Merchants of Culture. John B. Thompson

where a more thorough updating was necessary – when you’re in the midst of a revolution, two years can seem like an eternity. I returned to around 20 of my sources in London and New York and spoke with them about the changes that have taken place, partly in order to make sure that I was fully apprised of the most important developments but also in order to see how their views have altered over time as they have struggled to cope with the changes swirling around them. Once again, I am enormously grateful to these individuals – who will, as before, remain anonymous – for their time, generosity and openness. However, I have resisted the temptation to rewrite the text and revisit every actor and organization: while much has happened, the basic structures and dynamics of the world of Anglo-American trade publishing remain pretty much as I described them. Of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that these structures and dynamics will be transformed over time by the changes currently taking place: no one should ever underestimate the disruptive potential of new technologies. But at the same time we must see that the development and implementation of new technologies are always part and parcel of a broader set of social relations in which agents and organizations are bound together in relations of cooperation, competition and sometimes conflict with one another, and where outcomes are shaped as much by structures of power as they are by the intrinsic properties of technologies as such. This book describes those structures, shows how they arose, how they shape the practices of actors in the field and how they are changing today, and it intentionally leaves open the question of how far these structures will be altered in a future that remains – and is likely to remain for some while to come – uncertain.

      J.B.T., Cambridge

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

      It is a matter of some puzzlement that the one sector of the creative industries about which we know very little is the sector that has been with us for the longest time – the book publishing industry. First established in the fifteenth century thanks to the celebrated inventions of a goldsmith in Mainz, the printing and publishing of books is a business that has been around for more than half a millennium, and yet we know very little about how this industry is organized today and how it is changing. Books continue to command a good deal of attention in newspapers, radio and other media; they remain a staple source of inspiration and raw material for films and other forms of popular entertainment; and writers – especially novelists, historians and scientists – are still endowed with a stature in our societies, an aura even, that is accorded to few other professions. But on the rare occasions when the publishing industry itself comes under public scrutiny, more often than not it is because another journalist is eager to announce that, with the coming of the digital age, the publishing industry as we know it is doomed. Few industries have had their death foretold more frequently than the book publishing industry, and yet somehow, miraculously, it seems to have survived them all – at least till now.

It was partly with the aim of filling this lacuna in our understanding that I set out, nearly a decade ago, to study systematically the contemporary book publishing industry. I began by working on a sector of the industry that was close to my own world as an academic – namely, the field of academic publishing, which included the university presses, the commercial academic publishers (like Taylor & Francis, Palgrave Macmillan and SAGE Publications) and the college textbook publishers (like Pearson and McGraw-Hill). The results of that research were published in 2005 in Books in the Digital Age. Since then I have immersed myself in a very different world – that of general interest trade publishing, the world of bestsellers like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, of brand-name authors like Stephen King and John Grisham, of the many styles and genres of fiction and non-fiction, from commercial to literary, from misery memoir to serious history, politics and current affairs. I have studied this world in the way that an anthropologist would study the practices of a tribe inhabiting some remote island in the South Pacific, only in this case the tribe lives and works, for the most part, in a small section of an island squeezed between the Hudson and East rivers in New York and on the banks of the Thames in London. Their practices may initially strike the outside observer as strange, even at times bizarre. But the assumption underlying my work is that once we understand the structure of this world and how it has evolved over time, even the most surprising things do not seem so strange after all.

      The research for this book was carried out over a period of four years, from 2005 to 2009; I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK for a generous grant (RES-000-22-1292) which supported this research and enabled me to spend extended periods of time in New York and London. During this time I carried out around 280 interviews with senior executives, publishers, editors, sales directors, marketing directors, publicists and other managers and employees in many publishing firms, from the large corporations to the small indie presses; I also interviewed many agents, authors and booksellers, including some of the central buyers from the large retail chains. I am grateful to all of these individuals for being so generous with their time – and in some cases allowing me to interview them more than once. In a world where time is calibrated as carefully as money, I am very conscious of the fact that I was showered with temporal gifts. Their willingness to participate, their patient explanations of what they do and how they do it and their frank assessments of the challenges they face were the indispensable bases on which I have built my account of their world. For the most part, my interviewees remain anonymous; there are a few cases where I’ve allowed them, with their permission, to speak in their own name when I felt it would be helpful for the reader (or easy for a reader with any knowledge of the field to recognize who they were). But the fact that most of my sources remain anonymous, and that they and their companies are usually given pseudonyms, should not be allowed to obscure the magnitude of my debt.

I could not have completed this book without the generous assistance of Alanna Ivin and her assistants, who transcribed many hours of interviews with unstinting determination and professionalism. I am very grateful to Michael Schudson, Angus Phillips, William Shinker, Helen Fraser, Drake McFeely, Andrea Drugan, four anonymous readers for the ESRC and several of my interviewees – who shall also remain anonymous – who set aside the time to read an earlier draft of this text and provided me with many helpful comments. I am also grateful to Ann Bone for her skilful and meticulous copy-editing, to David Drummond for his inspired cover design and to the many people at Polity – including Gill Motley, Sue Pope, Sarah Lambert, Neil de Cort, Clare Ansell, Sarah Dodgson, Breffni O’Connor, Marianne Rutter and Colin Robinson – who steered this book through the publication process. My thanks, finally, to Mirca and Alex, who helped to create the space for this book to be written and who, in the case of Alex, never ceased to remind me of the primordial joy of reading books.

INTRODUCTION

      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