Merchants of Culture. John B. Thompson

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Название Merchants of Culture
Автор произведения John B. Thompson
Жанр Кинематограф, театр
Серия
Издательство Кинематограф, театр
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509528943



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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.

      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.