Rhiza Press has been around for 16 years now.

As a small, independent company we have produced over 150 books with a growing list of authors and illustrators.

Some interesting facts:

We have steadily increased our author base each year. We now have over 100 author and illustrators who we've worked with!

We have published debut authors in approximately 15% of our books each year.

We have started a number of author careers and contributed to many author and illustrator careers.

We actively look for original art and stories and love finding new ideas that further our Australian culture.

The challenges of being an independent and small press though are big.

And sometimes it's good to talk about them!

Given the incredibly large pool of available books, it can be difficult for small publishers to be noticed. If you look around, there are plenty of articles out there talking about how little authors make, but it's also hard for independent smaller publishers. Why? Because our profit margin is the same or less than the author royalty and we carry upfront costs.

In the past few years a number of big companies went out of business and as a result, small press like us have to deal with unpaid sales. We continue to move forward with our passionate love for Aussie books, but any small business in Australia will understand how challenging it is!

We continue to focus on our back catalogue of books and are just as passionate about stories we published 10+ years ago as we are about our new ones. Our ideal books are timeless and relevant. After all, every story can be new to someone.

Pulping in publishing

Did you know that most of the time if a bookseller returns a book that copy is pulped despite there being nothing wrong with it? It's easier for a distributor to do that rather than either return it to the publisher or put it aside for resale. It means that the publisher loses revenue because there's no sale but the book itself, which was paid for by the publisher, is destroyed. 

It can also be hard for a small press publisher to grow as marketing can be quite expensive. Advertising in various forms is the best way to become visible in the marketplace, which can make it hard for us to keep up, although we do our best with the resources we have available.

Competing in the market

The growth of AI-generated content has also resulted in an explosion of AI-generated books in the marketplace. Before AI was being used to write books, 100,000 ebooks were uploaded to Amazon every month. Since AI has been used for this, that has skyrocketed to 300,000. 

Bricks and mortar bookstores are fabulous places to buy books and are also a good way to avoid AI-generated content and find new gems. However, even there it can be a bit harder to find some smaller independent press books. This is completely understandable; they know that well-known books are likely to sell. Although a lot of wonderful independent bookstores and chains have our books on their shelves so please go looking! And they can order books in, and if get your local bookstore to order a book from a small press publisher, it can show the desire for our books. 

And we keep going. Thanks for following what we do and I hope you find some great stories!