In 1995, Keneally was no longer in mid-career. He was well known in his own country, was well recognized in both Britain and the United States and had Schindler's Ark/ List selling in over twenty languages worldwide. He had a firm sense of himself as a writer. Temperament still drove him to discover new stories, but his books were starting to stretch out behind him. It was time to take stock. Keneally declared, ‘I'm going to settle down and become more predictable in what I write. I'm nearly 60 now and it's about time I came in off the road.’

Predictability may have been the intention for his novels, but it was certainly not to be found in the industry that published them. As John Sutherland shows in Victorian Novelists and Publishers, a lot of the amalgamations and rationalizations during the 1980s were a repeat on a global scale of what had happened within nations during the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, some elements were new, and many of them affected the Australian market in different ways than elsewhere. A cultural boom in Australia commenced with government pump priming of the arts in the 1970s, and publishing of local writers flourished in the following decade. Business restructuring and government funding cuts then threatened a decline in literary production. Having access to three Anglophone markets enabled Keneally to keep publishing: when Britain went through economic downturns in the eighties, America kept the author's career going; when the United States suffered the 2007– 8 Global Financial Crisis, Australia was relatively insulated and could keep up its publishing.

In the 1990s, the merging of old family publishing houses into transnational conglomerates put pressure on all nation-based subsidiaries to return larger profit margins. Multinationals used collective financial power to buy and market ‘big ticket’ novelists likely to bring in huge sums. If Keneally had once been counselled against cobbling together two separate stories, now it was better policy to pull together as many stories as possible into one big book. Schindler achieved this by happy accident, and the strategy was repeated more deliberately in the non-fiction behemoth The Great Shame and the almost 600-page novel Bettany's Book.