Merchants of Culture. John B. Thompson
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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 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).
Figure 3 Publishing value chain
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