The Pulitzer Prize-nominated author is in Melbourne next week for the Melbourne Writers Festival, where he will lead a discussion of the success of his San Francisco-based indie publishing house McSweeney's.

Founded by Eggers in 1998, McSweeney's produces books, the influential journal of new writing (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern),  monthly magazine The Believer and Voice of Witness, a non-profit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises.

By email, often his preferred format for interviews, Eggers says the fact McSweeney's exists at all is hopeful.

"That's success for a very small independent publisher. We hope that our existence owes a lot to the care we put into our quarterly and books," he says.

"I'm answering your questions at an airport, and was just in the airport bookstore, which was carrying about 5000 book titles and 200 print magazines. So that kind of thing always gives you hope."

But the industry, he concedes, has changed and publishers now need to try twice as hard as they did 20 years ago.

"There are a lot of choices out there, a lot of ways to read, and if we in the print business want to survive, we have to make print an entirely different experience from reading digitally. So at McSweeney's, after we spend a year or so working on a book, making the text as perfect as we can, then we try to invest in the craft of the book, the feel and heft and beauty of the object itself," he says. "I really think people like beautiful things, and there's nothing more beautiful than a well-written book printed and bound and covered with care."

Eggers was already a seasoned publisher when he found fame - and gushing comparisons to JD Salinger - with his 2000 memoir A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. He has since written 11 novels and several children's books.

When he's not writing acclaimed novels - or screenplays or short stories or musical collaborations with the likes of Spike Jonze and Beck -  he's also a passionate literacy advocate. In 2002 he and teacher Nínive Calegari  founded  826 Valencia, a non-profit writing and tutoring centre for children aged between six and 18.

It's a model that has inspired similar enterprises around the world, including Sydney's Story Factory and Melbourne's 100 Story building in Footscray, founded by Lachlann Carter in 2009, who in Melbourne will co-chair another Writers Festival panel with Eggers discussing how these organisations inspire young people to develop a love of reading and writing.

The 826 model, Eggers says, also augurs well for publishing.

"We've been around 12 years now, and in terms of young people's love of reading, writing and making their own books,  none of that has changed a bit," he says. "Kids have an inherent and insatiable passion for stories, and all you need to do is keep feeding them books to read and paper to write on. In fact, because they swim in digital waters so often, making and holding books, and being published in books, is comparatively exotic. So we find that kids gravitate toward the tactile more than ever."

In the festival's closing night address, Eggers will also discuss his latest work, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, a novel written entirely in dialogue. It's not the first time Eggers has experimented with form, but this ambitious device he says, was "surprisingly liberating".

"I didn't set out to write an all-dialogue book, but after a chapter or two, I was finding that the book didn't need anything else. So it became a challenge to write the rest that way. Constraints often work that way - they free you by focusing you."

Your Fathers... was published less than a year after his last work, the cyber-paranoia novel The Circle, although the author plays down his evident prolificness.

"Fathers/Prophets actually was written, most of it at least, before The Circle. But it was such a different book that I set it aside," he says. "So I wrote The Circle, then went back to Fathers/Prophets and was surprised to find I still liked it. It does feel weird to have put those two books out in rapid succession, given until then, it had been about three years between books."

And yes, of course he's already working on his next one.

"There's a lot to say, and I could get hit by a bus tomorrow," he says.

It's the continuing success of his 826 program though, which has now inspired at least 22 similar programs around the world, of which Eggers seems most proud.

"The real growth has been in centres inspired by 826 but not directly affiliated with us. I just visited two in Italy that took our basic ideas and adapted them to their cities - Florence and Milan. And of course in Melbourne and Sydney, you have 100 Story Building and Sydney Story Factory, respectively. Seeing the idea adapted and shaped to fit other cities and countries is really the goal, and every time a new centre opens, it just knocks me flat," he says. "It's hands-down my favourite thing to stand back and watch it happen."

Dave Eggers will appear at the Melbourne Writers Festival, Saturday, August 30 (Meet McSweeney's, 3.30pm) and Sunday August 31 (Creativity, Reading & Childhood, 10.30am; closing night address, 6.30pm). www.mwf.com.au