“Must literary studies confine itself to the margins of the publishing field?” asks Andrew Goldstone in the first of what promises to be an important series of blog posts on John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century.
Noting that Thompsons’s amazing account of the publishing field omits readers and writers from its model--and does so by design--Andrew seems to conclude that the answer is “yes,” finding himself “oddly but emphatically at sea about how to appropriate his work for literary scholarship." Indeed, the “world of writers,” Thompson repeatedly argues, is very different from the world of publishers: “for them [writers] it is another world, located somewhere else and largely mysterious in the way it works, an object of wonder, dismay or simply incomphrenension depending on the writer’s experiences of it” (383). And yet the exogenous position of writers and readers to the publishing field need not deter the literary critic. The reason is simple: the objects of literary study aren’t necessarily writers and readers, but books. The death of the author, which literary criticism treats as a theoretical position, is in the publishing field something more like an operational principle. Editors fall in love with books, not writers. And about books, Thompson has a lot to teach us, giving literary critics new ways of talking about the relationship between the inside and the outside of books.
For the most mysterious and central aspect of the publishing field is the fetish of “big books.”
So what are big books, exactly? Simple, you might think: big books are bestsellers. Intuitively plausible though that may seem, in fact it is wrong. Big books are not bestsellers for the simple reason that, for most big books…, at the time when they are being sent out by agents and bought by publishers and are being treated by both as big books, they have not yet been published and no one knows whether they will actually become bestsellers. ‘We don’t know, we just don’t know.’ So big books cannot be bestsellers. At most they are hoped-for bestsellers, which is not at all the same thing. The difference between a big book and a bestseller is the difference between aspiration and reality. (194)
Given the temporal gap between hopes and reality, what convinces actors in the publishing field that they have a big book on their hands? The answer is perhaps just as mysterious as the big book itself: the answer is “buzz,” which Thompson defines as “a performative utterance, a type of speech act,” where “the recipients of hype respond with affirmative talk backed up by money.” Buzz is “a web of collective belief," what happens when hype pulls out its checkbook (194).
Here, the rubber of the literary field meets the road of the publishing field. In consecrating a manuscript with the title of a “big book,” members of the publishing field read together, interpret together, joining a money-minded version of what Stanley Fish once long ago called an interpretive community. Sociologically minded literary scholars might attempt to model how the publishing field chooses big books (or any books for that matter). After all, not all manuscripts get published; not every book becomes "big." At every stage of the publishing chain, agents, editors, publishers, bookbuyers, and ultimately consumers make choices. Some potential-books get knocked out of circulation and others move further down the chain. Some forthcoming books become big, drawing in the publisher's marketing resources and attention. Others fall by the wayside. By design, the institutions of publishing are designed to manage the problem of scarcity--scarcity of resources and attention. What are the filters, norms, expectations, and constraints that distingiush the unpublishable from the publishable? What practices, rituals, beliefs, and values put some books on the fast track, while holding others back, especially among large consolidated corporate publishers?
It’s possible that what gets chosen by the publishing field is essentially random–there is some fascinating research that suggests that buzz might be allocated without rhyme or rhythm–but it seems that we shouldn’t begin from the assumption that building buzz depends on the random initial allocation of attention and resources. There are a number of important filters already discussed in Thompson’s book that can help us think about the relationship between the outside and the inside of a big book. I'll name just a few here (some already mentioned in Andrew's initial post):
- Voice: “‘To me it’s always about voice basically,’ said a senior editor who acquires both fiction and non-fiction for one of the imprints of a large publishing corporation… ‘Even if it’s fairly analytical or something, it still has to be an author who you feel like you’re kind of in good hands with, and they have this, whatever, special spark of genius that you want to be stuck with for 300 pages” (195). This ineffable quality of the writing itself, so often described in terms of "voice," was analyzed at considerable length in Mark McGurl’s The Program Era. Writers in MFA programs are asked to find their voices, and the publishing field is there to commodify those voices once discovered. Is “voice” the same in both fields? Formally speaking, what sort of sentences have "voice"? Which don't?
- Comps: Comps are simply comparable books, books that can plausibly be said to resemble the manuscript under consideration, both in terms of content and in terms of possible future sales record. To be publishable, it helps to be legible to actors in the publishing field in terms of what has already been published. This act of imagination and scenario-building drives the creation of hype and buzz. But as Thompson points out, there is a logic of plausibility that must ground comps. You want to comp a manuscript not to a major bestseller but a more modest but promising success. The question for literary sociology is: what are the horizons of the imaginable? What are known frames of reference in the world of publishing? How do top-ten lists, prizes, syllabi, and other factors, both intrinsic and extrinsic to the publishing field, shape this horizon?
- Track: this is the author’s history of sales, as recorded on services like Neilson BookScan. Here, the filter is the marketplace itself, as represented though sales data, which then gets interpreted among members of the field. If an author is on a declining or stagnant tragectory in the market her capacity to sell manuscripts will diminish. Editors and publishers will have a harder time convincing bookbuyers to stock what they publish. Here, one could imagine more work being done on studying the relationship--and balance--between market performance and other factors in determining which books publishers select. As Thompson points out, unpublished authors often have an advantage over published authors, because their lack of a track record allows buzz to float free of inconvenient data.
- Platform: This is “the position from which an author speaks--a combination of their credentials, visibility and promotibility, especially through the media. It is those traits and accomplishments of the author that establish a pre-existing audience for their work, and that a publisher can leverage in teh attempt to find a market for their book” (87). Platform is especially important for nonfiction, and can explain why a book like Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like could earn a six-figure advance on the basis of nothing more than a popular blog. When investing the concept of a platform, we might try to figure out how different platforms accrue cultural capital, how the dynamics of different platforms shape the broader media environment, and so on. Given the proliferation of platforms online, there is a lot of work to do looking at how platforms affect books, and--as authors increasingly realize the potential to build audiences through other means--books affect platforms.
These are just some filtering and sorting mechanisms visible in Thompsons’s account. Other filters--cultural, political, material--also certainly must play a role in shaping the literary and publishing fields. My interest, like Andrew’s, is in finding the points of contact between literary sociology and the sort of work that more traditionally occurs in literature departments, however we might want to define that work. Fortunately, as this post argues, I would answer Andrew’s question with a resounding “No.”
Literary critics need not confine themselves to the margins of the publishing field; instead, they should sharpen their harpoons and hunt the publishing field's great unstudied white whale: the big book.
I immediately thought of McGurl's analysis too when I read the passage you quote about "voice." It's surprising, in a way, because McGurl is talking about specifically literary fiction, whereas Thompson is talking to an editor of a big non-fiction and fiction imprint. Whereas the category of "voice" is closely linked, in McGurl's reading of postwar fiction, to identity and in particular the genres of "high-cultural pluralism," all those identity categories (ethnic, gender, sexual, class) are basically completely invisible in Thompson's book. So I'm inclined to guess that "voice" in the publishing field and "voice" in the academic-fiction field are distinct concepts.
So many great ideas here, Lee, not to say answers to most of my questions. More effusions from me to follow, but I want to know what others think about white whales, comps, platform…
how the publishing field chooses big books (or any books for that matter)."
In the case of 'big books' one might ask: How many of the books so-designated go on to become bestsellers? We know that at least some books not designated as big do, in fact, become best sellers (e.g. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone). That is, having studied just how a book becomes big, one would like to know how often the process succeeds. If it always succeeds then, yes, it would seem that these little interpretive communities within publishing houses have figured out how to identify whatever it is that makes a title sell. If the process is not so successful, then what has one learned, other than how the process goes?
This is where a look at De Vany's Hollywood Economics might be worthwhile. What De Vany did was take a decade's worth of box office receipts and investigate whether a film's box office record could be predicted by knowing who's involved (directors, actors), genre (action, comedy, horror, etc.), overall budget, or performance on opening weekend. What he discovered is that none of those things predict box-office success or failure. Thus a studio may insist on getting some A-list stars to play in a film, but that doesn't guarantee success, nor does the lack of such stars doom a film to failure. And so on down the line.
These, no doubt, are crude things, much cruder than whatever judgment a producer makes about a treatment or a script (or an editor makes about a manuscript), but these crude things are associated with success or failure. De Vany's research suggests that belief in the efficacy of these factors is misplaced.
It would be interesting to know whether or not the success rate of Hollywood movies was higher, lower, or pretty much the same as the success rate of major publisher fiction. In the absence of any real information, I'd guess that the rates would be comparable.
This is very interesting. It'd get way complicated, however, when one considers the media's involvement in the whole thing. They are really the ones who do the anointing, no matter how much a publisher tries with ad dollars or fancy blurbs. The Atlantic did a rip job on last year's Big Book, the art of fielding, and talked about that--fluff pieces etc. I guess you could analyse up to the tipping point when everyone has to comment on it, read it so they can have a say in the conversation whether at the cocktail party or the Book pages.
But isn't The Art of Fielding the perfect example of a Big Book that fulfills its promise? Hype that turned into buzz. David Foster Wallace's editor, Michael Pietsch, as editor, massive advance after an auction. Harbach had platform--his association with n+1. Lots of comps: Just like Freedom! Like Infinite Jest and Moby-Dick, but more relatable! No track, so the imagination could run wild. A perfect Big Book--everything a publisher, agent, editor, and bookseller dreams of.
The Big Book exists "in the space of the possible," says Thompson: a book is Big before it ever enters bookstores, where it may or may not be a bestseller, may or may not command positive reviews or other kinds of "accredited visibility." The reviewing media are not really involved in this stage of potential existence, since this is all in the world of talk among publishers, editors, agents--though the media may matter a lot, since they are one potentially crucial conduit for platform if the author has preexisting media visibility. And in any case the point of Thompson's emphasis on concepts like platform, webs of collective belief, etc., is that the established reviewing media never command a big enough audience to produce the kinds of sales publishers of big books desire. That kind of symbolic capital matters, but not on the scale that makes or breaks bestsellers on its own
This does raise a significant question: does a "quality" Big Book like Harbach's emerge in the same way as a "commercial" Big Book?
I like the question of how the Big Book relates to other books, and to the media. Another layer (not to navel-gaze) is us—the novels we choose to teach, the ones that are Big enough to filter into high school curricula.
Race and gender (not to mention target age—look at the YA market) also seem to be unstated but important factors in what gets to be a Big Book. Women and writers of color have complained for a long time that their books get pigeonholed as "African American fiction" or "chick lit" or what have you. I suppose the same can be said for "nerd" genres as well (sci-fi and fantasy).
Sometimes those works can be Big Books—I assume any Toni Morrison novel is expected to be a Big Book. But how much of that is because Beloved is on every high school summer reading list? (And how many high school summer reading lists plop Beloved down and consider their duty to African American fiction done, inadvertently leaving Morrison looking like the exception that proves the rule?) And how might we track the soft and subtle creepings of expectations and prepublication "buzz," which are influenced by all these things and more?
I'd love to hear Ed Finn weigh in on this....
... not only because she is so widely taught, but also because she worked in the publishing industry--as an editor for twenty years--and so is probaly a rare case of an author who knows how the industry works, or how it worked at the time when she started writing, at least.
Speaking of her experience in an interview, Morrison said, "It lessened my awe of the publishing industry. I understood the advresarial relationship that sometimes exists between writers and publishers, bu I learned how important, how critical an editor was, which I don't think I would have known before." She also reported that "the industry became less interesting" to her after the consolidations and changes Thompson documents in his book, which is one of the reasons she left.
Jim English has an interesting account of the campaign to get Toni Morrison a Pulitzer Prize in The Economy of Prestige, which also speaks to the intense, self-conscious canonization effort that was needed to overcome the biases you mention in your comment, Natalia. Morrison was arguably optimally located to become one of the few African-American authors who regularly produce books that might be treated as Big in the publishing field.
And Morrison also benefited from Oprah's book club. Thompson describes the "huge surge in sales" (270) recognition by Oprah regularly produces. Oprah is a maker of bestsellers without equal.
Thompson quotes a publicity manager at a "major US house" who says: "It's almost too terrifying to complate what our industry would look like in her [Oprah's] absence."
If I may chime in a bit late to this really rich discussion, it seems that the thing that hasn't come up with regard to "bigness" are the television and film markets as part of the book's ecology. Andrew's mention of the (love it) "O-effekt" got me thinking in this direction...
Does part of a book's "big"-ness within the publishing industry have to do with its potential to be made into a film? Most filmable big books get made into films, and I at least used to think of the causality there as a one-way street: gosh, lots of people liked reading The Help, says Hollywood, maybe we should make it into a movie!
But there are several ways that the movie can conceivably precede the bigness of the book, as precisely the "potential" that publishers see for the book. And it even starts with the writing process: Kathryn Stockett wrote The Help with Octavia Spencer in mind for the role of Minnie; Michael Szalay gave an amazing talk at UCSB recently—soon to become an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books—about the aspirations of young novelists to get optioned, as Jennifer Egan recently was, by HBO. Part of the novelist's ambition these days is to make the extra money from such a sale of film or TV rights, which in turn are good for publishers. Remakes in film or television presumably boosts the book's sales a second time—say, four or five years down the line from its original publication—thus revitalizing and expanding markets for a book (George R. R. Martin definitely; Stieg Larssen probably not as much).
In short, I'm curious what Thompson has to say about the publishing industry's reciprocal relationships with film and TV (if you can call them "relationships" plain and simple, in the age of the media conglomerates whose assets span all three).
I wonder if an example to the contrary might be the exception to prove the rule. Colson Whitehead's Zone One, which I do suppose is quite big, based on Whitehead's track record, growing prestige, the not-quite-dead zombie market, and so forth. From some cursory research, it does seem like a big seller (its Amazon page is full of glowing reviews and its sales rank is #12,000), and I recall it being aggressively advertised in The New Yorker. If you've read the book (I feel bad about giving spoilers, even though I wasn't wild for the book), you'll know that the "reveal" near the end, a major plot point, is virtually unfilmable. I'm tempted to read the novel's requirement of non-visual representation as an intentional move that says, "this is a novel and it has to stay a novel." Not many, these days, from The Road to The Hunger Games, do.
What a terrific comment, Scott. So first of all Thompson also adds to the elements of this media ecology something we rarely think of, but turns out to be a staple of publishing: novelizations of screenplays, which are apparently a routine way to fill gaps in the bottom line.
The first wave of corporate aquisitions of publishing houses, in the 60s and 70s, were often by media conglomerates seeking "synergy" (RCA bought Random House, Time Warner bought Little, Brown, etc.); but in the 80s those same conglomerates mostly sold off their publishing interests when they discovered that the synergies were not as profitable as they expected. Thompson reports a remour that CBS "would be happy to sell Simon & Schuster if they could get the asking price" (111). Big publishing is actually less conglomerated with visual media than it was twenty years ago.
And yes, right alongside his discussion of Oprah is his discussion of movie adaptation as another "recognition trigger"--which is, says one of his publicist interviewees, "almost as good as Oprah" (270)! Movie adaptations regularly boost book sales. But he doesn't say much about whether movie-adaptability can contribute to potential appeal when a book is first up for publication.
Perhaps the basic issue is just the scale of production: compared to the number of books the publishers put out and need to put out, Hollywood just doesn't make that many movies. Even if almost every major movie were adapted from a book, that just wouldn't be enough in the way of Big Books to sustain the publishers. But I'll look out eagerly for Szalay's essay on the subject--and perhaps from you too, on Whitehead and the rejection of transmediality?
Wow, I'm thrilled to hear this is part of Thompson's investigation—I've long been idly curious about precisely these details (synergy!), so I'm looking forward to checking it out firsthand. Thanks so much for the response and sneak preview.
The Szalay talk was kind of a revelation to me, with regard to HBO in all of this (I'm guessing this might be so contemporary it's not even in the Thompson book). The consistently high-brow shows on their network have essentially made HBO the novelist's way to sell out without apparently "selling out." (Jonathan Franzen, once reluctant to "go Oprah," was recently involved in an abortive deal to make The Corrections for HBO, for instance.) Such highbrow status seems like something kind of new in the book-radio-comics-TV-movie history. And HBO shows have an auteur-ish quality to them (David Simon) or even feature main characters as novelists (Jonathan Ames in Bored to Death; Hannah Horvath in Girls)—the latter in an interesting loop that stages the solitary authenticity of the struggling novelist within the successful but obviously corporate production environment.
An interesting side note: I heard recently (from Amitav Ghosh, in a frank talk about the industry) that the major houses are starting to interview their authors—to see whether they'll put a good, approachable face to the book on book tours and media appearances—before signing them. @colsonwhitehead, it so happens, is hilarious on Twitter...
At the risk of making this an "and also, EVERYTHING" comment, in addition to other media (film, television, who knows—soundtracks?), we might add in the possibility of various kinds of merchandising—toys, clothes, theme parks, hamburgers, whatever.
Disney is the obvious example of this; my sister and I have been watching with a fascinated horror as ABC/Disney, in its tv show Once Upon a Time, attempts to canonize and consolidate a set of Disneyfied and thoroughly copyrighted versions of fairy tales by placing them in a single codex that reappears throughout the series. "Cinderella" (an actual fairy tale—Perrault, the Grimms, various other sources), "Pinocchio" (from an 1883 novel by Carlo Collodi), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (seriously!): it all gets jumbled into a "fairy tale universe" with a homogeneous "back-in-the-day" temporality. The mechanism for Disney's corporate consolidation of literary history is a book, which a little boy named Henry carries around and consults from time to time.
I will be shocked if Disney does not eventually produce and market copies of this book.Obviously, Disney is producing and marketing copies of this book.Disney has reprinted some public domain versions of fairy tales and slapped a few cheap illustrations and a brand name on them; this is still selling books, but the Amazon comments will blow your mind.A similar conceit operates in Disney's other notable "all ur public domain materials are belong to us" effort, the film Enchanted (2007): the opening Disney logo resolves into a scene visually reminiscent of their Sleeping Beauty (1959), at the center of which lies a codex, which opens to reveal the world of the film. (This observation is due to my sister Maria Cecire, who has an essay on this film in Disney's Medievalisms). The book is—conventionally—a pretext for a film. This is true in something like The Princess Bride (1987), which opens with a book-reading sequence, but even more the case with Disney: the book is a pretext not just for film and tv, but for a whole corporate strategy ("Disney princesses," etc.).
Disney is perhaps the ultimate octopus, so it's no surprise that a different ABC show, Castle, which has an author as a main character, has released three novels, a graphic novel, and an e-book "written by" the fictional author character in the show. (This is similar to the movie novelizations that Andrew describes above, but not quite the same thing.) It's telling (warning: Wikipedia info ahead) that upon release, the first novel ranked #26 on the NYT Bestseller List. The second novel débuted at #7. The third novel? At #1, of course. This is about sellers, not readers.
This may seem like a contemporary phenomenon, but I don't know that it is. When John Newbery published what are typically called the first "children's books" in the eighteenth century, they came with—what else? Toys (gendered, of course—a ball for boys and a pincushion for girls). As Robin M. Bernstein has shown by looking at novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin, toys and playing have long been closely tied to the act of reading.
Because publishing is now part of huge "media conglomerates," we're asked to understand books as pretexts for other media, and vice-versa. I'm intrigued to learn that publishing is less closely tied to visual media than it was twenty years ago. Is it that visual media don't help sell books, or that books don't help sell visual media?
Jim Collins explores this whole Hollywood-literature nexus in Bring on the Books for Everybody, which has a chapter on what he calls the "cine-literary." As he argues there, "The seamless, simultaneous, interconnection of novel, film, featurette, Web site, and digital reading device is the foundation of cine-literary culture, and within this culture, reading the book has become only one of a host of interlocking literary experiences" (119). He's mainly interested in transmedia narratives where the book and the film become interrelated but occasionally competing forms of symbolic capital, a point we might illustrate now with conversations about how HBO gracefully (or un-) elides and interprets something like Game of Thrones.
An extremely belated followup, the great piece on the place of HBO in the contemporary novel's media ecology is out at the LA Review of Books: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=753&fulltext=1&media= . Elsewhere on the site, Szalay has an audio interview of Dana Spiotta (the subject of his review in the HBO piece) in which he confirms several of his hunches about her intentions...
Awesome; thanks for the follow-up, Scott.
I've been trying to resist Natalia's invitation until I had a chance to read Thompson's book but it's become clear that life and fatherhood are not going to stand aside. So I will have to rely on Lee's (hopefully) excellent precis above.
What seems to be missing here is a recognition of the revolution the publishing industry is suffering through right now, and especially the spread of the author agency contract model. And, as Scott Selisker notes below, publishers are starting to interview authors to judge their celebrity potential. Maybe the "author" is dead in a literary sense, and we're studying what I call the "social lives of books"--but the "author" as celebrity is enjoying a renaissance powered by the networks of micro-fame that Twitter and other social media enable. This is good news for people who were celebrities already, like James Franco or Timothy Ferriss, whose direct publishing contracts with Amazon will net them far more than traditional publishing deals. It's also good news for those who don't have the connections or credentials to break into the literary scene, creating at least the potential for new kinds of independent publication. On the other hand, it may be bad news for readers.
As the model changes, the field of literary production shifts as well. Hidden within this concept of "Big Books" is a whole raft of qualifiers: literary fiction of the right kind, published by the right people. These people still happen to be mainly white, and if the books are "serious", predominantly men. But the publishing houses that produced the right stuff and supported it with genre fiction and the other stuff on Oprah (i.e. not Morrison and Tolstoy but Wally Lamb) are fighting for survival now. If we imagine the 20th century's community for "literature" as a gentle curve with The Catcher in the Rye on the popular side and things like Mason & Dixon a bit downslope, in the 21st century competition has turned up the gravitational force. The curve is compressed, with a higher anchor on the popular side (for instance, Franzen's Freedom) and a long tail of niches and obscure reading communities.
We endorse a few authors, like Morrison, to climb the bestseller lists without confiscating their "literary" halos, but I think we will increasingly confront a world where "big books" (which, in the literary fiction context, were really books in the middle of the curve, modest success stories selling hundreds of thousands of copies but not exactly Harry Potter hits) exist primarily through author celebrity. It will take a Colson Whitehead tweeting consistently to hold together a reading community between books. Authors are already starting to feel the pressure of serving as their own individual fields of production.
So I think the features Natalia identifies, and which Lee/Thompson describes as "voice," are far more complicated than what's discussed above. An author like Junot Díaz does indeed have a distinctive "voice"--but his appeal and literary success are bound up in his position as an author-figure, not just in the books themselves. Ethnicity, gender, and genre are all community markers that we increasingly interpret through author interviews, profiles and social media, influencing the social context within which we read a given book.
I find both these posts very interesting and quite relevant. But I was wondering if Thompson talks about the actual size of the reading public, say for contemporary fiction. Some years back, my wife attended the writer's conference in Sewanee TN and I was there with our children. During a reception I had a conversation with an agent about the extent of the audience for literary fiction in the US. And she told me that it was, relatively speaking, limited for the size of the US population. She thought that the small size of the public explains in part the difficult straits that literary fiction finds itself today. Any thoughts on this?
(Or, to put it another way, who is in "the reading class"?)
So, the publishing business has been around for awhile, and it's organized to make money by selling books. It's thus not unreasonable to assume that they're doing their best to sell as many books to as many markets as possible. And there's no reason to assume there's some extra special book sauce that will double sales except that, alas, no one has yet discovered it. So we're up against the size and structure of the marketplace.
You ask a good--and difficult--question, Gregory. Thompson argues convincingly that the publishing field is polarized, in a number of ways. There are large conglomerate publishers and small--often very small--publishers, but few medium-sized publishers. These conglomerate publishers increasingly rely on frontlist sales (rather than backlist sales), but can't predict which titles will sell, apart from a small coterie of brandname authors (Grisham, King, Clancey). But the titles that do sell, sell very very well. The Da Vinci Code sold tens of millions of copies, which is small compared to the size of the population of the planet, but not insubstantial.
True bestsellers generally sell in the millions in the U.S., but most of the rest sell far far less--in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, if they're lucky, more often less. What is significant about this isn't the absolute size of the market--though one of the important things about Oprah is that she got traditional non-readers to read--but the distribution within the market. While there is a "diversity of titles"--more books are being published than ever--Thompson convincingly argues that there isn't a "diversity of marketplace"--only a very very small number of books get promoted and read. One could imagine a different publishing field, which put different pressures on the bottom line of publishing conglomerates, might produce a different distribution of sales.
Other research, like Wendy Griswold's, suggests that the reading public is also polarizing. More of us are reading less, but some of us are reading more than ever (Griswold calls members of the latter group the "reading class"), which complicates the portrait painted by reports like the NEA's Reading at Risk.
That is, publishers are producing titles that would, in fact, be read, but the audience for those titles doesn't know about them. Hmmm . . . .
Let's assume that the difficulty of reading the market is such that publishers have no choice but to produce titles that don't in fact have a market. A big chunk of the first printing for these books will thus languish in a warehouse someplace. The same happens for those books that do have an audience but that audience can't find the books. And the publisher has no way of telling whether non-sales mean no audience at all, or a real but inaccessible audience.
Interesting. Is Thompson's argument about the non-diverse market more than observing that the large majority of books receive little promotion?
* * * * *
Here's a useful tidbit that speaks to this issue. It's from a reader review (B. Bennetts) at Amazon:
The first doesn't much surprise me. But the change in distribution sales volume per title, that's very interesting. As for the causal link implied in that last sentence, I'd need to know more.
Thank you, Natalia, for linking this up to Lee's and my previous outing. The reading class is, roughly speaking, 25% of the population in a high-income country like the US or the UK, skewing towards the better-educated, the white, the urban, and women. Griswold is very lucid at explaining the numbers are not always easy to reconcile. Almost everybody reads and wants to read more. Avid readers are perhaps 15%. A 2002 NEA study found that ~46% of Americans "read literature."
But we're still talking about an enormous number of people and books. Thompson gives the total revenues in US trade/mass-market publishing in 2007 as $9.645 billion, citing the Association of American Publishers. A lot of books (to first order, 1 billion?) sold. Or to take another example from Thompson, when McEwan's Atonement became a NYT bestseller on the heels of the movie version in early 2008, it sold 640,000 copies in six months. That gives a sense of the audience for a maximally-visible "literary" novel.
Anyway, as Lee and I have been trying to emphasize, Thompson's argument is that much of the logic of trade publishing is not determined by readership but by the self-reinforcing practices of publishers and retailers--especially the growth imperative of the corporate owners of presses.
I'm trying to understand what it means, abstractly and concretely, that publishers think of retailers as their market rather than the readers. Abstractly, given that retailers make their money by selling to readers, are they an inadequate proxy for their customers and therefor do not represent those readers to publishers? If that is so then what, concretely, could/would publishers if they regarded readers as their market? For example, would they send direct mail pieces to readers?
To answer your question, Bill, I think my title conveys the central distinction. Retailers will return unsold volumes (sometimes hundreds or thousands, and often several months or years after the book was first "sold" to the retailer). And they get their money back from the publishers. So think about what that does to your economics--as a publisher, you want to identify books that will sell in large quantities, and quickly, so that you're not dealing with the inventory nightmare of many titles selling a few copies at a time (or being returned to you for pulping a few books at a time). This is the proverbial "death by a thousand papercuts" for publishers.
Ergo, only large publishers can really afford to carry a big list or take any risks, and only small publishers are crazy enough to try in spite of the financial realities, or print small enough runs to essentially hand-sell their stock.
is that publishers couldn't think about their readers if they wanted to. Economics would seem to make that pointless.
That may be true, but it's not quite what I'm looking for.
We exist in an intellectual milieu where many scholars all but reflexively assume that, because publishers are in it for the money, what they do is automatically somewhere between evil and suspect. Writers, providing they write the right stuff, they're good, and readers, they need protection from evil publishers and help in finding good writers.
What most impresses me about this whole business, and I do mean business, is that, whatever the state of their moral being, publishers can't predict the market place. That's their number one business problem. Even if the evil ones see the light and turn toward The Force, the freakin' Force is not going to allow them to predict the market. That problem still plagues them.
Does this focus on retailers mean that readers are not going to get books that they need or want? Perhaps it does. If so, we need to see that argument carefully spelled out (and perhaps Thompson does so).
There are, of course, situations where the market doesn't provide readers with what they want, and in those situations we (sometimes) see the development of underground means of publication and distribution. So the notion of an unresponsive supply-side to the market is not an empty one. But it's not clear to me that we face that situation as a function of the economics of the existing business models or what, if anything, could be done about it.
Literary sociology isn't about deciding whether publishers are evil and suspect. We might arrive at that conclusion after reading literary sociology, but this is separate from the project of creating models of how institutions of production, distribution, and consumption shape the literary world. If Thompson's account is to be believed--I find it persuasive--selling to retailers rather than consumers changes the priorities and behavior of large conglomerate publishers, in exactly the ways Ed specifies. If we don't like the results, one thing we could do is change the way we fund the arts in the U.S., making writers less reliant on publishers. See our previous discussion of Griswold.
"Literary sociology isn't about deciding whether publishers are evil and suspect."
Agreed.
"If we don't like the results, one thing we could do is change the way we fund the arts in the U.S., making writers less reliant on publishers."
But there's still the problem of getting work to readers. It's not the writer that's the focus of my attention. It's the reader.
Look at our précis of Griswold, especially the discussion of Norway; it's not only about writers but also readers and retailers.
I want to raise the question of time. The temporal horizons of literary scholarship and commercial publishing are different, and have been getting more so. Publishing has been less and less concerned with books that people will be interested in reading 3, 5, 10, or 50 years from now. Not so for us. Another way to put this question is, of course, that literary study is traditionally concerned with questions of value that cannot be enummerated in market terms. But the opposition between the kind of value that drives our enterprise, and the kind of value that drives publishing, is to my mind better described in temporal terms.
One caveat: as Aaron Kunin has been brilliantly arguing lately, there does exist a version of literary studies historicism that is similarly unable to see beyond a vanishingly brief temporal horizzon. This was most obviously true for the New Historicisms with their fetish of the decade and year, but this kind of thing lingers.
In other words: Publishers are the historicists of the present.
The time question is crucial—or anyway I think so; I’m writing a further post on time and history in the field as described by Thompson. I’m reminded of the Bourdieuean distinction between the time-scales of the subfields of restricted and large-scale production.
I think the idea that (new) historicism in literary studies is confined to a narrow temporal horizon is a caricature that mistakes efforts to take in cultural breadth as a failure to think in historical depth (North’s Reading 1922, I think, pursues both depth and breadth admirably). And I don’t want anything to do with “our” enterprise if it is limited to the false question of lasting literary value—which, fortunately, it needn’t be. But in any case, one thing we can do with Thompson is to replace, or at least supplement, the (to me altogether tiresome) question of enduring literary value with another question about the mechanisms that in fact give books and authors their “shrinking window” in the marketplace. Those mechanisms seem to have as much to do with retailers as with publishers: the two are locked in a kind of feedback loop, in which the mass-merchandisers’ emphasis on selling a few items in huge quantities (on low margins) pushes the publishers’ search of big books—and those huge sales are in any case the only way the publishers can meet the growth imperative of a large, diversified corporation. Thompson also shows how agents too have become part of this field logic by their power to command high advances for big authors. In other words, no single agent alone sets the temporality of the field, now or in the past.
Literary sociology must begin with reflection on the sociology of knowledge production, and in particular its own position in the contemporary research university. I think that such a reflection will lead us to acknowledge that questions of literary value are inescapable. The current configuration of US knowledge production is part of why Bourdieu-style analysis has come to seem...dated. (His analysis of aesthetic experience, for example, contains assumptions about the nature of that experience that, while powerful in the intellectual context of 80's France, are hardly tenable today.) Bourdieu's best readers (Guillory, McGurl) have understood that Bourdieu's viability in literary studies depends on departing from Bourdieu's dismissal of aesthetic value. I think we need to travel further down this line, in part by challenging literary sociology's traditional disengagement from the natural sciences. Engagement with these disciplines provides potentially interesting methods for discerning the factors that give aesthetic value a temporal horizon inaccessible to either current publishers, new historicists, or old (Bourdieu-style) literary sociology.
Szalay's piece is very relevant to the discussion here--and interesting in its own right.