 In spite of his belief that there was a market for cheap Australian books the prospects were not encouraging.Australians generally had not much faith in the value of the work of their novelists, and it seemed unlikely that books could be sold in large editions in a country with a population still under 4,000,000 when Rowlandson began publishing at the turn of the century.An early transaction was the unprecedented fee of £500 for the copyright of "Sandy's Selection" by Steele Rudd, which meant that about 20,000 copies had to be sold before a penny of profit could come in.