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Getting started in the publishing industry can seem like a daunting feat, with many different areas and roles to choose from. There are different branches including trade, education, academic, scholarly and scientific publishing etc. ��There are also a number of divisions in publishing that are often not as visible as the roles of publisher or editor. These range from sales, marketing, production, publicity, product, digital, legal, finance and more.

լ�е��� (SUP) is a not-for-profit, scholarly publisher of research-based books that engage, inspire and stimulate debate. At SUP, we believe in the value of research, the power of knowledge and the ability of books to change the world. Our mission is to enable, support and facilitate the dissemination of outstanding research. We look to find new ways of extending the availability and accessibility of knowledge and increasing engagement with individual works.

Meet the Team

We’ve asked our team some frequently asked questions about their entry into the industry and advice for those wanting to make a start.

Susan: I’m the manager and publisher for լ�е���. I manage the business, and also commission new books for two of the SUP scholarly series.

Naomi: I’m the publishing manager and լ�е���, my main role is to steer our books through the publishing process, and liaise with our wonderful authors, copyeditors and designers.

Nathan: I’m the production officer at լ�е���. My tasks include typesetting, scheduling, ebook distribution and design.

Kelly: I’m the publishing projects officer at լ�е���. My main role is to provide marketing, sales, and distribution support to the team.

Q: Did you always want to work in Publishing?

Susan: I always wanted to work with books, but hadn’t considered working in publishing until the opportunity arose to restart SUP.

Naomi: I have always loved reading, but it wasn’t until I was about halfway through my undergraduate degree that I realised there was a whole industry devoted to making books.

Nathan: Initially I wanted to be a web designer, but I realised my skill set aligned better to traditional publishing.

Kelly: I’ve always enjoyed reading but didn’t realise there were so many different opportunities available that would allow me to work with books in some capacity.

Q: Did you study/ What did you study?

Susan: I studied a BA Library Science at Kuring-gai CAE (now UTS). It was probably close to the end for that degree, once KCAE became part of UTS the degrees changed into Information Management and Knowledge Management. I also have an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management at UNSW, which helped me with the business side of running SUP.

Naomi: My undergraduate degree was in economics, and then when it dawned on me that instead of crunching numbers I could devote my days to books, I enrolled in the masters of publishing at the University of լ�е���.

Nathan: I studied a BA in Fine Arts and a Masters in Multimedia Design.

Kelly: I did��Bachelor of Business degree��at the University of Newcastle, and when I graduated I found out about the Masters of Publishing available at the University of լ�е��� and enrolled myself in the next available semester.����

Q: What are some of your previous roles and how were they applicable to working in SUP?

Susan: I would say I’ve worked at the confluence of IT, media and information management for most of my career. My first job post-uni was in the editorial library of the լ�е��� Morning Herald, where you needed to find answers to journalists’ questions really quickly. We had an in-house full text database of the SMH stories, and these needed to be checked each day to ensure that the text in the database matched what actually appeared in the print edition.

I also worked at the State Library of NSW as a reference librarian and then running one of their small businesses, ILANET, which offered network services to libraries around Australia. That was at beginning of the internet age, so we were an ISP for a while.

I came to the University of լ�е��� Library as a web developer, and I also worked as a freelance web developer for several years, including for the լ�е��� Writers Festival. Restarting SUP gave me the opportunity to bring all of my skills and experience together – running a business, checking the accuracy of text, and bringing the research to a wider audience.

Naomi: I spent almost 8 years working at a trade publisher, starting as publishing assistant and moving through the editorial department to become an editor. One of my focuses was on cookbooks and ‘image-heavy’ books, which has translated well to SUP’s archaeology series and Indigenous music, language and performing arts series, as the books we publish in these categories also require a keen attention to balancing textual information with graphs, images and tables.

Nathan: I’ve worked for Weldon Owen, Pan Macmillan, Hachette Australia, and Wolters Kluwer CCH. All gave me the skills working in production and design that I use today.

Kelly: I worked as a client services coordinator at a marketing agency before I started working at a trade publisher as a sales coordinator, and later as a marketing and publicity coordinator. I worked there for 3 years before moving to a children’s education publisher as a marketing coordinator for a time before coming to work at SUP.

Q: What do you recommend for someone trying to get into the industry?

Susan: When you’re starting out, don’t get too hung up on getting into your ideal role straight away. Many of our interns take a ‘foot-in-the-door’ role and then use that to move into editorial later, or in fact find out that they love production or sales or PR. And keep reading widely!

Naomi: Keep an eye out for opportunities outside of the editorial department: publicity, sales and marketing are creative and interesting areas to work, you don’t just have to be an editor!

Nathan: Be open to learning everything! Also, many people want to work as an Editor, but there are many good Publishing roles in Sales, Marketing, Publicity and Production that many people often overlook as a potential career.

Kelly: There are many opportunities in the industry that may not necessarily be what you have in mind, but they can serve as stepping stones into another role, or you may find that you prefer working in a different area than you had imagined. Intern or try to find an entry level role where you can. I’ve met so many publishing professionals with a wide variety of studies and experience, so definitely think about your applicable skills and how they can be used in the different areas of publishing. Read as much as you can!

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If you have more questions, check out our blog post ‘Your Publishing Questions Answered!’.

Stay up to date with SUP news by signing up to our monthly newsletter .

Head over to to peruse the program for this year. There will be a broad range of speakers and panellists featured, sure to inspire and lead to many thoughtful conversations and constructive ideas.

As a not-for-profit publisher, լ�е��� takes a hybrid approach to open access, with some books released commercially and others in open access. We launched our platform in 2019 to host our textbooks and other OA titles.

Our OA books cover subjects across the humanities and social sciences. You can explore more by visiting the SOL , but here are a few of our Open Access books to get your started:

is a customisable, open access textbook. It provides a holistic coverage of politics and policy topics for use in junior and senior university courses. With contributions from Australia’s leading politics and public-policy scholars, the textbook includes material on Australian political history and philosophy, key political institutions, Australian political sociology, public policy-making, and specialised chapters on a range of key policy domains. Each chapter was subject to anonymous and rigorous peer-review to ensure the highest standards.

In��, researchers from a range of disciplines��consider how researchers and communities can work together well. How can research be reimagined using the knowledge of First Nations peoples and other communities to ensure it remains relevant, sustainable, socially just and inclusive?

The issue of animal welfare has attracted attention in Australia in recent decades and interest in the area only continues to increase. However, the policy process remains poorly understood.��is the first Australian book to examine the topic systematically. Without taking a specific ethical position, Peter John Chen draws on a wide range of sources, explores the history of animal welfare in Australia, examines public opinion and media coverage of key issues, and comprehensively maps the policy domain. He shows how diverse social, ethical and economic interests interact to produce a complex and unpredictable climate.

gathers 71 of Professor Simon Chapman’s authoritative, acerbic and often heretical essays from across his 40-year career. The collection is an essential guide to many key debates in contemporary public health and would be of great interest to public health students and practitioners, and provides compelling, entertaining reading for anyone interested in health policy.

Wangga, originating in the Daly region of Australia’s Top End, is one of the most prominent Indigenous genres of public dance-songs. focuses on the songmen who created and performed the songs for their own communities and for the general public over the past 50 years.

Check out our other open access book on .

The book is available now, in paperback and open access, free to download and read online as part of our .

The book’s editors recently wrote for��The Conversation��about��their experiences with community-led projects. Read an extract of their reflections below, and their complete article��.

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By��Victoria Rawlings, James L. Flexner and Lynette Riley

For too long, “research” was an activity done to or on Indigenous people; it was something imposed from the outside. This was especially the case for people who came from communities that were oppressed or marginalised in the colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Indigenous people throughout the world feel they have been the subjects of endless measurement, recording, and invasion of privacy with except for the scholars who make careers out of it. Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls this approach “research adventures in Indigenous lands” in her book .

Our collaboratively edited volume, , represents a substantial step towards redressing power imbalances that continue to characterise much academic research.

The book asks how to move research done to and on people towards for and with people. It features both and reflects on research that foregrounds non-academic priorities.

Since the global Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and beyond, academic researchers have recognised the political and moral responsibilities we have to those impacted by our studies.

To meet their responsibilities to different communities, researchers have incorporated methodologies such as:

• participatory action research, in which members of the community affected by the research actively participate in different parts of the project

• public patient involvement, in which non-academic people work as employees or volunteers in organisations’ high-level work

• community-based participatory research, which aims to equitably involve community members and others in research projects.

Each of these are slightly different, and are used variously in different disciplines, but their increasing presence affirms that involving communities in research is crucial for good research outcomes.

However, we have found approaches putting community at the centre of research beyond disciplinary siloes have not yet been documented in a comprehensive way. Our book builds on previous research by bringing together various community-led approaches, including from education and social work, health and medicine, and archaeology.

Stories, not blueprints

The chapters in our book reflect on community-led approaches to research in different spaces. They consider questions of identification of a community, appropriate protocols, and how to build positive collaborations.

The authors do not attempt to provide a template that can be applied in all research situations. Nor should they. As several chapters point out, there is a risk to “community-led” becoming another buzzword that ends up being appropriated for marketing or institutional propaganda.

We found community-led research must be built on a foundation of real relationships, mutual respect, and true reciprocity. We have all come into community-led research from different disciplinary perspectives and research experiences, as well as personal experiences.

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Keep reading in��.��

As a scholarly publisher, լ�е��� is committed not only to publishing new research-based books, but also to understanding the academic publishing ecosystem, how it is evolving, and what this means for our authors and readers. SUP's Publishing Manager, Dr Agata Mrva-Montoya, recently completed a research project with Edward Luca, looking at the publishing strategies and behaviours of academics in the humanities and social sciences. Their findings raise important questions about the pressures placed on academics to publish in certain ways, and what this means for scholarly publishing.

The Conversation has published an article by Agata and Edward summarising their research. Read an extract below and their complete article .

Book publishing sidelined in the game of university measurement and rankings��

Academic book publishing is under threat. Global university rankings and competition for funding and international student enrolments are reshaping the research landscape. Academics are under more pressure to win grant funding and publish journal articles, rather than books, and be more strategic in their publishing.

With universities due to the impacts of COVID-19, these pressures are only going to increase.

Traditionally, a monograph published with a prestigious publisher has been a key medium to create and disseminate research in the humanities and social sciences. It has also been important for building scholarly careers and reputations. However, shows publishing pressures, incentives and rewards are changing ...

Academics are caught in the middle between the pressure to publish in quality outlets versus the need to demonstrate impact in the broader society ...

The different expectations of various stakeholders mean academics receive conflicting advice about publishing strategically. Academics are encouraged to engage with the Australian context and communities. At the same time, they are told to produce research that prestigious international journals and publishers will accept.

These pressures lead researchers to publish in ways that reflect how they are being measured. This appears, in turn, to influence their research agendas. The current research landscape seems to be more a reflection of what is being measured, rather than what is needed by society or would advance knowledge.

Extract from Agata Mrva-Montoya and Edward Luca, "Book publishing sidelined in the game of university measurement and��rankings", The Conversation, 18 May 2021. This extract is republished under a Creative Commons licence. To read the complete article, please click .

We are the first Australian publisher to join the , an organisation established in 1981 with a mission to ‘facilitate and influence the production and use of quality alternative formats for people with print disabilities by optimising the evolving Round Table body of knowledge’. As well as being a clear statement about our and commitment to accessibility, the membership of the Round Table will allow us to further develop our accessibility knowledge and contribute towards ending the global ‘book famine’. According to the , less than 10 percent of published works are available in accessible formats. This lack of access to information affects the opportunities for learning, participating in the social and economic life of society, and leading a balanced life. We as publishers have a moral obligation to change that.

While accessibility awareness is growing in the publishing industry, a shows a clear need for more information and training around what accessibility is and how to achieve it. Respondents reported a lack of skills and knowledge, and limited awareness as the key barriers to the production of accessible ebooks. Interestingly, publishers of all sizes were able to make progress on accessibility implementation, which means that it can be done regardless of available resources.

To ensure that ebooks are truly born-accessible requires embedding accessibility in the whole publishing workflow and embracing the idea of inclusive publishing. Retrofitting accessibility at the end of the publishing process is time-consuming and expensive. Respondents to a survey of reported that it can take from one week to six months to convert a single book, and it depends on many variables: the time it takes to get a file from the publisher, the type of source file, the size and complexity of the book, and the type of output produced.

There is a huge opportunity for publishers and alternative content providers to work more closely together to make the conversion process easier and more efficient in the short term (by providing editable source files in a timely manner), and to make some of it obsolete in the longer term by producing ‘born-accessible’ publications. As , Senior Director of Content Standards and Accessibility at Macmillan Learning, writes, ‘Content that is born accessible is inherently better prepared for digital distribution. It is more compatible across different systems, platforms, and screens. It is flexible and adjusts to the needs of the user.’ Basically, born-accessible publications are better for everyone.

At SUP, we keep reviewing and improving our processes. And we look forward to playing our part in raising accessibility awareness and promoting the adoption of accessibility standards throughout the publishing industry, and most importantly, increasing the availability of published content to people with print disabilities.

Words by Agata Mrva-Montoya.��Image via .

It’s impossible to watch a mating dance by one of the species of birds of paradise and not marvel at what magnificent and quirky creatures they are. Popularised by the intrepid filmmaking of Sir David Attenborough, the vibrantly coloured and visually striking birds have a long history of being admired, but also traded, by humans.

In a recent produced by the լ�е��� South East Asia Centre (SSEAC), Dr Jude Philp talks about the birds of paradise trade, and the existential threat they faced (and are still facing). Philp is a co-editor of Recording Kastom and senior curator of the Macleay Collection at the new Chau Chak Wing Museum, which houses approximately thirty taxidermied birds of paradise from New Guinea and its off-shore islands, as well as an additional thirty riflebirds – the only bird of paradise that is found in Australia.

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Interestingly, Philp identifies the thirst for comprehensive biological knowledge and the trading of birds of paradise between museums as one of the critical forces that drove the species to near extinction. Coupled with a loss of habitat, this trade took birds of paradise perilously close to being wiped out by the turn of the twentieth century. And despite some crucial protections coming in for the species since then, illegal trade of the birds continues today.

In Plumes from Paradise, Pamela Swadling provides a comprehensive history of the birds of paradise trade. She traces its origins to the European trade boom of the 19^th century, where the skins and feathers were prized by milliners for their beauty. They were made into hats that adorned the heads of fashionable women, first in Europe and eventually around the world.

However, as Swadling notes, Australia made its stance clear in 1908 by prohibiting plume hunting in the then Australian-administered Territory of Papua. The Dutch and German colonial authorities introduced similar policies for New Guinea. While it took time, these measures later influenced the conservation push aimed at protecting birds of paradise in West Papua and Papua New Guinea.��

First published in 1996 by the Papua New Guinea National Museum, a new edition of Plumes from Paradise was released in in 2019. As well as detailing the plume trade, the book focuses on how the trade of other products – including spices, woods, resins, shells and pearls – impacted the people, economy and political history of New Guinea and its surrounding islands up until 1920.

Philp describes birds of paradise as ‘aesthetic wonders that dance and move and stimulate ideas.’ These aesthetic wonders not only stimulate ideas for their potential mating partners, but have piqued the interest and desire of humans for hundreds of years. It’s crucial that they be protected, so that they continue to captivate their fellow birds of paradise, as well as people, for centuries to come.

Alex Christodoulou is a word-obsessed sportswriter who currently specialises in horse racing. He will soon complete the Master of Publishing at լ�е��� University, and is eager to see more diverse voices in Australian print.

The publishing landscape is always changing. If it isn’t the eBook, it’s Amazon and the self-publishing boom. Once upon a time, the introduction of paperbacks made people sit up and take notice by putting books in people’s hands at a fraction of the previous cost.

But when you think of game-changers in the publishing industry, I’ll wager a textbook on Australian politics and policy doesn’t immediately spring to mind.

What makes this open access textbook so revolutionary is that it can be customised to fit the curriculum.

That’s right. The same book, but different contents. Are you keeping up?

The brainchild of members of the association of politics lecturers led by Dr Peter Chen, the Australian Politics and Policy open access textbook allows subject coordinators to format the content to their specific needs and desires. To do this, lecturers can select what content they want included in their digital version of the textbook to be used in their classes, from a comprehensive list of 40+ chapters, most of which come in junior or senior versions.

Importantly, these textbooks are provided open access. This means that the entire book is free to read and/or download anywhere in the world, at any time – provided you’ve got a half-decent internet connection that is.

As if all that wasn’t enough, the plan is for 10 percent of the book’s content to be updated annually, so the material never runs the risk of falling behind the times.
As you can imagine, this textbook is the ideal resource for university lecturers and students. Not only can the content be customised for students in their junior or senior years of university, but specific subject matters can be included or eschewed depending on the focus of the particular area of study. On top of that, instructors who adopt the textbook are also provided with PowerPoint slides and revision material for each chapter they include in their personalised version of Australian Politics and Policy.

This is all music to the ears of students, who for years have been forced to fork out $50 per student for a politics textbook that often contains pages of outdated or unsuitable content.

Statistics on the adoption of the customised textbook show that in the twelve-month period from October 2019 to September 2020 1,451 people have had access to a bespoke version of Australian Politics and Policy. Students have made up the bulk of this figure, collectively saving tens of thousands of dollars, while at the same time having had access to the most relevant textbook on politics and policy that this country has to offer.

But that doesn’t mean that the textbook only has an Australian appeal. In fact, the statistics tell us that readers from the USA, China, India, Germany and the Netherlands have accessed Australian Politics and Policy.

While the customisability of the textbook is one of its most exciting features, it also functions just as well as a regular open access learning resource. The stats show us that the senior edition has been the most popular, having been read online almost 12,000 times from Oct 2019–Sep 2020.

The height of this popularity came in the three-month period from January to March 2020, when the online textbook welcomed 3,393 readers to its senior chapters, who spent an average of 20 minutes per visit.

Whether it’s being consumed in its existing format, or being customised to the requirements of its audience, there’s no doubting the value of Australian Politics and Policy. With over a hundred academics and scholars contributing their knowledge and insight, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

But what really makes this textbook so revolutionary is the way it can be so easily adapted to the curriculum needs. And in a generation where students are often told that they need to be flexible and malleable to survive in the current marketplace, it seems only fair that their textbook does the same.

Alex Christodoulou is a word-obsessed sportswriter who currently specialises in horse racing. He will soon complete the Master of Publishing at լ�е��� University, and is eager to see more diverse voices in Australian print.

Happy World Hippo Day! To celebrate, here are some of our favourite hippos on the internet, real and otherwise. You can read about them all and many more wonderful, strange, endlessly fascinating hippos in��Obaysch: A Hippopotamus in Victorian London��by John Simons.

As well as telling the story of one hippopotamus, Simons considers how hippos and other "exotic" animals have been seen and treated in Europe through the centuries, and how this shifted during the Victorian era.

The SUP office will be closed from 23 December through 6 January. Orders placed during this period will be fulfilled soon after our return in the new year. You can also speak with your local bookseller about ordering SUP titles in. In Australia and New Zealand, all SUP books are distributed to bookshops by NewSouth Books and Alliance Distribution Services.

We look forward to sharing another year of good reading with you in 2021. Below, we're delighted to share some highlights from the first quarter of 2021.

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Animal Welfare in China by Peter Li (March) is a groundbreaking and timely study of the key animal welfare challenges facing China now, including animal agriculture, bear farming, and the trade and consumption of exotic wildlife, dog meat, and other controversial products. (You can hear author Peter Li discuss the Chinese wildlife trade and its potential role in the COVID19 epidemic .)

Later in 2021, we’ll have new books on the history and archaeology of Port Arthur, the plays of Patrick White, and a remarkable collection of rediscovered oral history interviews with Chinese Australians who grew up in the early 20th century. Plus much more!

We're��now spending a few days on campus each week, as the university prepares for semester 2.����

To celebrate, we've created a coupon for 20% discount of ALL TITLES, just use the code OPEN2020 at checkout.��

Processing of orders will be done twice a week, so there may be a few days' delay between receiving your order and it going out the door with Australia Post. We appreciate your patience!

We are not able to offer 'click and collect' at the moment, so this shipping option is not currently available.��

If you want to check if your preferred title is in stock, and when it will ship, please contact us: sup.info@sydney.edu.au

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Last updated��4 August 2021

SUP is not currently selling directly from our website. Please see below for alternative ways to purchase SUP books.

The լ�е��� team are currently working from home, but continuing to work on bringing you great books. If you're interested in buying any of our titles, please note that all of our books are available in Australian and New Zealand bookshops, courtesy of our distributor and ADS. They have plenty of stock, and many bookshops will deliver!

Here are a few of our favourites:

Or, find a bookshop near you using this

If you have any trouble purchasing an SUP book, please email us at sup.info@sydney.edu.au.

Overseas customers

Please note that all SUP titles (but not University of լ�е��� titles that we distribute) are available from online bookstores such as and .

eBooks!

All of our current releases are available on , the and , as well as many other eBook channels. And of course, our books are available to libraries through JSTOR, ProQuest and Ebsco.

Finally, a lot of our books are available to read for free, via the , including our first open textbook, Australian Politics and Policy.

Keep well, keep a safe distance, stay home, and read! Be kind to one another.

The SUP team

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We are delighted to become a signatory of the Accessible Books Consortium’s

By signing the charter, we are committed to making our books fully accessible to all users. Specifically, the charter asks publishers to:

• state their accessibility policy on their website
• nominate a senior manager who will be responsible for accessibility
• raise awareness among, and provide technical training for, relevant staff
• designate and publicise a point of contact in their organisation to assist persons with print disabilities to access their publications
• test their digital publications for accessibility, incorporating appropriate feature descriptions and metadata
• monitor their progress in this area
• promote the adoption of accessibility standards throughout the supply chain
• support national and international collaboration with organisations representing persons with print disabilities so as to increase the availability of publications in accessible formats.

We have been able to improve the accessibility of our ebooks thanks to our involvement in the , and working closely together with two organisations: the (RIBDC) and (IGP).

While we have embedded some of the accessibility requirements (such as the inclusion of ALT text) into our since we started producing ebooks inhouse, the feedback we received from RIBDC on our ePub files, and the advice on accessibility metadata was invaluable. In response, we revised our processes and were able to produce ePub 3 files which conformed to the level A success criteria of the (WCAG) 2.0 specifications.

Our collaborators at IGP have been instrumental in enhancing the system we use to produce our book files, to improve the level of accessibility of our ebooks. Our ePub 3 files are now WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliant, which is really exciting.

Apart from making sure that we are producing accessible ePub files, we have revised our submission guidelines and the editorial process to ensure that each submission has met the standards as well.

And we are not done yet. We need to improve the accessibility of our PDF files and continue to finetune our publishing workflows so that the implementation of accessibility standards is efficient and effective.

The following is a transcript of a talk given by Brigid Rooney at the launch of��Christina Stead and the Matter of America by Fiona Morrison on 6 December 2019.

By Brigid Rooney

I’m thrilled to launch Fiona’s wonderful book Christina Stead and the Matter of America, published with լ�е��� (what an apt occasion to celebrate yet another excellent լ�е��� Studies in Australian Literature title).

Fiona and I have been talking about Christina Stead for the past several decades. We’re evidently mad, having taken on Stead for our respective PhD projects. The thing is, once Stead’s got you in her grip, she doesn’t let you go. Not all writers demand or sustain such long-haul, repeated engagement. But Stead’s fiction is a gift that keeps on giving. It’s more daunting, wonderful, ferocious and revelatory the more you read it. So put down your Patrick Whites and your Shirley Hazzards. Stead’s our greatest twentieth-century writer. There, I said it. Indulge me. My point is that if Fiona’s book is anything to go by, staying with Stead, living with and returning to her repeatedly, not giving up, isn’t merely maddening. It can also be more than averagely rewarding and productive.

Just look at this gorgeous cover – a pic of Stead at her trickiest. There’s a touch of the Joan Crawfords about her in this shot, don’t you reckon? Softly focused, glamorously permed, yet one dangerously arched eyebrow. This shot dates from 1938, by which time she and Bill Blake were newly settled in the States, with her epic banking novel House of All Nations due out, and her next project The Man Who Loved Children soon underway. Fiona situates The Man … as the first in this American set. The other four are Letty Fox: Her Luck, The People with the Dogs, A Little Tea, A Little Chat, and I’m Dying Laughing.

This book’s intensive focus on the five great American novels enriches the field, redressing a gap. Attention to Stead’s more obviously Australian works has arguably obscured the full scale of Stead’s fictional engagement across multiple national contexts. Fiona’s title – the matter of America – cleverly focuses on the topicality of America. ‘Matter’ proves flexible and capacious, accreting layers as the book unfolds. Fiona took the phrase from a 1982 review by David Malouf, an astute reader of Stead. We reckon his personal favourite is A Little Tea, A Little Chat, an astounding if punishing read. At a time when her Australian and feminist reputation was being established, Malouf was the first to identify the orientation and energy of Stead’s distinctively American novels. Fiona also draws on Margaret Harris’s important work on the Balzacian anatomy performed by this American sequence. And then, she’s off and running.

The matter of mid-century America is cumulatively unearthed and anatomised through Fiona’s wonderful readings. Matter is both stuff, or content, and its circulation – money, commodities and capital – the fevered busy-ness of the capital world, the determinedly materialist ideology of the United States as emergent mid-twentieth-century power and geopolitical hub. It’s a little bit genius when, via Northrop Frye, Fiona meshes socio-political matter with the structure of Balzacian anatomy (anatomy being both individual organs/texts and their relations within a circulatory system). Fiona aligns this with her method of working, moving between individual texts in sequence, and setting them within the systematic, politically oriented project of Stead’s ongoing anatomy of the social world, in this case the American world: what is the matter with America, a question Stead’s fiction relentlessly pursues. Fiona not only confidently assumes but expands on Stead’s committed Marxist views. Among other things, she does terrific work drawing on Lukacs, thinking through Stead’s sense of totalities, and her experimental realism.

But the rubric of matter extends beyond dialectical materialism to encompass the logic of Stead’s situation as colonial woman writer on the move, a writer encountering America’s contradictions – its energy, verve and obsession with money, its perpetual ‘scramble for boodle’ (a phrase of Stead’s own). America is like and unlike Australia, a great colonial world to engage. Matter resonates also with Stead’s realist concern with detailing the world, with its talkers and their voices, with the energy and profligacy of desire, and with gender, the embodied experiences of women and men. Not to forget – and here we arrive at signature Morrison – there is this book’s magisterial account of Stead’s complex deployments of mode and genre. Fiona is forever alert to the productive intersections of realist, satiric and gothic modes with various genres like domestic fiction, the picaresque, the chronicle, and tragi-comedy. Nobody does genre like Fiona. She makes it look easy but it’s completely awesome and by the end we’ve got a whole new toolkit for reading Stead.

There are two fabulous chapters on The Man Who Loved Children that newly apprehend this classic work. I couldn’t agree with Fiona more when she parts company with those who complain that Stead’s American rather than Australian settings spoil the effect. While I’d never argue with Americans who sense something amiss, Fiona rightly argues that Stead’s outsider suturing of national/narrative worlds, forging this novel’s Australia/America palimpsest, is a major source of its political charge. Stead’s transnational dislocation lets her see anew (because through each other) these American and Australian contexts – and all stuffed explosively into this novel’s domestic pressure cooker.

Fiona’s chapter titles are massive fun: her methodological second chapter is titled ‘Christina Stead’s Westward Expansion: Totality, Avant-Garde Realism and the American Folk’. And what could be better than ‘The New York Love Market and the Picara Fortunata in Letty Fox, Her Luck’? The three New York novels, in different modes, deliver their anatomy of the metropolis, its social milieu and economic circulation. In her reading of A Little Tea, A little Chat, for example, Fiona homes in on the thoroughly corrupted and empty Manhattan scammer Robbie Grant and his terrifying woman The Blondine. Robbie lacks interiority – he’s a vector for the endless circulation of the commodity, the emptying of value into exchange (wheat, gold, women), a post-truth kind of guy. In Fiona’s hands we recognise him as a mid-century precursor to Trump. Imagine what fun Stead would have had today.

There’s so much more to say, but I’m running out of time. What a wealth of observation Fiona yields from this material, and seemingly without any effort at all. Did she even raise a sweat? I think she was surprised to learn that my favourite chapter was the one on I’m Dying Laughing, Stead’s yet to be adequately recognised masterpiece, her unfinished, posthumously published monster. It’ll kill you this book, if you’re not careful. The present participles of its title, Fiona deftly points out, echo its sense of perpetual suspension, its affective load of unbearable hysteria. I find very persuasive Fiona’s claim that Marxism provided the otherwise rootless Stead and Blake with an ideological home, ‘a system ... that continued to give them a set of ideological coordinates to live by well into the Cold War years’. The very thing that Stead’s American protagonists lack is a system or theory for grasping or thinking totality. And yet her art dwells in ever deepening contradictions as the century wears on. The genres of chronicle and tragicomedy powerfully converge in I’m Dying Laughing, a novel that, Fiona argues, ‘chronicles the logic of this inability to frame the capitalist totality and draws it out as an account of illegibility and loss.’

Christina Stead and the Matter of America is a terrific book. It will make you want to read Stead’s American novels – whether again, or for the first time. It is immensely readable, packed with juicy passages and incisive observations. Fiona, you’ve done justice to the energy and fearsome intellect of Stead’s work. Huge congratulations on it. I declare this book launched.

By Agata Mrva-Montoya

On Friday 29 November we launched our first open textbook, the result of a pilot project that we started in 2017, when we first became interested in engaging with the educational sphere. We wanted to find out whether there was interest among academics in producing open educational resources, and what resources were required to publish them.

You are probably wondering, ‘Why firing a cannonball?’

‘Fire bullets, then cannonballs’ is a concept developed in the book Great by Choice by Jim Collins. According to :

First, you fire bullets (low-cost, low-risk, low-distraction experiments) to figure out what will work – calibrating your line of sight by taking small shots. Then, once you have empirical validation, you fire a cannonball (concentrating resources into a big bet) on the calibrated line of sight.

This is not quite what we have done with our first open textbook, but we didn’t venture into the project without preparation. In fact, we fired lots of bullets, that is, we published lots of books, fine-tuned our publishing workflows, and did lots of research before we embarked on the project.

We wanted to find out who has been involved in open textbook publishing in Australia and New Zealand, but also in Canada and the USA. , the open textbook movement has been supported by ‘federal and state legislative efforts to reduce the overall cost of higher education’. Many initiatives have been funded by government grants and produced by library-based publishing services and infrastructures, often in collaboration with university presses or other parts of the university.

We also looked at what open textbooks have been published, particularly in Australia – in what subject areas and the intended audience: the host university’s students or beyond. We were also interested in how they were published and the output formats. We noted that open textbooks have been usually released as PDF, ePub or Mobi files, with an option to buy print copies at cost price.

We reviewed the literature on the benefits of open educational resources. The shows that the use of open textbooks in teaching has been associated with higher grades, greater retention, better completion rates and higher satisfaction among students. Students not only do better, but they also save money. We were ready.

In October 2017 we released a call for expressions of interest to the University of լ�е��� community to see if any academic wanted to write an open textbook. We received three proposals and the Australian Politics and Policy proposal was chosen as the most innovative project, with the greatest potential impact.

We chose to fire a cannonball!

Dr Peter Chen wanted to create a customisable, open textbook to provide a holistic coverage of politics and public policy for use in undergraduate and postgraduate university courses. He wanted to give instructors the ability to compile a bespoke edition to suit their teaching needs.

Chen organised a team of nine editors to work on the development of Australian Politics and Policy. In its final format, the textbook contains 40 chapters with most of them in two versions, junior and senior. Over 110 scholars have been involved in the project, including 70 university-based and independent scholars from across Australia who wrote the chapters and another 38 academics who carried out anonymous and rigorous peer review to ensure the highest standards.

While the textbook was being written, we worked with wonderful professionals at Infogrid Pacific (IGP) to develop a platform to host the textbook and our other OA books: . This platform allows users to read the books online and download a PDF file of each title.

The tricky part was to devise a way to enable instructors to customise the textbook for their unit. An will allow us to collect basic demographics and a list of required chapters, so that we can create a customised version of the textbook and email the PDF and ePub files to the lecturer. As IGP’s has the capacity to create remixes of books hosted on the platform, the manual customisation process is fairly straightforward and we will be able to supply instructors with high-quality PDF files and fully accessible ePub 3 files for their students.

Actually, the more tricky part was coming up with the cover design. We wanted for the cover to evoke both politics and public policy, appeal to both academics and students, and make the nine editors happy. I think our designer, Miguel Yamin, did really well.

Symmon Natour, Pat Norman and Michelle Harrison from the University of լ�е��� Library created a for us, starring Dr Peter Chen and one of his students, Salina Alvaro. They talk about the benefits of the open textbook and explain the customisation process.

The textbook comes with an instructor’s kit containing review questions and lecture slides. Having additional resources is expected in educational publishing, and we wanted to make it easy for academics to adopt the textbook for their units.

was officially launched last week. Lisa McIntosh, interim University Librarian, Prof. Pip Pattison, DVC Education, and Prof. Rodney Smith, president of the Australian Political Studies Association, fired the cannonball, and for the next few months we will be closely observing how far it goes, and whether it hits the target.

We have plans to evaluate the success of the textbook as part of a research project investigating its value, strengths and limitations. We hope that the results will help us improve its future iterations, and contribute to the broader scholarship on the creation and adoption of open educational resources.

The editors have plans to revise existing chapters to improve their content and keep them up to date, to add new teaching resources, and expand the number of chapters available in the textbook. We will keep recalibrating the cannon.

We hope that the Australian Political Studies Association will endorse the textbook and the current editorial group will formally become part of its Teaching and Learning committee. Getting an endorsement and an ongoing association with APSA would be fantastic for the future of the textbook.

In the introduction to the textbook Prof. Rodney Smith is quoted describing the average Australian’s knowledge of the political system as ‘sketchy, at best’. During a time of escalating national and international debates on critical issues such as climate change, having a good understanding of political systems and policy making has never been more important.

Together with Dr Peter Chen and all the editors and contributors to the textbook, we are hoping that our open textbook on Australian politics and policy is going to change that. Please check it , spread the word and help us ensure that our cannonball is a success.

By Agata Mrva-Montoya

We are delighted to launch a new website and a new blog that mark the ‘coming of age’ of լ�е��� (SUP).

It has been 15 years since the University of լ�е��� Library decided to re-establish լ�е��� in response to a growing need for new avenues for scholarly book publishing for Australian academics. From the beginning, the press was set to capitalise on new digital and printing innovations, while maintaining a commitment to high-quality editing and production values associated with traditional publishing practices.

Over the years, SUP has changed its publishing program away from a broad focus on books in humanities and social sciences to a tightly focused list, strategically aligned with the research strengths of the University of լ�е���. While many of our books continue to explore Australian themes, some of our new series are international in scope, and we enjoy working with academic authors from around the globe on topics as diverse as the archaeology of central Asia or the story of Obaysch the hippopotamus, the first ‘star’ animal to be exhibited in the London Zoo.

Apart from reinventing our publishing program, we have adopted a format-neutral workflow, a cutting-edge title management system and a broad distribution arrangement, working with partners in Australia and overseas. We are constantly looking into how we can improve, innovate and generally do things better and faster.

The new website reflects our current publishing focus and our commitment to disseminating outstanding research. We continue to look for new ways to make knowledge more accessible and to engage with both the academic community and society more broadly.

You can find out more about the history of SUP on our website and check out our previous decade of blog posts on .