STARTING WITH A self-funded pilot in 1996, the Australian Society of Authors (ASA) has administered literary mentorships for several years. In 2002 we will probably have upwards of 130 applicants competing for fifteen Literature Board-funded mentorships. The ASA also set up the first national indigenous writers' mentorship scheme, funded by the Australia Council's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board, and providing mentorships for five indigenous writers.

A number of other writers' organisations will receive Literature Board funding for similar mentorship programmes in 2002: Australian National Playwrights Centre, Queensland Writers' Centre, Victorian Writers' Centre, WA State Literature Centre, and Varuna Writers' Centre in the Blue Mountains.

A decade ago, no literary mentorships were being offered. Today, they generate an enormous amount of interest and funding (the above programmes amount to $100,000 worth of mentoring activity in 2002). What has changed during that time?

All mentorship programmes aim to give emerging and developing writers practical advice about their manuscripts, but, in the better ones, a mentor's input is not just technical (helping emerging authors with a few rhetorical tricks of the trade) or emotional (welcoming them into the community of authors), but also professional (making the manuscript more publishable, and sometimes even connecting the writer with a publisher).

There's no doubt about the value of mentorships. Those involved in the ASA's programme have consistently rated it highly, and its book-publication success rate over the past three years stands at fifty per cent — a creditable figure, given the state of Australian publishing. The programme can boast numerous success stories: Frank Moorhouse working with Julia Leigh on her first book, The Hunter; Rosie Scott with Georgia Blain on Closed for Winter; Garry Disher working on Augustine's Lunch with Laura Budd; and John Tranter with Anna Funder on Stasiland are just four of over forty such partnerships. Georgia Blain, now the newly elected Chair of the ASA, speaks for most mentees when she says: When I was paired up with Rosie Scott, she not only gave me invaluable technical advice, I was also able to talk to someone who was an experienced writer — and this was enormously important for me in gaining confidence. Writing for a living seemed possible for the first time.'

It's no coincidence that the Australia Council's initial encouragement of mentorships surfaced at the time when Hilary McPhee was Chair in the mid-1990s. McPhee was a publisher at a time when in-house editors were increasingly sloughed off and replaced by overworked and marginalised freelancers. The result was underdone books that should have been cut by a hundred pages, an annoyance of typos, and the only evidence of an edit being an American-language computerised spell-check that changed harbour' to harbor'.

As the downsizing of publishers' editorial teams continues, authors are having to do it for themselves — hence the remarkable demand for mentorships. But even the best-resourced mentorship programme can only go so far in redressing what is essentially a structural problem within the industry. What, if anything, is happening beyond the realm of mentorships?

To their credit, the Literature Board and the Australian Publishers Association co-fund the Beatrice Davis Fellowship every other year, allowing a senior Australian editor to work in the USA for up to three months. In 2001 this cost $30,000. On alternate years to the Beatrice Davis Fellowship, the Literature Board funds a Residential Editorial Program (REP). On page 9, Heather Cam, one of the participants, discusses the latest REP, which was held over five days at Varuna at a cost of $45,000.

If allowed to continue, these programmes will certainly have a long-term impact on the quality of editorial input in Australian publishing. But last year the Literature Board decided to undertake a bold experiment in direct editorial funding: it awarded Penguin a grant of $20,500 towards a programme of intensive editorial support to ten Australian writers'. Explaining the Board's strategy, its Manager, Gail Cork, said:

The Literature Board has been concerned for some time about diminishing levels of editorial support generally available to writers. Penguin's programme is one of several options the Board is exploring. It is similar to a mentorship programme in that it will deliver intensive one-to-one professional support to ten (predominantly new) writers for a specified number of hours over and above what Penguin could normally provide. The Board's immediate concern in supporting Penguin's programme is essentially pragmatic; namely to measure the benefits that flow from a higher-than-usual level of editorial support in terms of both the writers' professional development and the literary standard of the finished work.

Bob Sessions of Penguin argues that the most important relationship in publishing is that between author and editor. The ASA agrees with him. It will be interesting to see if continuing Australia Council support for mentorship and editorial programmes can convince Sessions's peers in publishing. There is a great opportunity here for the Australian publishing industry and the Australia Council to invest wisely in the future.