John B Thompson is Professor of Sociology at Jesus College, Cambridge. His work has mainly been focused on media sociology and modern culture, especially the social organisation of the media industries in the age of information and communication technologies and the changing forms of political communication. Merchants of Culture gives a vivid account of our burgeoning world of globalised online consumer book publishing, replete with its ambitious writers, hacks jostling to engage in the world of agents, scouts and publishing houses, amid auctions, advances, deals and hopes, successes and failures. Would-be writers live in some sort of hope, while publishers live in the hope of finding the next Harry Potter.
The single most impressive fact to drive home about this remarkable book is that Thompson displays a rare gift, that of presenting a world of the most heart-stopping complexity in short, simple, inter-related steps. In the process he allegorises the life and condition of current publishing.
The case he uses paradigmatically to explore modern publishing would in itself have made an interesting novel – The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. A young middle-aged academic suffering from a terminal illness is invited in 2007 to give a lecture in a prestigious series devoted to what matters most to various professors and to sum up the wisdom they would like to pass on to their students in their last lecture. He talks movingly about really realising your childhood dreams. It is videoed and reported in the Wall Street Journal. It’s picked up and he appears on Good Morning America and Oprah. The lecture duly appears on YouTube. With the aid of cyberspace communications it becomes a talking point and he begins to receive invitations from New York publishers. Pausch finds this all rather amusing, as it seems to him he has barely six weeks to live. But he is promised a deal and guaranteed a co-author. His agent sends out numerous persuasive proposals to likely publishers and a deal is negotiated within two weeks for $6.75 million.
Why would anyone pay millions for a book by a professor of computer science who has not previously published anything resembling a bestseller? Thompson’s book poses this question and then proceeds to answer it – and in so doing places before us an all-embracing map of the world of trade publishing over the last half century and how it’s organised today, showing “who the key players are, what pressures they face and what resources they have at their disposal”. We also learn inter alia how the actions of each key player are conditioned by the actions of others, as they are not acting on their own, they’re always acting in a particular context, influenced by the actions of others. By gradual stages of simple relation, we see the whole complex world that connects the individual consumer to the vast regiments of international publishing.
Thompson begins his survey with a discussion of the historical developments beginning in the mid 20th century which saw the move from independent book stores to department stores and then mall-based retail outlets, eventually bringing us chains such as Barnes and Noble and Borders, with the disappearance of the independents. Maximising stock turnover meant the introduction of table displays, dump bins and a general encouragement to impulse buy.
These revolutionary developments carried within them further changes in book production and marketing including paperback publishing. The whole shebang was made as if to facilitate online retailing, which followed in due course. The over-riding preoccupation with Amazon became the customer experience – “selection, convenience and price” – a million titles, round the clock, every day of the week. This was not without danger to the publishing industry as, additionally, it offered huge opportunities for the second hand book market.
He then examines the other cogs developing in the machine to facilitate the constant feeding of the great beast, beginning with agents, and this interface brought with it other developments, such as those associated with the saleable rights that might attach to a work. Agents began further to act as advocates of the interests of their authors “whom they thought of as their clients” and writers became potential stars. “What’s the latest Bill Bryson?” Then the ineluctable imperatives of capitalism bring us the publishing corporations and while Thompson does, on the whole, accept the fact that the big publishing corporations now function in much the same way as big businesses, he does dispel some of the long held myths about the effects of the industrialisation of book publishing. Among matters he discusses are the importance still attached to publishing quality books and the question of whether owners operate a baleful influence on editorial content.
We get a useful airing of the notorious row at HarperCollins over Chris Patten’s book East and West, which criticised the Chinese government (and was eventually published by Macmillan). Thompson points out that such examples are rare. It’s untrue that publishers only go for tried and tested authors and formulae, huge sums are paid to new talent. The old linear model of editorial/ sales/marketing/reps and retailers has been adjusted and editing and sales staff co-operate as never before.
We are given an understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of the scale of modern publishing, with the various shifts in the balance of power between the production and retailing sides of the industry where “big book” sales run into millions. Modern technology ensures that sales can be carefully followed, annotated and evaluated. But things are not always what they seem and the example of Dan Brown is impressive here, as he had no apparent readership and was offered $400,000 for a two-book deal, and The Da Vinci Code went on to sell more than 18 million paperback copies in the United States alone. A good British example would be Watership Down.
We are now in a world where book publishing spills out into other media in the construction of the author-as-celebrity, one already known before he/she publishes their book. Whole industries are afoot to create such literary/media celebrities (supply your own examples) and ghosts earn a better living now than they ever did when they only haunted castles and stately homes. The closing sections of this book, dealing with technological aspects such as the digital revolution, are certainly a tour de force, but maybe a bit of an information blitz. Never mind, this is a book to buy and use and keep on your shelf. The situation is by no means settled and change is in the air that we breathe. And now comes a Kindle to light us to bed…
