ABOUT SPINIFEX PRESS

Mission Statement

Spinifex Press is an award-winning independent press publishing innovative and controversial books across a wide variety of subject areas. Spinifex publishes fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Fiction includes literary, crime and sci-fi. Non-fiction includes memoir, politics, health, travel, cyberculture with specialist lists across fiction and non-fiction in Asian and African Studies, Indigenous, feminist and lesbian titles, books on globalisation and Women’s Studies.

When Renate Klein and I started Spinifex Press in 1991 we already had a great deal of experience in publishing – publishing and writing in the mainstream and for the feminist and lesbian markets – and had each been involved in major literary events for women.

Renate had co-edited Test Tube Women, which dealt with the new reproductive technologies, including lesbian mothers and the use of home-grown artificial insemination methods. I had co-edited several anthologies of fiction with significant contribution of lesbians, Moments of Desire with Jenny Pausacker and The Exploding Frangipani with Cathie Dunsford, who has gone on to write the Cowrie series published by Spinifex.

Together we had been involved in raising funding for and organising the Australian Feminist Book Fortnight, which was a national celebration of feminist books and took place in 1989 and 1991. Renate had earlier been involved in the First International Feminist Book Fair, held in London in 1984, and I had previously organised a major women writers festival in 1985.

Effectively we had both been commissioning and nurturing feminist and lesbian titles, but in two very different publishing settings, with fiction and poetry at Penguin Books in Melbourne, and with non-fiction and academic materials, for the Athene series, and two journals, Women’s Studies International Forum and Issues in Reproductive and Genetic Engineering.

So when it came to founding Spinifex we had some fairly definite ideas about how we’d go about it, and we used our first twelve months to test ourselves against the market. Of the first four books we published three were translated into German, and one of these into Spanish as well. Three won awards, and three were reprinted. Not bad for a first effort.

Sybil: The Glide of Her Tongue (1992) was our first book with lesbian prominently mentioned on the cover. A book of poetry published by an Australian publisher will usually sell between 500-1200 copies. Nearly 2000 copies of this book have sold. We did get some resistance from the book trade with this and other up-front books, but the market is inconsistent and sometimes it seems to be an advantage. Sheila Jeffreys’ book The Lesbian Heresy (1993) proclaimed its existence in big letters, and we found that our heterosexual male and female reps generally found this easier to sell in than our lesbian reps did. Since a negative response from a bookseller can feel like an attack to a lesbian, and not be noticed at all by the others in some circumstances. These experiences (and others) helped us decide to join a larger group for distribution at the end of 1993. And although we sometimes long for the lesbian-owned distribution company selling to lesbian-owned stores for these titles, the world isn’t like that and there are in fact fewer outlets now than there were in 1993.

Something we realised very quickly was that if we were to publish a significant number of lesbian titles, we would need more than the Australian market. We’d pre-empted this by acquiring distribution in the US within two months of our first book appearing. The US lesbian market is as big and as diverse as the entire Australian market, and with loyal niches among feminist bookstores and support from the quarterly, Feminist Bookstore News (now defunct), we were able to get information about our titles out to committed buyers and readers. Just as in Australia, the demise of feminist bookstores has changed the landscape of bookselling, so too has this occurred in the US where a very significant number of independent feminist and lesbian stores have now ceased trading. The early to mid 1990s were very healthy for sales in the US, but huge returns have crippled many distributors, and we have recently changed distributors in the hope that a Canadian-based distributor might share more culturally with us.

There is a very healthy market for lesbian titles in Germany, and a number of publishers with whom we have worked on several occasions. Frauenoffensive and Orlanda are two of the oldest German feminist presses who have co-produced lesbian titles with us, and we’ve also done business with a number of very mainstream German houses. In particular, the Cowrie series is all available in Germany, as is Nattering on the Net, Figments of a Murder. Our most translated book is Betty McLellan’s Help! I’m Living with a Man Boy (German, Slovenian, and Japanese). We’ve also co-published in English with publishers in Botswana, South Africa, Philippines, Canada, India, Bangladesh, Tunisia, NZ, USA, and the UK.

In general, publishing lesbian titles, in addition to a range of feminist titles – some of which the mainstream recognises as highly marketable – is an advantage. We know the lesbian market very well, and we understand its needs. This is one of the few advantages we have over the mainstream who tend to have a one-size-fits-all approach. But the visibility of our lesbian titles is enhanced by sitting with more mainstream titles, and the combination helps us to survive.

We have tried, therefore, to publish as diverse a range of authors as possible with certain focal points. We now have good list of books with an Asian or Pacific focus, a number of titles by indigenous writers, several from Africa, and a reasonable number of European and North American feminist writers who have international reputations, indeed we now have authors from every continent. These sit side by side with books which have arisen out of the Melbourne and the broader Australian community of feminists.

Lesbian fiction has proven to be successful along several dimensions – sales, awards, translations – and we now have a fabulous range of writers in our list including Finola Moorhead, Gillian Hanscombe, Marou Izumo, Merilee Moss, Suniti Namjoshi, Cathie Dunsford, Sandi Hall, Laurene Kelly and many more who appear in our anthologies. To see our lives reflected in fiction is always a great pleasure.

Feminist and lesbian publishing is a vulnerable area of the market. We try to respond to what we perceive to be the needs of that market, and we like to know that our books are being read. The global market both helps and hinders. There is much more competition in every niche than ever before, but the books are more readily marketed through the internet, and our website plays an important part in this area. We cannot compete with the market clout of big transnational companies, but we keep in touch with our communities. We hope readers will continue to support local lesbian and feminist publishing, and the booksellers who support us. For if not, how will we know what our writers and artists, our activists and theorists are thinking?