About Text

The Text Publishing Company acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the country on which we work, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and pays respect to their Elders past and present.

Text Publishing is an independent, Melbourne-based publisher of literary and commercial fiction and non-fiction. Text has been awarded the ABIA Small Publisher of the Year three times and won the Leading Edge Books Small Publisher of the Year in 2018 and 2019.

At Text we want to publish books that make a difference to people’s lives. We believe that reading should be a marvellous experience, that every book you read should somehow change your life if only by a fraction. We love the phrase ‘lost in a book’—that’s where we want our readers to be. You can’t get lost in a newspaper or a magazine or even a movie. But people get lost in books every day—on the tram, on the beach, in bed. Reading is what keeps the imagination supple and challenges preconceptions and prejudices. You read at your own speed, and the world you enter courtesy of the writer is yours and yours only, even if the person next to you on the bus is reading exactly the same book.

We are committed to providing first-class services to the writers who trust us with their books. If we are to fulfil our promises to readers, our job is to do everything in our power to help our writers write the best books they can. We care passionately about the quality of our editorial work. Design and production matter to us because we want our books to be beautiful objects. And since we want our beautiful books to be read on trains and beaches, in beds and planes, or under the desk at school and work, we work up a sweat to promote and market them. And that includes selling rights on behalf of our writers to publishers all around the world. In fact we earn more money for our writers through licensing international editions than we do by turning their books into bestsellers in Australia and New Zealand.

We publish a very broad range of fiction and non-fiction, international and local, books for adults and young adults. We are capable of falling in love with any book, and many of our authors have led us into fascinating territory we would never otherwise have discovered. Lots of our books are award-winners around the world. If you are a writer or an agent and would like to send us your manuscript we would love to consider it. If you are a reader we hope that somewhere on our list you will find the book that makes the world a different place for you.