Oz Lit for Dummies – Part 1

The Australian book market is much like its foreign counterparts in that the books that sell are usually not the books receiving critical acclaim and international prizes. Typical also is the condition of Australian book review sections, which appear in only a handful of publications, and those have ever fewer fiction reviews with less space dedicated to each. So I won’t bore you all with a longwinded rant about the disconnect between the elites and the common reader or the death of literary culture, because we’ve all heard it before. What I will do over the next couple of days is give you a quick rundown on the Australian books that are being bought, the ones that are winning the big awards, and the ones that I reckon you should read.

If you’re used to reading US sales figures the ones quoted here are going to seem ridiculously tiny, but there are only 20 million of us, remember, so it doesn’t take all that many sales to make a significant impact on the marketplace. Total adult fiction sales in Australia last year were 1,050,000 units, which is slightly more than the year before, but less than the combined total of Harry Potter books sold. Four of the top ten selling adult fiction titles were by homegrown authors, which is cause for celebration because it’s double the number that made it onto the list the previous year.

The number one Australian book, with sales of over 190,000 was The Bride Stripped Bare, an anonymously published novel about a housewife’s secret sex life which gained mucho publicity through the revelation that the author was Aussie housewife (and marketing genius) Nikki Gemmel. Next up with 120,000 was Matthew Reilly’s American style action thriller Scarecrow, followed by two multi-generational romantic sagas: Barra Creek by Di Morrissey (85,000) and The Touch by Colleen McCullough (75,000). To put these sales into perspective, a typical literary novel here sells less than 2000 copies.

I know Gemmel caused a similar stir in Britain as she did here, and that McCullough has had an international following ever since The Thorn Birds , but considering the fact that the other names on the Aussie top ten (Dan Brown, Wilbur Smith, James Patterson, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell) are found on bestseller lists all over the world, I’m interested in whether any of the Aussie’s have made an impact outside of Oz. So how about it? Did any of these books get attention in your neck of the woods? When you think of Australian fiction, what comes to mind?