The Literary Market in the UK

The Literary Market in the UK edited by Amrei Katharina Nensel and Christoph Reinfandt Faculty of Humanities English Literatures and Cultures The Literary Market in the UK Editors Amrei Katharina Nensel, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen Prof. Dr. Christoph Reinfandt, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen © Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and the authors 2017 Design and layout Amrei Katharina Nensel and Christoph Reinfandt Cover Images Fotolia©Maksym Yemelyanov Fotolia©spr Fotolia©olly Further information http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/angl/ i Contents List of Figures iii Preface iv Contributors v The Present in Perspective: Mapping the Literary Market Today 1 Christoph Reinfandt British Publishing and the Rise of Creative Writing: A Personal View 19 Blake Morrison Discounted and Digital: British Publishing in the Wake of the Net Book Agreement 35 Amrei Katharina Nensel The Impact of Digital Publishing on the Literary Market 55 Sophie Rochester The Postcolonial Writer as Commodity 69 Ellen Dengel-Janic The Ever-Changing Rules: Acquiring, Editing and Publishing Literary Fiction in the UK 81 Interview with Alex Bowler Literary Reviews: Past, Present, Future 101 Interview with Erica Wagner The Reception of Literary Fiction in the Digital Age: The Democratisation of Reviewing in Reading Groups 109 Interview with Irene Haynes ii List of Figures Figure 1: The Market-Marketplace-Matrix 10 Figure 2: The Circuit of the Book 38 Figure 3: The Publishers’ Profit Margin in Relation to Sales Revenue 42 Figure 4: Number of Titles Published in the UK 46 Figure 5: Market Share of UK Book Retail Sales by Type of Outlet by Value 48 Figure 6: Market Share of UK Book Retail Sales by Type of Outlet by Volume 49 iii Preface The Literary Market in the UK collects material which emerged in the wake of a highly suc- cessful lecture series of the same title, presented at the University of Tuebingen in summer term 2011. Given the enthusiastic response to the lecture series,1 a book project was enter- tained for a while until unforeseen circumstances, other commitments, and, most of all, the intensity of change in the publishing world made it impossible to produce anything well- rounded, systematic and fast enough in the old medium of the book that could possibly do justice to recent developments in the literary field; the plan, alas, had to be abandoned. Viewed with some distance, however, it seems that some of the material that was gathered and pro- duced in this context might be of some value for future research, and so the present e-publi- cation presents a mixture of academic essays and interviews with actors in the literary market in the hope of offering coordinates of systematic access and a glimpse of the rapid changes under way in the world of publishing in the UK between, roughly, 2010 and 2014. Thanks are due to Lisa Peter for coming up with the idea for the original lecture series, organising it, and conducting the interviews; to Ellen Dengel-Janic for her support in organizing the lecture series; to all contributors for their patience; and to Amrei Katharina Nensel for stepping in and helping to salvage at least parts of the project. Christoph Reinfandt Tübingen, January 2017 1 Most of the lectures have been archived on the Tübinger Internet Multi Media Server TIMMS and can be accessed under http://timms.uni-tuebingen.de/List/Browse#ni000004000002022 (Philos- ophische Fakultät > Neuphilologie > Englisches Seminar > Lecture The Literary Market in the UK SoSe 2011). iv Contributors Alex Bowler has worked as Editor for Jonathan Cape since 2006, where he became Deputy Publishing Director in 2015. He has edited the likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan. His commissions include Kevin Barry’s novel City of Bohane and Tom McCarthy’s Booker-shortlisted novel C. In 2016 he joined independent Granta Books as Publishing Direc- tor. Ellen Dengel-Janic teaches English literature at the University of Tübingen. She has published on South Asian literature in English and Indian diasporic literature and film. Irene Haynes founded bookgroup.info in 2002 with Clare Chandler. Since then it has become the independent site for book groups in the UK. She is also on the panel of Exclusively Inde- pendent, the scheme with the backing of Arts Council England that aims to bring independent bookshops and independent publishers together. Blake Morrison is a poet, novelist, and a Professor of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, London. In the 1980s and 90s, he worked for the Times Literary Supplement and as a literary editor for The Observer and The Independent on Sunday. His books include two memoirs, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, which was made into a film, and Things My Mother Never Told Me; two collections of poetry, Dark Glasses and The Ballad of the Yorkshire Rip- per; an account of the James Bulger murder case, As If; and three novels, The Justification of Johann Gutenberg (a fictional portrait of the 15th-century printer), South of the River (a ‘state of the nation’ novel set during the Blair years) and The Last Weekend, a psychological thriller published in 2010. Amrei Katharina Nensel is Coordinator of Academic and International Affairs at the School of Business and Economics at the University of Tübingen. Her PhD research focuses on trend development in young adult fiction. Christoph Reinfandt is Professor of English Literature at the University of Tübingen. Among his main research interests are the sociology of modern literature and contemporary Anglo- phone literatures and cultures. Sophie Rochester worked in communications for publishers 4th Estate and Jonathan Cape before moving to the digital agency Good Technology in 1999, joining Colman Getty as Asso- ciate Director in 2002 working on, among other things, the digital development of the Man Booker Prize Website and communications strategy, The Poetry Archive and Oxford University Press’s Dictionary of National Biography online. In 2009 she founded The Literary Platform, initially as a free online resource dedicated to exploring the interface between literature and technology showcasing ground-breaking projects, and then as a specialist consultancy. In 2010 she launched, supported by Arts Council England, the National Lottery funded Fiction Uncovered – now the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize – an ongoing programme dedicated to celebrating the work of British fiction writers. Erica Wagner was Literary Editor of The Times from 1996 to 2013. She is also an author and literary critic in her own right, having published a volume of short stories (Gravity,1997), a novel (Seizure, 2007) and poems, as well as critical monographs (Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters, 2000) and biography (The Chief Engineer, about Wash- ington Roebling, the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge, 2017). She has also judged the Man Booker Prize twice, in 2002 and 2014. v The Present in Perspective: Mapping the Literary Market Today CHRISTOPH REINFANDT Any attempt at outlining the contours of the literary market today will immediately be confronted with that elusive institution, the publisher. As a rule, the publisher does neither write, print, bind nor sell books, but is nevertheless placed squarely in the midst of things: accepting or com- missioning manuscripts from authors, preparing them for printing, arranging the actual produc- tion of books through printing and binding, taking care of cover design as well as advertising and promotion, and finally organising the distribution of the finished product to booksellers who will then sell it to individual readers and institutions (for a systematic introduction to the field of book publishing cf. Clark/Phillips 2008). All of these activities have become absolutely essen- tial for literature after it detached itself from the original activity of writing through the invention of printing, establishing the possibility of a literary marketplace for selling and buying printed matter in the process. And what is more, all of these activities have to take place before a single copy can be sold (cf. Fletcher 1996, vii-viii). Without publishers willing to provide this financial advance, the whole network of activities that we call literature would not be possible, and so it is no exaggeration to point out that the basic coordinates of the literary market were established through this mode of print-based publishing. In recent years, however, these coordinates have been severely affected by the technological shift towards digitalization, and the literary market today is very much in transition. Given the risks that publishers have faced with their prefinancing obligations even in what seems in retrospect fairly stable conditions based on material objects, it is clear that the activity of publishing will only flourish if it can rely on social rules and conventions which lend stability to its precarious and to some extent virtual status between authors and booksellers. And while this becomes even more pressing in the digital age, the emergence of new rules and conventions seems to be forever lagging behind. Generally speaking, the one most im- portant institution which protects the publishers’ investment from the vagaries of the material and also the digital marketplace in which books are bought and sold is copyright law in the larger context of intellectual property law: the publisher does not, in the literal sense, buy a book from the author, but rather the rights to publish a book by the author. One could say that 1 The Present in Perspective: Mapping the Literary Market Today the publisher buys an ‘ideational object’, i.e. the thoughts of the author in the ‘documented form’ of words arranged into a text (cf. George 2012, 92). Only the publisher who has bought the rights is legally entitled to turn the ideational object into material copies in book form, which are then published and subcontracted for sale to the public through booksellers.

Load more