Recent intelligence would have it that the NZ publishing world is in for a bit of a shake up: the Weekend Herald reported on Saturday that two relative newcomers to the book trade are fightin’ fit and dead keen to put NZ writers on the international map.

NZ booksellers are hoping that ex-Listener editor Finlay MacDonald (now commissioning editor at Penguin Books) and ex-Metro editor Nicola Legat (pictured, now publishing director at Random House) will allow their ‘journalistic ears’ to support more popular fiction both here and overseas.

Support for home-grown writing from Creative NZ seems to be on the highbrow end of the scale – whether poetry or fiction – and there doesn’t seem to be a desire to find a NZ version of Danielle Steel or a John Grisham. It’s this bit of the market that we need to drop our snobby trousers and put a bit of welly into – in a tasteful way of course – if publishers are to survive. It’s all very well for publishers to take a safe punt on a book that’s got a lit-grant going for it but if it’s only going to sell 700 copies, how is that going to put us on the map?

The NZ public is undoubtedly interested in books: a record 11,000 were estimated to have been at the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival this year, and we spend $250-300 million on books per annum. At the next festival in 2007, local authors will again be up there with international lit-stars, driving home the message that we can compete with the best in the world. But, says Doris Mousdale, (Booksellers NZ chairwoman and book manager at Real Groovy) ‘Why separate NZ authors on the bookshelves? Why not put them in the general fiction sections?’ She does.

Overseas, non-fiction (read gardening) does quite well but in the fiction stakes it seems you either have to have some kind of universal appeal (Sarah-Kate Lynch, who’s doing very well indeed in Britain, thanks to her own efforts) or go for the other end of the scale and be wholly kiwi and thus exotic (Alan Duff or Witi Ihimaera). But the NZ literature that’s between these two is also world-class and selling that globally is what Nicola and Finlay are after.

The other potentially major fillip to the local publishing trade is news of the second round of placings on the new Publishing Intern Programme. The programme offers six months’ paid work in the industry to three graduates of the Whitireia Diploma in Publishing each year. It’s supported by Creative New Zealand, Booksellers New Zealand, Book Publishers Association of New Zealand and Whitireia Community Polytechnic.

The press release for this had as it’s headline: ‘New Blood in the Book Trade … Regenerating a Static Industry’. Michael Moynahan, who is MD of Random House and President of the Book Publishers Association of New Zealand says there is a lack of movement in NZ’s ‘close-knit’ publishing community.

And Rachel Lawson, who runs New Zealand’s publishing training course at Whitireia says the same: ‘Look around the book trade and you’ll see the same faces you saw 10 or 15 years ago – often doing the very same job,’ she says. This is because, apparently, New Zealand publishers have followed an international trend to reduce in-house staff and so have been out-sourcing editing and design work to what has become an increasingly small group of freelancers.

‘Publishing was traditionally learned by unofficial apprenticeship – people would be mentored in-house then move up to senior positions,’ says Lawson. ‘But today’s new people tend to be project managers – I think of the role as a “post box”, delivering parcels to the freelance experts and never getting your hands on the real work. The industry is in danger of gutting itself with this reliance on old knowledge.’

‘The intern programme and Whitireia’s publishing course are providing a much-needed resource to regenerate this vital creative sector,’ says Michael Moynahan. ‘These young people represent the cream of our new publishing talent.’

The inaugural intern programme in January this year has seen ongoing employment for all three interns, so it seems to be working.

For more information about the intern programme and the Diploma in Publishing, contact Rachel Lawson, Whitireia Community Polytechnic, 04 473 0806, or email r.lawson@whitireia.ac.nz