This essay is an autoethnographic discussion of Australian digital-first publishing from 2012-2016. With particular emphasis on Escape Publishing (Escape), the imprint I founded and oversaw from 2012-2018, I will look at how the parallel industries of genre romance, self-publishing, and digital-rights management led to a genre-friendly bubble of digital publishing in Australia in 2012 that eventually deflated by 2016.
The year 2012 saw the launch of four separate digital imprints of established Big Six (later Big Five) publishers within the Australian market. Pan Macmillan Australia announced the Momentum imprint in August 2011, which officially launched on February 1st 2012 with a range of backlist titles and a handful of new releases. In August 2012, Penguin Australia and Harlequin Australia announced new digital imprints at the Romance Writers of Australia conference on the Gold Coast: Destiny and Escape respectively. In December 2012, Random House Australia also announced that they would be introducing a romance-focused digital imprint entitled Random Romance. Momentum announced an expansion in 2013, Momentum Moonlight, a dedicated romance imprint and HarperCollins created Harper Impulse a 'direct to digital' imprint in 2014.
This is Chapter 5 in the collection and