Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your role within Wakefield Press?

I am 61 and have been working at various editions of Wakefield Press for more than half those years. I am sole director of this company now, and I suppose I can be called managing director though I generally sign myself publisher.

I’ve worked across editing, marketing, distribution, and finance. Probably my best skills are in manuscript editing and revising. These days I’m more a lynchpin, working to keep channels flowing between all involved in the creation and successful publishing of our frontlist and backlist.

What’s your favourite book?

When I was small, a favourite was Norman Lindsay’s 1918 book (we had a more recent copy!) The Magic Pudding: Being The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff. It’s about a bad-tempered pudding that – magic! – always returns again in its bowl after it’s been eaten. Ignoring the bad-tempered bit, there’s an analogy there with POD/short-run printing. It used to be stock-on-hand that was valuable. Now value is rather in the ethereal file that can be so quickly turned into the stock you need.

What are you reading at the moment?

I just finished George Orwell’s 1984. Fitting perhaps, given a major theme is the elimination and reinvention of history and memory by ‘Big Brother’.

Wakefield Press is a well-established Australian publisher, now in its 31st year! Can you share a bit about Wakefield’s story, and how it has evolved over the past 3 decades?

In fact, there was first a Wakefield Press in Adelaide from 1942, associated with the city’s once-iconic Beck’s bookshop. The shop’s proprietor published the occasional small book until he retired in the 1960s.

South Australia’s state government revived the name in the early 1980s, with a state-owned ‘quango’ Wakefield Press established to publish mainly books of South Australian history. Later in the decade the government divested itself of Wakefield Press to the owners of a fledgling politics and arts magazine, The Adelaide Review. They acquired the name, a second-hand accounts computer, an agency right to market the books already published by WP, and the duty of seeing some forthcoming titles to completion.

I scored a job as sales rep and invoicing clerk/packer/dispatcher for WP, combined with proof-reading, ad-selling and writing the odd review for the magazine. After just a couple of years, an eternal truth – ‘tough gig, books’ – was dawning on the Review’s owners, and they started to make noises about unloading Wakefield Press. I was about to turn 30, and really wanting to make something of my life. So, after some negotiation and a small sum, in early 1989 I became the owner of the Wakefield Press name and the agency right. Don’t think I got the second-hand computer. My original ambition was simply to eke an existence from sales distribution, and publish the occasional book.

Things moved quickly, however. In the first year I published a couple of books I’d lined up before taking over. They went quite well, and I was hooked on publishing – on having a stake in what gets said and thought. Soon we were publishing 30 to 50 new titles per year, across many areas. Along the way, we’ve provided first publishing jobs to several talented young people. They have always contributed fresh ideas and talents to Wakefield.

What sort of genres does Wakefield publish? Are any of those genres a particular favourite of yours to publish?

We publish quite broadly across genres: history, literary and young adult fiction, memoir and biography, art and illustrated books, poetry, food and wine, ‘issues’, some sport. Some think we publish only South Australian authors or books, which isn’t the case. It is true though that a preponderance of our titles have some South Australian connection. I’m proud that we have given so many ‘local’ authors their early opportunities, and grateful to authors who have stayed with us or returned to us.

I enjoy publishing all genres, but I do like the distinctive nature of our South Australian history series and titles. No one else is going to publish so much as we do in the field, and I do feel we have a responsibility to carry the torch. These days I much enjoy working on complicated illustrated books of art and history, helping to put the jigsaw pieces together. There’s joy in that, amid the hard work and frustrations, involving all the publishing skills. There is no other publisher in SA with our all-round capacity under the one roof.

Have you noticed any interesting trends in what your readers are buying at the moment? Any runaway successes?

We’re too small to be really indicative of trends. The older I get the more I like to look for books still likely to be read and used in a hundred years, rather than books just ‘for the moment’. We are publishing less in food and recipe books than we did. Partly almost by mistake, but also because the market is so glutted.

Right now, pandemic days, it looks like readers are seeking comfort and sure bets, catching up on books they have always meant to read, and returning to authors they’ve enjoyed before. In this respect, our distinctive publishing of South Australian works is important. With state borders closed, intra-state travel and interest are growing.

It is a very difficult time to be in the publishing industry. How has Wakefield coped with the COVID-19 pandemic? How has Print-on-Demand factored into your response?

We have been thankful for government stimulus measures. We’ve been using POD/short run for some years so really we’ve just been grateful the option has continued through the pandemic. With international freight means and avenues unpredictable, LS has been very useful in enabling us to get books to overseas customers.

What kind of factors do you consider when selecting titles for POD?

With paperbacks we tend now to load all titles up to LS, unless they are colour books, and make them available wherever we have rights, including in Australia. LS simply increases our reach. As a small publisher/self-distributor, shops can be reluctant to bother making small orders to us, whereas they may batch them with an order to LS.

A main factor is the international reach LS facilitates. With postage costs from Australia ludicrously expensive, the capacity to Print On Demand close to the customer (and for the retailer to be able to order ‘nearby’) is a godsend.

Speed is a factor. LS in Australia has been brilliant in turning books around quickly, whether for initial runs or small reorders. Instead of ordering for two years, I’m ordering for two months. Convenience is also a factor. The LS website makes ordering and establishing costs so simple.

It’s pleasing to see the LS in Australia now offers POD hard-case print and delivery choices at good unit prices. We are starting to use that, doing small hardcase runs of books published mainly in paperback. One plan is to use POD and short-run printing to create a series of South Australian classics. No one else would do it, so we’d corner that market, small as it may be for many titles. This would be across genres. Anyway, always plenty to do.