Appendix 2

NOTE ON RESEARCH METHODS

This book is based on research that was carried out between 2005 and 2009, primarily in London and New York. Having previously studied the worlds of scholarly book publishing (including the university presses) and higher education publishing (including the college textbook publishers), my aim in this research was to study the world of trade publishing – that is, the world of general interest books that are aimed at a wider public and sold through high-street bookstores, general retailers and other outlets. I planned to focus primarily on mainline adult fiction and non-fiction; I was not proposing to examine in detail the more specialized domains of trade publishing such as children’s books, illustrated art books, diet, health and self-help books, or more specialized genres like romance and science fiction. I also planned to restrict my focus to English-language trade publishing, and more specifically to the trade publishing business in Britain and the US. The inclusion of both Britain and the US was essential in my view, since most of the large trade publishers operate as international organizations and have a major presence in both of these countries, and since Britain and the US are both the principal sources of content for trade publishers operating in the English language and their two most important markets. Focusing on just one of these countries would be partial at best and would fail to do justice to the internationalized, and increasingly globalized, character of English-language publishing.

The main research method I used was the semi-structured in-depth interview. The great advantage of this method for the kind of research I was setting out to do is that it enables you to get inside organizations and get a feel for how they work, allows you to explore issues in depth and helps you to see the world from the viewpoint of particular individuals located at particular positions within the field. I always assured my interviewees that they and their organizations would remain anonymous, and that anything they said that was confidential would remain so. This was vital, in my view, since we were often discussing sensitive issues about strategy, organizational politics and performance, and since it is difficult to talk about a business like publishing without using particular examples and individuals to illustrate your points. I wanted interviewees to feel free to discuss these issues openly, without having to worry about whether their views would be reported verbatim and attributed to them in print or whether their organizations would be named. Assurances about anonymity and confidentiality were an essential part of building trust in a relationship where the richness and quality of the communication is directly dependent on the extent to which the interviewee trusts the interviewer and believes that what they are doing is worthwhile. All interviews were recorded and transcribed – although, my assurances about anonymity and confidentiality notwithstanding, there was the odd occasion when I was asked to turn off the recorder while a particularly sensitive issue was discussed.

Interviewing is an underestimated art. It’s not so much a method as a skill or craft that you learn by doing – you get better and better but, in my experience, you never feel like you’ve mastered the art. Partly this is because your questions as an interviewer get better as you understand more about how an industry and the organizations within it work; rereading my first interviews, I am always struck by how naive some of my questions now seem, how many opportunities I missed and how many tantalizing comments I failed to follow up. Partly it’s also because every interview situation is different and you can’t anticipate what will happen in the course of the interview, what kind of rapport you will establish with the interviewee or even how long it will last. Sometimes you go into an interview expecting to have an hour only to find that an emergency has cropped up and your time has been cut in half. Then there are other occasions when a scheduled hour turns into an hour and a half or even two, and when the interview turns into a flowing conversation with no real time constraint. As an interviewer you have to have the flexibility and sharpness of mind to respond to these varying circumstances, to seize unexpected opportunities when they arise and make the most of whatever time you’re able to get.

I always went into interviews with a structured set of topics and questions, tailored to the individual and organization concerned, but I never treated this plan as fixed: I allowed the conversation to flow in different directions depending on the interests and experiences of the interviewee and his or her judgement about what was important and what was not. Sometimes things came up in an interview that I had not thought about in advance, perhaps didn’t even know existed; part of the skill of a good interviewer is to be able to see the importance of these unanticipated revelations, to put aside your preconceptions and, on the spur of the moment, find a way to follow up these fresh openings. An interview is a living, flowing conversation, and, as in any conversation, timing is crucial: something unexpected is said, you have a chance to follow it up if you can find the right words quickly, and then the opportunity is gone. If you miss it, it may never come again – this might be your only hour with this particular person. Of course, you might be able to send them an email afterwards – ‘Could I just ask you one more question about something you said?’ – but it’s never the same: in all likelihood you won’t get a reply, and if you do, it will almost certainly lack the kind of spontaneous frankness and insightful detail of an answer given to a direct question asked face-to-face in the full flow of a conversation. I often found myself coming out of an interview thinking, ‘If only I had asked that question then…’

I was lucky: I had many second chances to ask questions I had failed to ask the first time around and to follow up points that had come up in the course of an interview, as I was able to interview many individuals twice or even three times over the course of several months or, in some cases, several years. This turned out to be invaluable as a way of deepening my understanding of the business of trade publishing and how it was changing. Sometimes second interviews are much more revealing than first interviews, partly because the relationship and a degree of trust have already been established and partly because the basic ground has already been covered: now you can focus on particular issues and explore them in much greater depth. But they can also be more revealing because your own understanding of the business and the field has improved since the first interview, so your questions are more precise and to the point.

While interviewing can be a wonderful way of gaining insight into how organizations work, it also has its limitations. However generous your interviewees may be (and some of mine were extraordinarily generous), their time is limited and other commitments are always pressing in; you can learn a lot in an hour or two but much, necessarily, will remain unsaid. More importantly, some interviewees are more open than others; some will lean back in their chair, throw their feet up on the table and tell you frankly and unselfconsciously how things work and how they do what they do, while others will sit behind their desk and try to fill the time with anodyne descriptions of general trends or bland statements of company policy, occasionally glancing nervously at the microphone. Whenever I found myself faced with organization speak (it happened, though less frequently than one might think), I tried, as gently as I could, to cut through it: I wanted to know what really mattered to the individual I was interviewing, how they really did what they did and what they really thought about it. But however many times you come back to a question and ask it again in a slightly different way, sometimes you can never be entirely sure that what you’re hearing is what this person really thinks, or merely what they want you to think they think. This is why it helps to spread your net widely and not to rely too much on the words of any one individual. Usually you can tell – if you’re a reasonably competent person skilled in the ordinary arts of conversation – when someone is speaking honestly and openly and when they’re having you on. But you can never be entirely sure.

My interviews were focused above all on the three key players in the field of trade publishing: publishers, agents and booksellers. I selected the publishing houses carefully. Working with the large corporate publishers was essential, since they had become such dominant players and occupied what could be thought of as the centre of the field. But I also wanted to talk with people working at medium-sized and small houses – some so small that they were literally a one-man one-woman operation run from a computer and a telephone in their apartment in their spare time – to see how their perspectives and working practices differed and to understand the difficulties they faced. I wanted to understand the similarities and differences between Britain and the US, so I made sure that I worked with publishers in both countries. At the large and medium-sized houses I interviewed CEOs, CFOs, COOs and other senior managers, including sales and marketing managers and, where they existed, the managers responsible for developing digital strategy and new business initiatives. I interviewed many publishers, editors and other staff at different levels of the organization, from the heads of imprints and divisions and senior editors who had worked for the company for many years to junior editors and editorial assistants who had been with the organization for only a year or two (and, in some cases, less). As new entrants to the field, junior editors and younger staff are still learning the ropes and they lack the standing, the authority, the security and, in some cases, the conviction of their more senior colleagues, all of which means that they tend to have a different and, in some respects, fresh perspective – outsiders within; some things that their senior colleagues take for granted are still puzzling to them, and listening to them describe the practices and procedures to which they were trying, sometimes struggling, to adapt helped to throw these practices and procedures into sharp relief. I also interviewed a number of former CEOs, publishers and senior managers who had retired from the business for various reasons; in some cases I was able to interview them both when they were in post and after they had left. These post-retirement interviews were often tremendously insightful: the fact that these individuals were retired tended to give them a certain distance from the organizations that had once employed them and enabled them to speak with a kind of candour that would have been difficult while they were still in post.

I interviewed a wide range of agents, including well-known and well-established agents who were the founders of, or partners at, large and powerful agencies; agents who had recently split off from established agencies and set up their own agencies, or who had given up their careers as publishers or editors and ‘gone over to the other side’; and a number of younger agents who were working for agencies and struggling to build their own careers. On the retail side, I interviewed people working for some of the large bookselling chains as well as a variety of independent booksellers; I also interviewed some of the book buyers at supermarkets in the UK.

To set up interviews, I drew on existing contacts where I had them – having previously carried out research on academic publishing, I already had many contacts in the world of trade publishing. I also asked interviewees for their advice on other people who, in their view, would be worth interviewing, and I was able in this way to generate a constantly expanding network of contacts and potential interviewees. Access was easier than one might have imagined. Publishing is an industry of the word and those who work in this industry – publishers, editors, agents and others – like to talk. The only area where I experienced any significant difficulties in terms of access was on the retail side of the business. Not among independent booksellers – they were only too willing to talk, feeling, as many do, like a profession under siege. But the big retail chains were a different story. Getting access to the people at the top was not so hard – they were surprisingly generous with their time; but trying to get access to the middle management, and to key players like buyers, was, in some cases, like trying to find a back door into Fort Knox. One way or another, I managed to speak to enough buyers or former buyers to feel that I had some grasp of the way they worked and the problems they faced, though this is one area where I would have liked to have been able to do more.

Apart from interviewing people who worked for publishers, agencies and book retailers, I also interviewed a variety of other people who were connected in some way to the world of trade publishing, including book review editors working at key review media like the New York Times Book Review, fiction editors working at key literary magazines like the New Yorker, producers working for the book clubs of television programmes like the Richard and Judy show, freelance designers working for both large and small publishers, scouts working on a retainer for foreign publishing houses, managers working for technology companies that have a stake in the publishing field and, of course, writers – including writers writing under their own names, writers writing under pseudonyms and ‘ghostwriters’. While I was not setting out to study the world (or worlds) of writers, it was always part of my plan to carry out interviews with a number of writers; in the end I did more than I had originally planned, partly because the interviews themselves were so interesting and partly because they offered a very different and crucially important perspective on a field to which writers both belong and don’t belong, like some distant cousin who is tolerated but not really welcome at the family gathering. A proper study of the worlds of writers would be a wonderful project in its own right, but this was not the project on which I was embarked here.

Altogether I did around 280 interviews, amounting to around 500 hours of recording. Most interviews were around an hour and a half in length (the standard time period I asked for when setting up the interview), but many lasted two hours and some went on for considerably longer. Once the interviews had been transcribed, I read them, noted common themes, filed them away and returned to them later, rereading some interviews many times over the months and years. Since I had done all the interviews myself, I was already familiar with the contents, but the details fade with time; rereading them and noting common topics and themes was a helpful aide-memoire when it came to developing the main lines of argument and analysis.

In addition to conducting interviews, I sat in on acquisitions meetings at some of the large trade houses, which gave me a sense of how decisions were taken and business was handled in a large organization. Many publishers were also happy to share sales figures and other internal documents with me. I visited Nielsen BookScan, Bowker and the Book Industry Study Group, and all of these organizations gave me generous access to their data and research reports. I kept detailed field notes throughout the time that I was doing research; these notes, filling a dozen notebooks, were a way of highlighting for myself certain themes that were emerging from the research and beginning the process of trying to make sense of the world in which I was immersed.

Making sense of a world like trade publishing is no easy task: like many spheres of social life, this is a messy and confusing world, full of arcane practices and eccentric individuals but above all just very diverse and complex. There are many different publishing houses, each with its own history and distinctive organizational features, there are hundreds of agents and agencies and thousands of booksellers; these and other players are constantly interacting with one another in elaborate and shifting ways, and this complex field of interaction is itself conditioned by a range of factors – social, legal, economic, technological – that often arise outside the field and extend well beyond it. Trying to make sense of all this is like being faced with a large pile of pieces from a jigsaw puzzle, not knowing what the puzzle is a picture of or even whether the pieces in front of you make up a picture at all. My assumption was that, if you fiddled around with the pieces for long enough and looked at them from different angles, you would eventually be able to see how they fit together, you would be able to discern some order in the chaos, some structure in the flux. Or, to recall a different metaphor used in the Introduction, if you listened attentively to people speaking a language you didn’t understand, you would eventually be able to grasp the rules of grammar that make their language intelligible and enable them to communicate with one another. My task as the analyst was to find this order and bring it to the fore, to grasp these rules and make them explicit – or, to put it more technically, to reconstruct the logic of the field. Reconstructing this logic is a way of trying to identify the forces and processes that are most important in shaping the structure and development of the field; it is a way of separating the essential from the inessential, the things that matter most from the things that matter less. It is not saying that other things are unimportant or have no place in a full account of the world of trade publishing; it is simply saying that they are less important if you want to understand what makes this world tick.

Of course, I may have got it wrong. It could be that the factors I’ve picked out and linked together in what I call the logic of the field are less important than I think, or that I’ve overlooked something that is crucial if you want to understand how the world of trade publishing has evolved over the last 40–50 years – if so, then, as with any serious attempt to make sense of the social world, my reconstruction is open to revision and my argument open to criticism. But the basic assumption underlying my approach is that, despite the enormous complexity of this world and the arcane, even baffling character of some of its practices, it is a world that can be understood.

‘To be understood’ does not mean that we have to settle for something less than a rigorous, social scientific account of this world, as if ‘understanding’ were the feeble sibling in the family of the social sciences. To understand that which is puzzling, to clarify that which is obscure, to render intelligible that which seems at first to defy our comprehension – these are perfectly legitimate goals of social scientific inquiry. Only those wedded to an archaic and narrow-minded conception of the social sciences would think otherwise. But to put it like this does not do full justice to the notion of the logic of the field. For reconstructing this logic is not just a way of understanding a world that might strike one as puzzling and obscure: it also helps us to see why the players in the field act as they do – why, for example, some players situated at some positions in the field are willing and able to pay so much for a particular book by a particular author while other players situated at other positions are not, or why some organizations owned by large corporations are willing and eager to acquire other publishers while other organizations are not, and so on. In other words, the logic of the field has some explanatory value: it helps us not just to understand a world but also to explain why the actors and organizations that inhabit this world act as they do. This may not be explanation in the sense of trying to formulate a general law that demonstrates a regular relationship between cause and effect, but there are more ways of thinking about explanation, tailored more sensitively to the kind of place that the social world is, than this simplified model of explanation as law-like regularity would suggest.

The logic of the field provides the backbone for my account of the world of trade publishing – without it, we might have a collection of good stories but it would be spineless, it would lack structure and argument and it would give the reader no sense of the dynamic processes that bind the key players together in relations of competition and mutual dependency. But at the same time I’ve tried to flesh out this account by weaving into the analysis the views and stories of particular individuals. These are always individuals situated at particular points in the field or on the margins of the field, often belonging to organizations that are themselves situated at particular positions. As explained earlier, I’ve given pseudonyms to most of these individuals and invented names for their organizations to preserve their anonymity; in the small number of cases where I’ve attributed the views expressed in interviews to actual individuals, I’ve done so with their permission. I’ve quoted them pretty much verbatim, though I’ve taken the liberty of tidying up the grammar now and again and of removing some of the idiosyncrasies of the spoken word when I felt they would hinder rather than help the reader. Of course, deciding which individuals from among the many I interviewed should be given a voice in this way was not easy, not simply because there were so many who spoke with great force and eloquence about the world of which they are part and to which they have devoted most if not all of their professional lives, but also because any selection is necessarily going to be partial – a particular set of views from a particular set of places expressing a particular set of experiences. But when these voices are placed within the context of the structure and dynamic of the field, their partiality can be relativized. They can be seen for what they are: not disembodied voices claiming some special privilege to speak authoritatively about this world, but rather voices speaking from particular positions within the field, drawing on all the knowledge and expertise they have gained to speak about this world as they see it, to explain how they do what they do and to describe their experiences of it. The viewpoint of any individual player in the field is just that: a view from a point. Its singularity is not a partiality that distorts our understanding of this world but rather a complementary moment that enriches it – it is the particular within the general, the concrete within the abstract. Weaving the views and stories of individuals into the analysis brings the logic of the field down to earth and gives the reader a glimpse – or, more precisely, a series of glimpses – of what it is to inhabit this world, to live in its different neighbourhoods and to speak the language that all of its inhabitants have, in their own idiomatic ways, learned to speak.

As with any attempt to understand the world of others, I place a great deal of weight on what those whose world I have sought to understand make of my attempt to understand it. When I finished a draft text I sent it to a number of individuals who work in the field of trade publishing in Britain and the US and invited them to comment on it. This was extremely valuable as a check on my own understanding of their world and as a way of ensuring that the details of my account were accurate; it also gave me a chance to test my account of the logic of the field against the experiences and intuitions of key players. I did not take the view that the validity of my account required any and every member of the field to accept it as a fair and accurate account of their world – that would be far too stringent a requirement. But I did and do believe that if this account were entirely unrecognizable to those whose world it is, then I would have failed in my task to make sense of it. That they should recognize in my account the outlines of a world they know from within, that they should see it as a fair and accurate representation of their world (albeit not the only possible representation), was, in my view, an important test of the validity of my account, even if it was not the only one. They didn’t have to agree with every detail of my account or share my critical assessment, but I would expect them at least to recognize in this account the contours of their world. For it is, after all, the language they speak whose rules we are seeking to understand.