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What is a field? I borrow this term from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and freely adapt it for my own purposes.¹ A field is a structured space of social positions which can be occupied by agents and organizations, and in which the position of any agent or organization depends on the type and quantity of resources or ‘capital’ they have at their disposal. Any social arena – a business sector, a sphere of education, a domain of sport – can be treated as a field in which agents and organizations are linked together in relations of cooperation, competition and interdependency. Markets are an important part of some fields, but fields are always more than markets. They are made up of agents and organizations, of different kinds and quantities of power and resources, of a variety of practices and of specific forms of competition, collaboration and reward.

There are four reasons why the concept of field helps us to understand the world of publishing. First, it enables us to see straightaway that the world of publishing is not one world but rather a plurality of worlds – or, as I shall say, a plurality of fields, each of which has its own distinctive characteristics. So there’s the field of trade publishing, the field of scholarly monograph publishing, the field of higher education publishing, the field of professional publishing, the field of illustrated art book publishing and so on. Each of these fields has its own peculiar traits – you cannot generalize across them. It’s like different kinds of games: there is chess, checkers, Monopoly, Risk, Cluedo and so on. To the outside observer they may all look similar – they’re all board games with little pieces that move around the board. But each game has its own rules, and you can know how to play one without knowing how to play another. And publishing is often like that: people who work in the business tend to work in one particular field. They become experts in that field and may rise to senior positions of power and authority within it, but they may know nothing at all about what goes on in other fields.

The second reason why the notion of field helps is that it forces us to look beyond specific firms and organizations and makes us think, instead, in relational terms. The notion of field is part of a theory that is fundamentally relational in character, in the sense that it assumes that the actions of agents, firms and other organizations are oriented towards other agents and organizations and predicated on calculations about how others may or may not act in the field. Agents, firms and other organizations never exist in isolation: they are always situated in complex relations of power, competition and cooperation with other firms and organizations, and the theory of fields forces us to focus our attention on this complex space of power and interdependency. The theory constantly reminds us that the actions of any particular agent or organization are always part of larger whole, a system if you like, of which they are part but over which they do not have any overall control.

The third reason why the notion of field helps is that it calls our attention to the fact that the power of any agent or organization in the field is dependent on the kinds and quantities of resources or capital that it possesses. Power is not a magical property that some individual or organization possesses: it is a capacity to act and get things done that is always rooted in and dependent on the kinds and quantities of resources that the agent or organization has at its disposal.

So what kinds of resources or capital are important in publishing fields? We can see, I think, that five types of resources are particularly important in publishing fields: what I shall call ‘economic capital’, ‘human capital’, ‘social capital’, ‘intellectual capital’ and ‘symbolic capital’ (figure 1).² Economic capital is the accumulated financial resources, including stock and plant as well as capital reserves, to which publishers have access, either directly (in their own accounts) or indirectly (through their ability to draw on the resources of a parent company or raise finance from banks or other institutions). Human capital is the staff employed by the firm and their accumulated knowledge, skills and expertise. Social capital is the networks of contacts and relationships that an individual or organization has built up over time. Intellectual capital (or intellectual property) consists in the rights that a publisher owns or controls in intellectual content, rights that are attested to by their stock of contracts with authors and other bodies and that they are able to exploit through their publications and through the selling of subsidiary rights. Symbolic capital is the accumulated prestige and status associated with the publishing house. The position of any publishing house will vary in the social space of positions, depending on the relative quantities of these five forms of capital they possess.

Figure 1 Key resources of publishing firms

It is easy to see why publishers need economic capital: as the principal risk-taker in the publishing chain, publishers must be able to draw on their financial resources (or those of financial agents and institutions to which they are linked, such as banks or parent companies) at various stages in order to finance the production and publication of books and in order to build and expand the business. Early in the publishing cycle they must be prepared to pay an advance on royalties to an author or an author’s agent. At later stages publishers must invest in the production of the book, paying the bills of copy-editors, typesetters, designers, printers, etc., and tying up resources in stock which may or may not be sold, and they must invest in marketing and promoting the book. The larger the capital reserves of the publisher, the larger the advances they are able to offer in the highly competitive game of acquiring content, the more they are able to invest in marketing and promotion and the more they are able to spread the risks of publishing by investing in a larger number of projects in the hope that some will bear fruit.

It is also easy to see why publishers need human capital: like other organizations, publishing firms are only as good as their staff. A highly trained and highly motivated workforce is a vital resource for a publishing firm and in many ways the key to its success. This is true at all levels, but particularly true at the level of editorial staff, since this is the creative core of the publishing firm. The success of the firm depends crucially on the ability to attract and retain highly motivated editors who are able to identify and acquire the new projects that are likely to be successful and are able to work effectively with authors to maximize the potential of these projects. In the highly competitive field of trade publishing, an editor is as good, and only as good, as the track record of the books that he or she has acquired and published over the years: this record is his or her CV. Editors who have the right combination of judgement, taste, social flair and financial nous are highly valued assets, and their ability to spot successful books becomes vital to the overall success of the firm. But the other side of this equation is that an editor who greatly overpays for a book that flops, or who buys a string of books that perform below expectations, may come to be seen as more of a liability than an asset and may find that their judgement is called into question, their job is in danger and their career is at risk.

However, even the best editors do not work on their own: they need good contacts. Much of their time is spent cultivating relationships with agents on whom they are largely and increasingly dependent for the supply of new book projects: the famous publisher’s lunch is not just a pleasant perk of the job but a necessary condition of doing the job effectively, precisely because this is a field in which networks and relationships – i.e. social capital – is crucial. The importance of relationships applies to other sides of the business too. Publishing houses invest a great deal of time and effort in developing close relationships with suppliers and retailers and they work hard to manage and protect these relationships because they are vital to their success. And the larger the publisher is, the more they may be able to call on their business partners to do favours for them – for example, ask a printer to prioritize an important reprint and deliver it within three or four days, or call up the product manager at a major retailer and ask them to pay special attention to a book that the publisher regards as a key title.

Publishers possess another kind of resource that is vital to their success: intellectual capital (or what is often called intellectual property). The distinctive feature of the publishing firm is that it possesses the right to use and exploit intellectual content, to ‘publish’ or make available this content in forms that will generate a financial return. This right is regulated by the contracts it signs with authors or agents and other content-controlling sources, such as foreign publishers. Hence a publisher’s stock of contracts is potentially an extremely valuable resource, since it establishes legal entitlements to the content (or potential content) which the publisher is able to exploit. But the precise value of this resource depends on many things. The value of a contract for a particular book depends, for instance, on whether the book will actually be written and delivered in a suitable time period, how profitable the book will be (that is, what kind of revenue stream less costs, including advances, it is likely to generate) and what territorial and subsidiary rights it includes (whether it includes world rights in all languages or merely North American rights, for instance). A publisher’s stock of contracts represents the sum total of rights it possesses over the intellectual content that it seeks to develop and exploit. A contract can be a valuable resource but it can also be a liability, in the sense that it can commit the publisher to producing a book which, given the level of advance paid out and other costs incurred in producing and marketing the book, may turn out to be a loss-maker rather than a profitable proposition.

It is easy to see why publishers need economic, human, social and intellectual capital, but why do they need symbolic capital? Symbolic capital is best understood as the accumulated prestige, recognition and respect accorded to certain individuals or institutions.³ It is one of those intangible assets that is enormously important for publishing firms. For publishers are not just employers and financial risk-takers: they are also cultural mediators and arbitrators of quality and taste. Their imprint is a ‘brand’, a marker of distinction in a highly competitive field. Publishers seek to accumulate symbolic capital just as they seek to accumulate economic capital. It is important to them partly because it is important to their image, to the way they see themselves and want to be seen by others: most publishers see themselves and want to be seen by others as organizations that publish works of ‘quality’, however that might be defined (and there are many ways that it can be). No major publisher would willingly embrace the idea that their sole purpose in life is to publish schlock (even if they accept, as some do, that they need to publish some schlock in order to do other things). But it is also important to them for good organizational and financial reasons. It strengthens their hand in the struggle to acquire new content because it makes their organization more attractive in the eyes of authors and agents: many authors want to be published by houses that have established a high reputation in their particular genre of writing, whether it is literary fiction or crime novels or biography or history. It strengthens their position in the networks of cultural intermediaries – including booksellers, reviewers and media gatekeepers – whose decisions and actions can have a big impact on the success or otherwise of particular books. A publisher who has established a reputation for quality and reliability is a publisher that agents, retailers and even readers will be more inclined to trust. And it can also translate directly into financial success: a book that wins a major literary prize will very commonly experience a sharp upturn in sales, and may even lift the sales of other books by the same author.

While symbolic capital is of considerable importance to publishing firms, it is also important to see that other players in the field, including agents and authors, can and do accumulate symbolic capital of their own. Authors can become brands in their own right – most well-known writers, like Stephen King, John Grisham, James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, etc., are brand-name authors in this sense. They have acquired large stocks of symbolic capital and are able to use this to their advantage. In the early stages of their writing career, a publishing firm may have invested in the building of their brand, but as they become better known and develop a fan base of regular readers, the author’s brand separates off from the publisher’s brand and becomes less and less dependent on it. This puts them or their agents in an increasingly strong position 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 in Britain and the United States, so much so that 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