Articles

Posted by Literacy Consulancy on 15/10/11

TLC Director Rebecca Swift examines the increasing commercial pressures on the publishing industry.

I remember the day when modern publishing in the UK ‘changed’. I was twenty-five and proud to be working as an editorial assistant at an independent publishing house that had helped bring about a revolution in the way the public viewed work by women writers

Enter, one ordinary London afternoon circa 1991: a man in a suit. The kind of man that we did not often see inside our offices. The ‘buzz’ was this was ‘the money-man’. We in the then large editorial department gathered round to listen to what he had to say. Editors at our company had, the gentleman informed us, hitherto been publishing by following ‘our tummy waters.’

‘Tummy waters’, the money-man said, as if to a group of primary school children, which included the companies editorial directors, women who had been buying books with flare and commitment for many years, ‘ had to stop.’ He went on to explain the brilliance of his principle thus: ‘If for example, you get in two books and one shows promise but needs editing, and one is in a perfectly finished condition, you would take the one in the finished condition, wouldn’t you? Time after all is money. Editing is after all time. You follow?’ He scanned the room to see if through the fog of our basic, feminine, aquatic instincts we could sufficiently access his logic – as if publishing were some kind of Sophie’s Choice”.

My naive reaction then was, however, on behalf of writers as well as the future of our literary culture ‘HELP!’ This was because literary history is littered with examples of writers who a) have thrived with editorial support in the first instance if not throughout their careers (T.S. Eliot, Esther Freud, Dick Francis… ) and b) writers who have taken several novels to ‘mature’ and become successes at both critical and sales levels (Michelle Roberts, A.S. Byatt, Barbara Trapido…) What on earth would happen to them? What would happen to some of the best writers in the language, if these limiting principles regarding what it means to be creative were allowed to operate? How limited also would the job of editor become if there were no value attached to spotting potential and helping a writer reach it? And this was before the next stage in the financial argument had become truly pervasive: that every book be a best-seller, or die.

It is by now well-documented, that as tutor at Oxford Brookes Publishing course Claire Squires puts it in ‘Novelistic Production and the Publishing Industry in Britain and Ireland’ (A Companion to the British Novel, Brian Schaffer ed., Oxford, Blackwell 2002), ‘the deregulation of the financial markets in the US and UK in the 1970s and 1980s was crucial to the intensification of publishing conglomeration.‘  Squires also confirms what those who care about books know that the demise of the Net Book Agreement in 1995 ‘is another indicator of the intensely competitive nature of the more recent literary marketplace.’ In addition, the tendency of bookshops to stop stocking back and mid-list titles in favour of front-list title, and that of libraries to stop stocking books that were not among the most-borrowed further pressured all publishers. Together, these changes meant that many smaller, independent presses such as the one I worked for could not survive.  In short, over a period of a few years between the late 1980 and 1993, the company I worked for laid off 23 of 27 staff and was then sold to a conglomerate, with the head of marketing firmly in position as publisher. As Claire Squires corroborates, ‘the history of Virago ‘demonstrates the fate of radical publishing practices under the pressures of conglomeration’ and she goes on to comment: ‘Whether it is possible to retain a publishing programme with a political mission under such swings of ownership is questionable.’

Since that time, as we know, the trend that this example illustrates has only intensified. Last remaining independent houses such as Fourth Estate, have been bought up and existing conglomerates such as Random House have themselves been bought and sometimes bought again. Within those houses, imprints have been closed, with literary imprints, or more modestly selling imprints,  being under particular scrutiny. The most recent example of this, to the upset of many editors which the industry, was Flamingo.  Two large independents survive, Bloomsbury (thriving in part due to the outlandish but exciting success of Harry Potter) and Faber (who traditionally earn a good deal from the T.S. Eliot Estate). Canongate, who have a sound, inventive programme and have recently enjoyed particular recognition by virtue of Jan Martel’s Booker prize winning Life of Pi , and other small, honourable independents such as Arcadia  (run by the tireless Gary Pulsifer, Arts Council-backed, publishers of Kathy Acker and Shere Hite), Saqi (run by the passionate Andre Gaspard, successful publisher of mainstream ‘casualty’, winner of the Orange prize, Maggie Gee) and Maia, recently founded by Jane Harvill and Maggie Hammond (champions of writers of the calibre of Sara Maitland, Lewis DeSoto and Michael Arditti …) operate like brave but beautiful fishes in an enormous and hazardous sea.