This podcast explores the origins, purpose and plans of Grattan Street Press with two of the publishers—Sybil Nolan and Matt Holden.
Transcript
(Intro)
I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the unceded lands we are meeting on, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong/Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin nation and pay our respects to their elders past and present.
(Background music continues)
Hello and welcome to the first episode of GSP Talks.
My name is Varada Nair, and I will be your host today!
This episode explores Grattan Street Press – How it came to be, their aims, goals and future endeavours.
To discuss this, we have none other than the proud publishers of Grattan Street Press – Sybil Nolan the managing editor and Matt Holden the head of sales, publicity and marketing.
(Background music fades out)
Varada: Hello Matt and Sybil. How are we feeling today?
Sybil: Great
Matt:
(Timestamp: 8:27 to end)
Matt: I’m well, thanks Varada.
Varada: I would like to start off by asking you to introduce yourselves in your own words.
Sybil: Hi, I am Sybil Nolan. I’m a publisher at Grattan Street Press. I’m currently in charge of the editorial team at Grattan Street Press. I’ve been working at Melbourne University since 2013 and I was around at the time the Press got started and was involved in its establishment.
Varada: Matt?…
Matt: Hi, I’m Matt Holden. I’m the publisher who oversees the marketing and sales and publicity in the Press at the moment. I have been in at the University of Melbourne since 2013 although not involved in Grattan Street Press since then and I have also worked a lot as a journalist, editor, publisher and a bookseller outside of University life.
Varada: Could you start us off with the origin story of the press? Why it was founded, and the gap it aims to fill in publishing?
Sybil: Yeah, thanks for asking that question. It’s a really interesting one. Late in 2015 when Mark Davis and I were sort of the main program staff in publishing a guy called Per Henningsgaard came to see us and Per had come to Australia from Ooligan Press which is the teaching press at the Portland State University in Oregon. A very innovative press that has won a lot of awards for its books and Per told us about his model and at the end of that meeting I remember Mark and I just looked at each other and said ooh we are gonna have to have one of these because it’s obviously the way of the future and the thing we realised was that actually with IngramSpark coming online and being able to do very high quality print on demand books from their new factory in Melbourne we were able to actually not only edit but publish books within a semester so that was, that became our model for the press and we started it off in late 2016 after I went to Ooligan Press in Portland to check it out in early 2016 and then came back and we wrote the curriculum for it and yep!
Varada: Yeah. Nice.
Matt, what are the challenges that come while marketing books as a teaching press?
Matt: That’s a good question Varada and I’m glad you asked it. I think there are two main challenges there. The first one is a lot of marketing in books as in many other areas depends on relationships with your customers and as Grattan Street Press has a new cohort of students every semester with new marketing and publicity people it’s quite hard for students to develop those relationships with bookshops and with journalists and the other sorts of people that we need to talk to and we also have the problem of the kind of break between semesters (V: Right) you know, between 2nd semester of one year and the 1st semester of the next (V: That’s true) and no students doing any publicity and it sort of falls to us to try and maintain some of those relationships. So, we, well I do a fair bit of work outside semester on those sorts of things. I think the other thing, that makes it difficult is that we have a very small list (V: mmhmm) and publish a couple of books a year, so we only have one or two opportunities each year to get booksellers’ attention and to get various attention to get people talking about us. We’re not like even you know like a small independent publisher would be publishing over ten books a year and would have something to offer booksellers every month as a way of keeping a presence in the shop and of keeping their relationships going in their own kind of way. And I guess we also have the problem that it can be difficult for students to do the kind of cold-call approach to people that that type of marketing sometimes requires.
Varada: So how is a teaching press different as compared to a traditional press?
Sybil: I guess it’s different just that it in a traditional press you’re also being trained if you are a person who is working in publishing for the first time but you’re being trained by doing the work and having your supervisor give you more suggestions and save you from imminent disasters that you inadvertently created and at Grattan Street Press actually it’s a similarity that that’s the model we use, we use the model of a small publishing house such as you find typically in Melbourne and we let students do most of the publishing work themselves with us sort of looking over their shoulders and saying Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? Why don’t you try this? Why don’t you try that? No, we can’t possibly do that it would cost us too much, etc. etc. So, yes there are similarities, the differences are of course that we could, although we publish our books and they are available for sale on our bookshop online and in some independent bookstores we could never hope to match the sort of sales numbers that commercial publishers would actually be able to achieve most of the time. Would you agree to that Matt?
Matt: I’d say yeah. Yeah.
Varada: So, how do your roles overlap? Where do you need to collaborate more closely? Yes, you and Matt.
Sybil: Yes, well I’m the publisher, in this semester, I’m the publisher working with the editorial team and the commissioning team and Matt’s the publisher in charge of sales and marketing and so that’s based on the fact that in publishing the staff of a publishing house do work in teams (V: Right) it might be small teams it might be big teams but everyone works in a team and so it seemed logical to divide into two teams one that was logical for a person in charge of sales and marketing to lead and one that was basically the editorial team.
Varada: Right. Matt, do you have anything to add to that?
Matt: Yeah, I think that it mirrors the division in lots of publishing enterprises where sales, marketing and publicity is a kind of coherent group of people who are working on one aspect of getting the books out and getting the authors known to the public. I guess, the overlap is in the communication between us about what’s going on in different times. I mean, ideally the marketing side of things we get regular updates from the editorial people about what the products are? What are these books? What are we focusing on in selling them? What are their good points? Even if part of our job is also to understand that for ourselves. So, there’s a kind of, yeah, a little bit of overlap.
Sybil: And there’s a bit of tension there, isn’t there? Because the editorial team are always… working, working, working on making the book. And, you know, sometimes they feel that they’ve got too much of a deadline to help sales and marketing. But if you don’t help sales and marketing, you don’t sell any books.
Varada: Sybil, could you tell us how you balance supporting student involvement all the while ensuring professional publishing standards?
Sybil: That’s a really good question, and I think Matt’s becoming our expert on that with his project to… Do you want to explain about your project?
Matt: Yeah, so at the moment, I’m looking at what we do when we teach in this sort of situation where we don’t have a sort of set weekly curriculum or programme, but we’ve got a set of tasks that students need to do. And I think what we both are trying to do is give students the freedom to kind of do these tasks and explore what it takes to do them, but providing fairly regular little bits of feedback and little guardrails and trying to reorient students’ thinking beyond the task to what the aim of the task is, if you like. And I think you might have seen some of that with some of the kinds of marketing things we’ve been doing, where we try to encourage you to step back and think about the, what are you actually trying to do here beyond complete this task, I think. And I think in the editorial department, Sybil can probably speak about the way they approach that with kind of editing, copyediting, proofreading and things like that.
Sybil: Yeah, I think a lot of it’s just to make sure that we’ve got the team really well set-up and that they understand their roles. What I found out is sometimes people are a bit unclear about their roles because they’ve never done them before. So, I know what a copyeditor does, I know what a production editor does, but sometimes I have to go back in and really try and clarify what everyone’s role is.
Varada: So how do you decide which projects or manuscripts align with the press’s mission?
Sybil: That’s fairly straightforward actually because, for me, the primary thing is the quality of the writing, and the next important thing is that it’s in line with Grattan Street Press’s audience. And now we’ve been going since 2016, we have a really clear idea of who that audience is. It’s divided between young people like you and their parents, to put it bluntly. Parents and friends.
Matt: People who want to be writers or who are friends of writers or parents of writers.
Sybil: Exactly, yes.
Varada: So how does the press measure success, specifically like in impact and education?
Sybil: Well, our mid-semester survey is very important to us in terms of gauging how students are finding the experience. So, we really value the feedback we get from that survey, and we normally find out a few little, there’ll be a few little bumps going on around the place always. I can think of only one semester where people were ecstatically happy the whole semester. But yeah. And then we also obviously look at sales. We look at the calibre of writers who are submitting material to us for publication. And we look, I think, to see if the book’s having any impact in the… with the GSP audience, and where there’s a bit of a buzz around it. Yeah, so they’re the sort of things we look for. Can you think of anything else, Matt?
Matt: I think we have got that mission of uncovering Australian voices, maybe. So, I think a fair bit of what we try to do is find writers who haven’t been heard, but who we think deserve to be heard.
Varada: We were just discussing before that there are certain misconceptions about GSP that we would like to debunk, of course. One of the misconceptions that we were discussing was that we assumed that GSP was a press that only published students’ work. So, my question to both of you would be, what is the biggest misconception about GSP that you would like to debunk?
Sybil: We really need to hear what you think are the misconceptions because, after having done this for, you know, so long, I’m completely acclimatised to GSP, and I don’t think there’s any misconceptions.
Matt: The funniest one I’ve heard was that GSP is a place.
Sybil: Oh yeah.
Matt: Someone mentioned that they hadn’t visited the press at all over the course of the semester.
Varada: Oh right.
Matt: And really, GSP Press is the people.
Sybil: Yes, that’s right.
Matt: Or GSP is the people, rather.
Sybil: It’s one of the things about the way it was designed was, we knew we were never going to get a room of our own, the rooms being so scarce at this university. And so, we dreamt of having somewhere where you could have a little copper or brass plate up that said Grattan Street Press. We knew it wasn’t going to happen, and so we went, ‘OK, we’re going to make this a really nimble press.’ So, it doesn’t matter where we meet, as long as it’s a room, that it’s quiet enough that the two groups can do their work without shouting over, trying to shout over the top of each other, and that’s basically been just the one requirement.
Varada: So, what are you most excited about for the press in the next few years?
Sybil: From my point of view, I’d say like it’s great that we finally seem to be getting some real traction in the literary community with Annie Raser-Rowland’s shortlisting in the WA Premier’s Fiction Awards this year. That’s been really well-deserved recognition for Annie but also shows what the press is capable of producing. That book was a novella, so it’s clear that people are more prepared to come to small presses for small books. And it worked for Annie. And, you know, when we talk about it together, the staff involved in GSP, Katherine Day, as well as Matt and me, we talk about, you know… There are increasingly signs that we’re being more successful in having authors who are immensely publishable come be published by us.
Matt: I’d agree. But I also think I’m excited about the kind of continuity that we’ve been able to bring to sales and marketing over the last couple of years, because I’ve been in that role each semester now for about four or five semesters. And I think in the past, sometimes that role has rotated around people who have to pick up and start again each time.
Sybil: Yes, that’s really true.
Matt: So, for me, although I like to think of myself as an academic at a university, I’ve also got a part of myself that is a sales manager or publicity coordinator at this small publishing house. And that’s something that I try to do year-round.
Varada: Thank you so much, Matt and Sybil, for sitting with us and talking about Grattan Street Press and thank you everyone for listening to us and listening to the first episode of GSP Talks.
(Background music fades in)
Stay tuned for more such exciting episodes with GSP Talks. To keep up with the latest from Grattan Street Press, follow our social media handles. Links are in the description.
See you soon!
(Outro)
GSP Talks is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging, and recognise them as the first artists and storytellers of this land.
Leave a Reply