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Genres

Fiction book publishing for Australian novelists

Novels and short story collections, edited properly before anything is designed. You keep the copyright, the royalties and the right to take the book elsewhere.

Start your publishing journeyStart with an assessment
  • A free manuscript read
  • Fixed written quote
  • You keep the rights

Portfolio

Fiction covers from our studio

Cover and production work, each shown with its title and author.

  • Thirty-Six Winters — a lone figure at the end of a long jetty in cold blue mist

    Thirty-Six Winters

    Ruth Carmody

  • The Glasshouse Year — fine green ink botanical line drawing of trailing leaves on cream paper

    The Glasshouse Year

    Imogen Teale

  • Salt and Paper Boats — torn paper collage of a small boat on layered bands of blue and sand

    Salt and Paper Boats

    Nadia Vance

See the full portfolio
A reader absorbed in a novel under the warm glow of a desk lamp

What this genre needs

Fiction lives or dies on structure

A beautiful sentence cannot rescue a novel that starts in the wrong place. Almost every manuscript we read needs structural work before it needs anything else.

The most common problem is not bad writing. It is a novel that spends sixty pages getting to the thing the book is actually about, a middle act where nobody wants anything urgently, or a point of view that shifts because the author needed information on the page. All three are fixable, and none of them are fixed by a proofread.

So fiction projects start with a read: book editing for the manuscript, then book cover design once the word count has stopped moving, then self-publishing to get it on sale. Doing it in that order is the whole trick, and doing it in any other order costs money.

  • A structural edit before a line edit, in that order
  • Genre positioning that tells you what your category expects
  • Covers tested at thumbnail size against your actual competition
  • Paperback and ebook, with print on demand in Australia

What's involved

What publishing a novel involves

Four stages that decide whether the book finds readers.

  • An honest read

    A written assessment of what the manuscript needs before you spend on anything.

  • Two editing passes

    Structural work first, then a line edit once the shape of the book is settled.

  • Category positioning

    The categories, keywords and comparable titles your novel actually sits beside.

  • Retail and library listing

    Paperback and ebook on the major retailers, orderable by shops and libraries.

Case study

A literary fiction cover, decision by decision

How the studio approaches a quiet literary novel, where the cover has to signal seriousness without tipping into austerity.

The Weight of Rain — rain running down a dark window with a blurred warm light beyond it

The Weight of Rain

Clare Mahoney

The brief: a quiet literary novel with no high-concept hook, where the cover has to signal seriousness without looking austere enough to put a general reader off. Literary fiction is the hardest category to design for because the signals are subtle.

What we did

  • Chose an abstract image over a figure, so no reader is told what the protagonist looks like
  • Set the title large enough to carry the page at 20mm, which most literary covers do not
  • Used one typeface in two weights, because mixed display faces read as commercial
  • Built a muted palette with one warm accent so the cover is not grey on a grey shelf
  • Left a clear band for a prize or review quote the book may earn later

What was delivered

  • Front cover at thumbnail, retail and poster sizes
  • Wraparound print cover with spine and barcode area
  • Ebook and audiobook squares
  • A one-page rationale explaining every choice

Questions authors ask

Fiction: questions authors ask

If a traditional deal matters to you, submit first — self-publishing a novel makes a later acquisition harder, because the sales record follows it. Give it the time you are willing to lose, usually a year of agent and publisher submissions, then decide. We will not pretend the two routes are equivalent.

Most adult fiction categories expect 70,000 to 110,000 words, with literary fiction comfortable at the lower end and fantasy tolerating more. A 40,000-word novel is a hard sell in any category, and a 200,000-word debut is expensive to print and daunting to a reader. We will tell you where yours sits.

Yes, with one honest caveat: collections sell less well than novels, and that is true in traditional publishing too. The design and production work is the same, the editing is often lighter, and the marketing is harder. If the collection is what you want to publish, we will do it well.

Yes, and it is the most useful thing we do. A manuscript assessment costs a fraction of an edit and tells you whether the book needs another draft. Plenty of authors go away for six months and come back with a far better novel that then costs less to edit.

Yes. The copyright stays with you under your legal name while the book is published under the pen name, and the ISBN can be registered to an imprint rather than to you personally. Retailer accounts need your real identity for payment, but the book itself need not carry it.

Most do, and the practical question is which single category it sits in on a retailer page, because that is where readers browse. We pick the primary category your book competes in and use the secondary signals in the cover and blurb. Refusing to choose is how a book reaches nobody.

Still have a question? A real publisher will answer it.

Start your publishing journey
Make room for your book.

From your desk to a reader’s shelf

Send us your novel

An editor reads the manuscript, or a substantial sample, and tells you what it needs before you spend anything. Free, and no obligation.

Start your publishing journeySee our work