Annual general meetings are usually pretty dreary affairs: financial reports are read out, there is lots of proposing and seconding on the previous year’s minutes and the like, and then new office-bearers are announced. AGMs of the Australian Publishers Association (APA) usually follow much the same pattern, but this year’s APA AGM, held last Thursday in Sydney, held some surprises.
The main surprise was that there was an election for the presidency of the APA, and that the likely favourite didn’t win. Running against the high-profile Penguin Australia CEO Gabrielle Coyne was the little-known Stephen May, a psychologist and the founder of Brisbane-based Australian Academic Press. May apparently sent a letter introducing himself to all APA members and did some concerted lobbying, particularly among the smaller publishers and the academic/scholarly members, and he gained a majority of the votes from the APA’s diverse membership of 230 companies to seal the result.
There was also a strong range of candidates for the eight positions on the APA’s Independent Publishers Committee, with elections to decide the convenor (Rex Finch of Finch Publishing was elected) and the committee members, who represent publishers such as UQP, UNSW Press, Magabala, Spinifex and the National Library of Australia.
For many years there has been grumbling among the smaller publishers that the APA was dominated by the all-powerful Trade Publishers Committee, which in turn was dominated by the multinational companies (Penguin, Random, HarperCollins, Hachette, etc). The last few years have seen the composition of the APA’s senior office-bearers become more diverse and to better represent the breadth of publishing activity undertaken in Australia (for a start, it’s not often acknowledged in public ‘bookish’ spheres that educational publishing, from primary through to tertiary, makes up at least half of the publishing business in Australia).
When the election for the presidency was announced a few weeks ago, APA CEO Maree McKaskill told the Weekly Book Newsletter that it was ‘the sign of a healthy organisation that is not dormant’. She added: ‘The campaign on parallel importation of books [last year] has certainly created a real bond between the publishers and re-invigorated the membership so that they value the organisation and as such the elections reflect that.’
The composition of the new board of the APA is certainly more diverse than ever, with representatives from Black Dog Books, LemonFizz Media and Cengage sitting alongside those from Allen & Unwin, Random House and Pearson. Stephen May is to be congratulated on his election as president. His challenge is to bring together the differing views and priorities of publishers from varying sectors and to be able to present a united stance when needed (for the government’s Book Industry Study Group, for example).
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