It’s a few days to the Malta Book Festival – which is basically Christmas for the book crowd. Five days where we meet like-minded booklovers, talk incessantly about books, fete prize winners, drink glasses of wine at endless on-stand dos and buy more books than we’ll have time to read. It’s also, for thousands of Maltese, the only occasion during the year when they browse through bookshelves and come into direct contact with books outside of their children’s textbooks. Sad, but true.

Statisticians and their interpreters – politicians – will argue till the cows come home about whether reading figures are up, static or down. For every study showing an increase in reading, another will show a decline. And, for that matter, how do we classify reading in 2018? Is it just reading the good old printed book that counts? Or do we count reading blogs, Twitter and Facebook feeds?

And must the text be written in proper Maltese, or English, to count? Is reading through the latest Salott rant and attendant deluge of comments on a par with a paragraph from Ali Smith?

If I had to predict the chatter at this week’s Book Festival, I’d probably be safe to highlight the following: There have never been as many new Maltese books as now; Maltese literature has improved immeasurably in quality; editing of manuscripts is finally a thing, meaning that novels are starting to be tighter, more focused and sharper; visibility of Maltese authors is at unprecedented levels; and more people than ever seem to be enjoying Maltese literature.

There have never been as many new Maltese books as now

All of the above are true. This should be, and indeed is, a golden age for Maltese literature.

And yet.

Truth be told, the publishing industry in a tiny country in 2018 is one that should, by all objective criteria, no longer exist. The size of the market is what it is – especially for Maltese language books – and sales figures for Maltese books are down, inexorably, year after year.

More and more publishers have closed down. Average print runs are at their historical lowest ever. Costs of book production, on the other hand, have shot up and are now near identical to those of the giant international publishing houses. The costs of publishing, say, 2018’s chart-smashing Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine in the UK are very similar to those of the newest Maltese literature sensation. The only difference is in the printing costs, of course, but as anyone with a know­ledge of the economies of printing will tell you, the bulk of costs are incurred in creating the book and printing the first print run. Additional run-on costs for increased quantities are, relatively speaking, minimal.

And yet, Eleanor Oliphant has sold three-quarters of a million copies to date, while a bestselling novel in Maltese will, if extremely lucky and popular, hit the 1,000-copy mark. An off-the-charts success might reach 3,000 copies over the course of its lifetime. Averages are nearer 300-500 copies. And even that tends to be a one-off exception.

In a way, publishing is a victim of its own success. Maltese publishers and authors operate with a passion-to-profit ratio unparalleled in any other industry. Nowhere else is so much invested, in time, energy, commitment and money, for so little return. Standards of publishing, from editing to proofreading to design to marketing to production values, have risen sharply over the past 15 years, making the Maltese book near indistinguishable from that of old. This has obviously entailed a drastic increase in costs, that has not and cannot be matched by an equivalent increase in sales.

For sales are down. Retail, we are told, is an issue. The dominance and sheer volume and visibility of English imported books, in a bilingual country as is ours, inevitably drowns out the puny marketing budgets of Maltese books.

So yes, please do visit the Malta Book Festival at the Mediterranean Conference Centre this week. Please do rejoice in the unprecedented joy and quality of Maltese literature. Please do share in the enthu­siasm of the occasion, the events, the wine. But do keep in mind that beneath all this is an industry that is in real danger, and that if a cultural segment in Malta has ever merited urgent support, literature and publishing is it.

Chris Gruppetta is director of Merlin Publishers, one of Malta’s longest established publishing houses.

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece

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