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Talking Books: Self-publishers push for recognition

Richard Flanagan Picture AAP

Self-publishers are a hopeful lot, willing to take on the uncertainties of the publishing market and back their own work. But these authors and other industry players have been dismayed in the past week to learn self-published and ebook-only authors again will be excluded from consideration in the national literary awards.

Now one of their number has started an online petition to urge Tony Abbott to allow them entry to the awards.

Megan Masters' Change.org petition to the Prime Minister, Arts Minister George Brandis, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and shadow arts minister Mark Dreyfus argues: "Self-published authors have just as much right to be recognised, and should be allowed to submit entries to the Prime Minister's Literary Awards."

The Prime Minister's awards program was started eight years ago by former prime minister Kevin Rudd and is described as Australia's richest literary prize, paying its winning authors the most of any literary awards in the country. It claims to "recognise and reward excellence in Australian literature and history" and play an important role in celebrating "outstanding literary talent in Australia".

But there's the itch. Self-published authors do make a valuable contribution to cultural and intellectual life in Australia and their omission from the nation's awards program is a slap in the face for the hard work they've put into sharing their work with readers.

They are not the only group to be excluded - digital-only authors are also out of the frame, along with authors who've paid vanity publishers to put forward their work.

Category winners in the five Prime Minister's Literary Awards (fiction, poetry, non-fiction, young adult fiction and children's fiction) and the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History each receive $80,000 tax-free. Fellow short-listers each take home $5000 tax-free. They're big prizes to miss out on.

Man Booker and WA Premier's prize winner Richard Flanagan famously gave away his $40,000 half of his joint win in the fiction category last month for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. But not all authors have a Booker prize-winning sales boost to help pay the mortgage.

Flanagan won hearts with his gift but in the days after the win a judge revealed another panellist had chosen only one winner, Flanagan's fellow joint winner Steven Carroll, for A World of Other People.

In the background, award administrators are probably well aware that opening up every category to self-published or digital authors would add significantly to theirs and judges' workloads.

But a smart approach could be taken. They could introduce a named category award, in a similar manner to the history prize, and set specific criteria, or only include authors with a national distribution or popular book.

A self-published author might, for example, be considered for publication only if their book had an ISBN from the National Library of Australia and national bookshop distribution as evidenced by entry in the Nielsen BookScan database.

Digital-only authors could in turn be considered only if their books were available at one or all of the big four ebook stores - Amazon, iBooks, Kobo and Fictionwise - or be trending in at least one top 100.

There are lots of options and it's time the PM's literary awards recognise the talented self-published and digital authors in this country.

To sign the petition, visit Change.org.