The Ministry for Culture and Heritage report Exports of New Zealand Published Books that has just been released is choc-a-block with a huge number statistics about state of our publishing industry.

For us, the most interesting figures relate to New Zealand literature. These key points are taken verbatim from the Fact Sheet for the report:

• sales of New Zealand literature titles within New Zealand are at around $15 million, which represents 18% of the domestic market for all New Zealand published books

• the publishing of New Zealand literature is considered risky and will generally only be undertaken if support is available – either through a government grant, or from an academic institution or through cross-subsidy from a commercial best seller

• many publishers specialising in literature are small operators whose attempts to export result in a net loss

• the majority of small publishing operations have little expertise in international marketing and have ineffective mechanisms for collecting revenue from overseas

Another report is due to be released in the near future, called New Zealand Book Publishing: Industry Development Issues. This is from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, and preliminary findings include this comforting discovery:

there is evidence from supply, consumption and labour force statistics that New Zealand publishers' share of the domestic market for books is increasing.

So there’s hope, after all.

PS: You can download the Ministry for Culture and Heritage report from the department's web site. More information on New Zealander’s cultural consumption is available from a joint Ministry for Culture & Heritage and Statistics NZ report from 2003, called A Measure of Culture: Cultural experiences and cultural spending in New Zealand. That one is available for download here.