Merchants of Culture. John B. Thompson
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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.
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