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There are three key developments that are crucial for understanding the logic of the field of trade publishing, and these will occupy our attention in the first three chapters: the growth of the retail chains and the broader and ongoing transformation of the retail environment of bookselling (chapter 1); the rise of the literary agent as a key power broker in the field of English-language trade publishing (chapter 2); and the emergence of transnational publishing corporations stemming from successive waves of mergers and acquisitions, beginning in the 1960s and continuing through to the present day (chapter 3). I will seek to show how these three key developments have created a field that is structured in certain ways, a field that shapes the ways in which agents and organizations can act and that has certain consequences; chapters 4–8 examine these consequences. Taken together, this analysis of the key developments and their consequences will lay bare what I’m calling the logic of the field of English-language trade publishing. Chapter 9 will examine the digital revolution and its implications for the book publishing industry, while chapter 10 will offer a more normative reflection on the world of trade publishing and its costs. The concluding remarks will briefly consider some of the challenges the publishing industry faces as it enters the second decade of the twenty-first century.

In developing this account of the contemporary world of trade publishing in Britain and the United States, I rely largely on the insights gained through my interviews with practitioners in the field (a more detailed discussion of my research methods can be found in appendix 2). I also draw on data gathered by Nielsen BookScan, the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), Subtext and other sources. I make use of other studies and books on the book business when it is helpful to do so but I have generally found these to be of limited use for various reasons. The study carried out by Louis Coser, Charles Kadushin and Walter Powell, alluded to earlier, remains the best of these studies and an indispensable reference point for anyone interested in the modern book publishing industry.¹² But the research on which this study was based was carried out more than 30 years ago, in the late 1970s, and the world of publishing has changed quite profoundly since then. Moreover, this study was focused solely on the United States, and hence it lacks the more comparative and international perspective to which any study of the creative industries today, in our increasingly globalized world, must aspire. It is not without significance that, of the five largest publishing houses that are key players in the field of American trade publishing today, four are owned by large international media corporations which have substantial stakes in the UK, Europe and elsewhere.

At around the same time as the study by Coser and his colleagues appeared, Thomas Whiteside published a series of articles in the New Yorker, subsequently incorporated into a book, which cast a more critical eye on the world of New York trade publishing.¹³ This was a time – around 1980 – when the takeover of many publishing houses by large corporations with diverse media interests was eliciting growing concern in many quarters about the possibility that the literary values associated with these houses were being eclipsed by the search for a new kind of lightweight, downmarket content that would be as suitable for TV talk shows and movie tie-ins as traditional books. Whiteside’s insightful analysis lends support to these concerns and highlights some of the key trends that have continued to shape the industry in the years since. But as with the work of Coser and his associates, the value of Whiteside’s study today is limited both by its age and by its exclusive focus on the United States. Moreover, the central theme of his critique – the idea that trade publishing was becoming part of a movie tie-in business in which the big Hollywood studios were increasingly calling the shots – now looks, with the benefit of hindsight, to be an exaggeration. It is undoubtedly true that movie tie-ins can be big business for trade publishers and can generate welcome spikes in sales, but movie tie-ins and the sale of movie rights have turned out to be less important for trade publishers than Whiteside thought. Other aspects of our contemporary media culture, such as the celebrity status and ‘well-knownness’ which stems from being seen and heard in the media, are more important for understanding the world of trade publishing than the links with the Hollywood movie business, or than the idea that books were becoming the ‘software’ of multimedia packages in an increasingly integrated communications–entertainment complex.

Apart from the studies by Coser et al. and Whiteside, many of the other books on the modern publishing industry that have appeared in the last decade or two have been books written by publishers themselves. The books by André Schiffrin and Jason Epstein, The Business of Books and Book Business respectively, are probably the most interesting recent examples of this genre.¹⁴ Both Schiffrin and Epstein were distinguished publishers and editors in the world of American trade publishing – Schiffrin was the director of Pantheon for many years until he fell out with its corporate owners and resigned in 1989 to set up his own not-for-profit house called The New Press, while Epstein was editorial director at Random House for many years and enjoyed a long and distinguished career as one of America’s most successful editors. Their books are thoughtful reflections on the state of trade publishing in America at the turn of the millennium; they lived through and experienced personally the huge changes that have swept through the industry since the 1960s and 1970s, and their books bear witness to the scale and the costs – both in cultural and in personal terms – of these changes. But their accounts are inextricably entangled with their own personal experiences and career trajectories. These are not even-handed accounts of an industry undergoing dramatic change, nor do they purport to be: they are memoirs with a critical edge. They are personal and sometimes opinionated accounts – gracefully written, rich in anecdote, tinged with a shade of nostalgia – of an industry as seen from the particular perspectives of two protagonists who have charted their own courses through the complex and turbulent world of publishing. That the protagonists have charted their courses so successfully and recounted them so eloquently is a tribute to their remarkable talents as publishers and authors, but this does not alter the fact that their accounts are, by their very nature, partial. These books are symptoms and reflections of a world in change as much as they are analyses of it.

While I have learned much from these and other accounts of the modern publishing industry, I have tried to do something which no one else has attempted. While the existing literature tends to be focused on the publishing industry in one country and most commonly the United States, I have sought to be international and comparative in my analysis, focusing on the field of English-language trade publishing which, by its very nature, is something more than American trade publishing and something less than book publishing, even trade book publishing, per se. I have sought to ground my analysis in a careful consideration of the facts and empirical trends but I have not restricted myself to a mere recitation of facts and figures. The account I offer is both analytical and normative: an attempt to lay bare the fundamental dynamic that has shaped the evolution of this field over the last few decades and, on the basis of this analysis, to offer a critical reflection on the consequences of these developments for our literary and intellectual culture. And I shall try to show that, when we grasp the logic of this field, we shall be able to make sense of those actions of agents and organizations within the field that might otherwise seem bizarre, including the actions of the organization that undertook to publish a small book by a hitherto largely unknown professor of computer science who happened to deliver an inspiring last lecture on realizing your childhood dreams.

1 ¹ See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1993); Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Some Properties of Fields’, in his Sociology in Question, tr. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1993), pp. 72–7; Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, tr. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).

2 ² This account is based on John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), pp. 30–6. However, I’ve added social capital to the original scheme, since it became clear that this form of capital, important in all publishing fields, is particularly important in trade publishing, where networking is vital.

3 ³ See Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity, 1991); John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 16.

4 ⁴ The very different logics of the fields of scholarly book publishing and higher education publishing are analysed in Thompson, Books in the Digital Age.

5 ⁵ There are of course countries other than the United States and Britain within the international field of English-language publishing, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, and the dynamics of trade publishing in each of these countries have their own distinctive characteristics. However, the volume of output in the United States and Britain and the scale and geographical reach of their publishing industries mean that these two countries have long had a dominant role in the international field of English-language trade publishing.

6 ⁶ On the rise of English as a global language, see David Crystal, English as a Global Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For further discussion of the global dominance of English and its implications for the shaping of publishing fields, see Thompson, Books in the Digital Age, pp. 41–3.

7 ⁷ In 2002, around 215,000 new titles were published in the US and around 125,000 in the UK, compared to around 79,000 in Germany, around 70,000 in Spain and around 59,000 in France. (See tables 9 and 10 below for details on title output in the US and the UK. For details on title output in European countries, see Publishing Market Watch: Final Report, submitted to the European Commission (27 Jan. 2005), at http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/media_taskforce/doc/pmw_20050127.pdf) According to United Nations data, exports of printed books (excluding dictionaries and encyclopaedias) from the US in 2008 totalled $2.36 billion, and book exports (excluding dictionaries and encyclopaedias) from the UK totalled $2.15 billion; these figures were well ahead of Germany (total book exports of $1.5 billion), France ($791 million) and Spain ($755 million). Data available from http://data.un.org.

8 ⁸ Analysing UNESCO data, Wischenbart found that more than half of all books translated globally are from English language originals, whereas only 6 per cent of translations go from all other languages into English; see Rüdiger Wischenbart, ‘The Many, Many Books – For Whom?’ (11 Sep. 2005), at www.wischenbart.com/de/essays__interviews_rw/wischenbart_publishing-diversity_oxford-2005.pdf. For a more detailed analysis of translations in Europe, see Rüdiger Wischenbart, Diversity Report 2008: An Overview and Analysis of Translation Statistics across Europe (21 Nov. 2008), at www.wischenbart.com/diversity/report/Diversity%20Report_prel-final_02.pdf. Further discussion of translations and bestseller lists in Europe and the Anglo-American world can be found in Miha Kovač, Never Mind the Web: Here Comes the Book (Oxford: Chandos, 2008), pp. 121–7.

9 ⁹ The notion of the logic of the field is discussed in more detail in ch. 8.

10 ¹⁰ The notion of publishers as gatekeepers of ideas is developed by Lewis A. Coser, Charles Kadushin and Walter W. Powell in Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (New York: Basic Books, 1982), discussed further below.

11 ¹¹ The practice of allowing booksellers to return stock for full credit has a long history in Europe but was used rarely and half-heartedly by American publishers until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when publishers began experimenting seriously with returns policies as a way of stimulating sales and encouraging booksellers to increase stockholdings. In spring 1930, Putnam, Norton and Knopf all introduced schemes to allow booksellers to return stock for credit or exchange under certain conditions, and in 1932 Viking Press announced that orders for new books would be returnable for a credit of 90 per cent of the billed cost (see John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 3: The Golden Age between the Two Wars, 1920–1940 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1978), pp. 429–30, 441). The practice of returns subsequently became a settled feature of the book trade and marks it out as somewhat unusual among retail sectors.

12 ¹² Coser et al., Books.

13 ¹³ Thomas Whiteside, The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980).

14 ¹⁴ André Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (London: Verso, 2000); Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).