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From marketing to metadata, Australian publishing is set up to exclude neurodiverse voices like mine.
I am an author, illustrator and composer and have been involved in Australian children’s and YA book publishing and music for the past 35 years. Australia has been a wonderful place to develop a career in publishing because of the sense of collegiality and "family" among authors and illustrators. Perhaps this is because Australia has a relatively small population. But my country also has a particular set of issues that don’t serve creators very well, related also I suspect to our relatively small population.
I live with a serious complex mental illness, and I believe that some of those issues in publishing are writ large for people like me. When I began my career it was in the very early days of a shift in marketing and promotion away from publishing houses to become equally the responsibility of authors and illustrators. This has been a very difficult situation for neurodivergent creators. One reason I am a composer on the musical side of my career is because it was almost impossible for me to sustain a life as an instrumentalist with my condition. One huge reason I have been successful as a book creator is because I have had loving people around me who have tirelessly promoted my work, even when I have been unable to have any kind of public face.
With treatment and good management, that situation has now changed and I am quite comfortable with the media and with public speaking; but for many neurodivergent creators, the world of publishing, with its imperative for creators to maintain high social media presences and to be "performers" at conferences, festivals and in schools, is very difficult to navigate. As I have discovered with some of my titles, regardless of how well they were received in the literary journals, without a high degree of involvement by me in promoting and marketing them, their shelf-lives were not particularly long. Beyond a basic high level of literary merit, it seems marketing has everything to do with the success of a work. It saddens me to think of the amount of intellectual and artistic wastage in the publishing industry simply because some neurodivergent creators cannot play that game.
It saddens me to think of the amount of intellectual and artistic wastage in the publishing industry simply because some neurodivergent creators cannot play [the] game
With the current release of my work The Tree of Ecstasy and Unbearable Sadness into the UK, I am fortunate in being able to have the support of a generous philanthropist who will help me fund a wonderful team of people to promote and sell the work, but like many creatives I have spent most of my career unable to afford this. I’ve observed that Australian publishing houses do only a minimal amount of marketing and promotion for most titles.
The Tree of Ecstasy and Unbearable Sadness is my "coming out" work; it’s a metaphorical journey through psychosis in an Alice in Wonderland kind of way. I wanted to share the exquisite highs and the terrifying lows of mania, depression and psychosis with my audience in a way that is, for them, safe and presented in an artistically beautiful way. I wanted to add my voice to the ongoing conversation about mental illness and neurodivergence in a way that audiences could, just for a moment, feel what it is like. Empathy, I believe, is the route to demystification and de-stigmatisation.
Ironically, I’ve discovered – in Australia at least – a weird kind of equivalence between the stigma I have experienced as someone with neurodivergence and the way this new work has been treated within the "system", and that is to do with what I see as the bureaucratisation of the industry. In Australia, reader awareness of a work is often tied to literary awards. In particular, if children’s and YA books are not shortlisted by the Children’s Book Council of Australia, they often drop below the public radar because publishers tend to focus their efforts on shortlisted books. In my opinion, there haven’t been, for example, any picture books exclusively for young adults shortlisted in the council’s awards for at least the past 16 years and, as a result, Australian publishers now discourage such works.
There is also a ripple effect in that other awards in Australia are now setting the readership ceiling age for picture books at 13. This has meant that works like mine are seen as outside the norm, don’t fit in. There are also issues within the metadata systems that publishers are required to lodge when books are released. The categories are limited to ages of readership and genres in a way that a work like mine simply doesn’t neatly fit and results in search engine algorithms that potentially yield inaccurate information about books.
Strangely, in a world that is becoming more tolerant of difference, some aspects of the publishing industry seem to be becoming more rigid and closed. For the neurodivergent, this, unfortunately, is business as usual.
The Tree of Ecstasy and Unbearable Sadness by Matt Ottley is published by One Tentacle Press in the UK on 16th May.