Is there a way to change the system in Australia so more published authors make a comfortable living from their writing? 

Keeping in mind the odds against them:

The huge number of books already available to readers - in libraries, on the shelves at home, borrowed from friends etc, and that book sales in 2020, a good year in sales, hit 67 million books, which is only 2.6 books for each Australian (and the vast proportion of those are old titles).

The competition. Hundreds (thousands?) of authors get published every year in Australia, most sell below a thousand copies each (at best a few thousand dollars for six months to X number of year's work) and these authors must fight each other for the marketing dollar and the ever shrinking book coverage in the shrinking traditional media. 

The drift to online bookshops. Before the internet the range of books available to the reader was finite, because bookshops were finite. So at any given moment there might be between 10,000 & 100,000 titles available to buy. Since the advent of online shops, there are millions.

The influence of social media. Recent trends have been drawing readers to backlist titles (titles published more than a year ago) which is great for the chosen few but has played havoc with new book sales drivers like the bestseller lists. 

And then there is the media obsession with the debut. A debut is a story. Rags to riches, overcoming adversity etc. Plus, a debut is new. Shiny. It's an understandable obsession. And publishers have to feed this need, dragging marketing spend (thus potential sales) from mid career authors to do so. 

The publishing model itself. Jackie French once told me an author's viability is in their backlist. The same goes for publishers. The more they publish the greater chance of striking publishing gold - a perennial bestseller. The more of these they have the better for their bottom line. 

So publishing is a numbers game, and the more they publish the greater their chance of winning. Most authors just make up the numbers. On occasion, a book secured for a paltry advance becomes a bestseller. These outliers are like crack cocaine for publishers. 

Publishers can't count on the outliers though, so they try to manufacture bestsellers. They might throw a quarter of a million dollars at a couple of celebrities and a sportsperson, or an retiring politician - blowing their yearly budget - ensuring their other authors get greatly reduced advances. 

Back to Jackie French's point. Backlist being the revenue engine for an author. But how do you develop a backlist in an industry obsessed with the new? Getting your second or third or fourth book published is just as difficult as the first, if your first didn't break sales records. 

Having kept all of this in mind, is there a way to change the system in Australia so more published authors make a comfortable living from their writing? 

I can’t say I’ve ever been described as an optimist. Curmudgeon, yes, but optimist, no. Which surprises me as I have always harboured a faith in human progress. Living to eighty is better than living to forty. Surfing the internet is better than sitting through a Latin mass. Flying around the globe is better than trying to walk it. Democracy is better than all other forms of government. I suppose this made me some kind of humanist. Things always appeared to be getting better in the greatest happiness for the greatest number kind of way. Until Trump, whose ascendency seriously shook and weakened the foundations of my poorly built edifice. I’m not entirely sure when it collapsed but I can tell you about the day I noticed my faith in humanity was gone.

March 2020. I was in my parents-in-laws’ house in Kent staring out a window at sheep scattered across green hills when I concluded the most likely place I’d find a gun was in the cluster of farm buildings down the lane. Farmers were always shooting something, I told myself. The hills were alive with the sound of slaughter. A gun would mean we’d be safe. That was the same day I googled - How do you butcher a sheep? How do you preserve meat? And later found myself browsing machetes online. Guns run out of ammunition, I recalled from some movie, but a blade is forever. I even wondered if my tennis strokes might make me quite a proficient killer if ‘worst comes to worst’. Not realising if I was thinking such thoughts, they already had. 

I moved to the UK from Australia at the end of 2019. Partly because my English wife Tamsin wanted to move home, partly because Escape to the Country’s Jules and Alistair had seduced me with their promises of a thatched cottage in a gorgeous garden settled amidst green rolling hills only a short walk from the friendliest pub in the kingdom. However, those charming fellows neglected to mention that Britain was quickly becoming a basket case. Buyer beware I suppose.

Over the years everything everybody said couldn’t happen in Britain had happened culminating in Boris Johnson winning a thumping majority soon after I arrived, quickly followed by the signing of a Brexit deal. I might as well have moved to Trump’s America. 

When a virus some said was like the flu and others said was like the plague jumped from far away China to nearby Italy. I took it personally. I’d been had. 

The Chinese government was nailing people into their apartments and Italy was running out of coffins and The World Health Organization was declaring a pandemic, and what were the leaders of my adopted country doing to prepare? They were celebrating the return of a blue passport. I felt as confused as those who had voted for Brexit only to discover they had scuppered their dreams of retiring in Spain. Then, as if to cut off my escape route home, Australia appeared to implode. My compatriots were filmed punching each other in supermarket aisles over packets of toilet paper. The world chuckled one last time as I lost my mind.

I am sure I would have acted more reasonably if the world’s leaders had been more inspiring. It is hard to have faith in humanity when people in democracies willingly elect the kind of leaders those with no vote have forced upon them. From Trump to Modi, from Morrison to Bolsonaro, from Putin to Xi to Johnson, we were being led by men who were more like Bond villains than statesmen, skilled at dividing people not uniting them.

Then, as predicted by the government who signed the deal no less, Brexit began disrupting supply chains. Those fights over toilet paper everyone had been laughing at only a few days before, were suddenly happening in supermarkets in Britain. Was it because of Brexit or Covid? Didn’t matter. Empty supermarket shelves had fools like me panic buying non-perishable food and carrying out rice by the sack. 

A sense of impending doom spread through the UK faster than the virus. I don’t think it was fear of the virus though, I think it was fear of other people. Those idiots will empty the supermarket shelves if I don’t empty them first. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in my reasoning. It wasn’t a time for critical thinking. If all those zombie films had taught me anything it was that zombies are the least of your worries. Other people are the real danger.

In those early days of the pandemic everything was so obviously wrong, but Boris Johnson kept assuring the public that it was business as usual. I think my near hysteria had something to do with living in the incredibly beautiful and serene English countryside. I was living in a cosy crime novel. It was all so pleasantly sinister.

No that’s wrong, it was more like living in the opening chapters of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds after the Martians have arrived and the hero has witnessed them incinerate forty people but still goes back home for supper as he would on any other day. Some of his neighbours have heard about the arrival of the Martians and some haven’t, some laugh at him when he brings it up. The following day he tells us, ‘I saw my neighbour gardening, chatted with him for a time, and then strolled in to breakfast. It was a most unexceptional morning.’

I was living one long unexceptional morning, and in the circumstances it seemed rude to harp on and on about the end of the world. So I prepped in silence, noting the comings and goings on the farm, Googled tips for salting meat and drew up plans for my bunker convinced I would end up saving my wife and her parents, and anyone else who sought refuge with us.

But I was a fool listening to fools. Governments and filmmakers around the world had convinced many of us that other people were the problem. That we should fear ourselves and each other. That an unprecedented event like a global pandemic would end in riots, anarchy and martial law. 

But they were wrong. I was wrong. People weren’t the problem. In fact, here in the UK many people had already been wearing masks and had placed themselves under lockdown long before the government got around to doing so. 
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The pandemic tested governments and the people in ways that revealed the character of both. On the whole, the people did a damn fine job. More often than not it was governments who let us down. 

Navigating the pandemic seems to have given people the confidence to demand better leaders. The US turfed out Trump, Australia has just given Morrison the boot and Johnson teeters on the brink. Could this new found confidence herald a new age? I’m optimistic.

I tried to explain Australia’s latest literary scandal to my family. It all seemed so simple before I opened my mouth. But in moments I had tied myself in knots and my family were smiling politely and edging away from me as though I had lost my mind. So, if I am going to try to explain the scandal now, it's probably best if I start from a place of ignorance, which is easy for me as I live there.

This is a story about an author called John Hughes. (Not to be confused with the director of The Breakfast Club.) Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of him. I hadn’t either and I probably should have, especially since Hughes is an award winning Australian writer whose latest novel, The Dogs, was recently longlisted for The Miles Franklin Literary Award.

The Dogs was published by a very small independent publisher, Upswell Publishing. One of those publishers who pride themselves on taking risks on books they know have little commercial appeal but great literary merit. Having one of their books longlisted for the Miles Franklin would have been validating, and possibly lucrative.

Over the years The Miles Franklin Literary Award, in its longlists and shortlists, has championed the work of writers published by small and micro publishers and even a few writers who couldn’t find a publisher for their work and chose to self-publish. Some have gone on to win. The judges of the award, to the despair of some booksellers who would prefer more commercially viable winners, have a reputation for lifting very literary writers out of obscurity and onto the podium. Confirming a prejudice among some literary types that only small publishers are brave enough to publish real literature and the big guys only publish literary sell-outs.

This is where I got into trouble when trying to explain all this to my family. And I still feel tempted to go on a lengthy digression into the literary/commercial divide within the Australian literary world, but will not give into temptation, except to say there are deep and long lived resentments on both sides (and I once wrote a book about them).

So The Dogs has been longlisted and we were creeping ever closer to the date they announce the shortlist and then the winner. Still with me? Then an article by Anna Verney appeared in The Guardian Australia claiming that sections of The Dogs had been lifted from the Nobel Prize winning author Svetlana Alexievich’s non-fiction book The Unwomanly Face of War. (Just nod along as though you know who Alexievich is and murmur, love her work.)

Hughes responded quickly to these accusations and explained that the book took over ten years to write and somehow his original notes got mixed with his research notes and unbeknownst to him, some of Alexievich’s work made its way into his. Hughes' publisher, the highly respected Terri-ann White, stood by him and they both apologised. White then asks the Miles Franklin Literary Award to remove the novel from the longlist, which they promptly did. On Twitter a number of Australian writers expressed horror at such a mistake happening and mumbled ‘but for the grace of god go I’ and that was that.

But Anna Verney was not done; in subsequent articles, aided by literary sleuths and academics, more examples of literary theft were revealed. Not only has Hughes accidentally ‘borrowed’ from Alexievich, but there are slightly altered passages from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in the text, too.

Now Hughes comes out with a very different explanation in an op-ed. It is all part of his process, writers have long stood on the shoulders of giants, borrowing bits from here and there isn’t as uncommon as it would appear, if T.S. Eliot can do it, so can he. That sort of thing. His publisher distances herself from him. And I learned a new word, bricolage. Look it up, I had to.

On Twitter, the gloves come off and he is openly declared a plagiarist. There is a great deal of anger and resentment. Some claim that only a privileged old white male would ever think he could get away with such a thing. Others are angry that his publisher hadn’t spotted the stolen passages, that the Miles Franklin judges hadn’t, that well-known reviewers missed it. Some readers expressed embarrassment for championing the novel. Others said the fact no one picked up on the plagiarised passages was proof that literary types didn’t even read the boring literary books they were always making others feel stupid for not having read. And that the whole literary world was an emperor with no clothes, etc.

But we’re still not done. For a while now I have been following the Lecturer in Literary Cultures at the University of Tasmania, Emmett Stinson on Twitter. He always has fascinating and complex things to say about literature. Well, he and other academics have been reading The Dogs closely and discovering more and more examples of Hughes’ light-fingered approach to literature. (But Stinson probably wouldn’t appreciate my use of the phrase light-fingered. Too emotive.)

And if you thought things were complicated before, hold onto your hat.

Stinson and other academics swerve away from accusations of plagiarism. They are interested in the text and Hughes as an artist. As more and more examples are discovered, and the number of writers involved grows, it becomes clear that Hughes was up to something and working out what that was becomes interesting in itself.

Which makes me and others wonder if plagiarism on this scale is art. If a novel made up of passages from dozens of other people’s writing works as a novel and, as it was longlisted for The Miles Franklin Literary Prize, it would appear it does, is that something new and innovative? Or just something deeply cynical? The key element in all of this is attribution. If Hughes had a page at the back of the novel listing all of the authors he had borrowed from, would he still be on the longlist? Does a novelist, a writer of self-evident untruths, need to list sources? What if Hughes had only used passages from books long out of copyright? I don’t think Jane Austen gave anyone permission to insert zombies into Pride and Prejudice.

Other interpretations question whether Hughes expected readers to recognise the sometimes quite famous passages immediately and when none did, found himself in a tight spot. Wandering down this path we could even speculate that it was Hughes himself who tipped off the journalist who broke the story. Unlikely as that sounds.

If we set aside these more generous attempts at explanation and see it as so many see it, as a clear case of plagiarism, then we must look at the question of motive. If you’re writing literary fiction in Australia you learn very early on that there is no money in it. Grants, residencies, writers retreats are your reward (but only if you’ve learned how to fill out those interminable forms), and if you’re extremely lucky you win a prize or two. Stealing the work of other literary writers and passing it off as your own, is not a fast track to financial security. You’d be better off trying to write a crime novel set in the outback, like everyone else. So let’s cross financial reward off the list of motives.

There are other possible motives. He did it to win The Miles Franklin Award. But why would a plagiarist head towards greater scrutiny? Besides, winning the Miles is a one in a billion shot whether you’ve borrowed from Proust or not.

Maybe Hughes is thumbing his nose at the pretentious literary snobs who salivate over this sort of thing if they're let in on the joke. The adolescent in me favours this motive.

As Hughes has shown himself willing to lie about his work, first stating that his borrowing was an accident, then saying it was intentional, could we trust him if he came clean about his motives? Nup. So we may never know.

One benefit of all this is that The Miles Franklin Literary Award is being talked about again. Probably not in the way it had hoped for. In recent years, longlist and shortlist announcements have barely registered in the media. Even the announcement of the winner can be overlooked. (Name the last five winners without Googling them.)

Slightly salty writers like myself tend to believe that for the most part you can have integrity or you can be popular, but it’s nearly impossible to enjoy both. The Miles reconfirmed its path when it resisted the urge to give the award to Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows the Universe which would have been a very popular and newsworthy choice. And a few years later its principles are rewarded with a literary scandal. Beggars can’t be choosers.

Just with my attempt to explain this sorry saga to my family, I have ended up only scratching the surface. But you get the gist. Needless to say, all of Hughes’ other work is now being placed under the microscope. This is far from over. Oh goodie.


John Purcell is the author of the novels, The Girl on the Page and The Lessons.

I’ve been reading a lot of biographies and memoirs of novelists. They don’t make for uplifting reading. I mean honestly, what a miserable bunch writers are. Moan moan, drink drink, write write. Never satisfied. Always seeking out greener pastures. Boring everyone to death with their thoughts, boring them even deader with their silence. Their interminable reading. And that tap, tap, tap, or scribble, scribble, scribble and shouts for silence echoing down the hall. All the while torn between incompatible futures – that of austere artistic merit and the esteem of the few or the abuse of talent and shameless wealth and lonely fame. Both futures lined with the same milestones – divorce, financial disaster, anxiety over legacy, obscurity, addiction, illness, despair – leading to the same place, the grave.

Of course it isn’t all doom and gloom. Some get cut down in their prime. Like that newly published writer who was killed by a falling branch while walking down the Champs Elysees. I don’t recall his name.

No, you’re right, maybe I am choosing the wrong writers. I am a miserable bastard myself. It’s probably just unconscious bias. I’m drawn to the worst of them. There are probably hundreds of happy writers and as many biographies of them. Case in point, there’s a biography of Henry Miller on my shelf called The Happiest Man Alive. He’s dead now, too.

Even though I know how it always goes, I can’t help reading about them. There is just something fascinating about writers. At least to me. They are such odd bods. Walking contradictions. Brilliant and stupid. Exciting and dull. Observant and yet so blind. Especially to their own faults and their own talents.

I am talking of a certain subset of novelists. I can admit it. Not all writers wrestle with their own devils. Not all are artists. Some start out with no integrity so don’t live in fear of losing it. In fact the vast majority do their best, succeed or fail, potter about, develop a small following, get bored of financial insecurity and go back to the work they did before. Those few who succeed beyond their own expectations and actually make some money from their work try very hard not to disappoint their readership and present them each year with the same novel in different guises.
My 2018 novel, The Girl on the Page, dealt with all this – miserable writers, artistic integrity, the lure of commercial success, the publishing machine and literary prizes. So you would expect I was done with writers in my novels. But you’d be wrong.

Just as I can’t stop reading about writers, I can’t stop writing about them either.

When I wasn’t looking, a novelist snuck in the back door of my new novel The Lessons and proceeded to take over. Her name is Jane Curtis and she is a piece of work. But I kind of like her. The novel centres on the love affair of two young people, Daisy and Harry. It was almost a romance novel before Jane Curtis turned up and did what all novelists do, stuck her nose where it didn’t belong and brought pain and misery to everyone she claimed to love. But she does all this with such flair that we can almost forgive her.

The truth is, the novel just didn’t work until Jane turned up.

I have always been fascinated by stories that seem to be aware they are stories. The multiple endings to John Fowles’ French Lieutenant’s Woman, Kurt Vonnegut inserting himself into the narrative of Breakfast of Champions so he can be there when his two main characters finally meet, that sort of thing. Jane gave me the opportunity to play in my own small way.

The bulk of The Lessons is set in the 1960s, Jane’s first person narrative is set in the 1980s and interrupts the main narrative from time to time. A novelist in a novel will always bring an element of self-consciousness to a narrative. Throughout the 1960s storyline Jane is writing novels based on the events we are reading about. The reader is invited to reflect on what they are being told in light of this.

I feel I must have been influenced by E.M. Forster’s use of novelist Eleanor Lavish in A Room with View. As witness to events in the first half of the novel, Lavish is able to effect change, albeit unwittingly, in the second half of the novel, even though she herself doesn’t appear, because her much disparaged novel is read aloud to the main characters, and that novel contains a description of a kiss everyone has been trying very hard to pretend never happened.
The reading aloud of Lavish’s novel forces Forster’s characters to interrogate the stories they have been telling themselves. Stories within stories. We are all novelists. Some are just better than others.

Throughout The Lessons, with each of Jane’s interruptions, I hope the reader will become more and more conscious of her attempts to control the narrative. I found her voice irresistible. I gave way to her more times than I’m ready to admit. I ask the reader to keep their wits about them. But then, to my mind, there is no better narrator than a novelist. Who better to tell us the whole truth than a professional liar?
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--The Lessons by John Purcell (HarperCollins Australia) is out now. 

I find it funny when someone asks me how I write female characters. As though women were some foreign entity only ever glimpsed by the fortunate. Rare and unknowable. But they aren’t rare, are they? Women are everywhere. My mother is a woman. So are my sisters. Come to think of it, so is my wife. And my step-daughter. My publisher is a woman, too.

The question isn’t as simple as it seems either. How do you, a man, write female characters? It’s a bit of a trap. It kind of implies that not only would it be too difficult, if not impossible, for a man to write a female character, convincing or not, but that a man really shouldn’t be writing women period. On the other hand, I may be over analysing it. Sometimes we ask a question because we don’t know the answer. I’m sure there are men out there who see women as completely alien and can’t imagine what they’re thinking at any given moment. I think the accepted collective noun for such a group of men is a Morrison. A murder of crows. A Morrison of unimaginative men.

Both my recent books, The Girl on the Page and my new book, The Lessons, centre on the lives of female characters. This wasn’t my plan. I didn’t set out to write about women. I wish I had that much say in what I write. I write what bubbles up from within me. One of the narrators of The Lessons, Jane Curtis, a novelist, wasn’t part of the original concept of the novel. Her character’s role expanded as I wrote. Her voice was the clearest in my head. It was like meeting an interesting person at a party and getting to know them over subsequent accidental meetings, until a friendship develops and you find you’re arranging to meet up regularly. I came to know Jane Curtis over time.

But she isn’t real, you made her up, shouts a heckler from the back.

As I said, my mother is a woman. A very intelligent, strong willed woman with feminist principles. And I mentioned my sisters – both a little bit older than me, both big influences on me as a teen. The eldest was heavily involved with politics as a young woman, the other sister was very interested in having a lot of fun. Each liked dragging their younger but taller brother here and there, as protection. I was jammed into the backseat of cars full of young women and taken to parties, nightclubs and bars. I listened to their stories. I was trained to see the world through their eyes. My sisters told me what music to listen to, what books to read, what films to watch and, somewhat disastrously, what to wear. And all the while their friends taught me other memorable lessons.

As a result I was never one of the boys. I sought out the company of women. Still do. The better question to ask me would be, how do I write men?

I’ll admit, writing female characters does hold certain advantages for the novelist. The inequalities in society means there is conflict in every aspect of their lives. A necessary element of drama. In this life there is still so much for women to overcome, from the mundane to the monumental. In my first few novels, my protagonist Emma Benson battles against the suffocating sexual mores of modern suburban life. In The Girl on the Page, Helen Owen hits out against ageism in the arts, while editor Amy tries to find something to value in herself. In my new novel, The Lessons, Daisy Richmond is told she doesn’t know her own heart and is forced by her mother and aunt to give up on her first love.

An early draft of The Lessons was in the voice of a male character. But it was too like being in my own head. Artistically, I prefer to see life through the eyes of women. In The Lessons the reader gets to do both.

But that damnable question won’t go away. How do I write female characters? I don’t know. My wife is my muse. I read novels by women. Memoirs and histories, too. Writing The Lessons I discovered Cat Power and obsessed over her music. I have many female friends, I take an interest in their lives, and I listen to them.

How do I write female characters? Women are half of all life. How could I not?

Learn more about The Lessons here. 

As we near publication of my new novel, The Girl on the Page, I cannot but stop to wonder where the book came from. I wrote the novel so quickly. It just fell onto the page. Almost as if I had been researching it for years. But I hadn’t. I had just been working away at my day job selling books.

Then it hit me. Rather belatedly, I’ll admit – everything I had done up till now had been research for The Girl on the Page.

I spent the greater part of my twenties and thirties sitting behind the counter in a second-hand bookstore. First someone else’s, then my own. Second-hand bookselling looks a lot like normal bookselling to the untrained eye, but they are nothing alike. And neither are the customers.

Second-hand bookshops are not viable businesses. But somehow they always seem to limp on. Mine teetered on the edge of oblivion for the full ten years of its existence. It never fell in. The end came when building owners tore the building down. I had no option but to get out of their way. By then I’d had enough of living hand to mouth, so decided to become a full time writer. This reasoning still makes me laugh.

Those ten years sitting in my bookshop were my education. I learnt more than I can say. My teachers were the eccentrics who visited regularly. And they were eccentric. Every sort of misfit, creep, loser and cracked genius would venture in. The world’s outcasts desperate for the lifegiving air of a musty secondhand bookshop.

Some of my teachers wore the outer garments of the everyday man and woman, but this would be pulled aside as soon as they entered. Then they would air their grievances, or lose themselves in some trancelike hymn to the last book they had read, or they would take umbrage over one of my eccentric book cataloging decisions. The greatest teachers were the idealists, the artists, the true believers. Their unbending natures in a world of bending reeds excited my imagination like no others.

It was their recommendations I heeded. The old man with a permanent drip hanging from the end of his nose who spoke of Jung and chemistry and forced me to take home all of the works of John Cowper Powys. The angry woman who made me read The Egoist by George Meredith. The white-haired woman who spoke little and read much, who placed a copy of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy on my desk and made me promise to read it without asking what it was about. The best advice. And the woman who overheard my conversations with other customers and brought Of Human Bondage to the counter saying it was the only great book she had ever read and wanted to know if I thought it was great, too. It was.

Then there were the shelves themselves. The hours in a second-hand bookshop are twice as long as the hours outside the shop and I would peruse my own shelves and listen to the books chatter as I passed. As I read more and spoke more with my oddbod teachers, the shelves grew more talkative. I heard Willa Cather and Edith Wharton arguing, the incessant chatter of Christina Stead’s House of All Nations and the urgent whispers of Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin.

My new novel, The Girl on the Page, is born from these experiences. This is where the hearts of the two of main characters, literary giants, Helen Owen and Malcolm Taylor were forged. Their knowledge and wisdom, too. And their integrity. Without my second-hand bookstore education, I could not have created them. I love them and all they stand for more than I can say.

Helen and Malcolm ask the question at the centre of the novel: what do we lose when we sell out? Because I love them, I feel cruel asking them to act out the answer to this question, but it is a question that needs to be answered in this increasingly opportunistic age.

Amy Winston is the other main character of The Girl on the Page, she works in publishing and is very much born of this age. Or at least so she appears on first meeting her. She is damaged and we meet her mid-decline. To create Amy Winston and her world I have drawn from more recent experience.

Since leaving the second-hand bookshop I have become unrecognisable to myself. I have become the book guy at Australia’s fastest growing online bookshop. I have published a series of erotic novels under a pseudonym. I have met and interviewed hundreds of authors and celebrities. I have worked closely with every major publisher in the country. And I rarely read a book by a dead person.
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The Girl on the Page describes what happens when these two worlds collide.
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(First published on the The Booktopian)

HarperCollins Publishers Australia is delighted to announce the exciting acquisition of The Girl on the Page by Booktopia’s Director of Books, John Purcell. The Girl on the Page is scheduled for publication in Australia in October 2018.

The Girl on the Page is a smart, sexy, provocative and powerful novel of ambition, betrayal and redemption. It follows the story of a hard-drinking, bed-hopping, hot-shot young book editor on a downward spiral. Having made her name and fortune by turning an average thriller writer into an international megastar, Amy Winston is given the unenviable task of steering literary great Helen Owen back on track to meet her publishing deadline. Helen and her husband are brilliant, complicated writers, who unsettle Amy into questioning who she is and what she does for a living – and before Amy knows it, answering these questions becomes a matter of life or death.

Publisher Catherine Milne says: ‘The joy of this novel isn’t just that it’s a complete page-turner, with lashings of sex, glamour, bad behaviour and wonderfully wicked insider publishing references, but that at its heart The Girl on the Page is a deeply serious and intelligent novel about the power of literature, which asks searching questions about art and commerce, integrity and authenticity – it’s razor-sharp, thought-provoking and vastly enjoyable.’

John Purcell says: ‘The characters came to me whole. I felt more like their biographer than creator. The challenge faced by my characters is one we are all facing. Do we take the money and stay silent or do we forgo fame and fortune to stay true to what is right and good? In my current role I have worked closely with people from all the major publishing houses and most of the boutique ones, too. I have interviewed Booker Prize winners and celebrities, chatted with authors who have sold hundreds of millions of books and laughed with nervous debut authors. Though perspectives change, the question of integrity is important to them all. It is this complexity I have attempted to depict in my novel.’

John Purcell has worked in the book industry for the last twenty years. After living in Europe and while still in his twenties, John opened a secondhand bookshop in Sydney, in which he sat for ten years reading, ranting and writing. In 2009, John joined Booktopia, Australia’s largest online bookseller, where he is currently Director of Books. In 2012, under the pseudonym Natasha Walker, John published a bestselling erotic trilogy, The Secret Lives of Emma, which went onto sell over 50,000 copies in the Australian market alone. John has appeared regularly at live events with the Sydney Writers Festival and the Wheeler Centre, and has appeared on Sunrise, Seven News, Nine News and across ABC radio. He also made a surprise appearance in Luke McGregor’s excruciating ABC TV series, Luke Warm Sex. 

The book is terminally ill, say those in the know, and lies near death in a private hospital plugged into a life support machine and surrounded by close friends and relatives. Right now, across the world commentators are drafting moving eulogies. Commemorative plates and tea towels are being made. Songs are being written. A mini-series is planned. TV people are putting together five minute montages for the news bulletins which touch on the book’s long and varied history

Everyone is preparing themselves for news because no one wants to be caught off guard. At any moment word may come. The book is dead.

But then, isn’t this is all rather familiar? I grew up in the seventies and eighties and back then top people had said something similar. They said that while the whole world was off watching TV the book had died of neglect in a rented apartment, friendless and alone. A few learned souls, a loneliness of dust-covered professors and dowdy librarians, had even been brought in to identify the corpse.

There had been no elaborate funeral planned for the book then. A pauper’s grave had awaited, and there, we were told, the book had been unceremoniously dumped. No one had wept.

Back then when the news had broken, people had been genuinely surprised to learn that the book had been living amongst them at all, they had assumed the book had died long ago. The book seemed to belong to another age altogether. The dark age before TV.

I suppose the prophets of doom did have a point. I’m sure I remember teachers teaching literature to students who had never read for pleasure. These were teachers who would no sooner expect a student to read outside the requirements of the curriculum than their colleague, the Latin teacher, would expect students to speak Latin outside of the classroom. And, really, these English teachers, the poor servants of an absent master, could only go through the motions. I imagine that any rare successes served only to underline the futility of the whole enterprise. For, to all concerned, the book was dead.

And where imagination still existed, it was nourished by a thin broth of TV and, beyond the thrall of the TV, film. It is easy to forget just how dominant TV was. There was no real competition from any other medium. For thirty years TV ruled unchallenged. Those living in its shadow soon took ill. First the book, and then film. To survive, film pumped out grandiose spectacles of a kind TV could not emulate. Star Wars, Superman, Jaws. But these did not save film. It was the video player that saved film. When film entered the home via the rented video cassette, it occupied the TV. And TV began speaking a new language. The video reintroduced the beginning, middle and end, the natural rhythm of the imagination, which TV had abandoned with its endless stream of programming.

Then the damnedest thing happened, the rhythm of film revived the wider world’s interest in the book. Some discovered that certain films were based on books. On one man’s books in particular, too. As I recall it, the book rose from the dead, beckoned out of the grave by the imagination of Stephen King. Suddenly a few teens were reading. They were choosing to read. They were turning off TVs. This faint heartbeat gave the book a fragile existence.

But the book had never really been dead, had it? No. And the book won’t die now, will it? No.

The book has always lead a double life – a private life and a public one. In the book’s public life its health is judged by sales, media coverage, popular influence and contemporary relevance. In the seventies and eighties because sales dwindled, because media coverage was negative, because its popular influence was nil and because it had no contemporary relevance, the book’s public life did meet its end in a pauper’s grave. And no one wept.

But the book lived on its private life. The wider world does not monitor the health of the book in its private life because it only recognises the book’s public face. Which is to be expected. The public face is a commodity, while in private the book is not bound by the expectations and conventions of business. Its value does not fluctuate according to the whims of commerce, for its value comes from within not from without.

The most baffling thing about the private life of the book, and this is why it doesn’t get any press, is that it belongs to everyone and therefore no one person in particular. So it is both priceless and worthless in the same breath.

The wider world can get excited about books when, as in the case of J.K. Rowling, someone makes a squillion dollars writing them. There is a story to tell and one that is easy to quantify. Books suddenly have a monetary value which can be compared with other commodities.

While I credit Stephen King with raising the public life of books from the dead, it wasn’t until the release and subsequent success of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and its sequels, that the book was able to walk without the aid of nurses. J.K. Rowling did more for the book than can be measured. The success of these books changed the way people thought about books and reading. Harry Potter Inc. took the book back to the days of its greatest successes – back to the days when Charles Dickens was the most famous man on the planet.

And yet suddenly, when the book seems at its most vigorous, when more people than ever are reading, when publishers and booksellers are finally making some money from the thankless enterprise, news comes that the book is ill, terminally so.

But the news is false – a rumour started by an accountant at work in unimaginative publishing house. Both the public and private manifestations of the book are well. More than well, robust. In a digital world of unimpeded exchanges of information, of open ended discourse, of perpetual updates and addenda, the book is a refuge, a closed circuit, something complete, a place where captured thoughts have ripened and matured. Truth be told, the wider public has developed the habit of thinking well about the book so that today there are more readers than ever before, reading more widely than ever before, with access to more books than ever before. So regardless of the format the wider public chooses to read – hardback, paperback or digital – until they can be persuaded that an alternative is better, the book, with it’s beginning, middle and end, is here to stay.

Were all publishing to cease and were all writers to fall silent the book would still live on. No-one can undo what has already been achieved. Our future, as our history, is permanently coupled with the book. So much so that when the end does come, it will be the end for both the book and humanity, which leaves no-one to make the pronouncement – the book is dead.


Originally published on the Booktopia Blog