Flat Chat Press: A Brief History

Industry experience with Flat Chat Press is an important component of the Bachelor of Writing and Publishing degree at NMIT. Flat Chat Press operates as a commercial publishing house, producing a wide range of publications: poetry, non-fiction, educational texts, fiction and children’s books.

Flat Chat Press grew out of the Professional Writing & Editing Diploma at NMIT. It was the brainchild of two of that course’s leading teachers.

From its inception in 2000, the PW&E course had published a regular in-house magazine, INfusion, which featured student and teacher writing. INfusion has appeared four times a year for the last nine years.

During early 2004, discussions took place about the possibility of encouraging a far more extensive publishing program, and linking the publications to a module within the Writing course – namely Small Press Publishing. This was how Flat Chat Press was born: as the publishing arm of the PW&E course at NMIT.

The mission statement, developed at that time, expressed the following guiding principles.

Flat Chat Press is guided by the following stated intentions:

To provide students enrolled in the PW&E course with the opportunity to have hands-on experience in all aspects of publishing: project development, manuscript assessment and selection, structural and copy editing, book design and layout, proof reading, negotiating with printers, distribution and so on.
To provide students in the PW&E course with opportunities to publish their works.
To produce a variety of books and related materials: short story anthologies, poetry, longer fiction, non-fiction, children’s books, educational texts and so on, and to market these at a reasonable price.
To showcase the writing of students and teachers in the course, as a means of building the reputation of the course across the state of Victoria and nationally.
To offer individuals and organisations opportunities to have their work produced professionally and for a fair and reasonable cost.