10 10 TROUBLE IN THE TRADE
Up to now I’ve concentrated on analysing the structure and dynamic of the field of trade publishing and examining the consequences of the digital revolution, and I’ve generally refrained from expressing views of a more normative or evaluative kind. I now want to change tack and offer a more critical reflection on the field of trade publishing. Are there aspects of trade publishing that are particularly troubling or worrying? Which aspects of the way this field has developed over the last 30–40 years are, or should be, a source of concern? And concern for whom – why should anyone be concerned? Does it matter what happens in the book publishing industry today, and if so, why?
Short-termism
Publishing was traditionally a long-term business. Good publishing was about acquiring books that sold well over a long time period. Any publisher would be happy to have a book that sold exceptionally well in its first year, but the books that were of particular value were those that sold well year after year, acquiring a long and healthy life on the backlist. As trade publishing became more vertically integrated, the backlist became increasingly important as a source of profitability and stability for trade publishers. Hardcover houses were no longer selling off the paperback rights: they began to build their own backlists by launching paperback imprints or acquiring paperback houses into which they could feed their books. Some hardcover houses that had sold off paperback rights began to revert them, so that they could build their own backlist by reissuing in paperback books they had originally published in hardcover some years (even decades) before. Paperback houses, in turn, began to secure their sources of supply by launching their own hardcover imprints or acquiring hardcover houses to supply their paperback lines. As the large corporations began to colonize the field of trade publishing from the 1960s on, many sought to acquire houses with long-established backlists, precisely because they knew that backlist publishing was the most profitable and least risky form of publishing.
However, developments in the field of trade publishing during the 1980s and 1990s began to erode the traditional emphasis on backlist publishing. Three developments were particularly important. First was the hardback revolution: as the retail chains rolled out their superstores and retailers began discounting aggressively, and as the large publishing corporations began to apply mass-marketing techniques to the publication of hardcovers, the volume of sales that could be achieved on the initial hardcover edition grew exponentially. The financial formula that had underpinned the industry in the 1950s and 1960s was being turned on its head: increasingly it was the frontlist hardcover, not the backlist paperback, that was the engine of growth for the industry. By the early 2000s, paperback sales, especially in the mass-market format, had begun to fall off, undercut by the decline in the price differential between hardcover and paperback editions and the widespread availability of attractively produced, heavily discounted hardcovers.
The second development was the increasing role of large corporations in the field of trade publishing and their hunger for growth. All companies need to grow, but large, publicly quoted corporations need to grow more than others. They need to keep the stock market and their shareholders happy, and achieving regular growth and good levels of profitability is the only way to do it. The large corporations that bought up publishing houses in the first wave of consolidation in the 1960s and 1970s undoubtedly had inflated expectations of the levels of growth and profitability that were achievable in trade publishing; most bailed out when they realized that their financial goals were not going to be met and that other benefits they had hoped to reap from their acquisitions, such as creative synergies with other sectors of their media businesses, were not materializing. The corporations that became dominant in the field during the second wave of consolidation were, at least in some cases, corporations that had larger stakes in the publishing industry, were more committed to it and were more realistic about the levels of growth and profitability that could be achieved in trade publishing. They did, nonetheless, expect to see growth and good levels of profitability – double-digit if at all possible, with 10 per cent top-line growth and profits of 10–15 per cent or more as a typical target. This was an ambitious and difficult goal to achieve in an industry like trade publishing, which is characterized by a high level of serendipity, and in markets that were mature and largely static, growing by little more than the rate of inflation.
During the 1980s and 1990s it was still possible for the trade houses owned by large corporations to achieve significant growth, but they did this largely by acquiring other companies and merging them into their publishing operations. This strategy of growth by acquisition delivered benefits at several levels: it contributed immediately to the top-line growth of the company; it offered the opportunity to improve the bottom line by rationalizing back-office operations and stripping out redundancy; it increased the scale of the company as a whole, thereby increasing its market share and strengthening its leverage in its negotiations with other key players in the field; and it could add editorial diversity and prestige, raising the profile of the house and making it a more attractive destination for authors and agents. But it also served to conceal the underlying fact that achieving 10 per cent growth in a flat market would be difficult, if not impossible, to realize through organic growth alone. ‘The corporations buy things for way more than they’re worth to hide the fact that there is no growth,’ commented one senior publisher who had worked for several large corporations and watched their behaviour at close quarters. They often end up having to write off some of the investment. Moreover, as the opportunities to grow through acquisition diminish over time, simply because there are fewer and fewer publishing houses left to acquire, the growth conundrum that lies at the heart of every publishing corporation becomes more and more apparent. They are forced to place more emphasis on high-risk bets on big books, in the hope that some of these will become bestsellers and make an exceptional contribution to growth, while at the same time looking constantly for cost-saving measures that might enable them to preserve or grow the bottom line if the top line remains relatively stagnant.
It is this pressure, rooted in the growth conundrum faced by every large corporation in the field of trade publishing, that leads inexorably to the short-termism of the publishing industry today. Within the large corporations that occupy the centre of the field, it is more and more difficult to publish for the long term, to adopt acquisition strategies that are aimed at building a backlist over time, precisely because the overriding imperative is to meet your budget targets for the current year and to fill the gap that is opened up every year, without fail, between the sales you’re likely to achieve with your current through-put and the sales you’re expected to achieve by your corporate bosses. ‘It’s an unrelenting pressure, and then you start at zero all over again,’ as one former CEO put it. So a great deal of effort is invested – by middle management above all, but by editors too – in trying to find big books that will make an immediate financial impact. Extreme publishing is, by its very nature, short-termist: it is publishing quickly in order to produce an immediate effect. This does not prevent the large publishing corporations from taking chances with new authors or even taking on some books that they know or strongly believe to be small – many continue to do so for a variety of reasons, as we’ve seen. Extreme publishing can and does go hand in hand with the development of a varied portfolio of books. But the relentless budget pressure unavoidably produces a gradual shift of priorities within the large corporations, forcing publishers and editors to devote more and more of their energy and resources to big books which could make an immediate impact and to pay less and less attention to books that might build more slowly over time.
Does short-termism necessarily lead to bad publishing? Not necessarily. The CEO of Olympic (discussed in chapter 6) was quite right to say that sometimes books published quickly turn out to be better and more successful books because they are closer to market when they are bought. Nevertheless, it is also undoubtedly the case that a short-termist mentality leads to plenty of bad publishing. You don’t have to be a cultural snob to see that a good number of the books that are put together in great haste – often ghostwritten ‘autobiographies’ of celebrities or heavily illustrated gossip along the lines of Paris Hilton’s Confessions of an Heiress – and published quickly in the hope that they will help to fill a budget gap are not books that add much to the cultural well-being (or even, for that matter, the entertainment) of the human race. Many also fail in straightforward financial terms, as increasingly desperate publishers find themselves competing with other publishers who are in the same boat and paying over the odds for books whose principal raison d’être is to plug a hole. They may ship out large quantities in order to register the sales before the end of the financial year, only to find themselves inundated with high returns several months later. And the stress experienced by those who have to manage this process is palpable. As one former CEO of a large corporation put it, ‘The agony and the ecstasy of the book publisher starts out with high returns in the first part of the year, disappointing sales and postponed publication dates and then sheer absolute terror as he or she contemplates the financial results based on what is actually known at that point.’
The problem is not just that the financial demands of the large corporations accentuate the emphasis on big books for which matters of quality are secondary to their immediate financial impact: it is also that the model itself is unsustainable in the long run. So long as the large corporations are able to acquire other companies and integrate them into their publishing operations, they will be able to conceal the extent to which their ability to meet their growth targets has depended on the growth and the economies of scale they’ve been able to achieve through mergers and acquisitions; when they are no longer able to acquire, the limitations of the model will be experienced with increasing severity. The gains achieved through acquisitions can be drawn out over several years and, combined with the occasional bestseller, they can cover over very effectively the tensions inherent in the growth conundrum. But they can’t cover them over forever. Your luck will run out eventually, and when you can’t fall back on further economies of scale achieved through mergers and acquisitions, you’ll have to start cutting into bone. ‘When you run out of spectacular bestsellers and you have no more cost savings that you can squeeze without changing the nature of the business and the company that you are, then, in a flat market, you bump up against a limit at some point,’ explained the former CEO. That may be a point at which one CEO or senior manager is pushed out and replaced by another, who may, with some structural reorganization, be able to reduce overheads and squeeze more savings out of the company, thereby improving the bottom line. But the reprieve is likely to be temporary. The problem has not been solved, it’s only been postponed. In all likelihood it will resurface again in a few years time because it is rooted in a contradiction that lies at the heart of the corporate publishing house – namely, the expectation of substantial growth in a market that is largely flat.
So what is the solution? Is there one? There are some senior figures in the large publishing houses who believe that CEOs should simply tell their corporate bosses that their growth targets are unrealistic. They should explain that when things are going well they can grow the top line by 2–3 per cent and they can grow the bottom line by 4 per cent but to expect anything more in a flat market is just not realistic. Would their explanations land on deaf ears? Maybe. It depends on which corporation it is, whether it’s public or private and what other pressures they might be facing at a particular point in time. ‘I wouldn’t say they were deaf to it,’ said the former CEO. ‘But if you have a portfolio of businesses that are all facing the same issue, what are you going to do? You increase the pressure – this is the classic response of corporate headquarters. You increase the pressure and see who responds better. Those who respond better get fed a little bit more in terms of reinvestment and those who don’t get starved and sold.’ There are plenty of those working in the large publishing houses who feel this might be a better option at the end of the day. ‘You’re better off saying, “Hey, you know what? Sell me then, get rid of us,”’ said one senior publisher. Corporate ownership has its advantages, but when it forces publishing houses to engage in activities that are concerned primarily with meeting short-term, unrealistic growth targets rather than contributing to the long-term flourishing of the publishing house and its programme, then the price to be paid for these advantages may be too high.
The short-termism of the industry is not due solely to the financial pressure produced by the unrealistic growth targets of the large corporations; it stems from other sources too, including the financial pressure produced by the large retail chains whose stock-turn requirements are much higher than those of the traditional independent bookstores and from the escalation of advances orchestrated by agents who, despite their avowals of loyalty to their clients, are locked into the same system of contestation and reward, a system that has produced a revolution of rising expectations from which no player in the field, even the small or medium-sized independent press, has been entirely shielded. For those authors who, through a mixture of talent, good connections and good luck, have enjoyed the rewards of this system, there is much to praise: advances are higher than they’ve ever been, books are available in more retail outlets and in more towns and cities than they ever were and, with some good marketing and a large and powerful sales force behind your book, sales can reach unprecedented levels. But these are the lucky few. For the vast majority of writers or aspiring writers, this system seems like an alien beast that behaves in unpredictable and erratic ways, sometimes reaching out to them with a warm smile and a handful of cash, inviting them to join the party and holding out the prospect of a future of riches and fame, and then suddenly, without much warning or explanation, pulling back, refusing to respond or perhaps cutting off communication completely. This is a system geared towards maximizing returns within reasonably short time frames; it is not designed to cultivate literary careers over a lifetime. Thoughtful publishers who came into the business before these features became so pronounced worry about the implications of this revolution of rising expectations for the future of literary culture: ‘What keeps me awake at night is worrying about how we are going to find the next generation of authors that we can build over time to create careers. We’ve been lucky in that we were able to build the careers of 10 or 12 really good writers that we’re still publishing now and that’s marvellous, but it’s the future that you have to be concerned about.’
Damaged careers
The writer’s world is not the same as the world of publishers, agents and booksellers. These two worlds bump up against one another, and they need and depend on one another, but the area of overlap is small and is generally limited to ritualized interactions that occur along the boundaries. Many writers – there are exceptions, of course – know very little about the world of publishing and the structures of the field upon which their careers as writers depend: for them it is another world, located somewhere else and largely mysterious in the way it works, an object of wonder, dismay or simply incomprehension depending on the writer’s experiences of it. Although publishing is seemingly about authors as much as it is about books, in fact most authors are very much on the margins of the field if not entirely external to it. Their contact with the publishing world is mediated largely through their agent (or agents if, like many authors, they have had more than one), and typically they rely heavily on their agent’s knowledge and advice in order to navigate this world. The writer’s world is, above all, the world of writers. Those whom many writers think of as their friends and colleagues tend to be other writers – these are the people and the networks that matter to them. Of course, it matters to them what their agents think, it matters what their editors think, it matters what their readers think, but for many writers, what matters more than anything else is what other writers think. ‘I’m engaging in a conversation with other writers,’ explained one young writer in Brooklyn. ‘As much as writing a book is an offering to a reader it is a contribution to a conversation going on among writers, and I want to feel as if I’m conversant with those writers, the writers that I admire, the writers that are speaking most intelligently and seductively at the table. I want to contribute in ways that are meaningful and inspiring to them.’
It is in order to contribute to this conversation with other writers – or, indeed, with readers – that many writers find themselves bumping up against the world of publishing: they need this world and its players in order to do what they want to do, which is, for the most part, to write. Most writers, aspiring or otherwise, are not writing full-time: writing may be their calling, their passion, but it is rarely – except in a very small proportion of cases – their principal means of livelihood. But if they want to build a career as a writer, they know they will need the help of those whose job it is to buy and sell the written word. This doesn’t mean that they come to see what they’re doing as writing for agents or editors – in most cases they don’t (‘I didn’t write my first book for them and I’m determined never to write a book for them in the future, so they have to be on the other side of the river,’ said the young Brooklyn writer); it’s simply that they realize early on in their career that they need agents and editors in order to pursue their own ends. It’s a relationship of mutual dependency rather than a seamless convergence of interests.
Each writer has his or her own story of how they encountered the publishing world and what happened to them as they sought to pursue their vocation as a writer. Some of these are happy stories – young, aspiring writers who are snatched out of obscurity from a MFA (Master of Fine Arts) or MA programme by a visiting agent who miraculously secures a two-book deal with a major trade house involving staggering amounts of money (‘It was just totally, totally unreal – so much more money than I had ever even contemplated that anyone would possibly ever give me in my lifetime that it was like on another planet’); or writers who had the good fortune to find an agent early on who advised them well and helped place their books with able editors with whom they have had long and cordial relationships, enabling them to pursue, with relatively little trauma, their ambition to write (and even, in a relatively small number of cases, to live from their writing). But for every happy story of this kind there are countless stories of frustration, disappointment and despair, as writers find themselves tossed about in the world of publishing as if they were a small boat on a stormy sea with no idea of where they were heading and unsure whether they would ever reach land.
Let’s briefly follow the story of one. Joanne came to writing later in life – she had a successful career as a university professor before deciding, in her mid-forties, to give up her career as an academic and devote herself to writing crime fiction. She had written a novel in her spare time, found that she had a knack for it and decided she wanted to do more. Friends had advised her that she needed an agent and gave her various contacts. She sent her book to three, all of whom responded positively and said they wanted to represent her, and she chose to work with one. She knew virtually nothing about the world of publishing. She expected her agent to sell her book (‘I didn’t realize there was anything else’) and she had no idea at all about which publisher would be a good home for it. She needed an agent to get her book published and she was happy to leave everything to her. As it turned out, her agent was well connected and in a matter of days she had lined up a good deal with a major trade house in New York. Joanne was having dinner in a restaurant when her agent phoned. ‘“Look,” she said, “he’s offered a certain amount of money,” which sounded like an amazing amount of money to me, “but I want him to offer twice as much. So I’m going to turn it down on your behalf. Is that OK?” And I thought, phew, what do I know? So I said, “Alright, do it, you know – I don’t know anything about it.” I was exhilarated, excited and amazed.’ The publisher duly doubled the advance, the book was sold in New York and the agent used this deal to help secure a good deal with a major house in London. When her agent asked her if there was any particular clause she wanted in the contract, she thought for a second and said, ‘Yes, I’d like a clause saying I don’t have to go on tremendously long book tours.’ A complete neophyte, Joanne’s greatest worry was that she was going to be exhausted by all the attention she would receive when she became a published author. Little did she know.
Joanne had seen her first book as a one-off, but her editors on both sides of the Atlantic urged her to treat it as the first in a series. ‘“Crime is a slow build,” they said. “The way to get noticed is to have a series so that people can lock onto your central characters. So could you do another one in the same series?” And I said, “Sure.”’ But beyond that, no one ever advised her about how to continue the series, how to build the central character or even how often to come out with a new book – nothing, not a word, either from her editors or from her agent. She was left to her own devices. The first book was published in hardcover, followed by a mass market paperback, then the second, then the third. Feedback was minimal (‘The sales are fine but, you know, we hope they’ll get bigger’) but things seemed to be going smoothly. After all, what did Joanne know? Her agent seemed happy, her editors seemed content and Joanne was doing what she wanted to do. But then, around 2001, just as Joanne was finishing her fifth book, things started to fall apart. This is how she tells the story:
A younger author got taken on [by my publisher in London] and I got to know her. Something happened and I realized that she had a relatively large marketing budget. And so I said to my editor, ‘What’s my marketing budget?’ and my editor went kind of blank and I said, ‘What is it?’ and she said, ‘Well, maybe you’d better talk to the head of marketing.’ So I called him and he said, ‘Your marketing budget is nil.’ They had made a policy decision to put all their marketing budget on their top four or five bestsellers and withdraw, utterly, the budget from everyone else. It wasn’t exactly nil because they still sent out review copies and things like that, but apart from that ring-fenced stuff, there was nothing. So I was really shocked and alarmed.
Joanne spoke to her agent and told her she was really unhappy about this. Was there anything she could do? But her agent was ‘really sort of fatalistic about it – “Well, you know, that’s the way things are going.”’ Joanne pressed – ‘But can’t you do anything? Can’t you intervene in some way?’ ‘Well, mmm,’ her agent replied. So Joanne continued to express her dissatisfaction to her editor and eventually the head of marketing took her out for lunch. He was new to the company, he liked Joanne and for some reason he decided to take it upon himself to offer her some friendly advice:
‘You’ve done five books with us,’ he said, ‘they’re good books and they’re all getting better and we’re really glad to have them here. But you won’t get anywhere until you have a different editor. Your editor is too detached; you need somebody like [X] who’s more at the centre of things.’ And he told me something I didn’t know – that my editor didn’t even represent my books in the marketing meetings. [X] represented them and [X] might not have read them, and [X] had her own authors. That’s the first time I realized that I didn’t have an editor at [the publishing house] who was going to get behind my books and push them. And then he said, ‘You need a new agent too. Your agent is good at getting good prices for books but we never see her here, never see her.’ He had been in the job 18 months at that point and he said within his first month there he had about 20 agents who converged on him. He said they do it subtly, you know, they just kind of show up at his office door one day and say, ‘Hi, welcome to the new job, how are you doing?’ Just chat and stuff. And he said, ‘I’ve been here 18 months and I’ve never exchanged any communication with your agent whatsoever.’ It matters, he said, because the agents have to be pushing all the time in order for your book to get marketing money. And that’s when I realized that the younger woman who had some marketing money when I didn’t, one of the people who made me twig that I was on the slide here, had a very aggressive agent who was in there all the time.
Suddenly it all fell into place, but it was late. Ten years had gone by, five books had been written, opportunities had been missed that would never return. The head of marketing, new to the business and speaking out of turn, had told Joanne something about a writer’s career that nobody, neither her editor nor her agent, had had the wits or the nerve to tell her before. ‘I just wished I’d had that information ten years earlier.’
Joanne went to see her agent and became more pushy. ‘“Look,” I said, “I really need you in there fighting for me, it’s really important.” And she said, “I’m an old-fashioned agent, I don’t do that.” So I felt kind of abandoned, like my agent wasn’t there for me and the publishers weren’t doing stuff they should do for my books.’ Joanne decided that she couldn’t stay with her agent. She realized that she needed to raise her game; she needed an agent who would get more involved in her career, could give her advice and champion her at the publishing houses. So she made appointments to see a number of other agents who had been recommended by writer friends. She decided to go with a top agent who was well known in the business – ‘very, very grand’ – on the grounds that her reputation would give her the kind of clout in the publishing houses that her previous agent had lacked.
By this stage Joanne had finished the sixth novel. Her new agent had read it, was enthusiastic about it, had given her some helpful feedback and sent it to Joanne’s publisher. Her editor wrote back immediately and said she thought it was wonderful, but then things went quiet. Eventually her agent contacted the editor and the editor said that, while she loved the book, ‘the marketing people weren’t keen and weren’t going to take it. That was really quite surprising – shocking actually. But my agent said, “Don’t worry, don’t be downhearted, it’s a great book and they weren’t backing you strongly enough anyway. We’ll find a better home for it.”’ Joanne continued:
Then I heard nothing from her for 13 months, which was really weird. I left it for quite a while because I knew Christmas was coming up and it takes a long time to get things done at that time of year. So I didn’t make too much of a fuss for a while. And then I started bombarding her with letters and emails and phone calls to the reception and she just blanked me; it was the most extraordinary thing. All in all, it was 13 months that she didn’t get in touch with me, she didn’t tell me what had happened to the book, nothing. Finally I had to go to the Society of Authors because I felt I couldn’t go to another agent until I knew which editors she’d already sent it to and what their response had been and she wouldn’t answer me. So I went to the lawyers at the Society of Authors and said, ‘Look, I’m having this real problem with my agent,’ and they sent her a letter. A month went by and she still didn’t respond. So I went back to the Society of Authors again and said, ‘What more can you do?’ They were going to do something very fierce and then finally I got a three sentence note from the agent saying, ‘Dear Joanne, I sent your book to…’ and she named about six houses. ‘They all liked it but times are difficult. If you want to talk to me about this, do pop by.’ That’s it. No apology. I felt just completely blaaah, just completely blaaah. It was awful.
By now Joanne’s career was in serious trouble. She had published five books that had all been well received, had even won prizes, but none had broken out in the way that would convince her publishers that they were the kind of books they should get behind and push. Her sixth book had been published by a large house in New York but had been turned down by the publisher of her previous five books in London, and then her editor in New York phoned to say he was leaving the publishing house. Now she had no agent, she had no editor and she was in her early sixties – a middle-aged literary orphan. I ask her how she now feels about her career. ‘I’m finding it hard to think about it at all, actually. I guess I’m in denial. I feel very alone and I’m sort of paralysed by what’s happened. I’m writing my seventh book very, very slowly. It’s a good book, a terrific book, I have a lot of faith in it, but I haven’t shown it to any agents because I know that agents are turning people away like mad and I don’t want a rejection by an agent now.’ She has been a writer for nearly 20 years and she has literally no idea who will publish her next book, or indeed whether it will be published at all.
Looking back, Joanne now sees that she was terribly naive. ‘I had very unrealistic ideas about what it means to be an author. I expected that, if you write a good book, your publisher will make it a success, they’ll back it by things like advertising, they’ll put posters in the subway and send you on a ten-city tour, whereas in reality your book goes out there, you have a little party if you’re lucky and then a few people say, “I enjoyed your book,” and that’s that.’ For most of her writing career, she had no idea at all about what those who could make or break her career were expecting from her. She got very little advice, either from her agents or from her editors, and the only person who gave her any real insight into the workings of the publishing industry was a marketing manager who was new to the business and wanted to help her out. But now it’s probably too late. She realizes now that this is an industry that expects things to happen quickly, that is hungry for something new and that has little patience for what it regards as a settled mid-list author. ‘If there’s a plateau, that’s not good enough. So the fact that there might be 5,000 or 8,000 people out there who are always going to buy your book is neither here nor there. Those people can go jump as far as the publishers are concerned. After five books, if you’ve not really gone up, you’re out.’ I ask her if she has any idea what it means to ‘go up’, what kind of sales her books would have to achieve for her to be in favour. ‘No, no one ever told me that. I have no idea what it is.’ ‘So you’re totally in the dark on that?’ ‘Yes, totally.’
Joanne is disappointed but not bitter. The way she was treated by some of her agents and editors was inexcusably shabby and she would be entitled to feel aggrieved, but she accepts part of the blame for her predicament. She feels that she was too naive about the industry when she began. If she knew then what she knows now she wouldn’t have counted on her agents and editors to provide her with sensible advice and wouldn’t have interpreted their encouragement as a sign of commitment or long-term support. She would have taken it upon herself to try to find out what she needed to do to try to make her career a success and she would have been much more assertive, telling her agent what she wanted her to do and spending more time chatting with people at the publishing houses, from her editors to the publicity staff, just to get them on her side. She would have talked herself up constantly, something she would have found difficult personally but which she now believes is essential ‘because publishers are terribly uncertain about what’s good and what’s not, about what’s going to be successful and what’s not, and they need to hear positive things’. Above all, she would have aimed to be much more ambitious at the very outset. She wouldn’t have taken the view that she could work slowly and steadily and try to build a career as a writer by writing better and better books but would have given herself ten years at most to make it big, ‘because if you haven’t done it by then, people will be looking to drop you’. She doesn’t blame the editors. She realizes that they’re subject to very similar pressures; ‘They make it quickly or they don’t make it and a lot of the time they’re as much in the dark about what’s going on as authors are.’ But she does regret the fact that the big publishers have become so impatient, so preoccupied with sales figures that they’re willing to cut loose authors in whom they’ve invested quite a lot simply because their books, however good they might be, are not displaying the upward sales curve they want to see. ‘I regret the loss of a previous publishing ethic in which editors committed themselves to authors whom they thought had potential and stuck with those authors and saw themselves as developing a body of literary works rather than just churning out bestsellers. What I feel, in a funny sort of way, is a kind of nostalgia for something I never knew.’
The one solace is that Joanne has lots of friends who are writers and she spends a lot of time with them – indeed, like many writers, she makes her living not by writing but by teaching would-be writers on a part-time basis. She has become part of a community of writers that has its own forms of social life and support, from informal networks of friends to meetings and writers’ conventions. It’s a community bound together by a shared interest in writing and by forms of friendship and loyalty that are deeper and more important for many writers than their relationships with agents and editors (‘Your peers who are writers become your friends and they won’t drop you when you’re not published’). The community of writers is a world apart; it intersects with the publishing world but that intersection is fraught with tension that stems from the fact that the interests of writers don’t always coincide with the interests of agents and editors, a point nicely conveyed by a joke, recounted by Joanne, that was told by a well-known writer in an after-dinner speech at a writers’ convention:
‘Here we are,’ said the writer who was giving the speech, ‘a gathering again of the publishing industry, of the writing industry, the book industry. Isn’t it wonderful? I can see you all out there,’ he said, looking out at the people sitting at their tables in the banqueting hall. ‘I can see the writers trying to look reasonably smart, as if they’re not on the breadline, which of course they are. And there we have the publishers – dressed down of course, because they don’t want anyone to know how well they’re doing. And the agents,’ he said, with a slight pause as he cast his eyes over the room again, ‘well, we don’t see that much of the agents, just the occasional fin slicing through the water.’
Of course, Joanne’s story is unique, as is the story of every individual, but the trajectory of her career is not. In fact, it is all too common. Many writers find that this is not an industry that is particularly responsive to their needs and that seeks to cultivate their writing career over time; they find, instead, that it is an industry willing to take them on when they are fresh and unknown, maybe even willing to lavish upon them advances far in excess of anything they ever imagined, but quick to cast them aside if, after several books (maybe even fewer), sales don’t rise to high enough levels – though what exactly those levels are remains, to most writers, a mystery, like some carefully guarded secret of the trade. Many find themselves struggling to break out of what becomes, in practice, a vicious downward cycle: disappointing sales figures mean that publishers offer less in terms of advance and provide little or no support in terms of marketing spend, and also mean that the bookselling chains order less stock and make the book less visible in the bookstores, all of which makes it more likely that sales for the next book will be even more disappointing. And so the downward spiral continues until someone makes a move to try to break it – the publisher declines the next book, or the agent decides that this writer’s career is going nowhere, or the writer decides that he or she needs a different agent or publisher or both.
It is hardly surprising that many writers come to feel that they have become prisoners of their ‘track’. ‘Absolutely,’ said one Brooklyn-based writer when I asked her if she felt trapped by her sales history. ‘In fact, I’ve been wanting to send out a Christmas card with the ghost of Christmas past who’s dragging his chains behind him, with the caption, “I wear the sales figures I forged in life.” That’s how I feel about my track.’ Like many writers, her career had gone up and down over the years. She’d published 14 books with major imprints, had had steady sales and one or two modest successes but nothing spectacular; she had lived in hope of the breakout book that never came. Now in her early sixties, her agent had failed to sell her last book. ‘My agent sent it out to 22 publishers and there were four or five who said they really loved it and wanted to publish it and they just looked at my sales figures and said no.’ It’s hard for her not to be despondent at this point in her career. ‘I began as a writer respected by writers, by publishers, and now I’ve become no better than my last sales figures. So, you know, it’s tough. I feel trapped. I think that’s what most of my writing friends feel as well. Just trapped by these numbers.’
So what does a writer do when their career has reached this point? What options are left? Of course, they could change publishers, give up on the large houses and move to the margins of the field where they might find a small publisher who is less preoccupied with sales figures and willing to take them on. Many do exactly that. The small indie presses have many writers who are refugees from the large corporate houses, happy to have found a publisher who, they feel, takes their writing seriously and is willing to stand by them and publish their work even if the sales are modest. But some writers find that they’re discouraged by their agents from making a move of this kind, on the grounds that it would look like a step backwards, ‘like your career is going in reverse or something’, as one writer put it. And indeed, whether discouraged or not by their agent, some writers feel that a move in this direction would be a public admission of failure.
There is another move they can make, more radical and perhaps more difficult at a personal and emotional level: they can change their name. It is not uncommon for agents to recommend this course of action, as we saw in chapter 2, but it is also increasingly common for writers to decide on their own that changing their name is the best option open to them at a certain stage of their career. ‘It’s like you’re playing chess,’ explained one New York writer in his early fifties, ‘and you’re not in checkmate yet but you’re close and you don’t have many pieces on the board. It’s the only move left to me.’ This writer did change his name but he didn’t find it easy – ‘I hate doing it because I’m proud. I would much rather have my name on my book because I wrote it, but I’m left in a very difficult position.’ He’d published ten books, some with major New York houses, and won several top awards for his fiction, but he’d been dropped by his publisher, ‘kicked to the kerb’ as he put it, and now he felt trapped by his numbers. ‘You’re better off in this industry being a completely unknown person. It’s better to have no history than a mixed history. It’s insane, it makes no sense, but that’s publishing.’ In an industry that he’d experienced as systematically bruising and disempowering – ‘everything in publishing is disempowering for a writer’ – this was the one way left for him to try to recover some fragments of agency and self-esteem.
Are these complaints about the industry nothing more than sour grapes? The angry words of writers who were simply not good enough to make the grade? Perhaps. The publishing industry is a business of selection and some writers are, inevitably, going to be disappointed. But from the viewpoint of many writers, the problem is not selection per se. They have no problem with selection. The problem is that in an industry preoccupied with growth and the bottom line, the criterion of selection that now seems to matter more than any other is sales. ‘It’s not the quality, it’s not the content, it’s like, “Yeah, she’s a great writer but look at those numbers.”’ They have a point. There are many agents and editors who feel genuinely committed to their writers and who value good writing, but in the tough world of trade publishing, numbers speak louder than words. Quality is often debatable but the numbers never lie. Some readers love The Da Vinci Code, others loathe it, but there is no publisher who would not love to have those sales figures on their balance sheet.
Of course, there’s some room to be flexible even within the large corporations, as we’ve seen. There are imprints in some corporations that are given more leeway in financial terms, on the grounds that the symbolic value they contribute is important for the profile of the publishing house. But even these imprints are not immune to financial pressure. They too must make their numbers. So however much an editor might like a writer’s work, however many prizes the writer may have won and good reviews they may have had, there is always the possibility that the writer will be dropped if their books display a disappointing sales pattern. Today more than ever, a writer’s career is always hanging in the balance, rising and falling with the sales of their most recent books and always at risk of being curtailed by a disappointing track. Careers cut short and writers cut loose are among the prices to be paid for the logic of the field. They are the human costs of an industry where numbers rule in the end and where short-term growth and bottom-line profitability have come to assume more and more importance in the practical calculations of the major houses.
The emphasis on sales and profitability is not experienced in the same way and to the same degree in all sectors of the field. The pressure is greatest in those houses and imprints that are part of the large corporations, precisely because these are the organizations that are most affected by the imperative of growth and the budgetary requirements that follow from it. The small and medium-sized independents are not subjected to the same kind of pressure and can afford to take a more long-term view, and there are undoubtedly many writers who have benefited from their more magnanimous approach. But given the preponderance of the large corporations in the field of trade publishing, the fact that small and medium-sized independents often act differently does not alter the fundamental short-termism of the industry as a whole.
Diversity in question
Short-termism may be regrettable; it may be tough on those writers who have fallen out of favour with the large publishing houses and stressful for those publishers and editors who are under constant pressure to meet budget targets; it may also lead to some poor publishing. But is there any reason to think that the developments characterizing the field of trade publishing have resulted in, or are likely to result in, an impoverished culture of the book? Have the processes of consolidation and the dynamics of the field led to a decline in diversity of output, a growing homogenization of content and an overall dumbing down in the quality of the books produced? There are many who believe or fear that this may be so. Their argument generally goes like this. Thanks to the consolidation of the industry, the large corporate publishers and the big retail chains now control a large and growing share of the book market. These publishers and retailers are driven above all by the pursuit of profit and growth, and the number of copies they can sell, rather than the quality of the books they are publishing or selling, necessarily becomes their overriding concern. The question of quality falls by the wayside as the corporate juggernauts pursue their relentless quest for profit and growth. Old-school editors who believed that publishing books was about making good literature available to the public, or contributing to the public debate by putting serious ideas and scholarly works into the public domain, are either pushed out or forced to swallow their principles and reorient their activities towards the new sales-based norms. The publishing output of the large houses becomes more homogeneous, more commercial and more closely tied to celebrity and entertainment, while good literature and serious non-fiction is increasingly marginalized, if not abandoned altogether. In the brave new world of corporate publishing and retail chains, quality literature and serious non-fiction have no place – like the independent publishing houses and booksellers upon which they once depended, they have been swept aside by the social and economic changes that have transformed the field of trade publishing since the 1960s. The result, say some critics, is a serious deterioration of contemporary culture, so much so that we are now in danger of losing some of the attributes that are essential for a vibrant, creative culture and an informed democracy.1
There is undoubtedly some substance to this line of argument. Within the large corporations, there are strong pressures to focus effort, attention and resources on big books, and to pay less attention to, or refrain from publishing at all, books that might be regarded as small or mid-list. There are limits to the extent to which editors can follow their hunches and experiment with new books that don’t bear the obvious signs of success – though, as we’ve seen, these limits are always negotiable, vary considerably from one imprint and one house to another and often depend on a variety of personal and contextual features. The preoccupation with sales tends to produce a degree of homogenization within the field, since editors, publishers and agents are constantly scrutinizing sales figures and bestseller lists to see what is doing well and are quick to jump on the bandwagon of the latest success – many people in the industry bemoan what they call ‘me-too publishing’. More generally, the preoccupation with big books and the reliance on the judgements of others – the web of collective belief – tends to produce a certain homogeneity in the field, since it’s difficult not to be caught up in the excitement of the moment and not to be swayed by what so many of your trusted colleagues appear to believe.
But while there are limits to experimentation in the large corporations and pressures towards homogenization in the field, the issues are more complicated than the line of argument sketched above would suggest. In the first place, this argument rests on a much too simplified view of what goes on inside the world of corporate publishing. As we’ve seen, this is, in practice, a plurality of worlds, and different publishing corporations operate in different ways. Some operate with a highly federal model and give a great deal of autonomy to their constituent houses, imprints or divisions to develop their publishing programmes – provided, of course, that they meet certain financial conditions. Within most publishing corporations there are some houses or imprints that have established reputations for publishing works of quality, both literary fiction and serious non-fiction, and it is acknowledged, even by the most number-crunching of senior corporate managers, that publishing works of quality is and should remain an important part of what a publishing company does. It may not make a big contribution to the profit and growth of the corporation but it contributes something else that, however important economic considerations have become, has not been eliminated from the field: symbolic capital. Winning prizes still does matter, even to large publishing corporations – perhaps especially to large publishing corporations, since it is one way of showing that, despite everything, they still are real publishers. Does this mean that those publishers and editors in the large corporations who care about quality literature and serious non-fiction are not under pressure? No, it does not. Does it mean that they will always be protected, like a safe haven shielding its boats from the storm, and that their future is secure? No, it does not. But it does mean that the suggestion that there is a straightforward trade-off between quality and sales, and that the drive for growth and profit in the large corporations will necessarily eliminate all quality publishing from their programmes, is much too simple and doesn’t do justice to the complex reality of life inside the worlds of corporate publishing.
There is another obvious objection to the line of argument sketched above: whatever might be happening inside the publishing corporations, they are not the totality of the field, and with many tens of thousands of new titles being published every year, it would be difficult to argue that there is a lack of diversity, or even a decline of diversity, in the field as a whole. With more than 300,000 new titles being published every year in the US and over 150,000 in the UK and with the numbers tending to increase year on year, it is not at all obvious that the culture of the book is being strangled by the financial ambitions of the large corporations. Admittedly not all of these are trade books – many are professional or scholarly books, and many may be published with very small print runs. But however you look at it, this does not appear to be a culture that is suffering from a worrying constriction in the number and range of titles produced. On the contrary, the field is characterized by a huge volume and diversity of output, and the consolidation of the large publishing houses has gone hand in hand with the proliferation of small publishing operations and a veritable explosion in the number of titles published each year.
So does this completely scuttle the line of argument sketched above? Surely, the riposte goes, the sheer number and range of books being published today is ample testimony to the vibrancy of the culture of the book and demonstrates – more clearly than any reflection on the literary merits or otherwise of particular authors or titles ever could – that the corporatization of the publishing business poses no real threat to literary culture. So is that the end of the matter? The line of argument sketched above now firmly and finally defeated? Not necessarily. In order to understand why, we need to distinguish more clearly between two kinds of diversity: diversity of output, on the one hand, and diversity in the marketplace, on the other. It is true that there is an enormous range of titles being published today, not only by the large corporations but also by the medium-sized publishers and the innumerable small presses and other players that live on the margins of the field. The diversity of output is probably as great as it’s ever been, if not greater, and it would not be easy to argue that fewer works of quality, whether fiction or non-fiction, are finding their way into print than was the case 30 or 40 or 50 years ago. You can try to make this argument but you will struggle, because for every example you produce of how difficult it is today for a publisher to take chances with a new and untested voice you can find a dozen examples of where chances of just this kind are being taken.
However, the key issue in the field of trade publishing today is not so much diversity of output, it is diversity in the marketplace. In other words, the real source of concern is not the diversity or otherwise of the books that are published, but rather the diversity or otherwise of the books that are noticed, purchased and read. The field may be characterized by an extremely diverse output, but if only a very limited number and range of titles are picked out and noticed – that is, made visible in a crowded marketplace – then we have a different kind of problem about diversity. Publishing organizations of various kinds may be producing a diverse range of books but this diversity is not necessarily reflected in the space of the visible. And given the focus of some retail chains – especially the mass merchandisers and the supermarkets but the specialist bookselling chains too – on bestsellers, brand-name authors and fast-moving titles, there is a tendency for success to breed success and for the most successful titles to crowd out others.
Consider some figures. Table 16 and figure 15 show the number of paperback fiction titles that sold in certain quantity bands in the UK in the calendar years between 2002 and 2006. We can see that the number of titles selling between 10,000 and 49,999 copies per year fell from 446 in 2002 to 305 in 2006 – a decline of 32 per cent. The number of titles selling between 50,000 and 99,999 copies per year remained fairly constant – a small number of titles, between 67 and 80. However, the number of titles selling between 100,000 and 199,999 copies increased from 39 to 52 – an increase of 33 per cent. More dramatically still, the number of titles selling more than 200,000 copies doubled, from 16 to 31. Taking the last two bands together, the number of titles selling more than 100,000 copies per year increased from 55 in 2002 to 83 in 2006 – an increase of just over 50 per cent. What this suggests is that a small number of titles are doing better than ever, whereas the number of titles that are doing moderately well – that is, selling in the modest but still just about acceptable range of 10,000–50,000 copies in paperback – is declining significantly. The top two bands of strong-selling titles are swelling in terms of the numbers of titles included in them, but the increase here – a total of 28 more titles – is small in comparison to the decline in the number of titles lost from the lower band (141 fewer titles selling between 10,000 and 50,000 copies in 2006 compared to 2002). In other words, the market is concentrating on a small number of titles that sell well, indeed better than ever, whereas the number of titles that sell in modest but acceptable quantities is declining. This is not exactly a winner-takes-all market, but it is a winner-takes-more market.
Figure 15 UK paperback fiction sales bands, 2002–2006
Source: Nielsen BookScan (A and B format pb fiction only; TCM sales within each given year).
Quite understandably, what happens in a winner-takes-more market is that the key players focus their attention more and more on the winners. The big agencies want to represent them, the large publishers want to publish them and the major retailers want to stock and display them, because these are the authors and the books where serious money can be made. Hence a relatively small number of authors and books tend to become the focus of attention in the field and to dominate the retail space – they appear on the front tables and dump bins of the retail chains, on the shelves and pallets of the mass merchandisers and wholesale clubs and in the limited number of slots available in the supermarkets. These tend disproportionately to be the books published by the large corporate publishers – partly because the large publishers can afford to spend more to pay for front-of-store displays but also because they are more able to pay the high advances that the winners can command in the market for content. The result is that in the major retail spaces where books are most visible to readers and consumers, the winners tend to crowd out other books. Not entirely, of course; there will always be exceptions – those small books that come from nowhere and become surprise bestsellers, confounding everyone’s expectations. But this should not blind us to the fact that, despite the enormous volume and diversity in output, the marketplace for books is increasingly one in which the winners take more and everything else faces a harder and harder struggle to get noticed, bought and read. Diversity in output is not complemented by a diverse marketplace, but rather by a marketplace in which a small fraction of titles, and most commonly those backed by the resources of the large corporations, tend to dominate the spaces of the visible.2
Part of what it means for something to be published is for it to be publicly available – that is, available for members of the public to see and read and know about. But being available is one thing; actually being seen and read and known about is quite another. And a book or text can influence public debate or become a significant cultural entity only if it is seen and read and known about. Simply being available is not enough – it is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Hence the forces that shape the spaces of the visible are of crucial importance both for the flourishing of cultural life and for the vitality of what one might call the public sphere.3 Of course, the bricks-and-mortar retail stores and chains in which books are displayed and sold are only part of the complex array of venues and sites that make up the spaces of the visible, but in the culture of the book they remain a crucial part. The more that this space is colonized by large corporations who can use their financial strength to gain advantage in the struggle for visibility, the more likely it is that the cultural and public conversation of which books are part will be skewed by corporate power. More books than ever may be available, but few people will see them or read them or even know they exist. The rich diversity of output cannot make up for a marketplace that is systematically skewed in favour of the largest and most powerful players.
While diversity of output is not the same as diversity in the marketplace, they are of course connected, and there is a danger, not altogether fanciful, that diminishing diversity in the marketplace could eventually lead to diminishing diversity in output. If publishers find it harder and harder to get certain kinds of books or certain authors noticed, they could find themselves under growing pressure to stop publishing them. True, these books and authors could migrate elsewhere and get published by smaller houses, but that cannot be guaranteed. A marketplace becoming more constricted, with more power concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer buyers whose decisions become ever more consequential for the fate of individual titles and authors, may eventually take its toll on the productive output of the industry. Diminishing diversity in the marketplace could force some publishers out of business and accelerate processes of consolidation, leaving fewer alternatives for authors who might be seen as marginal by the large houses.
That is why it is so important to maintain a diverse marketplace – it is vital for diversity and creativity in the industry as a whole. The decline of the independent booksellers represented a serious loss to this diversity: the more buyers there are in the marketplace, exercising their own individual judgement about which books to stock and display in their stores, the more diverse the marketplace is and the better for the industry. The demise of Borders, and the difficulties currently faced by specialized bookselling chains like Waterstone’s in the UK and Barnes & Noble in the US, represent another serious threat to diversity. Although the specialized bookselling chains use central buyers, they are nevertheless committed to books as a cultural form (unlike mass merchandisers, for example, for whom books are just one more product line). They are willing – to varying degrees depending on the retailer – to take chances with new books and new authors and to hold a wide range of stock and backlist titles. They are vital shop windows for publishers. Their spaces may be skewed by powerful interests, but at least they are spaces and without them the opportunities to make books visible would be greatly diminished. Publishers would be wise to see that it is in their own interests to do what they can to ensure that these retailers are able to survive in a world where the financial pressures on bricks-and-mortar bookstores are likely to intensify, and that they are not disadvantaged by terms that give significant advantages to non-book retailers who stock a small range of titles and concentrate on winners – a point that is of particular significance in the UK, where the abandonment of the Net Book Agreement without the kind of legal protection provided by the Robinson-Patman Act in the US has created a marketplace that is heavily skewed in favour of the largest and most powerful players. Level playing fields in marketplaces are good not just for smaller retailers who have less clout in their negotiations with suppliers: at the end of the day, they are good for suppliers too.
1 André Schiffrin offers a forceful, if somewhat extreme, version of this argument: ‘Books today have become mere adjuncts to the world of the mass media, offering light entertainment and reassurances that all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. The resulting control on the spread of ideas is stricter than anyone would have thought possible in a free society. The need for public debate and open discussion, inherent in the democratic ideal, conflicts with the ever-stricter demand for total profit’ (The Business of Books, p. 152).
2 The fact that the highly visible display spaces tend to be populated disproportionately by books published by the large corporate publishers may not be immediately apparent to the casual observer, partly because of the large number of imprints operating under the auspices of each corporate house. However, the skewing of the spaces of the visible in favour of the large corporate groups becomes apparent as soon as one takes account of the corporate affiliations. On a typical day in 2009 in one of the Barnes & Noble stores in New York, the front table of new non-fiction books had a total of 68 books on display, 41 of which were published by imprints of the five largest corporate groups. The front table of new fiction books had a total of 66 books on display, 44 of which were published by imprints of the five largest corporate groups. Hence, on this particular day, 60 per cent of the new non-fiction books and 67 per cent of the new fiction books on display on the front two tables were published by the five largest corporate groups. Compare this with the fact that these five groups accounted for 46 per cent of the US trade market in 2007–8, and of course they account for only a small fraction of total title output.
3 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, tr. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989); Thompson, The Media and Modernity.
