Figure 1 Key resources of publishing firms
Imagine for a moment that you are in the office of a scout in New York. It’s a sunny afternoon in November 2007; the sky is a brilliant blue and the air has the chill of late autumn. The office block is an old building, dating from the late nineteenth century; the offices have been tastefully redeveloped, with bright walls and polished wooden floors. Out of the window you can see several water tanks standing on the roofs of buildings, a common sight from upper-floor offices in this part of midtown Manhattan. A scout is a talent-spotter. She (usually they are female) generally works on a retainer for publishers in Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Scandinavia and elsewhere, looking for books that would be suitable for their clients to translate and publish in their own countries and languages. Scouts are the eyes and ears of foreign publishers in the heartlands of Anglo-American publishing. They are most commonly based in New York or London, working for publishers based in Rome, Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Rio, São Paulo, Tokyo and elsewhere; rarely does the direction of reporting go the other way. The scout you are talking to today – let’s call her Hanne – is telling you about how she finds out about the new book projects that are out on submission to the New York houses and are likely to be published in the next year or so, and in the course of her account she mentions a proposal for a book called The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. ‘Who is Randy Pausch?’ you ask. ‘You don’t know who Randy Pausch is?’ she replies, a tone of mild astonishment in her voice. ‘No, never heard of him. Who is he and what is the book?’ And so she begins to tell you the story of Randy Pausch and The Last Lecture.
Randy Pausch was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (now the story must be told in the past tense, though in 2007 Hanne used the present tense). He was a specialist on computer–human interfaces and had published numerous technical papers on aspects of programming, virtual reality and software design. But in September 2007 Pausch’s career suddenly took an unusual turn. He had been invited to give a lecture at Carnegie Mellon in a series called ‘The Last Lecture’ – a series in which professors are asked to think about what matters most to them and sum up the wisdom they would like to pass on to their students in a single lecture, as if it were their last. By a tragic twist of fate, this was, in all likelihood, one of the last lectures that Randy Pausch would be giving: this 46-year-old father of three was dying from a terminal form of pancreatic cancer. The lecture, on the subject of ‘really achieving your childhood dreams’, was delivered to an audience of some 400 students and staff on 18 September 2007; the hour-long lecture was videoed so that his children could watch it when they were older. In the audience was a columnist from the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Zaslow, who had heard about the lecture on the grapevine and driven down from Detroit to attend. Like many who were there, Zaslow was deeply moved by the occasion, and he wrote a short article about it for his column in the Wall Street Journal. The article appeared on 20 September with a link to a short five-minute clip of highlights from the lecture. ABC’s Good Morning America TV show saw the article in the Journal and invited Pausch on to the show the following morning. Media interest grew and Pausch was invited to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show in October. In the meantime, the lecture video was posted on YouTube and millions of people watched either the short clip or the full-length version.
Shortly after the article appeared in the Wall Street Journal, publishers in New York began emailing Pausch to see if he would be interested in writing a book based on it. ‘I found this laughable,’ explained Pausch, ‘since at the time the palliative chemo was not yet working, and I thought I was down to about six weeks of good health.’ But after some reflection he agreed to do it, on the understanding that he would co-author the book with Jeff Zaslow and that Jeff would actually write it. Jeff contacted his agent in New York and the agency took charge of preparing a proposal and submitting it to publishers. The agency turned down a pre-emptive bid and sent out a short, 15-page proposal to numerous New York publishing houses in October. Within two weeks they had done a deal. ‘So how much did it go for?’ you ask Hanne. ‘$6.75 million,’ she replies. ‘$6.75 million?! You must be joking!’ ‘No, seriously, it was bought by Hyperion for $6.75 million,’ she explains. ‘They closed the deal a couple of weeks ago. It will be a short book, about 180 pages, and they’re planning to publish it next April.’ You can’t quite believe what you’ve just heard. Why would anyone pay $6.75 million for a book called The Last Lecture by a professor of computer science with no track record as a successful author? Maybe $40,000 or $50,000, you think, or perhaps even a modest six-figure sum if you were feeling particularly bullish. But $6.75 million? How could a publishing company talk itself into laying down this kind of money on what would seem like a wild bet? To an outside observer this seems amazing, surprising, utterly bizarre. Even Pausch himself confessed to being astonished by the size of the advance (‘the book getting a large advance-on-royalties took us both by surprise’). How can we make sense of this seemingly bizarre behaviour? To many it will seem like another example of the ‘irrational exuberance’ of markets, but is it really as irrational as it seems?
To answer these questions properly we will need to step back from the details of our story and make a detour. We will need to understand something about how the world of trade publishing has changed over the last 40–50 years and how it is organized today – who the key players are, what pressures they face and what resources they have at their disposal. We will also need to introduce some concepts that will help us make sense of this world, and help us to see how the actions of each key player are conditioned by the actions of others. For these players are not acting on their own: they are always acting in a particular context or what I shall call a ‘field’, in which the actions of any agent are conditioned by, and in turn condition, the actions of others.
Publishing fields
What is a field? I borrow this term from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and freely adapt it for my own purposes.1 A field is a structured space of social positions which can be occupied by agents and organizations, and in which the position of any agent or organization depends on the type and quantity of resources or ‘capital’ they have at their disposal. Any social arena – a business sector, a sphere of education, a domain of sport – can be treated as a field in which agents and organizations are linked together in relations of cooperation, competition and interdependency. Markets are an important part of some fields, but fields are always more than markets. They are made up of agents and organizations, of different kinds and quantities of power and resources, of a variety of practices and of specific forms of competition, collaboration and reward.
There are four reasons why the concept of field helps us to understand the world of publishing. First, it enables us to see straightaway that the world of publishing is not one world but rather a plurality of worlds – or, as I shall say, a plurality of fields, each of which has its own distinctive characteristics. So there’s the field of trade publishing, the field of scholarly monograph publishing, the field of higher education publishing, the field of professional publishing, the field of illustrated art book publishing and so on. Each of these fields has its own peculiar traits – you cannot generalize across them. It’s like different kinds of games: there is chess, checkers, Monopoly, Risk, Cluedo and so on. To the outside observer they may all look similar – they’re all board games with little pieces that move around the board. But each game has its own rules, and you can know how to play one without knowing how to play another. And publishing is often like that: people who work in the business tend to work in one particular field. They become experts in that field and may rise to senior positions of power and authority within it, but they may know nothing at all about what goes on in other fields.
The second reason why the notion of field helps is that it forces us to look beyond specific firms and organizations and makes us think, instead, in relational terms. The notion of field is part of a theory that is fundamentally relational in character, in the sense that it assumes that the actions of agents, firms and other organizations are oriented towards other agents and organizations and predicated on calculations about how others may or may not act in the field. Agents, firms and other organizations never exist in isolation: they are always situated in complex relations of power, competition and cooperation with other firms and organizations, and the theory of fields forces us to focus our attention on this complex space of power and interdependency. The theory constantly reminds us that the actions of any particular agent or organization are always part of larger whole, a system if you like, of which they are part but over which they do not have any overall control.
Figure 1 Key resources of publishing firms
The third reason why the notion of field helps is that it calls our attention to the fact that the power of any agent or organization in the field is dependent on the kinds and quantities of resources or capital that it possesses. Power is not a magical property that some individual or organization possesses: it is a capacity to act and get things done that is always rooted in and dependent on the kinds and quantities of resources that the agent or organization has at its disposal.
So what kinds of resources or capital are important in publishing fields? We can see, I think, that five types of resources are particularly important in publishing fields: what I shall call ‘economic capital’, ‘human capital’, ‘social capital’, ‘intellectual capital’ and ‘symbolic capital’ (figure 1).2 Economic capital is the accumulated financial resources, including stock and plant as well as capital reserves, to which publishers have access, either directly (in their own accounts) or indirectly (through their ability to draw on the resources of a parent company or raise finance from banks or other institutions). Human capital is the staff employed by the firm and their accumulated knowledge, skills and expertise. Social capital is the networks of contacts and relationships that an individual or organization has built up over time. Intellectual capital (or intellectual property) consists in the rights that a publisher owns or controls in intellectual content, rights that are attested to by their stock of contracts with authors and other bodies and that they are able to exploit through their publications and through the selling of subsidiary rights. Symbolic capital is the accumulated prestige and status associated with the publishing house. The position of any publishing house will vary in the social space of positions, depending on the relative quantities of these five forms of capital they possess.
It is easy to see why publishers need economic capital: as the principal risk-taker in the publishing chain, publishers must be able to draw on their financial resources (or those of financial agents and institutions to which they are linked, such as banks or parent companies) at various stages in order to finance the production and publication of books and in order to build and expand the business. Early in the publishing cycle they must be prepared to pay an advance on royalties to an author or an author’s agent. At later stages publishers must invest in the production of the book, paying the bills of copy-editors, typesetters, designers, printers, etc., and tying up resources in stock which may or may not be sold, and they must invest in marketing and promoting the book. The larger the capital reserves of the publisher, the larger the advances they are able to offer in the highly competitive game of acquiring content, the more they are able to invest in marketing and promotion and the more they are able to spread the risks of publishing by investing in a larger number of projects in the hope that some will bear fruit.
It is also easy to see why publishers need human capital: like other organizations, publishing firms are only as good as their staff. A highly trained and highly motivated workforce is a vital resource for a publishing firm and in many ways the key to its success. This is true at all levels, but particularly true at the level of editorial staff, since this is the creative core of the publishing firm. The success of the firm depends crucially on the ability to attract and retain highly motivated editors who are able to identify and acquire the new projects that are likely to be successful and are able to work effectively with authors to maximize the potential of these projects. In the highly competitive field of trade publishing, an editor is as good, and only as good, as the track record of the books that he or she has acquired and published over the years: this record is his or her CV. Editors who have the right combination of judgement, taste, social flair and financial nous are highly valued assets, and their ability to spot successful books becomes vital to the overall success of the firm. But the other side of this equation is that an editor who greatly overpays for a book that flops, or who buys a string of books that perform below expectations, may come to be seen as more of a liability than an asset and may find that their judgement is called into question, their job is in danger and their career is at risk.
However, even the best editors do not work on their own: they need good contacts. Much of their time is spent cultivating relationships with agents on whom they are largely and increasingly dependent for the supply of new book projects: the famous publisher’s lunch is not just a pleasant perk of the job but a necessary condition of doing the job effectively, precisely because this is a field in which networks and relationships – i.e. social capital – is crucial. The importance of relationships applies to other sides of the business too. Publishing houses invest a great deal of time and effort in developing close relationships with suppliers and retailers and they work hard to manage and protect these relationships because they are vital to their success. And the larger the publisher is, the more they may be able to call on their business partners to do favours for them – for example, ask a printer to prioritize an important reprint and deliver it within three or four days, or call up the product manager at a major retailer and ask them to pay special attention to a book that the publisher regards as a key title.
Publishers possess another kind of resource that is vital to their success: intellectual capital (or what is often called intellectual property). The distinctive feature of the publishing firm is that it possesses the right to use and exploit intellectual content, to ‘publish’ or make available this content in forms that will generate a financial return. This right is regulated by the contracts it signs with authors or agents and other content-controlling sources, such as foreign publishers. Hence a publisher’s stock of contracts is potentially an extremely valuable resource, since it establishes legal entitlements to the content (or potential content) which the publisher is able to exploit. But the precise value of this resource depends on many things. The value of a contract for a particular book depends, for instance, on whether the book will actually be written and delivered in a suitable time period, how profitable the book will be (that is, what kind of revenue stream less costs, including advances, it is likely to generate) and what territorial and subsidiary rights it includes (whether it includes world rights in all languages or merely North American rights, for instance). A publisher’s stock of contracts represents the sum total of rights it possesses over the intellectual content that it seeks to develop and exploit. A contract can be a valuable resource but it can also be a liability, in the sense that it can commit the publisher to producing a book which, given the level of advance paid out and other costs incurred in producing and marketing the book, may turn out to be a loss-maker rather than a profitable proposition.
It is easy to see why publishers need economic, human, social and intellectual capital, but why do they need symbolic capital? Symbolic capital is best understood as the accumulated prestige, recognition and respect accorded to certain individuals or institutions.3 It is one of those intangible assets that is enormously important for publishing firms. For publishers are not just employers and financial risk-takers: they are also cultural mediators and arbitrators of quality and taste. Their imprint is a ‘brand’, a marker of distinction in a highly competitive field. Publishers seek to accumulate symbolic capital just as they seek to accumulate economic capital. It is important to them partly because it is important to their image, to the way they see themselves and want to be seen by others: most publishers see themselves and want to be seen by others as organizations that publish works of ‘quality’, however that might be defined (and there are many ways that it can be). No major publisher would willingly embrace the idea that their sole purpose in life is to publish schlock (even if they accept, as some do, that they need to publish some schlock in order to do other things). But it is also important to them for good organizational and financial reasons. It strengthens their hand in the struggle to acquire new content because it makes their organization more attractive in the eyes of authors and agents: many authors want to be published by houses that have established a high reputation in their particular genre of writing, whether it is literary fiction or crime novels or biography or history. It strengthens their position in the networks of cultural intermediaries – including booksellers, reviewers and media gatekeepers – whose decisions and actions can have a big impact on the success or otherwise of particular books. A publisher who has established a reputation for quality and reliability is a publisher that agents, retailers and even readers will be more inclined to trust. And it can also translate directly into financial success: a book that wins a major literary prize will very commonly experience a sharp upturn in sales, and may even lift the sales of other books by the same author.
While symbolic capital is of considerable importance to publishing firms, it is also important to see that other players in the field, including agents and authors, can and do accumulate symbolic capital of their own. Authors can become brands in their own right – most well-known writers, like Stephen King, John Grisham, James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, etc., are brand-name authors in this sense. They have acquired large stocks of symbolic capital and are able to use this to their advantage. In the early stages of their writing career, a publishing firm may have invested in the building of their brand, but as they become better known and develop a fan base of regular readers, the author’s brand separates off from the publisher’s brand and becomes less and less dependent on it. This puts them or their agents in an increasingly strong position when it comes to negotiating contractual terms with publishers and tends to ensure that their new books, regardless of who publishes them, are well positioned in the circuits of distribution and reception.
All five forms of capital are vital to the success of a publishing firm, but the structure of the publishing field is shaped above all by the differential distribution of economic and symbolic capital, for it is these forms of capital that are particularly important in determining the competitive position of the firm. Publishers with substantial stocks of economic and symbolic capital will tend to find themselves in a strong position in the field, able to compete effectively against others and to see off challenges from rivals, whereas firms with very small stocks of economic and symbolic capital are in a more vulnerable position. This does not mean that firms which are less well endowed will necessarily find it difficult to survive – on the contrary, the publishing field is an enormously complex domain and there are many ways in which smaller firms can compete effectively, out-manoeuvring larger players or finding specialist niches in which they can flourish. Moreover, it is important to see that economic capital and symbolic capital do not necessarily go hand in hand: a firm with small stocks of economic capital can succeed in building up substantial stocks of symbolic capital in the domains where it is active, gaining a reputation for itself that far exceeds its strength in sheer economic terms – in other words, it can punch above its weight. The accumulation of symbolic capital is dependent on processes that are very different in nature from those that lead to the accumulation of economic capital, and the possession of large quantities of one does not necessarily imply the possession of large quantities of the other.
The importance of economic and symbolic capital in the field of trade publishing can be seen in another way. For most trade publishers, the ‘value’ of a particular book or book project is understood in one of two ways: its sales or sales potential, that is, its capacity to generate economic capital; and its quality, which can be understood in various ways but includes its potential for winning various forms of recognition such as prizes and glowing reviews, or in other words, its capacity to generate symbolic capital. These are the only two criteria – there simply are no other. Sometimes the criteria go together, as in those cases when a work valued for its quality also turns out to sell well, but all too often the criteria diverge. Yet an editor or publisher may still value a work because they believe it to be good, even though they know or strongly suspect that sales will be modest at best. Both criteria are important for all publishers in the field, but the relative importance assigned to one criterion or the other varies from one editor to another, from one imprint or house to another and from one sector of the field to another. In large publishing corporations, it is not uncommon for certain imprints to be thought of as ‘commercial’ in character, that is, oriented primarily towards sales and the accumulation of economic capital, while other imprints are thought of as ‘literary’ in character, where sales are not unimportant but where the winning of literary prizes and the accumulation of symbolic value are legitimate goals in themselves.
As with other fields of activity, the publishing field is an intensely competitive domain characterized by a high degree of inter-organizational rivalry. Firms draw on their accumulated resources in an attempt to give themselves a competitive advantage over their rivals – to sign up bestselling authors and books, to gain the most media attention, etc. The staff of every publishing house are constantly looking over their shoulders to see what their competitors are doing. They constantly scrutinize the bestseller lists and study their competitors’ more successful books to see whether they can pick up clues about how they might develop their own publishing programmes. This kind of inter-organizational rivalry tends to produce a degree of homogeneity or ‘me-too’ publishing among the firms who publish in the same areas – one successful chick-lit book will spawn a dozen look-alikes. But it also produces an intense desire to find the next big thing, as firms are constantly seeking to prevail over their competitors by being the first to spot a new trend.
While many fields of activity are intensely competitive, the publishing field has a competitive structure that is distinctive in some respects. In terms of their competitive position, most publishers are janus-faced organizations: they must compete both in the market for content and in the market for customers. They must compete in the market for content because most publishing organizations do not create or own their own content. They must acquire content by entering into contractual relations with authors or their agents, and this puts them in a competitive position vis-à-vis other publishers who may wish to acquire the same or similar content. A huge amount of effort is invested by editors and publishers in cultivating relations with the agents and others who control access to content. But just as publishers have to compete for content, so too they have to compete for the time, attention and money of retailers and customers once a book has been produced. The marketplace of books is enormously crowded – and becomes ever more crowded as the number of titles published increases every year. Marketing and sales staff devote a great deal of time and effort trying to ensure that their titles stand out from others and are not simply lost in the flood of new books appearing every season. The financial resources of the firm, the social skills and networks of their staff and the accumulated symbolic capital of the imprint and the author are all important factors in shaping the extent to which they can achieve visibility for their titles in the highly competitive and increasingly crowded marketplace for books.
I’ve given three reasons why the notion of field is helpful for understanding the world of publishing but there is a fourth – in my view, the most important. I’m going to argue that each field of publishing has a distinctive dynamic – what I call ‘the logic of the field’. The logic of a publishing field is a set of factors that determine the conditions under which individual agents and organizations can participate in the field – that is, the conditions under which they can play the game (and play it successfully). Individuals who are active in the field have some degree of practical knowledge of this logic: they know how to play the game, and they may have views about how the rules of the game are changing. They may not be able to explain the logic of the field in a neat and concise way, they cannot give you a simple formula that sums it all up, but they can tell you in great detail what it was like when they first entered the field, what it’s like now and how it has changed over time. To use a different metaphor, the logic of the field is like the grammar of a language: individuals know how to speak correctly, and in this sense they have a practical knowledge of the rules of grammar, but they may not be able to formulate these rules in an explicit fashion – they can’t tell you, for example, what the rule is for the use of the subjunctive in English. As Wittgenstein would say, their knowledge of the language is that they know how to use it, they know how to go on. And part of my job as an analyst of the world of publishing is to listen to and reflect on the practical accounts of the agents who are active in the field, to situate these accounts in relation to the agents’ positions in the field and to seek thereby to work out the logic of the field – that is, to formulate it in a way that is more explicit and systematic than one is likely to find in the practical accounts of the agents themselves.
My focus here is on the field of English-language trade publishing – that is, the sector of the publishing industry that is concerned with publishing books, both fiction and non-fiction, that are intended for general readers and sold primarily through bookstores and other retail outlets. I won’t be looking at other fields of publishing – at academic or professional publishing, for example; these fields are organized in very different ways and we cannot assume that the factors that shape the activities of trade publishers will be the same as those that shape the activities of publishers in other fields.4 My focus is also restricted to the English language, and in practice this means the United States and Britain,5 simply because publishing fields, like all cultural fields, have linguistic and spatial boundaries and we cannot assume that the dynamics of trade publishing in the English language will be the same as they are in Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Korean or any other language – indeed, the dynamics of trade publishing in other languages are quite different in certain respects. There are even important differences between the United States and Britain, and yet there is also a deep structural similarity in the way that trade publishing works in Britain and the United States, so much so that it makes good sense to see British and American trade publishers as belonging to the same Anglo-American field.
The fact that the Anglo-American publishing industry is the dominant industry in the international arena of trade publishing today is not accidental: it is rooted in a long historical process, stretching back to the nineteenth century and before, which established the English language as the de facto global language and gave Anglo-American publishers an enormous competitive advantage vis-à-vis their counterparts in other languages, who found themselves operating in much smaller and more restricted fields.6 Today the United States and Britain publish many more new books than other countries and their book exports, measured in terms of volume of sales, are much higher.7 Moreover, books and authors originally published in English tend to dominate the translation market. Translations from English often feature prominently on the bestseller lists in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, whereas translations from other languages seldom appear on the bestseller lists in Britain and the US. In the international marketplace of books, the flow of translations and bestsellers is skewed heavily in favour of books and authors originating in the English-speaking world.8
So does the field of Anglo-American trade publishing have a logic, and if so what is it? That is the question to which this book seeks to provide an answer. Some may doubt whether the world of trade publishing has a logic at all – what we have, they will say, is a complex sphere of activity in which many different agents and organizations are doing many different things, and any attempt to reduce this complexity to an underlying logic of the field is bound to be misleading. Well, let us see; maybe they are right, maybe they are wrong. The social world is a messy place but it is not completely without order, and the task I have set myself is to see if we can discern some order in the plethora of details that make up the diverse practices of everyday life. Of course, I shall not seek to recount all the details – nothing would be more tedious for the reader – nor shall I claim to be able to account for everything that happens in the field. There will always be exceptional events, exceptional actors and exceptional circumstances, but the exceptions should not blind us to the rules. Some actors and some details will feature more prominently in our story than others, and for this I make no apologies. Finding order is about prioritizing detail, attributing more significance to some actors and events than to others, precisely because they tell us more than others do about the underlying structure and dynamics of the field.9
The publishing chain
In addition to the concept of field, there is one other concept, or set of concepts, that we need in order to understand the world of trade publishing – the publishing chain. The publisher is one player in a field, and the way that publishers relate to other players is shaped by a chain of activities in which different agents or organizations perform different roles which are all oriented towards a common goal – namely, the production, sale and distribution of this particular cultural commodity, the book.
The publishing chain is both a supply chain and a value chain. It is a supply chain in the sense that it provides a series of organizational links by means of which a specific product – the book – is gradually produced and transmitted via distributors and retailers to an end user who purchases it. Figure 2 offers a simple visual representation of the book supply chain. The basic steps in the book supply chain are as follows. The author creates the content and supplies it to the publisher; in trade publishing this process is typically mediated by the agent, who acts as a filter selecting material and directing it to appropriate publishers. The publisher buys a bundle of rights from the agent and then carries out a range of functions – reading, editing, etc. – before delivering the final text or file to the printer, who prints and binds the books and delivers them to the distributor, which may be owned by the publisher or may be a third party. The distributor warehouses the stock and fulfils orders from both retailers and wholesalers, who in turn sell books to or fulfil orders from others – individual consumers in the case of retailers, and retailers and other institutions (such as libraries) in the case of wholesalers. The publisher’s customers are not individual consumers or libraries but rather intermediary institutions in the supply chain – namely, the wholesalers and retailers. For most readers, the only point of contact they have with the book supply chain is when they walk into a bookstore to browse or buy a book, or when they browse the details of a book online, or when they check out a book from a library. For the most part they have no direct contact with publishers and know very little about them; their primary interest is in the book and the author, not in the publisher.
Figure 2 Book supply chain
The publishing chain is also a value chain in the sense that each of the links purportedly adds some ‘value’ in the process. This notion is more complicated than it might at first seem, but the general idea is clear enough: each of the links performs a task or function which contributes something substantial to the overall task of producing the book and delivering it to the end user, and this contribution is something for which the publisher (or some other agent or organization in the chain) is willing to pay. In other words, each of the links ‘adds value’. If the task or function is not contributing anything substantial, or if the publisher (or other agent) feels that it does not add enough value to justify the expense, then the publisher (or other agent) may decide to cut the link out of the chain – that is, to ‘disintermediate’ it. Technological change may also alter the functions performed by particular links in the chain. The functions of the typesetter, for example, have been radically transformed by the advent of computerization, and some typesetters have sought to take on new functions, such as marking up texts in specialized languages like XML, in order to protect their position (or to reposition themselves) in the value chain.
Figure 3 Publishing value chain
Figure 3 summarizes the principal tasks or functions in the publishing chain. This diagram is more elaborate than figure 2 because each organization in the supply chain may carry out several functions (the agents or organizations that typically perform the various tasks or functions are indicated in brackets).
The starting point of the value chain is the creation, selection and acquisition of content – this is the domain where authors, agents and publishers interact. The interaction is much more complex than it might at first seem. Sometimes it is a simple linear process: the author writes a text, submits it to an agent who takes it on and then sells it to a publisher. But often it is much more complicated than this simple linear process would suggest: an agent, knowing what publishers are looking for, often works closely with his or her clients to help shape their book projects, especially in the area of non-fiction, and proposals may go through multiple drafts before the agent is willing to send them out, or a publisher may have an idea for a book and seek to commission an author to write it, and so on. It is not altogether unhelpful to think of agents and publishers as ‘gatekeepers’ of ideas, selecting those book projects they believe to be worthwhile from the large number of proposals and manuscripts that are submitted to them ‘over the transom’ by aspiring authors and rejecting those that don’t come up to scratch.10 But even in the world of trade publishing, which probably concurs with this model more closely than other sectors of the publishing industry, the notion of the gatekeeper greatly oversimplifies the complex forms of interaction and negotiation between authors, agents and publishers that shape the creative process.
In trade publishing, both agents and publishers are involved in selecting content, working with authors to develop it and exercising some degree of quality control. The essential difference between the agent and the publisher is that they sit on opposite sides of the table in the market for content: the agent represents the interests of the author and is selecting and developing content with a view to selling it (or, more specifically, selling a bundle of rights to exploit it), whereas the publisher is selecting content with a view to buying it (or buying the bundle of rights) and then developing it for publication. The development of the content will commonly involve reading draft material and editing it (sometimes several times); it may also involve picture research, copyright clearance and various kinds of quality control. Many of the other functions in the publishing chain, such as copy-editing, text and jacket design, proofreading and indexing, will either be handled by specialized staff in-house or will be outsourced, depending on the publisher. Virtually all publishers today outsource typesetting, printing and binding to specialized typesetting firms and printers. Most publishers retain responsibility for sales and marketing, although some smaller publishers may buy in sales and distribution services from specialized firms or from other publishers who take on third-party clients. The sales reps sell to the booksellers, retailers and wholesalers (many smaller booksellers are supplied by wholesalers), and the booksellers and retailers stock the books, display them and seek to sell them to individual consumers/readers. Books are supplied to booksellers, retailers and wholesalers on a sale-or-return basis, so that unsold stock can be returned to the publisher for full credit.11 The publisher employs a range of marketing and publicity strategies, from advertising and authors’ tours to attempts to get authors on radio and television programmes and to get books reviewed in the national press, in an effort to bring books to the attention of readers and drive sales (or ‘sell-through’) in the bookstores, which is the only way of ensuring that books which have been notionally ‘sold’ into the retail network are not returned to the publisher.
Each task or function in the publishing chain exists largely by virtue of the fact that it makes some contribution, of varying degrees of significance, to the overall objective of producing and selling books. Some of these tasks (design, copy-editing, typesetting, etc.) are within the range of activities that could be done by a single publishing organization, although a publisher may decide to disaggregate the functions and contract them out in order to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Other tasks are rooted in activities that are quite distinct and that have, in historical terms, a more settled institutional differentiation. This differentiation may be characterized by harmonious relations between the agents and organizations involved, since all have something to gain from cooperation; but they can also be characterized by tension and conflict, since their interests do not always coincide. Moreover, particular positions within the chain are not necessarily fixed or permanent. Changes in working practices, economic developments and technological advances can all have a major impact on the publishing chain, as tasks that were previously commonplace or essential are bypassed or eclipsed.
Given that the publishing chain is not rigid and that particular tasks or functions can be eclipsed by economic and technological change, what reason is there to believe that the role of the publisher itself might not be rendered redundant? What are the core activities or functions of the publisher? Are these activities that could be phased out by new technologies, or that could be done by others? Could publishers themselves be disintermediated from the publishing chain? These questions have been raised often enough in recent years: in an age when anyone can post a text on the internet, who needs a publisher anymore? But the issues are more complicated than they might seem at first sight, and to address them properly we need to examine more carefully the key functions traditionally performed by the publisher and distinguish them from other activities that can be outsourced to freelancers or specialized firms. Figure 4 highlights six key functions of the publisher – it is by carrying out these tasks or functions that the publisher has traditionally made a distinctive contribution to the value creation process.
Figure 4 Key functions of the publisher
The first function is content acquisition and list-building. This is in many ways the key function of the publisher: to acquire and, indeed, help to create the content that will be turned into the books that comprise the publisher’s list. The publisher acts not just as a filter or gatekeeper but in many cases plays an active role in creating or conceiving a project, or in seeing the potential of something and helping the author bring it to fruition. Some of the best publishers are those who are able to come up with good ideas for books and find the right authors to write them, or who are able to turn what might be a rather inchoate idea in the mind of an author into something special, or who are simply able to see potential where others see only dross. There is a real skill here that involves a blending together of intellectual creativity and marketing nous, and that distinguishes outstanding editors and publishers from those who are run of the mill.
The second function is financial investment and risk-taking. The publisher acts as the banker who makes resources available up front, both to pay advances to authors and agents and to cover the costs of acquisition, development and production. In the entire publishing chain it is only the publisher, in the last analysis, who takes the real financial risks – everyone else gets paid (assuming that the author has received an advance on royalties and that the publisher has paid the bills). If the book fails to sell, it is the publisher who writes down any unsold stock and writes off any unearned advance. In the book publishing chain, the publisher is the creditor of last resort.
The third and fourth functions are content development and quality control. In some cases the content provided by an author is in excellent condition and needs very little input from the publisher, but in many areas of publishing this is the exception rather than the rule. Draft manuscripts are commonly revised and developed in the light of comments from editors and others. It is also the responsibility of the publisher to assess the quality of the text and to ensure that it meets certain standards. These standards will of course vary from one publisher to another and a variety of assessment procedures may be used, ranging from the judgement of in-house editors to evaluations by one or more external readers who are specialists in the field (although in trade publishing it is rare to go out of house). Quality control is important for the publisher because it is one of the key means by which they are able to build a distinctive profile and brand in the publishing field and thereby distinguish themselves from other houses.
The fifth function is what could be loosely described as management and coordination. This label describes a range of management activities that are an integral part of the publishing process, from the management of specific projects which may be exceptionally complex to the management of specific activities or phases in the life cycle of the book. For example, even if copy-editing is outsourced to freelancers, the freelancers must be given work and instructions, their terms of work must be agreed and they must be paid, and all of this requires management time and expertise; this is often handled by a dedicated in-house manuscript editor or desk editor. Similarly, even though typesetting, design and printing may be outsourced to specialized firms, the whole production process, from copy-edited manuscript to bound books, must be managed; this is usually done in-house by a production manager or controller. Decisions must be taken about prices and print runs, and stock must then be managed throughout the life cycle of the book. The copyright must also be managed through the sale of subsidiary rights (translations, reprints, serialization, etc.). All of these activities require a great deal of management time and expertise, and in most cases they are handled by in-house managers who have responsibility for specific sectors of the production and publishing process.
The sixth and final function is sales and marketing. I have bundled these activities together although they are in fact quite distinct. Marketing comprises a range of activities concerned with informing potential customers of the availability of a book and encouraging them to buy it. These activities include catalogue preparation and mailing, advertising, direct mail, sending out review copies and, more recently, various kinds of e-marketing. Most trade publishers also have a separate publicity manager and/or department whose task is to cultivate relations with the media and secure media coverage for a book – coverage that ranges from reviews, extracts and interviews in the printed press to radio and television appearances, book signings and author tours. Marketing and publicity have the same aim – namely, to make consumers/readers aware of books and persuade them to buy them; the only real difference is that the publisher pays for marketing, whereas publicity, if you can get it, is free. The task of the sales manager and the sales team is to call on the key accounts – which include the bookselling chains, independent booksellers, online booksellers, wholesalers and a variety of general retailers from supermarkets to warehouse stores – to inform them of the forthcoming books, solicit orders and manage the publisher’s relations with their key customers, with the aim of ensuring that books are stocked and available in bookstores for consumers to browse and buy.
These various sales and marketing activities are concerned not simply to bring a product to the marketplace and let retailers and consumers know that it is available: they seek, more fundamentally, to build a market for the book. To publish in the sense of making a book available to the public is easy – and never easier than it is today, when texts posted online could be said to be ‘published’ in some sense. But to publish in the sense of making a book known to the public, visible to them and attracting a sufficient quantum of their attention to encourage them to buy the book and perhaps even to read it, is extremely difficult – and never more difficult than it is today, when the sheer volume of content available to consumers and readers is enough to drown out even the most determined and well-resourced marketing effort. Good publishers – as one former publisher aptly put it – are market-makers in a world where it is attention, not content, that is scarce.
These six key functions of the publisher define the principal respects in which publishing firms ‘add value’. Whether these are functions that will always be performed by traditional publishing firms, or whether, in the changing information environment brought about by digitization and the internet, at least some of these functions will be eclipsed, marginalized, transformed or taken over by others, are questions to which there are, at this point in time, no clear answers. But before speculating about the imminent disintermediation of publishing firms, one would be well advised to reflect carefully on the functions actually performed by publishers in the cultural economy of the book, on which functions will continue to require fulfilment in the future and, if they do, on who will perform them and how.
What follows
There are three key developments that are crucial for understanding the logic of the field of trade publishing, and these will occupy our attention in the first three chapters: the growth of the retail chains and the broader and ongoing transformation of the retail environment of bookselling (chapter 1); the rise of the literary agent as a key power broker in the field of English-language trade publishing (chapter 2); and the emergence of transnational publishing corporations stemming from successive waves of mergers and acquisitions, beginning in the 1960s and continuing through to the present day (chapter 3). I will seek to show how these three key developments have created a field that is structured in certain ways, a field that shapes the ways in which agents and organizations can act and that has certain consequences; chapters 4–8 examine these consequences. Taken together, this analysis of the key developments and their consequences will lay bare what I’m calling the logic of the field of English-language trade publishing. Chapter 9 will examine the digital revolution and its implications for the book publishing industry, while chapter 10 will offer a more normative reflection on the world of trade publishing and its costs. The concluding remarks will briefly consider some of the challenges the publishing industry faces as it enters the second decade of the twenty-first century.
In developing this account of the contemporary world of trade publishing in Britain and the United States, I rely largely on the insights gained through my interviews with practitioners in the field (a more detailed discussion of my research methods can be found in appendix 2). I also draw on data gathered by Nielsen BookScan, the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), Subtext and other sources. I make use of other studies and books on the book business when it is helpful to do so but I have generally found these to be of limited use for various reasons. The study carried out by Louis Coser, Charles Kadushin and Walter Powell, alluded to earlier, remains the best of these studies and an indispensable reference point for anyone interested in the modern book publishing industry.12 But the research on which this study was based was carried out more than 30 years ago, in the late 1970s, and the world of publishing has changed quite profoundly since then. Moreover, this study was focused solely on the United States, and hence it lacks the more comparative and international perspective to which any study of the creative industries today, in our increasingly globalized world, must aspire. It is not without significance that, of the five largest publishing houses that are key players in the field of American trade publishing today, four are owned by large international media corporations which have substantial stakes in the UK, Europe and elsewhere.
At around the same time as the study by Coser and his colleagues appeared, Thomas Whiteside published a series of articles in the New Yorker, subsequently incorporated into a book, which cast a more critical eye on the world of New York trade publishing.13 This was a time – around 1980 – when the takeover of many publishing houses by large corporations with diverse media interests was eliciting growing concern in many quarters about the possibility that the literary values associated with these houses were being eclipsed by the search for a new kind of lightweight, downmarket content that would be as suitable for TV talk shows and movie tie-ins as traditional books. Whiteside’s insightful analysis lends support to these concerns and highlights some of the key trends that have continued to shape the industry in the years since. But as with the work of Coser and his associates, the value of Whiteside’s study today is limited both by its age and by its exclusive focus on the United States. Moreover, the central theme of his critique – the idea that trade publishing was becoming part of a movie tie-in business in which the big Hollywood studios were increasingly calling the shots – now looks, with the benefit of hindsight, to be an exaggeration. It is undoubtedly true that movie tie-ins can be big business for trade publishers and can generate welcome spikes in sales, but movie tie-ins and the sale of movie rights have turned out to be less important for trade publishers than Whiteside thought. Other aspects of our contemporary media culture, such as the celebrity status and ‘well-knownness’ which stems from being seen and heard in the media, are more important for understanding the world of trade publishing than the links with the Hollywood movie business, or than the idea that books were becoming the ‘software’ of multimedia packages in an increasingly integrated communications–entertainment complex.
Apart from the studies by Coser et al. and Whiteside, many of the other books on the modern publishing industry that have appeared in the last decade or two have been books written by publishers themselves. The books by André Schiffrin and Jason Epstein, The Business of Books and Book Business respectively, are probably the most interesting recent examples of this genre.14 Both Schiffrin and Epstein were distinguished publishers and editors in the world of American trade publishing – Schiffrin was the director of Pantheon for many years until he fell out with its corporate owners and resigned in 1989 to set up his own not-for-profit house called The New Press, while Epstein was editorial director at Random House for many years and enjoyed a long and distinguished career as one of America’s most successful editors. Their books are thoughtful reflections on the state of trade publishing in America at the turn of the millennium; they lived through and experienced personally the huge changes that have swept through the industry since the 1960s and 1970s, and their books bear witness to the scale and the costs – both in cultural and in personal terms – of these changes. But their accounts are inextricably entangled with their own personal experiences and career trajectories. These are not even-handed accounts of an industry undergoing dramatic change, nor do they purport to be: they are memoirs with a critical edge. They are personal and sometimes opinionated accounts – gracefully written, rich in anecdote, tinged with a shade of nostalgia – of an industry as seen from the particular perspectives of two protagonists who have charted their own courses through the complex and turbulent world of publishing. That the protagonists have charted their courses so successfully and recounted them so eloquently is a tribute to their remarkable talents as publishers and authors, but this does not alter the fact that their accounts are, by their very nature, partial. These books are symptoms and reflections of a world in change as much as they are analyses of it.
While I have learned much from these and other accounts of the modern publishing industry, I have tried to do something which no one else has attempted. While the existing literature tends to be focused on the publishing industry in one country and most commonly the United States, I have sought to be international and comparative in my analysis, focusing on the field of English-language trade publishing which, by its very nature, is something more than American trade publishing and something less than book publishing, even trade book publishing, per se. I have sought to ground my analysis in a careful consideration of the facts and empirical trends but I have not restricted myself to a mere recitation of facts and figures. The account I offer is both analytical and normative: an attempt to lay bare the fundamental dynamic that has shaped the evolution of this field over the last few decades and, on the basis of this analysis, to offer a critical reflection on the consequences of these developments for our literary and intellectual culture. And I shall try to show that, when we grasp the logic of this field, we shall be able to make sense of those actions of agents and organizations within the field that might otherwise seem bizarre, including the actions of the organization that undertook to publish a small book by a hitherto largely unknown professor of computer science who happened to deliver an inspiring last lecture on realizing your childhood dreams.
1 See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1993); Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Some Properties of Fields’, in his Sociology in Question, tr. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1993), pp. 72–7; Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, tr. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).
2 This account is based on John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), pp. 30–6. However, I’ve added social capital to the original scheme, since it became clear that this form of capital, important in all publishing fields, is particularly important in trade publishing, where networking is vital.
3 See Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity, 1991); John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 16.
4 The very different logics of the fields of scholarly book publishing and higher education publishing are analysed in Thompson, Books in the Digital Age.
5 There are of course countries other than the United States and Britain within the international field of English-language publishing, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, and the dynamics of trade publishing in each of these countries have their own distinctive characteristics. However, the volume of output in the United States and Britain and the scale and geographical reach of their publishing industries mean that these two countries have long had a dominant role in the international field of English-language trade publishing.
6 On the rise of English as a global language, see David Crystal, English as a Global Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For further discussion of the global dominance of English and its implications for the shaping of publishing fields, see Thompson, Books in the Digital Age, pp. 41–3.
7 In 2002, around 215,000 new titles were published in the US and around 125,000 in the UK, compared to around 79,000 in Germany, around 70,000 in Spain and around 59,000 in France. (See tables 9 and 10 below for details on title output in the US and the UK. For details on title output in European countries, see Publishing Market Watch: Final Report, submitted to the European Commission (27 Jan. 2005), at http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/media_taskforce/doc/pmw_20050127.pdf) According to United Nations data, exports of printed books (excluding dictionaries and encyclopaedias) from the US in 2008 totalled $2.36 billion, and book exports (excluding dictionaries and encyclopaedias) from the UK totalled $2.15 billion; these figures were well ahead of Germany (total book exports of $1.5 billion), France ($791 million) and Spain ($755 million). Data available from http://data.un.org.
8 Analysing UNESCO data, Wischenbart found that more than half of all books translated globally are from English language originals, whereas only 6 per cent of translations go from all other languages into English; see Rüdiger Wischenbart, ‘The Many, Many Books – For Whom?’ (11 Sep. 2005), at www.wischenbart.com/de/essays__interviews_rw/wischenbart_publishing-diversity_oxford-2005.pdf. For a more detailed analysis of translations in Europe, see Rüdiger Wischenbart, Diversity Report 2008: An Overview and Analysis of Translation Statistics across Europe (21 Nov. 2008), at www.wischenbart.com/diversity/report/Diversity%20Report_prel-final_02.pdf. Further discussion of translations and bestseller lists in Europe and the Anglo-American world can be found in Miha Kovacˇ, Never Mind the Web: Here Comes the Book (Oxford: Chandos, 2008), pp. 121–7.
9 The notion of the logic of the field is discussed in more detail in ch. 8.
10 The notion of publishers as gatekeepers of ideas is developed by Lewis A. Coser, Charles Kadushin and Walter W. Powell in Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (New York: Basic Books, 1982), discussed further below.
11 The practice of allowing booksellers to return stock for full credit has a long history in Europe but was used rarely and half-heartedly by American publishers until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when publishers began experimenting seriously with returns policies as a way of stimulating sales and encouraging booksellers to increase stockholdings. In spring 1930, Putnam, Norton and Knopf all introduced schemes to allow booksellers to return stock for credit or exchange under certain conditions, and in 1932 Viking Press announced that orders for new books would be returnable for a credit of 90 per cent of the billed cost (see John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 3: The Golden Age between the Two Wars, 1920–1940 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1978), pp. 429–30, 441). The practice of returns subsequently became a settled feature of the book trade and marks it out as somewhat unusual among retail sectors.
12 Coser et al., Books.
13 Thomas Whiteside, The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980).
14 André Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (London: Verso, 2000); Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).