Why this press, and how.

My daughter Sofia is two. She has the kind of attention you only get at two — fierce when a book has her, gone when it does not. She has favourite books. She has books she will not look at twice. She has books she has loved so hard the corners are soft and the spine no longer closes flat. Watching her read, over and over, has been the single most useful thing that has ever happened to me as a maker of picture books. A child tells you, with absolute honesty, whether a page is working or not. There is no diplomacy in a two-year-old.

Currawong Books Press began in that house, with that child, and with a small black currawong in a notebook. The notebook had drawings, and lines, and crossings-out. It had a story about a bird who loved every colour but her own. It had a feeling I could not quite name — something to do with being told you are not yet the right shape, and then deciding, quietly, to be yourself anyway. I knew the story worked. I had read it aloud enough times to a moving target to know that.

What I did not know was how to get it onto a shelf.

The maths of a small picture book

Australian children's publishing is small, slow, and brutally competitive. A traditional debut picture-book deal — if you are very, very lucky — pays an advance somewhere in the low four figures and a royalty of around ten per cent of net receipts. The publisher commissions the illustrator. The illustrator is paid a flat fee or a share of royalties. The author has little to no say in the visual world of the book they wrote. The book sits in the publisher's queue for two to four years before it sees a shelf. Most manuscripts are turned away. Of those that are accepted, most go out of print within five years.

I am not complaining about any of that. It is the economics of an industry that publishes beautiful, important books in a country with a small reading population and an enormous geography. The traditional houses do honourable work and I admire them. But it is not the only way to make a book, and for a single-handed press in regional Tasmania with a manuscript I happen to believe in, it was not going to be the way.

The other path — self-publishing the traditional way — runs into a wall the moment you cost out the illustrations. A full picture book with original watercolour or mixed-media artwork by a working Australian illustrator, commissioned at a fair professional rate, costs somewhere in the order of A$15,000 to A$30,000 for a single title. That is the going rate, and it is the right rate; that is what skilled human illustration is worth. But it means the picture book in my notebook would have to wait until I had saved that amount, which — given the realities of a young family, a mortgage, and a regional income — was a five-to-seven-year proposition. The story would still be true in seven years. My daughter would not be two.

What changed

What changed is that the technology to assist with illustration arrived. Not to replace it — to assist with it. AI image generation, in the hands of someone with a clear visual sense, a stack of reference images, and the patience to revise a single page twenty or thirty times, can produce illustrations that hold their own on a printed picture-book page. I know this because I have been doing it, every night, for over a year. I have generated, discarded, generated again, hand-edited, repainted by overpainting, asked for more wattle, asked for less wattle, redrawn the eye of a bird because it looked too sad. The work is real work. It is just a different kind of work than holding a brush.

I want to be honest about all of this because I think the publishing world is about to spend the next decade pretending none of it is happening, while quietly using it. That seems worse than saying so plainly. So:

On real art, worth defending

The Australian picture book is one of the great quiet treasures of this country. Shaun Tan, Freya Blackwood, Bob Graham, Alison Lester, Jeannie Baker, Stephen Michael King — these are artists in the full and proper sense of the word, and what they make is irreplaceable. We want to see them keep making it. The technology I am using is not a substitute for any of that; it is a way for a small press to exist at all where it otherwise would not.

What kind of press this is

Currawong Books Press will publish one or two books a year. Slowly. Carefully. With time spent on every spread. The aesthetic of each title is its own — Clara has her wattle and her wildflowers; Burnie, the bumbling bumblebee we are working on next, will have a different palette and a different visual world entirely. The press itself stays quiet — navy, cream, gold, a small feather — and the books are allowed to be loud, or soft, or strange, as the story requires.

I am the only person here. I write, I art-direct, I edit, I typeset, I file the trade-mark, I send the invoices, I post the books, I answer the emails. There is no publicist. There is no acquisitions editor. The only quality control on any Currawong title is whether the book is good enough to stand on a shelf next to a Shaun Tan and not feel embarrassed. That is a very high bar, and I am not going to clear it every time. But it is the bar I am trying for.

One last thing

The reason this press exists, in the end, is that my daughter — Sofia again — is at the age where the books you put in front of her start to do real work. They tell her what the world looks like, what kinds of people belong in stories, what is funny, what is tender, what is brave. Australian children's publishing does a quietly remarkable job of this, but it does not do it at any great volume. There is room, I think, for one more small voice in the bush.

If you have read this far, thank you. If you would like to know when the first book is out, The Currawong Letter is one note a month, no more. If you want to read something less considered and more like me thinking out loud, Notes from the Nest is the place for that.

— James