I run a publishing house. We receive book proposals constantly; we evaluate them carefully (the proposals as well as the authors); we decide to back some and to reject others; and those we choose to support we invest in heavily. We then spend years with the writer; we nurture them as people, scholars and authors; and we help them to find the words to say something important to the public. We constantly discuss ideas and writing. We debate the meaning of truth and how to make their writing complex and meaningful. Often we argue over sentences, adjectives and verbs. We regularly get our authors together to discuss common challenges and problems, or they read work in progress to one another and share their words, but equally often we help each of them to find that essential time alone where good writing happens.

The authors we work with – some of them experienced, others first-timers – are encouraged from the very beginning to imagine their audience. At the moment in our publishing house, reams of paper are curling off the laser printers into our corridors, completed manuscripts are being submitted at a healthy rate to outside scholarly readers, and people are working with that heightened sense of excitement as they finish long-term projects. We await the outside readers’ reports eagerly, hoping that they will not just give the manuscripts a positive tick, but that they will actually wrestle with the conceptual and stylistic character of the work. We hope for a long, gutsy report that will guide the manuscript in its final stages towards publication. I spend at least three days of every week teaching, supervising and editing people who are writing books. I administer an intellectual environment whose main aim is to foster fine learning and to distil it in well-written books that find as many readers as possible. I work in a university graduate history program.

I hope I have convinced you that what we do in such a place is rather like the work of a publishing house. Except that we offer extra advantages. We can and do try to support the whole person in their quest for authorship. We do a lot of the work that many good publishers used to do. In my lifetime, many publishing houses have retreated from substantial editorial work with non-fiction authors. They expect and pray for a fait accompli, a ready-made book that doesn’t need much structural work, and upon which they can establish a serious, scholarly reputation. These editors and publishers rely heavily on the careful, long-term work that universities do to nurture fine writing. They rely on the lifetime investment that good graduate supervisors make in the discovery of new and younger talent, and the work that they do in cultivating the confidence and skills of these budding authors. Publishers also rely on the courage and determination of graduate students who take on the double challenge of satisfying academic examiners and the general public. That is a double challenge – a serious gamble – that sometimes raises the stakes of university examination for the student, and it is a double challenge that many publishers are retreating from, even the university presses. Why? Because it’s hard. Because it takes time. Because original work sometimes means going against the grain of expectation and against the assumed trends of the market. And some  publishers then turn around and criticise universities for producing bodies of work that don’t fit the narrowing confines of the fashionable and saleable.

Of course, I am also sympathetic to the criticisms that publishers make of arcane university culture, and I’ve made such criticisms myself. Writing can go against the grain of university life. I work in a research school, but mostly I have to do my own research and writing in the margins of my time. I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing. It’s good to be made to fight to write. It means that you write because it matters, because you have something important to say, not just because it’s expected or routine. When you have to win the time for your own work, you make sure you don’t waste it.

But the difficulties of writing within the university are more than a matter of time management. In the modern bureaucratic university, being a writer who seeks a general audience can invite suspicion; you sometimes hear the words ‘popular’ and ‘paperback’ spat out at seminars and selection committees. Essays for newspapers or serious periodicals, however esteemed, are valued much less in academia than refereed articles for international journals, however obscure. The local audience, however large, can be seen as less important than a distant, overseas one, however small. Clear, everyday language can be seen as less scholarly than specialised jargon. We have to manage all these pressures daily.

So I am not denying that universities have their problems as environments for writers. But I also think that publishers, because they ultimately possess the power, underestimate us. Our graduate students are actually doing much more inventive things than many publishers know or are prepared to recognise. Publishers shudder at the label of ‘thesis’. It is a terribly disabling word for us all. ‘Thesis’ suggests something arcane before we have even begun, something limited and specialised that will never see the light of day, something that will only ever be bound and gagged. But the sustained research that animates a thesis is exciting and invaluable; it is the deep soul food that quickie books can’t offer; it is the foundations for new ways of thinking and seeing. I wish publishers would do more to help us to fight for this depth of research. Shallow opinions hold sway in the daily media – they are easy to express, sensational to publish, and immediately and briefly gratifying – but books founded on serious, sustained research work on deeper levels. They enter the heart, they change societies and cultures. Many recent award-winning books of Australian history began life as theses and were published with few major changes. Publishers rarely mention these when they preach to the academy.

Many of us in universities take writing very seriously, not just to ensure that our work reaches an audience, and not just to please publishers, but because good storytelling is one of the key techniques of humanities and social science research. Storytelling is sometimes underestimated as being easy and instinctive, but story is actually a piece of disciplined magic, of highly refined science. It is the most powerful educational tool we possess; it is learning distilled in a common language. It is also a privileged carrier of truth, a way of allowing for multiplicity and complexity at the same time as guaranteeing memorability. Story, as the American nature writer Barry Lopez put it, creates an atmosphere in which truth becomes discernible as a pattern. So I would argue that narrative is not just a means; it is a method, and a rigorous and demanding one. The conventional scientific method separates causes from one another, it isolates each one and tests them individually in turn. Narrative, by contrast, carries multiple causes along together; it enacts connectivity. In the analysis of our world, we need both methods. And scholars in the humanities know that stories change the way people act, the way they use available knowledge. The stories we live by determine the future.

Scholarly writers tend to be pathetically grateful to be published. We live in awe of the magic of publication. Some sense of that magic is essential and thrilling. But it’s important not to be blinded or intimidated by it. You need to cast as discerning and pragmatic an eye on your editor and publisher as they will on your manuscript. Some publishers just can’t imagine your book unless you help them. They work for a company, they manage a production line, and they are themselves a little intimidated by their own marketing gurus. You may be lucky enough to find a commissioning editor or publisher of the quality and authority of Phillipa McGuinness, Michael Heyward or Ian Templeman, but even they should be argued with. They welcome it, because they have to argue for your book in the larger publishing machine. Give them the ammunition to do so. In big publishing houses, even these fine editors and publishers, however devoted they are to you and your book, have to hand you over to a new team when the marketing begins. The marketing people will rarely have read your book. Only you, the author, will see the whole process through. Don’t be diffident, and don’t expect others to see it as you do. You will have gently and sometimes firmly to educate them along the way. Don’t be in awe of the publication process, because you will need to be alert to its flaws and weaknesses from the very start. And that includes a readiness to deal with the reflex hatred of the ‘thesis’ amongst publishers – a prejudice with some foundation, but one that also denies and dismisses the years of investment in fine writing that good universities make.