pockets of lively solo literary production happening across the state. In the spirit of relationality we wonder if the locales also deliver the majority of each book's readership – a question for another research project.
Victoria
Independent and self-publishing in Victoria occurred in more than 50 local government areas over the period 2013–2023. Again, the areas outside Melbourne with the highest populations in the state – Ballarat, Geelong and Bendigo – are among the places in which the highest number of books were published (see Table 6). Like NSW, Victoria has a lot of regional variation in the places where books are written and published (see Figure 6); Ballarat has the highest number of publications (249 books), and activity is spread out around the state.
Top 10 publishing locations by volume in Victoria.
Top-10 publishing locations, Victoria.
Between 2013 and 2023 there were 41 books that were independently published in Bendigo (a small city with a population of ∼167,000), which accounts for around 4.5% of the regional, independent publishing output throughout the sample period in Victoria. Titles from this region include Imbroglio (2017) by John Allen Bourke, a self-published satirical novel; SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror (2014) edited by Amanda J Spedding and Geoff Brown; and Brenda Stevens-Chambers’ biography Honkie & Ginny: From Black Sheep to Holy Dove: The Life of Henry Foster Midgley 1894–1917 (2013). On the other end of the spectrum, Yallourn, in the eastern part of the state, has the smallest population among the top-10 locations for independent publishing. Twenty-nine of the 36 books published in Yallourn over the period 2013–2023 were published by the small press Deadset Press, which specialises in genre fiction. For example, its Drowned Earth series of eight novellas, by eight Australian authors, is about the fallout from a tsunami that hits the Australian continent. This variety of works highlights the different forms and genres that are independently and self published in regional Victoria.
Western Australia
Just over 73% of the books published in Western Australia in the years 2013–2023 were published in Perth, the state's capital city (see Table 7). This finding is consistent with many of the other states with smaller publishing industries, such as Tasmania and Queensland, with most of the activity concentrated in and around the largest and most populated area. However, like the Northern Territory, Figure 7 shows that Western Australia's publishing activity occurs in some very remote areas. Broome, which is home to Indigenous publishing house Magabala Books and is one of the most remote places on earth (Magabala Books, 2025), has the third highest publishing activity in the state.
Top 10 publishing locations by volume in Western Australia.
Top-10 publishing locations, Western Australia.
Geraldton (population ∼3000, 11 books independently published in the sample period) is a coastal city around 450 km north of Perth and is a great example of the diversity of publishing activity that is happening in Western Australia. Geraldton is where author Angela Verdenius self-published her romance novels, Promises (2015), Heart's Desire … or Soul Destroyed 2018), Heart of the Betrayed (2019) and Loves Sweet Assassin (2020) among others; where Kate Venn published her erotic fiction FIFO’d (2018); and where Badimia elder Gami Ollie George published Nganang Badimaya Wangga: Yarns with Gami Ollie George (2017) with the Bundiyarra – Irra Wangga Language Centre. Geraldton is more than 400 km from Perth but despite its small population and its remoteness, it has a vibrant literary scene with local writers and an annual literary festival, Big Sky Readers and Writers Festival, where local and national writers are celebrated.
ACT and South Australia
Both the ACT and South Australia present a significantly different picture of independent and small press publishing than the rest of Australia. The ACT is a very small territory that is almost exclusively made up of the national capital, Canberra (population ∼456,000). As a result, independent publishing in the ACT is concentrated in that city. South Australia is a state of around 1.8 million people and, outside of the capital city of Adelaide (population ∼1.4 million), there are more than 50 local government areas. Despite this, 218 of the 229 titles published in South Australia over the sample period were published in Adelaide and the greater Adelaide area. The city or town with the next highest publishing activity was Whyalla, with two books over the sample period. Each of the other areas involved in publishing, of which there are nine, published a single book over the period. This level of urban concentration is unlike the other states and territories.
Data presented in this section show the complex relationship between place, population and publishing in Australia's regions. Publishing activity typically occurs in line with population, however, this is not always a neat correlation. We can see from places like Armidale in NSW, Campbelltown in Tasmania and Castlemaine in Victoria that population is not the only factor that influences the volume of publishing activity in a region. This finding raises questions around the role played by institutions and infrastructure that support writing in publishing in regional Australia and if the presence of universities, writers groups and libraries might impact the number of books being published.
Form and genre: What books are published in regional Australia?
In the previous section, we explored the places where publishing activity is most lively across regional Australia. In this section, we examine what is being published, looking at both publication form and publication genre. Form and genre are terms used in the AustLit database. Exploring both form and genre helps to establish a more complete picture of independent publishing in regional Australia, detailing both the type of book (e.g. picture book or novel) as well as what is inside (e.g. romance or fantasy fiction). Our dataset shows that the most popular forms of independent publishing in regional Australia are children's picture books and novels, and that genre fiction (fantasy, romance, crime, historical fiction, young adult, science fiction, horror, war literature or western) are the most popular kinds of novels to write and publish.
Twenty-one different forms of writing are represented in our sample. They are tagged in AustLit as anthology, art book, children's fiction, criticism, drama, essay, First Nations story, graphic novel, illustrations, interview, life writing, lyric/song, non-fiction, novel, novella, oral history, picture book, poetry, prose, reference work, and short story. Figure 8 details the eight most common forms across the states and territories: picture books, novels, poetry, children's fiction, life writing, short story, reference work and non-fiction.
Most common publication forms by state or territory, 2013–2023.
In most locations, picture books and novels are the most common publishing forms, with the picture book as most popular form in NSW and the Northern Territory, and the novel the most popular form in Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia. Figure 8 also illustrates that while there are some similarities across the states and territories, when it comes to publication form each region is different. For example, while the proportion of poetry among the sample of published books in Victoria and NSW is strong (22% and 25% respectively), in South Australia poetry represents the largest category of published works at 43%. Of all forms across all states and territories, poetry in South Australia is the highest proportion single category.
The Northern Territory similarly presents a distinct publishing profile with a high proportion of reference works (12%). These are most commonly First Nations language dictionaries, conservation guides and works about flora and fauna. The most common publishers of these works are Batchelor Institute Press, IAD Press and Diwurruwurru-Jaru Aboriginal Corporation. All three of these publishers are Indigenous-led and are attached, either historically or presently, to Indigenous learning organisations. Batchelor Institute Press, as discussed above, is the publishing arm of the BIITE, whose publications are ‘produced primarily for Indigenous Australian students living in remote communities’ and ‘developed by community Elders, students and teaching staff’ (Batchelor Institute Press, 2025). IAD Press was established to produce learning materials for the Institute of Aboriginal Development. Diwurruwurru-Jaru, also discussed above, is connected to a regional language centre in the remote town of Katherine. This publishing activity is directly linked to the preservation of Aboriginal knowledge, thus performing an important social function in the Northern Territory, where more than 30% of the population is Aboriginal. The only other place that has reference book activity is ACT (at only 1%), representing 11 books. Eight of these were published by Aboriginal Studies Press. It is clear from these data that cultural preservation is one important function of regionally published books.
Genre publishing in regional Australia
Figure 9 represents the most common genres across all states and territories. Children's books (which includes children's novels, children's picture books and books that have been classified simply as children's) are the most common genre across the country and are the highest (at 63%) in the Northern Territory. Following children's publishing, there is little consistency across the regions, with varying popularity of romance, fantasy, young adult, First Nations stories, historical fiction, crime, horror and science fiction. For the genre fiction novels and novellas in the dataset, fantasy is the most popular genre in the ACT, the Northern Territory, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria and WA, and romance fiction is the most popular genre in South Australia and NSW (tied at 8.15% with historical fiction). Science fiction is strongly represented across all the regions, and so too is crime fiction in places other than the Northern Territory. Publishing First Nations stories is most popular in the Northern Territory and is also well represented in Western Australia and the ACT.
Most common publication genres by state or territory, 2013–2023.
Across all states, more than 70% of the novels and novellas in the sample were classified as genre fiction (see Table 8). The Northern Territory, ACT, Western Australia and Queensland had the highest proportion of genre publishing, with South Australia and Tasmania having the lowest.
Proportion of genre novels and novellas per state or territory.
ACT: Australian capital territory; NSW: New South Wales; NT: Northern Territory; QLD: Queensland; SA: South Australia; TAS: Tasmania; VIC: Victoria; WA: Western Australia.
The proportion of genre publishing in each state and territory does not appear to correlate with trends that emerge from the publishing location data: for example, the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia have high regional variation of publishing activity and a high proportion of genre fiction publishing, whereas the ACT has the lowest regional variation in publishing activity but the second highest proportion of genre fiction publishing. Despite the limited regional variation among ACT writers and publishers, there is a significant amount of activity for the population, with 1164 titles published independently from 2013 to 2023, and 845 genre publications, from a population of approximately 474,000 people. On the other end of the spectrum, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria have the lowest representation of genre fiction among the states and territories, as well as some of the smallest relative publishing activity in the sample. While inconclusive, this suggests a correlation between the general amount of publishing activity and the proportion of genre fiction published in each region: high amounts of writing and publishing activity typically mean a strong representation of genre fiction.
In the dataset classified by specific genre, we can more clearly see the dominance of fantasy publishing across the regions, as well as the significant popularity of romance and science fiction. While the numbers in Figure 10 represent the percentage of the different genres, when novel and novella publishing is examined in real terms (i.e. the raw numbers), Queensland (1188 genre novels/novellas in the years 2013–2023) and Western Australia (729 genre novels/novellas in the years 2013–2023) emerge as the states with the most active independent genre fiction publishing scenes, with a high proportion of fantasy and romance writing in these regions. Beyond the strong representation of fantasy fiction, the dataset offers other interesting insights about genre fiction in the regions. Writers in South Australia and Western Australia publish a significant number of romance titles, and while crime fiction is well represented in most states and territories, there were no books tagged as crime novels published in the Northern Territory over the sample period.
Proportion of novel and novella genres by state or territory, 2013–2023.
Writing and publishing in regional Australia encompasses a wide variety of forms and genres. While children's fiction is the most popular form across each state and territory, each region has its own particular profile when it comes to genre and form: consider, for example, the popularity of romance fiction in Tasmania and the abundance of poetry being published in South Australia. These data illustrate that there is not a single story to tell about independent publishing in regional Australia. Rather, independent publishing in regional Australia is varied and diverse and is rooted in the experiences of place.
Conclusions
In the introduction to this article, we asked how we might articulate the value of the contribution that books published in regional Australia make to Australian literary culture. This article represents a first step in answering this question. By measuring the publishing activity occurring across Australia, we are able to not only observe the scale of the activity, but also the diversity of location, form and genre in the dataset. Placing these data into conversation with Graham's (2007) and Tynan's (2021) epistemologies of place and relationality, the relationship between place, book publishing and cultural significance begins to crystalise.
Data presented in this article illustrate that not only is independent and small press publishing happening across Australia, but also that each state and territory has its own profile of activity. While there are some broad trends that characterise publishing across the continent – such as the popularity of children's picture book publishing in all states and territories – each region's publishing activity differs. The framing of this research puts place and community at the forefront of our inquiry and, as such, these data reveal not only a strong representation of regional community publishing across Australia, but also an indication of how place and community influences what is published. The significance of place in publishing is illuminated by the volume of independent poetry publishing in South Australia, which is 18 percentage points higher than the proportion of poetry being published in NSW. This outlier suggests that further qualitative research into the relationship between populations and genres would offer more detailed explanations as to why some genres are popular or unpopular in different regions.
The relationship between community and publishing is perhaps most explicit in the prevalence of reference works that are independently published in the Northern Territory about native flora and fauna, as well as First Nations languages. This is indicative of how communities are producing the books they need. Both place and community are significant factors that influence the books that are published in Australia's regions, and more research is needed to understand the nuances of this influence, and the ways that communities respond to the particular needs of their region through small-scale independent publishing.
Our analysis confirms the hypothesis of this article that the scope of Australian literary production extends far beyond the publishing capitals of Sydney and Melbourne, and that the definition of Australian literature must include the books that are written and independently published in Australia's regions. Mary Graham's (2007) argument against universalism is foundational to understanding the nature of writing and publishing in Australia, especially when we take account of the full picture. And while the significance of regional independent publishing in Australia's literary culture has often been overlooked, this article demonstrates the essential role that community, storytelling, creativity and human agency play in understanding, celebrating and preserving place.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge Roseleigh Priest and her vital work in establishing the dataset for this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Project (Grant No. ARCLP210300666).
Declaration of conflicting interest
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data availability statement
Data used in this research has been sourced from AustLit dabase, which can be accessed through libraries, schools and institutions.