7 LOGOS 27/1 © 2016 LOGOS LOGOS DOI: 10.1163/1878-4712-11112093 This article introduces a collection of essays arising from the Small Press Network’s Independent Publishing Conference, an event that brings together publishing professionals from Australia and academics working in the nascent discipline of publishing studies. These essays address the role of small publishers Beth Driscoll Beth Driscoll is a lecturer in Publishing and Communications at the University of Mel- bourne and the author of The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and reading in the twenty-first century ( Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Her research into contemporary cultures of publishing and reading has also been published in the Cambridge Journal of Education, Journal of Popular Romance Studies, and Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. Her current research includes work on readers online and literary festivals, as well as the ARC (Australian Research Council) funded project ‘Genre Worlds: Australian popular fiction in the twenty-first century’ (2016–2018). driscoll@unimelb.edu.au Aaron Mannion Aaron Mannion is Associate Publisher at Vignette Press. He has edited and co- edited a range of publications, including the postgraduate magazine Plane Tree, the creative writing anthologies Muse and Nth Degree, the reviews section of the peer- reviewed journal Traffic, and Vignette Press’s Geek Mook. He is currently the fiction editor of Antic. Aaron read English at the University of Cambridge and is completing a PhD at the University of Melbourne. He is Deputy Chair of the Small Press Network and co-convener of the Independent Publishing Conference’s academic day. His work has been published in Wet Ink, The Sleepers Almanac, Island, and elsewhere. He was shortlisted for the Wet Ink Short Story Prize in 2011 and the Penguin Manu- script Award in 2009 and 2011. manniona@unimelb.edu.au Publishing in Australia National interests in a transnational age LOGOS_027_01_v3.indd 7 31-05-16 15:27