It's that niggling voice in the ear, the bête noire of most writers as they grind away, inscribing their words on to a page or keyboard and asking whether anybody will ever get to read what they write. The barriers to publishing often seem insurmountable. To the low-profile, unpublished writer they seem practically impossible.
Even writers with a substantial publishing history must continually confront that bogyman Bookdata, where statistics about sales of previous books may often predict for a publisher whether a writer is still a commercial commodity or not. The unforgiving market is always breathing down writers' necks.
Financial or economic justification for the role of the arts and creativity in society has long relied on an old economic-rationalist paradigm. Bureaucrats had to invent labels like 'cultural capital' to justify financial support for the arts and to ascribe dollar figures to creativity.
In these early years of the 21st century, amid market collapse, this economic theory may be losing support and in need of overhaul, despite the fact that most major publishing houses have long been tied to it.
The contemporary publishing landscape is changing in other ways too. Recently there has been a string of downsizing operations in many big publishing houses, notably Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, as well as lay-offs in Simon & Schuster, Random House, Thomas Nelson and Macmillan.
Jason Boog in salon.com maintains that this is because some publishing houses are run by people who don't understand books. Many corporate owners of major publishing houses, he argues, expect 15 to 20 per cent profit margins in an industry with traditional margins of 3 to 4 per cent.
Such expectations are unrealistic. Since the 1990s the advent of new technologies saw the markets of the big publishers already being eroded by smaller independents. Now the high returns demanded by shareholders could further work against them.
The current review of the Copyright Act law that restricts the parallel importation of books into Australia may signal other challenges for the publishing industry. It is not clear what effects this law will have. Books may be cheaper for the reading public, but publishers could also face competition from foreign publishers for editions of their own books.
Peter Carey has recently drawn attention to the limitations of a model of book-making that seemed so attractive in the late 20th century. He says: 'Executives, newly arrived in publishing from finance or "content control entities", have one abiding interest